Let Them Build Forts

I haven't been the best dad this week. Despite my efforts to be kind and patient, I have snapped at my kids more than once. Today I will bring home ice cream, and do my best to apologize while they are in their freshly-bribed sugary haze.

It was brisk outside this morning. I had to defrost my back window and even run the heater on the way to work. Summer is winding down.

I am listening to "Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey" by the one and only Chuck Palahniuk again. In the book he talks about chewing road tar. I googled it to see if people really did that, and stumbled upon this article:

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/localnews/columnists/sblow/stories/DN-blow_01met.ART.West.Edition1.4601573.html

I loved this article, and it makes me realize something else about the type of dad I have been. I can't say whether it is good or bad, but I am very protective of my girls. Perhaps overly so.

It made me ask myself the question, "If they were two boys, would I be raising them differently?" and the honest answer was a resounding, "hell yes!"

I don't think that is very fair to them, but I can't help but treating them like little princesses and wanting to pad the world around them. If they were boys, I would be telling them how much chicks dig scars and trying to toughen them up.

I started thinking about the world that we live in and wondering how necessary my protection really is. I started searching around online for statistics about crime during the last 30 years, and to my great surprise, violent crime rates were at their very peak during the late 80's and early 90's - just when I was running around the neighborhood.

Granted, at the time I was living in Centerville, Utah and spent my days catching grasshoppers and tadpoles. It wasn't exactly Detroit.

But are my daughters really at any more of a risk now than I was then, or Jenny was for that matter? We may be more aware these days of local sex offenders and cyber predators, but is that sick portion of our population really any more prevalent than they were 20 years ago?

I'm sure our parents wondered the same thing. They grew up in the 50's and 60's and probably didn't know what to make of our generation of Nintendo's and Walkman's.

I want my kids to be able to roam the neighborhood and have adventures. I want them to have a close group of friends and spend long summer nights begging for an extended curfew so they can play kick the can or capture the flag.

But with those desires for their childhood experiences comes an underlying fear. I was talking to one of my coworkers the other day. He has three kids and the oldest is his 8-year-old daughter. He and his wife have set a very strict rule of no sleepovers - ever. At first, I thought that was total overkill, but then he told me why they had come to that decision.

Last year his daughter had been good friends with another girl on the other side of the block. This other girl's father was a religious and local pillar of the community. The girls would spend all afternoon at their house, jumping on the tramp and playing games. This coworker told me, "If my daughter had asked me to have a sleepover at their house, I wouldn't have thought twice about it. I would have just told her to have fun."

A few months ago, that other father who was so liked and respected in their community and church was arrested and a giant stash of child pornography was found in the basement of his home. When this coworker told me about this, his face went pale.

I could tell that he felt guilty for having ever put his daughter in that situation. It was like he felt he should have possessed some sixth sense to weed out the creeps and sickos. I'm sure I would feel the same way. Unfortunately, these days it seems like more of a matter of luck than a matter of parental diligence. Nothing happened to his daughter, but anyone hearing the story probably gets the chills because you recognize how near to the viper's den she had actually been playing.

As parents, we are constantly surprised by our children. We are amazed by how quickly a two-year-old can escape from your sight and then use that split second to cut their foot or burn their hand. Things like that make us feel like massive failures.

Then again, other times you will wake up in the morning and find your five-year-old pouring a bowl of cereal for her little sister, and you can't help but want to trust them completely.

I hoped writing this would help me sort out the dilemma in my own head, but it hasn't. I guess all you can do is just be as diligent as possible. Keep track of your kids, but don't be that killjoy parent who is a pain in everyone's ass. I wish there was some easy-to-find line between neglectful and sheltering on the parenting style spectrum, but there isn't.

Maybe next year I will have them skip soccer and put them in karate instead...