Do you remember your mother playing with you?


My mother was a stay-at-home-mom until I was in high school. I remember her cleaning. I remember her paying bills, making doctors appointments, buying groceries, driving us to-and-from school, cooking meals, doing laundry, washing dishes and helping us with homework.

I have no memories of her playing with me. No crafting. No homemade playdough. No fort-building. No hide-and-go-seek.

It doesn't/didn't bother me. I think/thought I had a pretty great childhood.

I've talked to several friends who similarly have few, if any, memories of their mothers playing with them. They all feel they had good childhoods.

So I'm fascinated by the seeming shift in our culture which has taken place in the last 20-30 years. As far as I can tell, sometime around the heyday of divorce-guilt in the 80s, the term "quality time" joined the lexicon. Parents, both employed and non, felt compelled to spend more one-on-one, meaningful, facetime with their children. For the most part doing whatever it was that the kids wanted to do. I feel the Lego company was delighted.

It's not as though before the 80s parents never hung out with their kids but it just seems that it was less of an obligation and more of a "all the house work is done, let's relax and enjoy each other" type of thing. Stay-at-home-mothers before that time were homemakers/managers first and playmates last. They didn't seem to feel guilty about this at all. We had friends and siblings to fulfil that role. Parents were our caregivers and not our buddies.

But that's changed hasn't it? It can't be just my observation or experience that many (most?) parents now feel a genuine duty to fulfil the role of peer for their kids. That we should and do feel borderline abusive for telling a child to go and amuse themselves for a while so we can make dinner or clean the house. Or for not loving every minute of yet another inane round of dress-up-and-make-believe.

It feels intuitive to me that there's also a link between this guilt and the fear of letting children play without adult supervision. No responsible parent kicks their kid out of the house to go terrorize the neighbourhood for the hours after school/before dinner without feeling a nagging sense of negligence and tension anymore. So we keep them safe, inside, socially-isolated and bored.

And we feel guilty because they're bored. We feel guilty because we resent feeling obligated to entertain them. We feel guilty because sometimes the games they want to play are so mindfuckingly boring for us that we'd rather be scrubbing a toilet. We feel guilty because we buy them endless toys and distractions just to be able to buy ourselves some childfree time.

Which all makes me wonder whether my kids and their friends will remember playing with their mothers. And I wonder whether their memories will reflect an enjoyable, carefree childhood or one tainted by the sense that, for their parents, spending time playing with them was often more about guilt than desire.