To the Editor:
Re “A Dead Body and Leeches, but Still a Better Way to Be a Kid,” by Sarah Wildman (Opinion guest essay, March 22):
Ms. Wildman hits home in her essay about rewatching the Rob Reiner film “Stand by Me” when she confronts the vast chasm between childhood 40 or 50 years ago and childhood now. I often refer to the 1970s as “the last, best time to be a kid.” It was a time of freedom and imagination, without the expectation that every free moment be devoted to preparing for a narrowly defined idea of future success.
My own children are 27 and 30. They missed much of the tech craze and can easily set their devices aside. I see my daughter now providing her own child with analog options in their home. Does this signal a change for future generations toward a more balanced existence in the digital age?
Considered choices like hers and a recognition that there may be another way actually give me some hope that humans, when confronted with the possibility of losing our humanity, will respond before it’s too late.
It is no accident that a piece of literature transformed into a sensitive film provoked such deep thought and connection. The arts shine a light on our shared humanity and have the power to change our world — one heart at a time.
Elizabeth Volkmann Northampton, Mass.
To the Editor:
There are still places in America where children can roam wild and explore for hours, undeterred. For three years, my family was lucky enough to inhabit one of them: a seminary campus, of all places.
At the center of it was a shared playground and pavilion, the natural hub from which all the day’s adventures began. But our kids never stayed there too long; they migrated from house to house, following whoever had the best snacks or interesting game or activity to try. Most doors were open, day and night, and everyone knew one another’s name. Hours would pass and we wouldn’t know where our children were, but they always came home: exhausted, sometimes filthy, but always exhilarated.
While a childhood that looks like the one in “Stand by Me” might feel impossible to recreate in our current cultural landscape, there is still a possibility for it to exist. It lives in intentional community, in places where adults choose to live together for a shared purpose, to embrace life and raise their families together. For us, it was a hard place to leave. We still hope, someday, to find or build something like it again.
(Rev.) Shaina Ciaccio Chesterfield Township, N.J.
To the Editor:
Born in 1931 in southern Mississippi in the Depression, I spent my boyhood during the earth-shattering events of World War II. Our house stood on two acres with a barn, a cow pasture, a chicken yard and a large garden. It was fortuitously surrounded by 40 acres of untamed woodland, with blackberry vines, huckleberry bushes, a drainage ditch with crayfish we could catch, moccasin snakes we did our best to avoid, tall oaks between which flying squirrels soared, and muscadine vines offering succulent fruit, as well as a way to swing as we emulated Tarzan in the movies we escaped to on Saturday mornings.
Much of the rest of our summer days was spent deep in those magical woods, happily out of our mother’s sight. Of course, we were always at our games on the outskirts of danger. Our parents knew it. We knew it. Somehow the danger we both feared paled in the face of the imaginary world offered by those gloriously risky woods.
Tom Evans Summerville, S.C.
To the Editor:
I saw “Stand by Me” in a theater in New York City when I was 13. Like many other city kids, I, too, was feral and left free to range. For us it wasn’t rucksacks and train tracks, but backpacks and subways and a huge city where no one paid attention to wandering children. We were profoundly lonely and joyfully free.
That freedom felt precious then. Now it sometimes feels fantastical.
Four decades later, I think children are still lonely and wandering. Do they find this kind of freedom and intimacy with their friends, away from the fake world adults build and blind themselves with? Some still do. And perhaps it tastes even sweeter now to them, and is more carefully cultivated once found.
Sarabinh Levy-Brightman Belmont, Mass.
To the Editor:
I grew up in a tiny village in Unternbibert, Germany. The kids of the neighborhood and I spent almost our entire childhood roaming through the woods, chasing insects in the meadows, building treehouses or constructing dams in one of the two little creeks nearby.
When I was about the age of the protagonists in “Stand by Me,” my parents let me and my friends camp unsupervised every year at some ponds in the woods. I have a photo of myself from that time after taking a swamp bath; I am totally covered with sludge. All of this happened in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Now I am a teacher in a technical secondary school in Nuremberg, with students between 17 and 20 years old. I always ask how many of them have at least once slept in a tent. The numbers are constantly declining. Most shifted from roaming in the woods to roaming through the internet.
With this lifestyle, it’s easy to forget that we are living bodies capable of demanding tasks, even as children or young adults. It’s only when we throw ourselves into nature, the living world, that we have a chance to develop both physical and mental strength. So let the children be free.
Sven Jackisch Fuerth, Germany
To the Editor:
I grew up in Maine in the same place Stephen King did, in the same era, and I had the same so-called feral childhood — but really, we were just lower-middle-class street kids on the loose. There was no TV, but we had stories from our elders on back steps around the neighborhood. As long as we made it home for mealtimes, it was OK to range wide and far. We talked to down-and-out men riding the rails, rode ice cakes out into the tidal harbor, played from sunup to sunset.
I also went to the University of Maine with Mr. King. As an aspiring poet, I advised him to keep writing poetry and to stop publishing schlock horror tales in what I dismissed as barbershop magazines.
The young author naturally bristled, resisted my purist advice and went on to, well, knock it out of the park.
Lesson: Don’t ever take literary advice from me!
Walter Provencher Canberra, Australia
Calling All Teens: Are you a teenager with something to say? The New York Times’s Learning Network invites you to write a public-facing letter about an issue that matters to you. The Open Letters Contest runs until April 8.
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