doll.jpg

My son is 21. On his second birthday, my mother (who was born in 1940) congratulated me on his having reached that age. I thought it was a totally random thing for her to say, so I asked her to explain. She said something about how, in the past, when your kid made it to two, it was a big deal because they didn’t always make it. Made sense to me, but I thought it was a pretty anachronistic, and even silly comment. Then, about ten years later, a friend asked for the advice of her dad, a doctor (born in the 30s), when her husband was thinking of getting a vasectomy. He suggested she wait till her youngest child was two. So two was the magic number for that generation, evidently.

Mine was the “everything’s curable or, if not, there’s a vaccine” generation. When I was a kid, I knew that in the old days kids would die from things like strep throat. I read Little Women. Beth died of that (or scarlet fever, which is what strep turns into) if I remember correctly. And then there was Helen Keller. Everyone my age saw The Miracle Worker as a kid. She was a normal baby who got sick and ended up blind and deaf. But that was then. So it had never occurred to me that my son wouldn’t make it to two, or at least that his precious baby life could be cut short by some infectious disease.

I remember hearing, as a very young child, the story of The Little Match Girl, who was out selling matches in winter and froze to death. Then there was The Littlest Angel, a Christmas story about a four-year-old angel. “He was exactly four years, six months, five days, seven hours, and 42 minutes old when he presented himself to the Gatekeeper.” That was a little more realism than I needed at that age… And I remember saying bedtime prayers that included “if I die before I wake.” That was some scary shit. And it was all morbid as hell.

So when it was my turn to parent, I didn’t subject my son to any of that. I don’t think it was an entirely conscious decision; I didn’t really realize I’d done it until he was a much older child. It was probably because I remembered being disturbed by the thought of children dying when I was a kid and wanted to spare him that kind of fear. Maybe it was because I figured it would never be part of his reality (it hadn’t been part of mine) and that there was no point in drawing his attention to such a thing. From what I’ve seen, my entire generation (at least the middle-class parents) made the same choice.

It seems to me that growing up in sanitized, immunized America has had a deleterious effect on how my generation handles unpleasantness. We grew up so safe and comfortable that we don’t know how to deal with it. Maybe this explains, in part, why we can say things like “I don’t want to think about that, it’s too depressing.” Maybe it’s why Americans are such ostriches when it comes to things like, oh, the Iraq war, the president’s crimes, and global warming, for example.

My generation is bad enough, but we’ve raised a generation of kids-in-a-bubble and I’m afraid that they will be crippled as a result. We, as a culture, immunize our kids against ugly abstractions of every kind. We shelter them from death, war, famine, disease, even though they are inescapable phenomena and a fundamental part of the daily lives of most of the people in the world.

So we gave our kids’ brains an ugliness vaccine. We wanted to protect their innocence, but the result is that when they are faced with the realities of the world, they will have no idea what the proper response is. And they’ll make bad decisions. They’ll go to war because they don’t realize how horrible it is. They’ll keep conspicuously consuming because they have no sense of the harm they’re doing. Already, my generation is doing a pretty miserable job of dealing with these realities. Our kids will be worse. Just as our antibiotics can’t handle nasty bugs as well as they used to, the ugliness vaccine we gave our kids won’t protect them in the world they’re about to inherit. We have deprived them of their natural defenses by not allowing them, much less encouraging them to ponder ugliness, adversity, injustice…

Here’s another example: I (and millions of others) got the “starving children in China” bit when I didn’t want to eat all my food. That’s a bit of ugliness and guilt I declined to lay on my son because I didn’t think it was fair or necessary, but also because They said it wasn’t good for kids physically or emotionally. But the thing is, I am certain, now, that my attitudes about food and wasting food have more than a little to do with the fact that the concept that there were hungry kids in the world was presented to me when I was growing up.

When I was in preschool I got the mumps, and my mom had a mumps party. She invited all her friends with little boys around my age to bring their sons over. The moms made a game out of all of us sharing the same straw in a giant milkshake so the boys would be infected with my mumps. It wasn’t an uncommon practice.

America has become way too squeamish for such things now. The culture has disinfected its environment to the point that it’s phobic about ickiness, from germs on doorknobs to child prostitutes in Thailand. And American culture has become the ultimate overprotective mother. Admit it folks, kids with moms like that end up not knowing how to take care of themselves. Our kids would be much better off if we gave them regular mental mumps parties. It would help prepare them for what lies ahead. They’re gonna need all the help they can get.