It’s pretty easy to customize childhood.
If your daughter likes, say, cupcakes, she can watch every season of “Cupcake Wars” on Netflix and attend cupcake-making summer camp and have a cupcake-making birthday party and wear cupcake pajamas in her bed that’s made up in cupcake sheets. If she likes Legos, she can go on vacation to Legoland and watch “The Lego Movie” on an unending loop and attend Lego camp and have a Lego-themed birthday party and, well, you get the idea.
This isn’t completely new. But it’s certainly getting more pronounced as the options for toys and kids products and themed birthday parties and specialized camps appear to increase by the hour. Kids used to attend a single camp, sponsored by the YMCA, where they spent the summer surrounded by their classmates and neighbors doing a variety of crafts and games. Now they can attend sushi-making camp and STEM camp and Chicago Cubs camp and sewing camp and violin camp and so on.
They can even tune out the entertainment they don’t like, since every movie, book, show and song is available to them on demand, on a device. No more waiting through Wham! and Bananarama and the Bangles to finally hear your favorite Duran Duran song. (I grew up in the ‘80s.)
This isn’t a rant, I promise.
It’s a reminder, though — to myself as much as anyone — that our kids can easily go through large chunks of their lives without having their tastes challenged or broadened. We, their parents, can discern their special talent or beloved hobby and fully immerse them in it. Which then surrounds them with people who are also fully immersed in it. Which further narrows their worldview.
(Promise I’m not ranting.)
But here’s the thing: Sometimes their worldviews need broadening.
Last week, my supervisor asked if my son, 6, could judge a culinary smackdown hosted by the Chicago Tribune, where two high-profile chefs would compete for a panel of judges and a room full of food lovers to decide who could prepare the best mac ‘n’ cheese — made, of course, with a special flair. The other judges were highly qualified: a cookbook author, a well-known food blogger, the Tribune’s dining editor. My son would be, essentially, comic relief — a nod to the fact that mac ‘n’ cheese, as we know it, is a childhood staple.
Only he hates mac ‘n’ cheese. He isn’t a fan of hamming it up for crowds either.
Are you sure you don’t want my daughter, I asked. She’s a culinary wizard. She tried out for “Master Chef Jr.” She’s obsessed with the Food Network. She would delight in that experience and have many, many opinions.
Nope, my boss said. We want the little guy.
I ran it by him, and he reluctantly agreed. I coached him for days in advance. He was pretty delighted to hear that our usual rule — if we go to someone’s house and they cook for us, we never say, “Ew. I don’t like it” — was off the table. He understood that honesty was welcome and the main point was to have fun.
Still, I fretted. He’s going to be bored. He’s going to hate the food. He’s going to wish he were home playing football with his minifigures, and I should probably be letting him. Man, his sister would love this.
He had a blast.
Shortly after we arrived, one of the chefs, Cleetus Friedman, walked over and complimented my son’s football jersey. It was from the University of Maryland, one of my son’s favorite Big Ten schools, and the chef, it turns out, went there for his undergraduate degree. The host, speaker and author Laura Schwartz, was warm and friendly and immediately put him at ease.
When it was my son’s turn to meet the crowd, the following exchange took place:
Schwartz: “OK, Will! What’s your favorite food?”
(The correct answer, obviously, is mac ‘n’ cheese)
Will: “I don’t have one.”
Schwartz: “But what do you really love to eat?”
Will: “Pizza.”
Schwartz: “But when you’re asking your mom to make dinner, what do you ask her to make?”
Will: “Probably like a chicken or something.”
The crowd hooted. Will grinned. And the groundwork was laid for a delightful evening.
He tried strange foods. He spoke in front of a crowd. He talked to strangers, his mom safely at his side, and showed off his football cards to a table of women from Naperville. He loved it.
I would never have taken him to an event like that had my boss not suggested it. If I’d listened to my gut, I would have told both kids about it. My daughter would have jumped at the chance, and my son would have declined, and that’s what I would have gone with.
This was better. And it has me thinking that I need to do less fretting and more worldview-broadening. I don’t have to fill their free time with things they already love. I can punctuate them, also, with things they might grow to love. Or things they might try and then discover: Nope, still hate it. And that’s OK too.
I don’t want to raise rigid kids. I want their minds to be big and curious and their worlds to be filled with endless options.
I won’t pretend a single evening of artisan mac ‘n’ cheese made that happen. But it was a good reminder that part of my job as a mother is to keep finding things that will.
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