In this chapter, the author takes us on a journey through an evening in his childhood. Him and his friends of all ages would play army through everyone’s backyards or they would play baseball in the parking lot of the Farmers Market. How kids of all ages would play together.
This sounds similar to my childhood. Now I didn’t live in a big neighborhood, but there were a couple kids a little older than me, and we would all play together. I lived in a fairly rural community, where everyone knew everyone else, and if I did something bad in town, my mom usually knew about it before I had a chance to ride my bike back home. So I was able to connect with the first part of this chapter.
Now the author goes into the seven deadly sins of child rearing. He states that because children don’t play like that anymore, they have very structured play time and overscheduled lives like their parents, there are certain things they are losing out on. Frazee sees a loss of creativity, leadership, mentoring, conflict management skills, health, finances(of the parent, not the child), and loss of family meals. I guess I have never really thought about it, but you do end up learning a lot about how to lead and deal with other people out on the playground or out playing with your friends. I know, working with children, there are a lot of kids whose imaginations are severely underdeveloped.
In the book, Frazee says that there are medical professionals who believe that how children are highly structured today, is just leading to more stress in children. Now again, he mentions the Hebrew Day Planner from several chapters ago as a possible solution to this. While this is an application, I am hoping that he gets into a little more depth in the next section of chapters, which are so aptly named the How-To Section.
