For years people have looked at places like the Great Wall of China, the pyramids of Egypt, and Machu Picchu and wondered: why? Why would someone go to all the trouble of building something that enormous and complicated, when, surely, something a little simpler would’ve sufficed?
And then, one day, the answer came to me, and I could not believe how obvious it was. Of course, I thought, as I surveyed the pile of pillows and couch cushions that had once been my living room, the builders of those wonders must have had children. And those children obviously had twelve weeks of summer vacation.
Think about it: the first few weeks of summer are great. You have activities lined up and camps scheduled, and everyone is just about as busy as they were doing the school year, but this time they are busy having fun, fun, fun. But then your energy ( and your wallet) starts to grow thin, and you start to cut back on things a little bit. And with nothing but their own imaginations to entertain them, your kids turn into excitement vampires, draining you of ideas as soon as you walk in the door.
“Can we go to a movie?”
“Can we go out for dinner?”
“Can you drive us to the mall?”
And, of course, endlessly, “I’m bored.”
Soon all of your rules about limiting TV, computer time and gaming fly out of the window, and you find yourself saying things like, “Isn’t there anything you want to watch on TV? I think Daddy ordered the Playboy channel last night,” and “Are you sure there aren’t a few more Nazi Zombies you can kill?” because every hour of boredom for them somehow manages to translate into two hours of tedium for you. (One popsicle stick fort equals forty popsicles left out to thaw. One “homemade ant farm” equals you having to scavenge the back yard for all of your errant tupperware. One “couch fort” equals six loads of laundry. And so on.)
Suddenly, you begin to understand the Great Wall of China.
Sure, they say were trying to keep out the Mongol hordes. But also, just maybe, Emperor Qing Shi Huang couldn’t afford to send his kids to summer camp that year. And maybe the Pharaoh would have been happy with cremation, but Mrs. Pharaoh decided that this was the summer she was going to try to get the kids to spend more quality time outside. And who knows? Maybe even the Incan Mom heard “Che utzca” (or however they say “I’m bored” in Incan) one too many times, and finally said, “I know: why don’t you all go outside and build a fort?”
I have a friend whose grandfather, when left in charge of a pack of her unruly teenage cousins one summer, made them dig a basement under his house—by hand. This, I think, was parenting (or rather, grand-parenting) of the first order: not only did he manage to come up with a really dreadful job to threaten his obnoxious grandchildren with, he also had the will to actually stick with it (no two and a half, two and three-quarters for him). And on top of that, he got a new basement out of the deal.
I imagine that it was just that kind of thinking that led to the Panama canal. After all, it was Teddy Roosevelt who famously once said: “Walk softly, carry a big stick, and, whenever possible, use that stick to drive the kids outside during summer break.”