The Daily Treat
By Kent Doyle
I live next door to a nice couple in their early 40s who have a nice 9-year-old daughter. They’re my friends. Take off a few years and the parents are roughly the age of any children I might have had. The little girl could be a grandchild. When I look at her life and hear her thoughts, it often occurs to me just how different her childhood is from my 1950s upbringing.
Let’s call her Avery (changed from another equally obnoxious name) and that’s a difference right there. I had never met a girl named Avery before, and now there seem to be more than a few. There are also countless Max’s, Sophias, Ezekiels, and Isabelles – all easily distinguishable from the Johns, Lindas, Susans, and Davids that populated elementary schools throughout the 1950s. But let’s not waste any more time with such superficial disparities; let’s jump right into a few of the more substantive differences that may or may not make Avery and Kent (me) different people.
THE SCENE: Avery, her mother, and I are standing in a Target checkout line.
AVERY (unsolicited): I’ve decided what I want for my special treat today.
ME (not out loud): Treat of the day?
AVERY’S MOTHER (warily): Yeah …
AVERY (without batting an eye): A Frappacino.
ME (again not out loud): Frappacino?
Kids in the 1950s didn’t drink coffee. They particularly didn’t consume sugar- and chocolate-infused coffee-like drinks that cost upward of $5 a cup. And nobody I can remember ever felt remotely entitled to a special treat every single day.
Avery didn’t get her Frappacino, but I’m guessing she might have, had a slightly longer checkout line wedged the negotiating window open just a smidgen wider.
A torrent of other vignettes flooded my mind: Avery (like every other kid in her class) celebrates her half-birthday – half-birthday? – for which she receives an actual gift. This year it was a little pink case for the little white iPod Nano that was among her Christmas presents.
When she doesn’t like the family dinner, she has her mother or father prepare something special just for her. I often didn’t like what we were having for dinner when I was a kid, but if I dared voice my opinion, my mother would relish telling me that if I didn’t want to eat it, I could wear it.
Parental Devotion
Avery’s parents are involved in her life on a moment-to-moment basis. The first act of any day is to transport her to school (45 minutes each way), or to some other enriching activity. She and her parents share a common interest in life: Her. Few school or extra-curricular events fail to draw both parents.
I’m pretty confident that my parents loved me. Neither of them ever threw themselves in front of a car to save my life, but they never refused to, either. Still, it was clear by the time I entered elementary school that they had their lives and I had mine. They didn’t drive me to school. Instead, I walked to the corner and caught the yellow bus. Missing it was guaranteed to incur parental wrath. My parents went to the usual assortment of school plays and band concerts, and they sat through countless games of an athletic career that must have been as humiliating for them as it was for me. Yet they didn’t solicit my opinions about books or geopolitics around the dinner table, and they certainly didn’t inquire about my relationships with my peers.
Play
Do you know what a “play date” is? I had never heard of one until I met Avery. It’s where two mothers negotiate the getting-together of their two children. And I mean “negotiate.” Kissinger brought the North Vietnamese to the peace table with less fanfare. The discussions begin days or even weeks in advance. Transportation is arranged, activities are arranged, food is arranged, and safety is arranged. At least one if not both mothers will preside over the event, and the suitability of the requesting mother and/or her kids is weighed in the balance. The impact on other 9-year-olds might also be gauged.
My mother’s idea of arranging a play date was to open the back door. Outside I played until dinnertime with whoever else was let out. We played whatever we wanted, and used whatever equipment was available to us, including pointy sticks and shards of glass. My parents knew the names of most of my playmates, but their interest in boring kid stories was clearly limited.
School and Money
Both sets of parents (Avery’s and mine) could generously be called middle-class. The comparison pretty much ends there. Avery is hand delivered daily to a tony private school, while I walked or was bussed to Craig Elementary rain or shine. Avery’s parents see elementary school as where you first put your feet on life’s path. Personally, I never gave the life’s-path thing a moment’s consideration, and presumably neither did my parents.
A childhood threat in the Doyle household invariably involved physical violence (which rarely materialized) or yelling (which often materialized). In Avery’s world, parental threats are far more cataclysmic in scale and potential impact: “Do that again and you’ll never get into an Ivy League school.” Or worse: “If you don’t get that homework done every night you’ll” – gasp! – “be transferred to a public school.”
Money is at the heart of the school question. Modern parents face the guilt-inspiring dilemma: Take your chances in public school, which may or may not yield a lifetime of mediocrity, or shell out big-time for a fancy private school. My parents took their chances. Their major financial contribution was 50 cents a day for the school lunch program. The only kids I knew who went to private school were usually there as a result of some deal that was hammered out in juvenile court. I’m not talking about chump-change Catholic school either. I’m talking 25 grand a year in after-tax dollars. And I’m talking elementary school – not even high school or college. Third grade. Fourth grade.
Getting back to the school lunch program: Avery eats lunch in school, as I did. I can’t personally compare private-school food with what was scooped out of metal steam pans in the cafeteria at Craig Elementary. But I do remember that, for us, every Thursday was “pretend pizza day.” For Avery, every Thursday is “sushi day.”
