The Playdate

Parents, Children, and the New Expectations of Play

Tamara R. Mose

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780814764879
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A playdate is an organized meeting where parents come together with their children at a public or private location to interact socially or “play.” Children no longer simply “go out and play,” rather, play is arranged, scheduled, and parentally-approved and supervised. How do these playdates happen? Who gets asked and who doesn’t? What is acceptable play behavior? In The Playdate, Tamara R. Mose focuses on the parents of young children in New York City to explore how the shift from spontaneous and child-directed play to managed and adult-arranged playdates reveals the structures of modern parenting and the new realities of childhood. Mose argues that with the rise of moral panics surrounding child abuse, pedophilia, and fears about safety in the city, as well as helicopter parenting, and over-scheduling, the playdate has emerged as not just a necessity in terms of security and scheduling, but as the very hallmark of good parenting.

Based on interviews with parents, teachers, childcare directors, and nannies from Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Long Island, the book provides a first-hand account of the strategies used by middle-class parents of young children to navigate social relationships—their own and those of their children. Mose shows how parents use playdates to improve their own experiences of raising children in New York City while at the same time carefully managing and ensuring their own social and cultural capital. Mose illustrates how the organization of playdates influences parents’ work lives, friendships, and public childrearing performances, and demonstrates how this may potentially influence the social development of both children and parents. Ultimately, this captivating and well-researched book shows that the playdate is much more than just “child’s play.” Tamara Mose on The Brian Lehrer Show

1

From Play to Playdate

Moral Panic and Play Redefined

Within five minutes of a child abduction, an Amber Alert arrives on your cell phone, while at the same time, the television program you were watching segues from a missing child to one about a rampant school shooting. Remember when we used to see the photos of missing kids on the backs of milk cartons in the 1980s? Is the Amber Alert system, in which all radio and television stations and digital street signs alert the masses that a child has been recently abducted, better than the milk carton strategy? I sure hope so. Going from missing child immediately to children being shot by a disgruntled schoolmate or community member is enough to put anyone on high alert. I go through every day with such care to make sure that my children don’t end up in one of those two (and other) situations, but I cannot control every aspect of their lives (or mine, for that matter). It is scary to think that at any turn, something tragic could happen to our children and that we have limited control over the matter. How can we find peace of mind in such volatile times?

This chapter will look at why parents arrange playdates for their children; how parents describe their perceptions about safety in public spaces; and how they perceive lack of green spaces, need for community, and issues dealing with scheduling, all of which ultimately leads to the redefinition of play in private spaces to reproduce social and cultural capital.

Today’s parents are bombarded by media images that create concern for their child’s safety.1 Crystal is a forty-one-year-old self-identified European American mother who grew up in a suburb in the Midwest, but now lives in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan. Her large modern loft sits near Ground Zero, the former site of the World Trade Center. She discussed her fears when asked about raising a child in New York and how her first-grade daughter plays. She was interviewed during a playdate in which her daughter moved back and forth between Crystal’s loft and a neighbor’s loft. Crystal explained, “They’re exposed to a lot more adult-content imagery and language. Especially, you know, riding on the subways. She has a lot more questions than I ever had at her age. She can read, so you know, the subway ads, everything is a problem, . . . but I just always try to look at it as an opportunity . . . for conversation or discussions.” She added, “I think in New York . . . the kids can’t walk outside the building on their own.” She went on to state that, in general, scheduling playdates and ensuring safety (safety from vulgar imagery) are her primary concerns because of the way children are unprotected from adult-content promotional material.

