We ran our neighborhoods growing up.  We played an all day and night Hide and Go Seek with the boundary being several blocks.  If I didn’t check in every three-hours or so, I’d be grounded for a week. Loving to escape my house, I would often be grounded losing myself with my friends instead of telling my parents where I was.

Our son plays with us.  His best friend is a car ride away.  We’ve recently started talking to a middle school aged neighbor boy about babysitting for us.  It’s just different.  I’m not going to romanticize the way it was when I was growing up, and was mostly unsupervised.  When I was really little (4-6) things did happen to me.  Supervising your kids is ok, and was probably a good idea in the eighties, but wasn’t the way that my partner and I were raised.

Anyway, I picked up my son’s best friend yesterday and they just played and played.  It was so easy to weed and take care of things in our house.  My partner went to work about 2.5-hours afterward and I made them a warmed up meal.  I asked my partner who had a working Mom if I bought the right stuff for a playdate, and apparently the oven ready stuff got a thumbs up.  I even let them have plates in the basement.  They were adorable eating on the floor with their Kindles.

It’s funny, they spent some of the time on opposite sides of the basement Rec Room playing the same server in Minecraft.  These are some strange ways that kids play today.  I recall seeing this teenage boy and girl on the steps of a high school a few years ago, and they were sitting by each other and texting.  I went over to them and said, “You know you two have an opportunity to have an actual conversation instead of texting your friends,” and the male said, “We’re texting each other.  She is my girlfriend.”  That was perplexing, and equally so was that my son and his best friend were “playing” in almost a parallel fashion in the basement yesterday.  He will need some interactive things with us today.

Kids may eventually lack some of the social skills that come easily to those of us who roamed unsupervised through not the best neighborhoods.  Looking at each other, moving game tokens, and climbing random trees were all good things.  It’s not like those manicured and pre-arranged playdates with frozen pizza.  I don’t know.  Like usual, I want something in between for my family.  Something balanced.  Happy Memorial Day to all and may you have some tradition within our technologically-driven approaches.

Frozen playdate food