Thinking About Children

And trains and tax-reform and emigrating to Denmark

At the Hoyt-Sullivan playground in Somerville, Massachusetts, there is a little something for everyone. A long, speedway-looking-slide inspires one boy to send his Matchbox cars zooming down to certain death. A track that weaves between the play structures is perfect for a girl with the world’s tiniest top-knot to scooch her ladybug car along, without fear of encountering a big kid jumping off a swing. The park has sun and shade, epic birchwood walkways reminiscent of an Andy Goldsworthy highway maze, basketball courts, a well-stocked hand-sanitizer dispenser. It is a considerate place.

Eat your heart out, Waldorf educators…

But the piece de resistance of Hoyt-Sullivan (these names are so ubiquitous in this part of the country that they might as well have called it “your high school chemistry teacher park”) is a large, fenced-in platform that looms off of the park’s edge and over the train tracks below. Every time the chug-chug of an engine draws near, little people leap from their swings, clamber off of the see-saw, put down their sticks (or run with them pointing outwards) and sprint over to curl their fingers around the metal and watch the action. For a few seconds, you can feel the electric tingle of the train on its tracks, of the shared reverence taking place among these tiny beings.

I learned, while procrastinating on my writing, that the architects of this park had heard neighborhood children refer to the old spot as “train-go-by-park,” and built the platform to honor what the children had naturally found so special about this particular location. This touched me more than a post on an architecture website ever should. Sometimes you go to a playground and the ground is unusually hard. Sometimes there is no refuge from the midday sun. Sometimes, like at our neighborhood park back in Oakland, the play structure seems to have been built to swallow children whole, so that there is always some poor kid, somewhere deep within the windowless wooden labyrinth, crying for their mother. But when they built this park, they were really thinking about children.

My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Lund, thought about children. She filled her classroom with books and puzzles and songs and if any student of hers was considered to be smarter or more normal than any other, she never let on. The teachers I work now are inventing entirely new methods and curricula and ways of demonstrating love to their students. They are thinking about children, for many more hours a week than they are being paid to think about children, so much so that I often worry for their mental health.

A video of a Kindergarten teacher having an adorable aneurism trying to engage her students online recently went viral

The activists and volunteers who are fighting to pass Prop 15 in California next month, which would take some 12 billion dollars a year out of the pockets of our criminally tax-exempt, colossal corporations, and back into school budgets, are thinking about children. Denmark thinks about children. They provide parents 52 weeks of paid leave after a birth or adoption and affordable childcare from age one. Also, as I learned on a trip to Copenhagen, it is customary and safe for parents to leave a child sleeping in a stroller outside of a store or restaurant. No one will steal your baby or report you to the police. I tried it once for about 9 minutes at a gallery with big glass doors and was equal parts exhilarated by my trust and freedom and depressed about my own country’s confounding parenting culture.

That dude on the right is texting his buddies “Do you know that Walt Disney Studios, with 1.8 million square feet, is paying property taxes based on 1975 assessed land values??”

Our nation’s special education system, I have sadly learned, is not designed to think about children. It thinks about law suits, and remediating deficits, and whether a child has a Specific Learning Disability or a Speech and Language Impairment that “adversely affects the student’s educational performance.” There are people who say terrible things about these children, and there are even more people who do not say those things but who think them. And the children, as they always do, can tell.

As I wade through day after day of working on the toilet and screen-time negotiations and Right Wing Militias trying to reenact the Wes Anderson movie Bottle Rocket, I am thinking about children so much I can get little else done. Thinking about mine; how I will entertain them, protect them from my hopelessness and rage, and pick up the pieces of their world alongside them. I am thinking about other children, who have not been thought about enough by politicians, because the standard for thinking about children is so low at this point that the Secretary of Education is essentially a money-laundering operation disguised as a Dress Barn model.

I am walking around, very creepily, thinking about all of the children I see. Watching one struggle to get onto the swing next to us, doing everything I can not to scoop her up and plop her on there. I have cared for other people’s children since I was a child myself. I want to hug them and help them resolve their conflicts and give them an extra snack from my purse and tell them none of this is their fault but it sure is okay to be sad about it all. Having to care for my own children has meant that I can no longer work with other people’s children. Not having my finger on the pulse of what children outside of my home are experiencing is a foreign, uncomfortable feeling.

Many say that once you have your own children, there is nothing you won’t do for them. And others believe that doing everything for your children means thinking about other children just as much. And yet we are building private playgrounds in our backyards, hiring private tutors for our offspring, throwing everything we have at our kids and only our kids. How can I make a better world for other people’s children when I can’t even help them onto a swing?

My husband and I have managed to make it to one meeting of our local Integrated Schools chapter. In Oakland, the white population is over 30%, but the public school population is only 11% white. These wonderful folks want us to send our children to our local “under-performing” global majority public school, not exactly because it’s good for other people’s children to be exposed to ours, but because saying something is not good enough for our children is the same as saying it is not good enough for anyone’s children. And even though society does not require us to care about other people’s children, we know damn well that we should.

Attributing the quality “underachieving” to children themselves is an imaginative and twisted use of American individualism

Some people sleep. I lie down, much too late for my own good, and inventory all of my fears until morning, or, more often, until I hear “Mama, is it morning time??”

Will we emerge from this year better able, as a society, to think about children?

Will this country and its citizens ever give a shit about all kids and all schools?

How does a teacher think about children when they can’t get them to turn on their camera?

Will all this thinking do any good, or are our thoughts too old and jaded and narrow-minded to be of much service to our children?

Will I continue to look longingly at other people’s children as they pass me on the street, inspiring strangers to cross the street to avoid my desperate energy?

And what makes someone think about children when they certainly don’t have to? How do you get someone to ignore the sound of “build the stupid park and get on with it” and instead hear a gaggle of toddlers, passing on the sidewalk with their hands on a rope, point and laugh and yell “TRAIN-GO-BY-PARK!"?

One of my children on the train viewing platform. I would give a gazillion dollars to know what he is thinking.