Homework and Grades
Avery does several hours of homework most nights. Let me rephrase that. Avery and her parents do several hours of homework most nights. They have also signed a contract with her school obliging them not only to be aware of her homework assignments, but to insure that the work will be completed in a timely fashion.
The way it goes down is for them to hover over her workspace and spring into action the minute she becomes confused or distracted. Because these school administrators are not fooling around. The punishment for failure is expulsion. In public school they can’t throw you out, even if you’re truly incorrigible, even if you go around urinating in hallways. So every night at Avery’s home, before and after dinner, there are reviews in multiplication, spelling, and history. I doubt either one of Avery’s parents put in half as much work when they were in the fourth grade. I know I didn’t.
College-Bound
Gaining admission to the college of your choice is the sine qua non of the whole operation. These folks aren’t thinking about Slippery Rock State Teachers College. I once saw a woman pushing a baby stroller in full-blown yuppie regalia with a hat emblazoned: “Future Harvard Mom.” She looked dead serious.
I started thinking about getting into college during my senior year of high school. My parents didn’t seem to think about it too much either. Avery and her friends and all of their parents started to compose the personal statement pre-birth-canal.
Everybody (or at least everybody you’d want to have a play date with) has good grades and good test scores, so that alone won’t give you a definitive edge. What you need, at any and all costs, is experiences that ring of d-i-s-t-i-n-c-t-i-o-n. Have you participated in the Olympic Games? Started a business that employs more than ten people? Completed a solo circumnavigation of the globe? Are you an Eskimo with a published novel? No? No Harvard for you.
Avery’s parents stay up nights trying to dream up ways for her to excel. In my day, Boy Scouts and the student council counted as extracurricular activities. Forget that mundane crap. Avery studies the violin (she’s brutal), takes Spanish in school, Mandarin before school starts, and participates in a drama club every Wednesday after school. On weekends her parents drag her to all sorts of art galleries, chamber-music recitals, and science museums – all grist for the old college-application mill.
I did join the Chess Club as a high-school senior in a belated nod to the college of my choice. Fortunately, no attendance was taken. My more ambitious classmates read books to old people and joined the Science Club. Or said they did, anyway.
Summer Activities
Another area of child/parent collaboration for my neighbors is the selection of camps and activities covering every waking moment of summer. It was easier for my family. Again, my mother simply opened the door with a deft twist of the wrist, and what ensued was hours of unsupervised play. Our activities included baseball, bike riding, and getting into trouble appropriate for a 9-year-old. I never did learn Chinese. Then again, I never got into Harvard either.
I did go to the Hollow Dale Boy Scout camp for one week out of every summer. My parents laid out $75 like it was nothing, and my mother sewed kent doyle labels in every pair of underwear I owned. I still came home without several of them.
Avery went to tennis camp and riding camp last summer, and played soccer in her spare time. I’m not talking YMCA camp. I’m talking mucho bucko private day camps. Of course you can’t play tennis without a racket the size of a pancake griddle, and you’d look funny without the appropriate assortment of cute little white shorts and tops. Evidently, riding exists on a separate wardrobe plane, requiring special knee-high leather boots, a black helmet covered with fuzz, and the necessary red jacket. All that and she’s still talking about jodhpurs. Can somebody please tell me what the hell a jodhpur is?
Soccer is a nearly universal experience for elementary-school kids these days. I saw Avery play a half dozen times. She had the shorts, the shoes, the pads, and multiple official jerseys for home and away games. I never once saw her touch the ball, although I did see her do several very nice cartwheels.
So here comes a new summer, and there is no thought of Tennis II or Riding II, where at least the basic implements have already been purchased. Soccer is long gone. There was a Winter Olympics this year, and so there will be figure-skating camp. The skates are 600 bucks a pair, heat-molded around busily growing feet. Workout duds are costly, but nothing compared with the “competition” outfits. Imagine, if you will, a hundred
9-year-olds dressed up like Tanya Harding. Then, if your parents really love you and don’t want to see you miss out on Olympic Gold, there is a course in Ballet to add grace to your triples. Now, no self-respecting 9-year-old can show up to ballet class without toe shoes and an assortment of tutus.
We usually made a wallet in Boy Scout camp. I gave mine to my father every year. Now that I think about it, I can’t remember him ever using the thing.
My Point (if I have a point)
I didn’t go to Harvard, but fairly close, and with a full scholarship. I even managed to stagger through graduate school. I’ve been rich and poor, and everything in between. I want to say that the extra ration of freedom and independence I had as a child made me a decent humor writer, but the truth is Avery is funny as hell.
I didn’t have an enormous sense of entitlement at 9, and I think I would have liked it. Imagine somebody making a fuss over your half-birthday. But would it have made me happier? Beats the hell out of me. Will it make Avery and her friends happier? I don’t know that either. I’m not sure I like Frappucino.