Many parents discussed the violent advertisements they saw when taking their children through the city subways and the types of commercials that are shown on television even on the children’s programs. Just as Margaret Nelson found in her book about parents who constantly monitor their children in our hectic modern world, violence and sexually explicit images on television or in advertising created anxiety among parents of the middle to upper-middle class. Parents in this book revealed that after repeated exposure to such imagery, they felt that their fears were justified, thus creating a moral panic as a result of the relentlessly publicized violence against children.2 A moral panic has been defined as the widespread public awareness of a type of crime that is repeatedly publicized. Through such publicity the image is created of a group of violent people who threaten the welfare and values of a society, and this image creates a public moral panic. In addition, fear is spread when violence is random but highly publicized, as in the kidnapping of Etan Patz in New York.3

Others expressed similar feelings about New York. Maria, a thirty-five-year-old Upper East Side Jewish mother who is raising two small children (ages five years and six months) across from Central Park, stated that while New York has greater resources and more classes for kids to participate in, there is less green space than other cities. The noise, dirtiness, and the general safety concerns for children, from what she saw in the news, were problems for her as a parent. Carol is a forty-three-year-old black British immigrant to New York who used to work as a psychological therapist in England (at the time of her interview she was unemployed), and is raising her kindergartener in Brooklyn. After only a few months in Brooklyn, her perspective on raising children already differed from the perspective she held in her native England. Carol had recently been part of a parenting cooperative where parents take turns caring for each other’s children so the other parents could go out to dinner or on some other outing. Her experiences were different than in England, where she had a family network to rely on for her childcare needs. In New York she was still navigating the resources available to her. Carol’s biggest issue to date with New York was simply trying to immerse herself in the culture, which she said was difficult because one did not know whom to trust, something she had learned through watching American television. Carol determined that organizing and participating in playdates would allow her to figure out whom she could trust in New York with her child.

Words such as “trust,” “noise,” and “caution” were used consistently by parents and fit with the popular perception of the negative realities of raising children in New York. They have been influenced to believe, whether consciously or subconsciously, through the media, that New York City is unsafe and full of dangerous people. Parents described their sense that bad people are lurking at every corner and therefore one ought not to get too close to anyone, no matter how nice they may seem. Participants in this book described how they always teach their children to be kind to people, but wary of their intentions. In her book Adult Supervision Required, Markella Rutherford discusses how parents’ fears are perpetuated by the absence of children on neighborhood streets, which in turn drives parents to want their children indoors and away from adults who may be untrustworthy or dangerous.4 If there are no children on the streets, there are no “eyes on the street,” to borrow a term from the author and activist Jane Jacobs.5 The other concern is that because of noise due to traffic and the lack of green space (despite New York’s efforts to create more green spaces through its tree planting efforts and greenways), one may not be able to raise children in an environment conducive to learning or development. Although Maria lived directly across from one of the largest green spaces in the city, Central Park, New York’s lack of ample green spaces was of concern to her should she venture out beyond her own neighborhood. While New York City has several green spaces (although one could contest that definition), people experience New York as a “concrete jungle.” Green spaces, meaning parks with large trees and grass, are not equally distributed by race and class for the most part in New York City, and since urban green space is more concentrated, such as with Central Park, it affects how people experience a city in contrast to the way they experience a suburb.6

The other issue discussed by participants is a wish to feel connected to community. Carmen, a mother of one daughter, said, “Raising my daughter in New York is challenging and a little lonely despite the fact that there are so many people around. I find it hard to connect as a mother here in New York.” While she also stated that this could be because she was a single mother, she said that she found it hard to relax because the city was so busy, and it became difficult for her to move around.7 The sheer density of the city made her feel like a “stranger.”8 Despite the poor quality of the education offered in her small Massachusetts town in the 1980s, a town that also struggled with drugs and high unemployment after she left, it had once been prosperous and there was a strong Portuguese-speaking community that made her feel connected. She has yet to find that type of community in her area of Carroll Gardens (Brooklyn), where she rents an apartment with a roommate and works as a yoga instructor, earning a working-class wage of $32,000 a year. Sook, a forty-four-year-old Chinese American mother living in Brooklyn with her four children (all under the age of ten) and working full-time as a financial advisor on Wall Street, said that what she likes about New York are the “culturally diverse institutions.” Sook’s complaints are mostly related to the cost of living in Brooklyn (she owns a brownstone that costs a lot to maintain, since it is over a hundred years old) and her concern about the public school system and making sure that the schools are safe. Again, the safety issue came up in the interview, yet there was no concrete evidence that she could provide to suggest that the schools were unsafe other than the fact that there were security guards at the front desk of the school where her children attended. She was unfamiliar with the schools in Brooklyn before her children began attending, so this unfamiliarity grew into a fear for the safety of her children, a natural takeaway if you watch the news on any given day: schools are not safe for children, especially with bullying on the rise, according to Sook and other participants.

