And Zen What

They are all outside in the front playing soccer (sometimes degenerating to "sock-em"--Six just came in crying having taken a random and verifiably accidental shot to the eye). I love the sound of a bunch of kids playing after school. It brings me back to the days when we'd slam into the house and yell "hi!" and then immediately slam back out to go "calling on" kids til we'd gathered enough warm bodies for a good game of kickball. Followed by Red Light Green Light. Followed by Freeze Tag. Followed by moms calling our names out the back doors because dinner was ready.

Yes, that really was my actual childhood.

Kids have a different kind of childhood now. Kickball is now an organized after school activity. So is soccer. I have yet to hear of a Freeze Tag League, but I won't be surprised when I do. Between parental work days, cultural paranoia about stranger-danger, and--oh, the horror, the horror--homework (kindergarteners have homework; homework is a pox, a pox I tell you!), kids don't have neighborhood lives anymore. At least not where we live.

And it's a terrible loss. Sometimes when the light is just right, at dusk, a wave of warm memory washes over me--the sounds of moms calling, kids pleading for a little more time (that's not changed, anyway), the slight chill of evening, the scent of dinner wafting out to meet you on the back stairs.

I want so much for my kids to have something like that as a foundation, a set of memories of childhood that will catch them at unexpected moments as they are pulling into their driveways after work or calling their kids to the dinner table.

So I make a choice. At times I, well, I, um, fudge the homework tracking spyware sent home in their backpacks, the dread sign-off sheets designed to make me narc my kids for not reading the district-mandated 13.67 minutes per night.

Please don't tell on me. My permanent record can't use it, trust me.

I know they have to learn stuff. I do. And I believe the teachers when they tell me that they don't have time during the school day to teach my 3rd grader the multiplication tables (which is why Four's teacher wants the parents to teach them at home). I know that they have to push, pull, and drag their students over, under, or through an increasingly dizzying array of official educational "benchmarks."

But, still, I want my kids to have childhoods something like the one I had.

And they do. They come home, say hi, dump their stuff, and troop out. They have the same baroquely complex ways of choosing teams and deciding who gets "first ups" that we did. Though they start with soccer, not kickball, they do move on to Red Light Green Light and then to Freeze Tag. There just aren't any other kids out there with them, usually. I think the homework mafia has the other parents scared out of their socks. What if, due to Freeze Tag, their child ends up missing one of his math facts causing him to score too low on his college boards to get into the College of His Choice and so he ends up competing for a call center job that gets out-sourced to another continent and he has to live under a bridge?

The reason I can rattle that off so glibly is because that train of thought roars into my station too, all too often, even though I've read the research, even. The truth is that homework in elementary school has no positive effect on future academic performance. The only effect it can have is negative (burnout).

Parental anxiety can trick us into thinking that piling homework on second graders is a good thing, or maybe just a necessary evil.

But really, honestly, guys: the homework that is eating up your kid's time and your family's peace is neither good nor necessary. The school has my kids for seven hours a day during the week. I get them for an hour or so in the morning ("Mom, MOM! Five is sucking on my hairbrush!"), and maybe 3.5 or 4 hours after school. I am convinced that their futures will be better for their spending an hour or two of that time running and shouting and playing and fighting and negotiating what the next game will be.

I don't want to make them do their homework. I don't want to help them do it either. I did my time in elementary school.

I was such a good girl when I was in school, and now look at me--homework scofflaw! What's next?

Hmmm. Maybe a backpack full of homework back then would have kept me from becoming the evil homework-signoff-sheet-prevaricator that I have become in my dotage.

I'll have to give that some thought.

[think think think]

Nah.