Pants-Free Parenting: Childhood has its own problems

My 4-year-old handed me a scrap of paper, on it she had drawn two stick figures with sad faces. 'What is this?” I asked.

'It's a picture of me. I'm sad because I don't like being a kid.” She began to cry. I sat down and held her. I get it. The angst of being 4 is overwhelming.

Americans idealize childhood. We talk about it like it's a time of innocence and pure play. We talk about preserving childhood as if it were a magical jewel that gets stolen the moment a child begins adolescence. I've never believed that. I didn't like being a kid much either.

We tell children what to wear, where to go, how to dress, what to eat. When they cry they are being a nuisance and people expect them to stop. When they are happy they are being too loud. They have to hold still for the camera. They have to sit still in the restaurant. They are expected to be under control when they don't even know what control is. They are expected to fit in a world that does little to accommodate them.

Statistics show that if a person is going to be abused, they are more likely to be abused before the age of 18. Twenty-two percent of children in American live in homes that fall below the poverty line. One in five children go hungry. A growing number of children go hungry and often only have access to cheap unhealthy food. Our solution is to tell them to be more active and work harder. God forbid we feed them. Studies show children are chronically sleep deprived and yet, we expect them to do more homework, be more active. We begrudge them their time in front of the screen. Children are society's most vulnerable people - pulled along by the whims and wishes of adults who mean so well, but often get it so wrong.

I didn't like being a kid much either. I hated not being in control of how my hair was cut or what food I got to eat. I spent a lot of my time dreaming I was someone else - playing games where I was someone else. When I hear parents wishing again for the 'good old days” of childhood or rhapsodizing about how good their children have it, I wonder what that truly means. What are we saying about childhood with our mouths that we are not backing up with our actions?

'Be happy,” we like to chant to our kids. We tell them to suck it up, be grateful, we wish we had it as good as they do. A recent study done by Scott Mirabile, assistant professor of psychology at St. Mary's College of Maryland, found that when parents focus on positivity they ignore their children's negative emotions and this could have some, well, negative consequences. The study published recently in the European Journal of Developmental Psychology calls ignoring negative emotions an unsupportive emotional strategy. Mirabile writes: 'ignoring correlates positively with children's emotional liability, anger, and aggression suggests that parental ignoring is not only a response to children's poor emotional behavior, but also may be a cause of it.”

When my daughter sat in my lap and cried about her state of being a kid, I held her. And scratched her back. I asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. Where she wanted to live. What she hoped to do. Then, she asked me, 'Is it hard being a grown up?”

'It is,” I told her. 'It is hard when you are big and you don't know what to tell your little daughter.”

She gave me a hug and we went and ate some leftover Halloween candy, just because I was the grown up and I thought it would be a good idea.

' Lyz Lenz is a writer, mother of two and hater of pants. Email her at eclenz@gmail.com or find her writing at LyzLenz.com.