Finding a balance

As parents we want our children to be independent, but still need us. We want them to be self-starters and self-entertainers, but we also want them to want to do stuff with us. It's a hard balance to find sometimes. Lovey always wants to be entertained, whether by me or electronics. Telling him to find something to do usually results in whining or him asking if I wanted to play a game or do something with him. Littlebit has more of an imagination and is content to talk to herself and build in the sandbox.


This summer has been a challenge since their best friends moved in December. Last summer I rarely saw Littlebit and Lovey because they were in the cul de sac with their friends and I could keep an eye on them out the back windows. This summer friends are farther away and I can't watch Lovey as he plays. We started sending him with a watch and a time to be home, but this usually resulted in him returning just to ask if he could leave again, disrupting whatever game he was playing with his friends.


We decided to invest in walkie-talkies. This way he can go out and not have a set time to be home, but I can call him when I need him. At first when I told him the plan, his first words to me were, "I do not wanna be that kid!" He wanted a phone! Nice try. I told him it was this or he could come home every hour to check in. The first run with this was a little bumpy. The battery died because he kept playing with it checking in with me every five minutes. (His doing, not mine!)Then when the battery died he just kept playing and I had to go look for him when I couldn't get a hold of him to tell him to come home for dinner. We had a little talk about when it dies, coming home for his watch.


Yesterday I decided the kids needed to go out and get dirty and play. And not in our postage stamp of a backyard. Some day we hope to have more space, but it is not in the foreseeable future. There is a tree tract one house down that I usually don't let them go in, but yesterday I relented. When I was his age, I was riding my horse through the woods and along the trails by the power lines. And I didn't have a walkie-talkie or cell phone. Our house didn't even have a cordless phone! (Where they even around then?) I remember riding my bike across the highway to the convenience store. Yes, I was probably older than Lovey, but not much because I stopped riding bikes when I was thirteen. Now you couldn't pay me to try to ride across that highway, but different times. I want my kids to experience some freedom, but I am not ready to let go totally. I also don't want to be seen as that parent. The one who lets her kids just roam around. We live in a society of wrapping our kids in bubble wrap and while I don't want them to get hurt, I want them to take risks and have fun. So today they are in the tree tract jumping over sticker bushes, chopping at dead limbs with a spade, and climbing trees. Lovey came home for his watch because the walkie-talkie was almost dead. Good boy!


I hope that when they look back on their childhood, they remember the fun that they had together playing in that small patch of trees near our house. I hope this fosters creativity and independence in them as well.