As our teenage sons baulk at the various house rules we attempt to enforce, I grapple with the idea of them emerging into a world without parental control, and I often find myself contemplating the parenting of today compared with the world we grew up in thirty-odd years ago. Living in a vast Asian city, three quarters of the way up a fifty storey high rise is a far cry from my own youth in a small English county town and a small Australian city on the edge of a desert. In a world where every teenager is armed to the teeth with computers and cellphones, iPods and iPads and parents get nervous when their kids fail to return text messages in a split second, I remember back to my own childhood, when, once we were out of earshot, our freedom was absolute and our parents wouldn’t know where we were from dawn till dusk. I remember my own childhood, without texting, email or Facebook, running wild…
In the days before parents wrapped their kids in cotton wool and bound them up in text messages, we lived in the pine woods that snuggled around the cul-de-sac at the end of our street, aptly named Pinewood Avenue. Here we spent our weekends and our holidays, racing bikes, building camps amongst the bracken or under the rhododendrons and waging war against the boys.
In the winter, when the tracks were muddy and the bracken was dead and soggy, we retreated to the street, but for the rest of the year, the woods were our playground, our haven from parental supervision, aggravating younger siblings, and bossy older ones, where we could lose ourselves in imaginary games for hours on end.
Here we forced our way under the gloomy-green leaves of the lowering rhododendron bushes, creating secret passages and palaces, or we built nests in the bracken, with its dusty, musty, fresh compost smell that haunts me still, the scented stitches in the quilt of childhood memories.
“Mum, we’re going to the woods,” we’d yell over our shoulders as we raced down the drive on our bikes, tearing wildly away before anyone thought to stop us, barreling into the woods and slipping through the trees to the sweet shop to buy ‘four-for-a-penny’ with the tuppence we had smuggled from our mother’s purse, and then pedal furiously back to our latest camp, giggling and whispering, to share secrets and lollies in the damp, earthy shade beneath the rhododendrons.
The sense of freedom from time and the independence from adult rules seems superfluous now we are adults ourselves, but then – o! – the joy of taking charge of our own lives, if only for an afternoon. Burrowing deep down into the bracken like baby deer, we watched the sunlight flit and flicker mysteriously through the pine needles, casting strange shadows of pirates and fairies and other Peter Pan creations.
Then, growing bored, we would hear the siren call of swings and see-saws and the forbidden mill pond from across the busy main road at the bottom of the woods, and we would dash, shrieking, through the traffic, knowing our parents would scalp us if they knew…
…in the days before parents wrapped their kids in cotton wool and bound them tight with text messages, we lived in the woods, wild and free.