Picket Fence Post

Dear Teenaged Staples Employees with Whom I Spoke Yesterday,

You were all so very pleasant yesterday when I asked several of you where I could locate Trapper Keepers in your store.

Clutching three sets of school supply lists for my three kids (for items which ultimately cost me $130 . . . and I didn’t buy everything on the lists and made many unauthorized substitutions with store brands) I must’ve looked like a crazy lady to whom you gave quizzical looks. Was my scary/stressed out demeanor the reason why, when I asked, “Where are your Trapper Keepers?” you kept showing me intricate $20 zippered contraptions which were clearly meant for high school or higher-level students? Or were you just not in the mood to deal with me?

“No, that cannot possibly be what the teacher wants,” I said, pointing to one of the lists. “This if for a fourth grader.”

When I continued to get nothing but vacant looks, I dashed back to your humongous school supply display, grabbed a two-pocket folder WITHOUT fasteners (per teachers’ requests) and held it up to an employee. “See? This says ‘Trapper’ on it. That means that somewhere, there’s a Trapper Keeper for this to go into.”

More blankness. “Sorry,” one kind young girl said with a smile, returning to her work of stacking merchandise.

I received similar responses from other staffers whose glances bestowed unspoken pity upon me, the poor woman who, minutes earlier, had been muttering to her fourth grade son, “The teacher’s just gonna have to deal with these substitutions . . . HOW many of those? Ten? No way.”

Then, after 45 migraine-inducing minutes of trying to locate the nearly 40 items on the three lists (not including the ones I didn’t buy), I accidentally stumbled across a small Mead display. With Trapper Keepers. For $6.99. I brought a light blue Trapper Keeper to the front of the store where the nice young girl was still stacking the $20 zippered items and said, “I just thought you should know, THIS is a Trapper Keeper. It’s at the end of Aisle 3, in case any other parents come in here looking for it.”

In the future, perhaps you kind, polite and smiling young folks could put in a little effort into discerning if your store actually carries an item for which an already frazzled parent, clutching a vast school supply list, is looking instead of just providing blank stares.

Happy Fall!

Sincerely,

Meredith O’Brien

Image credit: Ironically, from Office Depot.

Fans of AMC’s critically acclaimed early 1960s drama Mad Men have no doubt noticed that folks tended to raise their children a tad bit differently when John F. Kennedy was the president than people do now. Not has a child on Mad Men repeatedly been shown fixing drinks for adults, but parents’ friends have slapped misbehaving youth and a pregnant woman openly drank, smoked and consumed caffeinated coffee, all considered no-no’s for today’s gestating ladies.

The most recent Mad Men episode was chock-full of examples of how much parenting has changed:

By watching the exploits of lead characters Don and Betty Draper and their grade-school-aged kids, Sally and Bobby, viewers saw Betty demand that Don spank their son in order to teach the boy right from wrong, particularly after he’d repeatedly lied to his mother. When Don refused to do so — instead disciplined Bobby by saying, “Mommy says you broke the hi-fi. I believe her. Don’t do it again.” and then telling him to go bed – Betty challenged Don, asking him if he thought he’d be the man he is if his father hadn’t spanked him.

Later in the episode, Don had to take Sally to work with him, where the girl received . . . an education. (See video here.)

But, ironically, the recent Mad Men show also dramatized examples of how parenting hasn’t changed completely, despite the passage of 40 years:

Bobby and Sally walked in on Don and Betty when they were in bed one morning as the parents were at the very beginning of gettin’ busy (Don was on top of Betty, but under the sheets). Don ordered the kids out of the room as they asked what was going on. ”We’re . . . (*pause*) sleeping,” Don said gruffly.

During another fight about Don’s “style” of discipline, Betty told her husband that she was tired of being trapped at home all day, “outnumbered” by the kids, only to have him come home and be “the hero.” (The “hero” thing happens at our house all the time.)

FYI: If you’re a Mad Men fan, please join me every Monday on my Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum blog where I discuss the latest episode and all things Draper.

