The C 'n' S Club

Free - Marie Wilson (mp3)
Running Up That Hill - Kate Bush (mp3)

My two daughters each got to have a friend sleep over the other night. Nary 20 minutes of the gathering had transpired before my eldest and her pal had written a sign: NO ONE UNDER 9 ALLOWED PAST THIS POINT. My other daughter Arden and her friend are, of course, 8.

Not to be outdone, Arden retaliated with a sign of her own: NO ONE OVER 8 OR MEAN ALLOWED IN MY ROOM. I guess she was hoping to strike at Avery twice as hard just in case she found a loophole for the age barrier.

Although this kind of divisive activity troubles the "Why can't we all just get along?" meddling parent in me, I managed to keep my nose out of it for once. I'm increasingly convinced that I over-meddle, that American Parents Circa 2010 do far too much meddling in their kids' lives.

This realization is by no means my attempt at excusing myself from parental responsibility. In fact, making the conscious choice not to meddle requires -- at least of a dedicated parent -- even more time and thought than does meddling, because meddling is a constant and easy reaction: see a problem and jump in to fix it. Not meddling, on the other hand, requires that we still see the problems but allow them to slide by us. Catch and release, if you will.

In an episode of The Wire I watched recently, a police captain praised the invention of brown-bagging because it allowed cops to ignore having to police disobedience to open container laws and focus on "real police work." Likewise, I think meddling in our kids' minutiae allows us to feel like we're being parents when what we end up doing is catching a lot of petty misdemeanors while ignoring and neglecting the deeper issues, the bigger laws.

Here are some of my most excited moments as a parent: when my daughters tell me they're going outside to play.

Often, I don't know what they're going to do, because they don't know what they're going to do. They might ride bikes around our dream of a back yard, a.k.a. the 100-acre school campus where we live. They might scale one of the two climbing trees above our house. They might head up the hill to the "rock quarry" and the unintentional reservoir that's filled the hole there, a place they declared to be the home base for The C 'n' S Club, a club they named after the first letters in each of their names.

Amidst just those three choices, three amongst many, lie infinite possibility for two girls. And therein lies our modern angst.

Allowing your precious, delicate young children to do something without known boundaries and with risks both known and unknown is like licking the tip of a 9-volt battery. They could fall out of a very, very tall tree. They could slip on the rocks and fall unconsicous into cold, muddy water. They could ride their bike unawares in front of a speeding and reckless teenage driver. All of this could happen beyond my eyesight, beyond earshot, leaving me helpless to fulfill my most vital and basic parental duty: to serve and protect.

One of Michael Chabon's early essays in his new book, Manhood for Amateurs, is called "The Wilderness of Childhood." Reading it had the time warp power of yanking me back to my own childhood, a time when at least 3/4 of my memories involve absolutely no adults.

Bottle rocket fights. Kickball. Bike rides miles away from home to the local theater or a huge construction site. Ghost in the Graveyard at 11 p.m. behind my friend's house, with one of those large inner tubes used as a primitive trampoline for home base. Swimming unsupervised at a friend's house, pretending to be Sub-Mariner and Aquaman and twisting and turning underwater as we wrestled with the tentacles of his pool's mechanized cleaning system. Hour after hour of role-playing games in a pal's basement, or sitting in one of our bedrooms and reading comic books while Elvis Costello's Get Happy! or the Best of the Doobies played on the turntable until someone got called home for dinner.

On our way to a concert in December, my friend Andy and I were reminiscing about our childhood. "I can't tell you how many times I'd go home from staying the night at your house, and my mom would be, like, 'Did you sleep over at Billy's last night?' and I'd be, like, 'Yeah.' Can you imagine? She went to sleep not really sure where I was, but she was totally OK with it. Slept just fine."

The adults in my childhood memories are certainly more pronounced and comprehensible than the ones in Peanuts cartoons, and their roles were neither minor nor insignificant. But their errors rarely involved neglect. Perhaps that was due solely to my incredible fortune to never get hit by a car, kidnapped by a pervert, or attacked by a rabid bully. Perhaps that was because nothing horrifying and worthy of Katie Couric ever happened to a kid in my neighborhood.

But as a parent, looking out one of the kitchen windows, watching my daughters hop on their bikes or trudge up that hill, the feeling I embrace is not knowing what they're up to, wondering what fun they might have that I can't begin to imagine. Looking out those windows is practice for the very thing all parents most anticipate and most fear, practice for the day we must acknowledge their increasing independence and accept that all we can do for them is hope, and cheer, and wait for them to visit our little universe on occasion.