Nothing stokes the ire of my inner syndicalist faster than the vainglorious parenting guilt trips from the affluent New York set, which are nearly always relieved by spending untold fortunes to correct the supposed deficiency in Mom and Dad.
The most recent example of this phenomenon is Tim McKeough’s “How to Create a Playroom That Appeals to Children and Adults” for the New York Times.
The first few lines are all you need to get the gist:
If you were a child again, what kind of playroom would you rather have: a basement filled with castoff furniture (because no one cares if you jump on that worn-out sofa), or a colorful room that celebrates toys and art, inviting you to climb up the walls?
It’s not hard to guess which one many parents have recently been choosing for their children.
“When I grew up, the playroom was always the worst room in the house, because there wasn’t much attention given to it,” said Karri Bowen-Poole, a former teacher who founded Smart Playrooms, a design firm in Rye, N.Y. “So it’s been incredible for me to see the transformative thinking that’s happened. Design does affect kids — how they feel about themselves, what they do and what we can get them to do, just by how we create a space.”
What kids are these people talking about? Everyone my age loved the basement with the old sofa because the adults didn’t care if we made fortresses from the cushions and launched the pillows back and forth. My cousins and I weaved between the support braces as we played tackle football on old foam matting left over from a renovation. Things broke, and attrition would set in if someone took one too many knocks to the head — scooting upstairs for an ice pack and quick cry under Mom’s arm — but then he would return triumphantly to ride at Agincourt de Sump Pump.
Clean, brightly lit rooms meant adult rules and adult desires — hardly suitable for our objective of maximal fun.
No, pieces like this one from the Times reinforce the loneliness of wealthy children while highlighting that their parents are so far removed from childhood (the older executive class that they are) that they think kids need a dog park in the house to be entertained. Interior decorators and bloggers take advantage of the vanity and ignorance of these parents, and the kids are stuck in a room that their imaginations will outgrow within days.
Might I suggest a house with a tree or two? Maybe some dirt? A sanitized, designed childhood indoors sounds like a hellish existence. But maybe that’s just me.