Lifeguards

My dad is sometimes the ultimate source of wisdom for me. Yesterday, he was here while his lovely granddaughters were splashing in the pool. They were doing something "against the rules". I think it was jumping off the ladder or something and they were told not to and my dad just kind of laughed. After the laugh, we got one of the "back in my day" stories. I loooove when my dad tells those stories. You know - the soda, three movies, popcorn, candy bar all for a dime? Those stories. He's not even old (only 64 this year) but it sounds like forever ago. Anyway, he tells about his days back in the pool. When you grow up in a big city, you go to a public pool. No one has a pool in their backyard - usually because you live in an apartment building that doesn't have a yard. So, he and his friends used to go to Tibbetts - that's a county park that has a large swimming pool. They did that when they were about 7 or 8. The older boys would push them under or throw the kids who couldn't swim in the deep end. They would walk to the park or hitchhike (yes, hitchhike at 7) and pay 25 cents. That would get you a towel and a locker and you could swim all day. They would save some money and walk to Yonkers Avenue for a hot dog and then take the bus home because they were too tired to walk. If they didn't have money, they would go swim in the river. The Hudson River. And not the nice, narrow clean part upstate. They would swim with the rats. I can feel you shuddering right now. His point? He said "We never lost a single kid." He doesn't understand some of the rules imposed on kids these days. And, frankly, neither do I. I think we get a little neurotic and we fear all the bad things that could happen to our kids. But, sometimes, all that fear means we're really not letting them live. You have to give kids a little bit of freedom. Otherwise, they'll be stifled and they'll wait their whole lives to break free. It means they'll either do bad stuff behind your back or grow to resent you and distance themselves. It makes me think of a Jeff Foxworthy bit where he said his parents had a 900-pound television sitting atop a metal tv tray when he was a child and that his dad said "let him pull it down on top of his head a few times...that'll teach him." Of course, I don't want my children to learn lessons in that way, but I do hope they fall a few times. If you don't make mistakes, you don't learn how to fix them.