Don’t sanitize kids from the truth

I heard the expression on the radio recently that we “sanitize” the lives of our children.
It’s true that memories of our own childhood sometimes get roughed up a bit with literary licence when we compare our stats with “kids today.”
As the distance from our childhood lengthens, the difficulties sometimes increase proportionately—a bit Monty Python-ish if you remember one of their skits, in particular, where each tried to out-do the other with how poor they were.
The stories become legends, epic, though I do not want to diminish the hardships that many families experienced in my era and before.
I’m very grateful that my children, like me, got to grow up playing outside; sometimes testing the safety factor when they were out from under my watchful eye but having the chance to play.
To play without rules, without my organization or any organization aside of their own imagination, while they built forts and slid down the stacks of round bales (which was completely against the rules), and catching frogs and collecting misplaced robin eggs.
My upbringing on a farm came pre-loaded with freedom. My sister and I often left on our ponies before the day had really started and we didn’t return until dark or hunger turned our path home.
That isn’t to say my mother didn’t come looking for us with angry eyes; her hands gripping the steering wheel of the car as she ordered us home with the jerk of her head. But some part of her was glad for our horseback adventures, for our sense of exploration and stretching the boundaries; for that is truly how we learn to survive by our own wits.
We don’t want our children growing up too fast but life is messy, hardly pristine, and exposing our children to the truth of life seems to me to better serve them.
At this time of year, we think of the young men who went off to war with no idea of what lay ahead of them.
I’ve heard veterans interviewed who confessed that the idea of war seemed exciting—a chance to see the world, to step out of their lives that felt ordinary and mundane. But how all too quickly the reality of that adventure would haunt them the rest of their lives, and how boys grew into men overnight when war gobbled them up.
We feel the emotional ache of death on Remembrance Day; the estimated 17 million lives lost in the First World War and the 60 million lost in the Second World War. We gather in silence on Nov. 11 alongside those who truly remember, their numbers shrinking every year.
Wearing a poppy seems a small tribute to the enormous cost of war.
I hope I raised my children to understand. I hope I didn’t sanitize them from the truth of freedom and the cost of its protection.
I hope they will stand together on Nov. 11 and tell their children—quietly—in solemn recognition of a story that gets lost in our current disregard for honour.
wendistewart@live.ca