think of the children

One of the outcomes of the automobile culture is that it imprisons children. If no one is expected or enabled to get anywhere except by car, then those who can't drive can't get anywhere - unless they have someone to drive them. So in every state, there exist plates bearing some version of "mom's taxi". Children rely on being driven places in order to get out of the house.

There are a number of results of this reality.

• parents' lives (that is, the time when they are parenting) consist primarily of shuttling kids to activities
• life for children and their families is intensely scheduled
• the minivan rules the suburban auto market
• many midweek meals are eaten in the car (from places that put food through a window)

These are all, in themselves, horrible results.

• Parenting in the history of our species has almost always been a matter of teaching children how to live, from the hands, the head, and the heart. Children learn by imitating their parents.
  
• The overly scheduled life is not worth living. People need down time, spontaneity, time when it doesn't matter what time it is.
  
• how many the vehicle seats doesn't change the fact that it almost always only has one person in it. They are more expensive to buy and to run than the vehicles they replaced.
  
• forget the nutritional wasteland of fast food - Michael Pollan ko'd that one. Every religion recognizes the meal as the height of human interaction, the depth of meaning.

Taken together, these are a staggering indictment of the lifestyle that suburban culture has created. But I have come to the conclusion that the most distressing outcome has to do with kids' souls. Children are born with the capacity and the desire to explore. They want to know things, and their brains are marvelously suited to direct the process of acquiring knowledge. (If that weren't the case, teaching would be impossible.) Shutting kids in houses until they can be shuttled in cars to organized activities (mostly indoors) severely limits the arena of their exploration, and the activity of exploring. They can't get out in "the world" - whether that's the world of ideas by walking to the library, the world of economics by walking to the store, or the world of nature by walking to the pond.

Now, if you're a parent, you might be protesting that you give your children ample opportunity to learn: scouts, sports, academic enrichment. And that your school is rated best in the city/state. But here's the thing: an essential ingredient in the exploration of the world is freedom - the ability to direct one's own course of study, to choose. In all the things we do to enrich our children, we consistently rob them of their freedom to follow their heart, their gut, their inquisitiveness.

Sadly ironic that in a country that teaches its children its own creation story at almost every grade level, the story of the idea of freedom, its children know very little about the freedom they are being taught. So they sit inside and surf the net.