The news and schools now pay more attention to school bullying, as well as school shootings. Schools even participate in regular lockdown drills in order to prepare students and staff for any potential shooting threats. This, in concert with the unfamiliarity of Brooklyn schools, perpetuates Sook’s fears in particular. Sook grew up in Chinatown and admits that she did not veer too far from there as a child; her opportunities were limited since her parents both worked full-time with minimal earnings. She said that, as one of five children, she was a latchkey kid and would walk home by herself and let herself into the home at a very young age, something she wouldn’t have her kids do today, due to the perceived lack of safety in New York according to the news, and admittedly due to the fact that there are almost no children on the streets doing the same. It is this perceived lack of safety that creates fear and ultimately leads parents to find alternatives for their children to socialize in controlled environments such as the playdate.

All of these mothers, and other parents whom I interviewed, discussed issues of safety, especially the dangers to children portrayed on television newscasts, including school security and the safety of children who go home alone or simply go outside by themselves. As a response to this safety issue, parents were more inclined to organize playdates. As Laura, a twenty-seven-year-old African American mother of a first grader, stated, “The city is a rough place for people to have kids.” She wanted to make sure that her child was in a controlled environment that would protect her from the reality that is New York City. The overstimulation of advertisements for horror movies or sexualized content in subway ads and around the city makes some parents anxious about protecting their children from violent imagery.9 On top of it all, there was a sense of disconnect for some who had yet to find their place in New York as residents and parents, mostly for those who did not grow up in New York and only had media images to draw on.

One mother, Jodi, however, clearly saw the inherent contradiction in what most mothers believe. Jodi grew up mostly in Brooklyn, but moved a lot as a child because she traveled with her father, who was a journalist and editor of a newspaper. She had traveled the world by the time she was her daughter’s age (six). Jodi stated that “parenting magazines say raising children has changed because everybody is overscheduled and parents are taking charge of their kids’ social life in a different way.” Parents, she noted, “are more concerned about safety, pedophiles, and somebody kidnapping your child, and this might not even be true. Mostly, things aren’t really any less safe than twenty or thirty years ago. My husband has a book that says most of these fears are not based on real things, so you can let your child walk down the block, but who’s going to do it? Nobody, because no one else does it. I think our parents were more involved in keeping us safe than people remember.” Jodi was expressing a real concern as she talked about overscheduling (a real issue that parents in this book acknowledge), a matter to be taken up in more detail in a later chapter, and how this related to safety. In her discussion of overscheduling and its effects on parenting styles, Jodi is hinting at the differences in how women and men are socialized to fear public spaces. The overscheduling, coupled with this gender-based socialization, attempts not only to create a child with certain skills, but also to avoid risk. Jodi suggested that by organizing playdates, parents feel that there is less opportunity for something bad to happen to their children.

