Reading Beverly Cleary’s classic 1975 tale, “Ramona the Brave,” to my daughter the other night, I came upon a shocking revelation.
Ramona, the self-described “spunky” protagonist, is in first grade — yet she bathes herself every night.
Yes, that’s right. The 6-year-old mixes the hot and cold water, washes herself, shampoos her hair and even wrings out the washcloth — all without the least bit of supervision from her parents.
The kindergarten moms to whom I related this tale were flabbergasted. We all agreed that our own 6-year-olds were in no position to pull this off — let alone the other feats of independence Ramona exhibits.
She walks to school by herself. One day, she changes the route she walks without telling anyone.
Faced with a dog barking at her viciously, she throws her shoe at him and then walks the rest of the way to school. No adults witness this sequence, and she tells no one at school that she’s missing a shoe.
Just the number of minutes in a day when Ramona is without grownup supervision is a jolt to modern sensibilities.
Mind you, I bemoan the overprotected world my children will grow up in, as do many other parents. But, as much as I long for them to be “free-range kids” (as author Lenore Skenazy calls them), I don’t think it’s merely irrational fear that prevents us from letting our kids bathe themselves or walk to school alone.
It’s also a matter of the pace of our lives.
Teaching kids independence takes time — a lot of time — and patience. It’s easier to ferry your 5-year-old around Manhattan in a stroller than teach her to walk quickly and avoid absent-minded tourists. It’s easier to give our kids mashed-up fruit they can suck out of a pouch than wait for them to peel an orange or pick the seeds out of a piece of watermelon.
And it’s easier — at least in the moment — to wash your son than to teach him how to run his own bath and trust that he’ll do it correctly.
Before becoming a parent,I asked a friend who already had kids what her new life was like. She asked, “You know those lists you and I used to have?” referring to our shared knack for cataloging every task, from doing laundry to writing book reviews. “You’ll have to give those up. At the end of the day, you’ll be lucky to cross one thing off.”
On Facebook mostly, I follow her life as a stay-at-home mom home-schooling three children in the Midwest. She still has lists, but the items are accomplished on a kids’ schedule not an adult one. The children read and do math and garden and bake and go to dance performances and museums. They even do laundry and the dishes and vacuum.
But there are days in my friend’s house when what was supposed to get done doesn’t get done. And that’s OK, as frustrated as it might make her, because ultimately her kids are her job. She can work at their pace.
Then there’s Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. In her soon-to-be-published book, she writes of mothers who work outside the home that they are not pushing themselves enough at the office: “We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in.”
Perhaps. Or perhaps we non-COOs don’t raise our hands at work because we simply want more time at home.
At the end of “Ramona the Brave,” her mom returns to work; the family needs the money she will bring in as a secretary in a dentist’s office. For most middle-class families this is simply the economic reality they must deal with. But Ramona is disappointed: She wants to make cookies with her mother, not eat the store-bought ones. “You can bake them from a mix,” her mother replies. “You’re old enough now.”
In other words: We love you dear, but we have to pick up the pace.