W e’d been toiling for what felt like ages across remote stretches of roasting sand, with beach chairs banging against our legs and heavy bags digging into our shoulders, when at last the beautiful blue ocean slid into view.
Curiously enough, this being the Delaware shore, we weren’t the only family that had made the trip. The seaside, what we could see of it through a haze of heat and sunscreen fumes, was a churning mass of sunburned flesh, gaudy umbrellas, colorful towels and cheap plastic buckets. The whine of a hundred competing radios rose thinly over the sound of the waves. It looked like Coney Island, as imagined by Dante. It looked great!
The almost-14-year-old stopped abruptly. “You have got to be kidding me,” she said. “No. Way.”
At the same moment, the nearly-7-year-old gasped: “Oh, no! We can’t go to this beach!”
“What are you talking about?” we asked one, and “Why not?” the other.
“It is a mob scene,” the teenager said flatly. “I am not going down there among all those people. Ugh. I’m going back to the car.”
My husband and I gazed in wonderment as she pivoted and began trudging back across the burning sands we had just painstakingly traversed.
Where did she think she was going? The car was locked, we had the keys, and after the effort of getting here, dad-blame it, we were going to the beach. My husband regarded her retreating figure, shook his head, and smiled. “I give it 15 minutes.”
Meanwhile, the almost-7 was pointing indignantly to a small tower on the horizon. “See? It’s a lifeguard!” she sputtered. “That means they won’t let us run at this beach, and no diving, and they’ll tell us off for splashing too much!”
Everyone laughed. In this child’s experience, “lifeguard” means a sullen teen at a suburban pool who springs to life on his pedestal only when there’s an opportunity to bark “Walk!” or “Stop jumping in!” at some poor, excited kid.
Beach lifeguards are different, we assured her, and no one here would blow a whistle every hour to clear the water for “adult swim.”
We trudged on, scanning the seething hordes for a spare bit of ground. And I fell to thinking again about the remarkable freedom children now have to express their preferences about every little thing.
You see it everywhere, in all families. On one end of the spectrum are complaints such as “My porridge is too cold,” or “But I wanted apple juice,” or even “This beach is too crowded.”
At the other end, there’s the howling outrage we saw recently when a young boy began shrieking at a group of laughing adults. Their conversation was impinging on his enjoyment of a violent video, it seemed.
Seeing a child behave badly is, alas, nothing new. The amazing thing was his parents’ reaction. “Sorry, honey,” they soothed, “we’ll try to talk more quietly.”
Every so often I read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books to my children, and the high points — for me — are the chapters that show how different expectations used to be for childhood stoicism. The Ingalls girls would never dream of griping about their food, or even speaking at the table unless addressed by an adult.
In one wonderful chapter, the good children are scandalized by an idle, troublemaking cousin. Though the boy is 11, he refuses to put in a proper day’s work in the field, and when he eventually steps into a bee’s nest and gets stung all over, everyone thinks he’s got his deserts. I can’t imagine what the Ingalls family would have made of shrieking Video Boy (or Stalking-off Girl, for that matter).
By now, we’d settled ourselves at the beach. The toddler still wasn’t having any of the nasty sand or water, but seemed quite happy playing on a beach chair. The other children had sprinted for the waves. My husband’s cell phone rang. It was our teenage daughter, sweltering outside the locked car and hoping for rescue. We told her to start walking —we’d meet her halfway.