That’s the conclusion of Philip K. Howard, who, in a Wall Street Journal piece entitled, “Why Safe Kids are Becoming Fat Kids,” said that by trying to rid our children’s lives of risks on the playground, we’re not only sucking fun out of their lives, but we’re driving them to the relative “safety” of TV, video games and computers where they sit, sloth-like, munch on Cheetos and gain another half-pound with each tick of the clock.

Quoting the American Academy of Pediatrics as saying that unstructured play is crucial to children’s development, Howard wrote:

“The harmful effects of our national safety obsession ripple outward into society. One in six children in America is obese, and many of them will face a lifetime of chronic illness. According to the Center[s] for Disease Control, this problem would basically cure itself if children engaged in the informal outdoor activities that used to be normal. But how do we lure children off the sofa? One key attraction is risk.”

He added that when we adults seek to eliminate pediatric risk — like the potential risks involved in falling from playground equipment, sledding or playing tag at recess — we rob the kids of their chance to figure out how to navigate such hazards in the future. And he’s right. If children don’t try to test their limits while under the care of engaged parents who do not hover and suffocate them, what are they going to do when they’re finally on their own, like, for example, at college?

Certainly I don’t want my kids to break their limbs, require stitches or sustain concussions, but I likewise don’t want them to be reticent to go outside in their backyard or school playgrounds and figure out how to play on their own without having adults there to guide their activities.

I thought I was one of a naive minority of folks who thought it unconscionable that Major League Baseball decided to air this year’s All-Star game at 8 p.m., when the first pitch occurred near 9 p.m. My kids – then ages 6, 9 and 9 – wanted desperately to watch the game, but, given its starting time, I told them upfront they’d only get to see about an inning or so live before they’d have to go to bed. I recorded the rest of the game on our Digital Video Recorder (DVR) and told them they could watch it the following day. And I thought that this arrangement stunk.

I felt the same way about the World Series games last fall, which commenced late in the evening and my three young Boston Red Sox fans barely got to watch them (until what I hoped would be the last game and I actually encouraged them to stay up even though it was a school night) because they were prime-time events, airing at times way beyond grade school-aged kids’ bedtimes.  Ditto for the recent NBA championship games in which the Celtics were contending and eventually emerged victorious.

Then along came Stephen King’s column in this week’s Entertainment Weekly, giving voice to the complaints I’ve long had about professional sports which – despite the fact that they cash in on youthful enthusiasm with a variety of over-priced youth paraphernalia and stuffed animals of team mascots — that they’d rather air sports events at night, make lots of money in ad revenue and to hell with the kids and families.

King, a fellow Sox fan, wrote, “. . . [T]hanks to the unholy alliance of Fox and MLB, most ‘event’ TV baseball might as well come with an Adults Only tag.”

Arguing that greed has corrupted America’s favorite past-time, King wrote:

“This year’s All-Star game is a particularly disgusting case of how the game has been pimped out by the very people who pretend to care about its traditions. Fox came on air at 8 p.m. on July 15, and bingo, there go the 6- and 7-year-olds: Sleep tight, kiddies. The game actually started around quarter to nine (there go the 8-year-olds). It rolled past midnight with the score tied (there go the teenagers and working stiffs) and finally ended at 1:38 a.m. on July 16 . . . At 15 innings, it would have ended late no matter what, but if the first pitch had been thrown at 7 p.m., the game still would have been over before midnight. But hey, the kids don’t buy Bud or lawn tractors, so to hell with them.”

He concluded by quoting a sports commentator as saying, “Commerce trumps conscience every time.”

As The Girl continues to come to terms with the fact that baseball is a business, not a national treasure (she’s struggling to overcome her anger and betrayal over the departure of her favorite Sox player, AGAIN, and trying to get through a Sox game without getting upset), I believe it’s my job to give the kids a jaded, realistic perspective on matters involving today’s professional baseball: It’s not about the fans who love the teams, buy the outrageously expensive tickets and shell out hard-earned money for shirts and various merchandise. It’s not about tradition. It’s not about what’s fair. It’s about MLB (the league, the owners and the players). And their money.