I always thought that once my kids got old enough to go to school, the era of the playdate would be over.
I really believed that once they started school, and began to make friends with the kids in their classrooms, that eventually all of their friends would be school friends, and therefore all of their friends would live in our neighborhood–just like it was back when I was a wee, paste-eating elementary school-er myself.
Obviously, however, all those years of eating paste have left my brain completely addled; how else could I have failed to make the connection between the long line of white SUVs I see waiting outside the school every afternoon and the fact that nobody lives in the same neighborhood as their school anymore. (There are, of course, a few exceptions to this rule–like us–but for the most part, it’s wall-to-wall SUVs. Sometimes I think that the only reason there are still a few of us left without them is that, somehow, we were gone the day the SUV fairy came by. Probably out on a bike ride or something).
My missing SUV aside, what that long line of cars really means is that my dream of the decline and fall of the playdate empire has been premature, to say the least.
I don’t know what I was thinking: after all, I already knew that the days when “playing” simply meant rounding up a group of neighborhood kids and seeing whose house you could get thrown out of first were as long gone as the days of a kid on a bicycle delivering your newspaper. And I knew that they were both gone for precisely the same reason: most kids aren’t even allowed to leave their own living rooms unsupervised anymore, let alone their houses.
In fact, even if my kids’school friends did live in the same neighborhood as us (and they don’t–two of them don’t even live in the same zip code), they still probably wouldn’t be allowed to walk over to our house on their own–as I mentioned before, most kids these days aren’t allowed to do anything on their own (at least until they turn 16 and get a car that is, at which time it seems that they suddenly have no restrictions whatsoever).
It’s bizarre.
We all claim to want strong, independent kids, but I guess that some parents think that these are traits that can be “organized” into children–as if there was some sort of “Independent Thinking” club you just needed to make sure that they all signed up for in kindergarten. (“Did you get the new “Independent Thinker” t-shirt? Remember: we all have to match.”)
Maybe I’m just grumpy because three years after my last child started school I’m still being asked to get in the car and drive across town so that my kids can “play.” Meanwhile, our own neighborhood is filled with kids my children have never met, either because they don’t go to our school or because, like us, they, too, are always off somewhere else (probably at playdates on the other side of town as well). The worst part of it is that, in those few moments when both sets of children are actually present in the neighborhood at the same time, my kids always resist my suggestions to go out and “play” with them by saying, “But we don’t know them.” And they’re right: they don’t.
I could, I suppose, make the introductions myself, but that would mean that first I would have to go and meet the parents–my neighbors. Who has the time for that? After all, I need all of my spare time so that I can catch up with my friends. By email. Because, of course, we don’t live anywhere near each other either.