Here are the last few paragraphs from this week’s ‘My Turn’ essay from Newsweek, written by Carolyn V. Egan and entitled, “Sidewalks Can Make a Town a Neighborhood.”

“Parents have become slaves to their children’s schedules, terrified to let their offspring out of sight. New houses are huge, enclosing all of life. They’re connected by technological portals to the outside world, making an abstract of everything beyond their walls.
“We worry about the safety of our children if we let them loose to wander sidewalks, even while we hear more and more stories of predators on the highways and byways of the Internet. We have forgotten that we cannot protect our children by telling them to hop in and buckle up. Our children do not develop the instincts to discern and avoid danger from the back seat of an automobile. We deprive them of self-mastery by insulating them from very cold and very hot temperatures, from rain, from wind. They do not know who they are without a plan, without a ride. While we encourage dependence in our children by chauffeuring them everywhere, we also encourage in them habits of selfishness and parochialism.” [Interesting thought!] “Adult maturity is rooted in the unstructured roaming of childhood.
“Sidewalks are becoming nostalgic artifacts of a time before three- or four-car families. To me, their absence represents disturbing changes in the way we connect to one another – and the habits, values, and capacities we bequeath to our children…”

What are we trying to accomplish? What kind of people are we trying to form as we deal with our children? How many of our decisions concerning our children are based solely on fear?
I truly believe we do ourselves and our children no good by trying to remove from their lives all hardships, all inconveniences, all failures, all responsibilities, all things that might impinge upon their self-esteem, all the things that build character, sense of self, understanding of their true potential born of experience rather than psycho-babble, understanding of their limitations… We do them no good by making them, even unintentionally, as neurotic, self-absorbed, and over-burdened by planned-activities, as ourselves.
We do our children no good when we make excuses for our own laziness and apathy when we don’t get up on Sunday mornings for church and say things like, “I don’t take my children to church because I want them to have the freedom to choose their own religion.” I have experienced far too many new college students who arrive on campus with no ability to make good and rational judgments about what is a legitimate form of religious expression and devotion and what is not – they are prime targets of the cults. They’ve been taught nothing and do not know how to judge or discern – they have no foundation.
So, what is the answer to a world that is, in fact, dangerous? Part of the answer is rediscovering the very real experience of community, which also means the rediscovery that the ‘other’ is at least as equally important as the self. We are increasingly loosing our ability to understand the experiential necessity of living in tactile neighborhoods (communities) where the other adults and older children are engaged with one another and are looking after the younger children for their safety and formation. While this is a very loaded phrase, it really does take a village to raise a child, at least as well-adjusted child.