Women are taught to fear outdoor spaces, what the geographer Gill Valentine called a “geography of fear.”10 In addition, women have been socialized to accept the private sphere of the home as a safe space that is contrasted to the public sphere, where they are or may be subject to harassment and violence.11 In taking charge as a mother by overscheduling a child, one is attempting to ensure that the child is accounted for at all times and not roaming unsafe public spaces. That being said, this also relates to women working outside the home and having less time to account for their children’s whereabouts. Women working outside the home want to ensure the safety of their children by enclosing them in private spaces that are considered safer, hence the enclosed commons of the playdate. Fathers in this study were not typically responsible for the children’s schedules, so this was all directed by mothers even when fathers were the primary caregiver. Therefore, if one is a “good parent,” one would have a heightened response to one’s children’s needs by ensuring that the child is active in all ways, but safely occupying indoor (read private) spaces. And thus the moral panic continues. Jodi’s clarity on the media’s role in the paranoia that pervades parenting in New York helps make clear how parents view New York as a city in which to raise children.12

New York City has long been seen as fraught with scandal and danger. In the summer of 2011, headlines featured the story of an eight-year-old Orthodox Jewish boy from Borough Park, Brooklyn, who was dismembered and stored in a man’s fridge after the boy attempted to walk home by himself for the first time with his parents’ approval. It was stated in the news that the man who committed the crime was from the same Orthodox community as the parents, and the motive for such a heinous crime was unclear. While it is important to be aware of this type of coverage, especially if the criminal has not been caught, it is of the sort that frightens parents into believing that their child could fall victim to such a kidnapping and what appeared to be a random murder by someone with a history of mental illness. It only takes one story such as this, covered over and over on television news, on the Internet, and in newspapers, for a viewer/reader to determine that this could be anyone’s fate. Add to this the policing of parents by race and class, and the panic becomes even more pronounced. For example, the black South Carolina mother who was arrested for leaving her nine-year-old daughter at a nearby park while she worked at McDonald’s due to lack of affordable childcare sparked debate about how young is too young for independence and whether the child was safe at a park on her own. Unlike this mother, the Jewish parents of the boy who was murdered were never arrested. Yes, these are two very different states, yet the stories beg the question. How do we judge good versus bad parenting, what are the anxieties associated with parenting, and how do we then try to alleviate those fears? Given media stories on situations like the South Carolina mother, along with parenting magazines that equate good parenting skills with having a solid grip on children’s activities, parents understandably feel anxious about parenting. This is precisely how the moral panic begins and continues to perpetuate itself, and thus results in what I call the playdate phenomenon.

With the media placing death and disaster at the forefront of their news coverage for the primary reason of selling more newspapers or winning coveted ratings for television, as noted by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the secondary effect is that parents become paranoid about their children’s safety. Media consumption on the whole has changed socialization.13 According to Bourdieu, the conformity and censorship that affect what is shown on television or written about in newspapers are directly correlated with the lack of job security in the field of journalism and news media. This structural corruption of the media is a result of competition for market share (ratings) that simply results in a sensationalized newscast that lacks a critical analysis of reality. In other words, the news as it is presented gives the audience a sense of reality instead of a true reality. Parents are consumed with the fear of failing their children and, as the economy continues to fail parents at this time, the middle-class social anxieties that many of these participants expressed make them feel as though they are losing ground.14 As Manhattan mother Cecile stated, the anxiety has to do with “parents feeling that their children will need to compete in some world market.” By taking control, then, of a child’s schedule, parents can alleviate some of this angst. Understanding this angst requires us to delve deeper into the differences between children’s play in the streets with neighborhood kids, which is potentially dangerous, and playdates, which are more organized and seemingly safe.

Play versus Playdate

The sentiment among most participants is that play is somehow substantively different from playdates. The parents interviewed described the differences quite concretely, illustrating that they are in fact two separate forms of play. Only one male parent, thirty-one years old and living in the Upper East Side, recalled that he heard the term “playdate” as a child. All of the other parents and participants said that they had never heard the term “playdate” until they were much older and actually could not recall when they first began hearing the term being used. For many, it was after having children themselves. Most said that play in their childhood was some form of “free” play, where kids went outdoors on their own to find friends to play with in the neighborhood. Play was defined as children having to make up their own games using whatever was made available to them either in the form of toys or nature (e.g., dirt). When asked to define a playdate, most interviewees said that a playdate was very much a “date” in the way that adults use the term, to mean that you set a time and place ...