Down in the Park

It's park/playground season again. At the beginning of last summer, I became a stay at home father. Two or three times a week, I would take my boys to one of the great parks in our county. I observed a lot of things, some of them trivial, but some of them a little disheartening.

Some of the fun or funnier things: Parks are full of discarded band-aids. People will knowingly bring their unfriendly dogs to child infested areas, which makes me think they want to be sued. People usually won't make any effort to clean up messes made by their children's leaky or explosive diapers. I'm not the only stay at home father. The number of men accompanying their children seemed to increase as weeks went on.

I also noticed that people don't tend to teach their kids to be more social or even nice. Owen is our oldest at four years old. He hungers for social interaction, and we love to take him to these public places because he gets to interact with a wide variety of children he doesn't know. As the summer progressed, he got steadily better at introducing himself and making quick friends.

Unfortunately, not every kid wanted to play with him. Some were quite rude about it. When I would notice this, because it was usually pretty easy to overhear, I'd call Owen over. I'd explain to him that not everyone wanted to play with him, that he should probably just avoid those particular kids.

Now, I'm not saying that children shouldn't have the right to pick and choose who they want to play with, but it still surprises me that, to this day, I've never had another parent call their children over to ask them to be more accepting of Owen. No one has told their kids that we're in a fun zone where everyone should be encouraged to join in together.

There was one day where I heard an older kid run up to his father complaining that a younger kid wouldn't leave him alone. The father advised his kid to get forceful if he had to, even telling him to give the kid a little shove if he had to. To be honest, that angered me, which is probably not the healthiest response in and of itself.

These public places offer a great opportunity for our kids to interact with different ethnicities and cultures. We're sort of proud of the fact that neither of our boys has ever pointed out another person's skin color or distinguishing attributes. When they played with Jewish and Muslim kids, they didn't even point out their unique attire. Okay, we have had Owen recently point out a few people that are tall and large, but it had more to do with him being impressed than judgmental. We love that they get to interact in this way.

I just wish that more of us were willing to pull our kids aside and instruct them to interact. I wish playgrounds were areas where our kids would get a starter course in acceptance, that they were encouraged to include everyone so that everyone walked away with a fun experience.