When I was a little girl, my family came to Green Lake, Wisconsin, for a week each summer. We rented a cottage, next to my Aunt Ginny and Uncle’s Chuck’s cottage. Along with our four cousins, my two older brothers and I swam like little maniacs, went boating and fishing, beat the crap out of each other and ran around well past dark. I remember playing “Jaws” with my Dad in the water, and getting the bejeezus scared out of me with a Ouija board at bedtime. I don’t recall there being a TV, and obviously there wasn’t wireless internet access, an iPad and YouTube. At least from my vantage point now, a good couple of decades later, it seems like we were more or less always contented with what we had, as long as there was the lake and some Merkt’s cheese and Jim’s summer sausage around. (Ya der, hey.) Of course, we were country kids to begin with, growing up with everything we needed, a few of the things we wanted, and not a whole lot more.
This summer, after not being here for many, many years, I decided to bring my son to Green Lake to get away for a few days. My son — a child of a fairly urban suburb and a web-obsessed Mom — has, at the ripe old age of five, announced that he would like to start vlogging product reviews of his Lego sets.
The first morning we were here, we took him on two-mile hike around the property on which we are staying, the Heidel House (great location, nice views, marginal beds and average food). For all of the complaining, you would have thought we were taking him on the Bataan Death March. He has no interest in swimming in the lake, as it’s too cold, or even the outdoor pool; he requires the indoor pool heated to about the temperature of bath water, and reminiscent of the health club where he takes swimming lessons. Out on the insanely expensive rental boat, he clung to his Lego catalog like a tattered paper life preserver.
He has the attention span of a gnat, and the desire for outdoor physical activity of a sponge. (SpongeBob Squarepants, be damned.) This from a child who uttered the word “outside” as one of his first five words. Now, most of the time, he would honestly rather be watching Lego videos on YouTube than doing most anything. Just now, we forced the end of post-bike-ride-and-swimming “quiet time” — aka video watching — to get him out on the little beach with a bucket and some shovels. There wasn’t much argument about that, but much of the time, when you try to take the iPad away the reaction is like you’re trying to steal a kidney.
My fundamental assertion: kids today have gotten soft.
I do know I can’t blame this all on the web, of course; this is really more of a rhetorical question. It’s not just the web – it’s the onslaught of media in general. And it’s 100% my fault, and my husband’s, that our son gets too much computer time, and watches too much television. When I am on the computer or the iPad during my downtime, what’s he going to want to do in his? Duh. Yet, my husband and I are both active people and generally set a decent example in this regard, and that doesn’t seem to rub off on the little man to the extent that the computer addiction does. I’m sad for him, that he’s not a country kid living in “simpler times”, with simpler parents. We’re trying to set limits, and balance it out with more outside time. And I refuse to, on top of the computer addiction, go out and buy the NintendoDS he already hears his friends talking about. And yes, we do read to him from actual old-fashioned paper books; actually, he taught himself to read when he was three…on pbskids.com.
In spite of all of this, and the questioning that comes along with it, this time has been a gift. There’s just nothing like the smell of your kid’s beachy head on your shoulder on a boat. Yet I knew, of course, that Green Lake wouldn’t be the same. Yesterday, we cruised the entire perimeter of the lake, looking for anything that might remotely resemble my childhood memories. Most of the little cottages are gone, replaced by mega-homes. We found one “ghetto” section of the lake, where there were a couple of cottages that “could have” been the ones. But sadly I found out today from one of my cousins that he was forced to sell the cottage when recessionary times fell on his home-building business last year; the wealthy neighbor to whom he sold it leveled the cottage of my childhood, seeking a little bit of “green space”.
On the upside, the cottage in which my family stayed is being remodeled and will hopefully be available for me to share with my family next summer.
We won’t be bringing the iPad.
