Some Poolside Thoughts

About teens, responsibility, and mental health

Poolside, baby, layin’ in the sun.  With my dark sunglasses, and the radio on.

That’s a line from a classic Webb Wilder song, but I was actually poolside for July 4^th and had some thoughts, which were echoed today when I revisited the same pool. 

The pool in question was the Knoxville Jewish Community Center pool, a place where both Helen and I spent a lot of time as kids, her because she was Jewish, me because my friends were.   I hadn’t been there in about 20 years – Doug Weinstein and I tested some dive gear after hours then – and it had been much longer since I had actually been a patron.  But Helen and her sister Anne wanted to go to the July 4^th party, where there were free hotdogs (Hebrew National, of course, the best!) and beer and it was fun.

I ran into a couple of law school colleagues, and Helen’s sheer exuberance at racing her sister down the lanes and splashing water at her was a delight.  Helen had so much fun that we went back this week.  No free beer this time, but it was still fun.

The place has hardly changed since I was a kid.  The high-dive is gone, probably because of liability concerns.  There’s more security (there was none back then), and the poolhouse is spiffed up a bit, but basically the same.  There’s still a kids’ day camp (my sister went to it when she was a little girl, and a girlfriend of mine worked there one summer).  The campers and their counselors were out in force.

And what struck me now, as it didn’t when I was young, is that the pool is basically run by teenagers.  The camp counselors are teenagers, mostly high-school age, the lifeguards are the same, only the top couple of staff seem to be full-fledged adults.

We watched one counselor, a girl who looked to be maybe 16, striding around purposefully, corralling errant kids, leading them by the hand to their proper places or escorting them to the bathroom with the authority of a drill sergeant.  Likewise the lifeguards, male and female.

This reminded me of Helen’s other sister  talking recently about her time as a lifeguard at the UT Married Student Apartments.  Harried grad-student parents (there were lots of grad student parents back then, now they’re vanishingly scarce) would sometimes leave their kids, quite young ones aged 3-6, at the pool for hours, under the supervision of a couple of 18 year old lifeguards.  Nobody drowned, and nobody thought much of it, but you’d never see that today.

But back then it was basically assumed that anyone over 14 or so was competent to look after kids. Supervising children was a basic life skill, learned at home by example, often with younger siblings or cousins providing the opportunities.  Heck, I was babysitting for money starting at age twelve.  (I was inspired by Henry Reed’s Babysitting Service, where someone tells Henry that he can be sweating in the summer heat mowing lawns, or he can be enjoying a cool drink while some three-year-old sleeps.  It wasn’t always quite that easy, though as the oldest of three I was used to it.  And I mowed lawns too sometimes.)

Nowadays, you don’t see so many teenagers entrusted with kids, and you really don’t see teenagers entrusted with responsibility in very many settings compared to a few decades ago.  This may be why today’s teenagers (and twenty-somethings) seem so immature, anxious, and generally incompetent compared to previous generations. 

As Thomas Hine writes in American Heritage, “Young people became teenagers because we had nothing better for them to do. We began seeing them not as productive but as gullible consumers.”  This phenomenon started around the turn of the previous century, but it has only accelerated, especially in recent years.. 

More responsibility brings both competence and confidence.  Less responsibility does the opposite, and that probably has something to do with the outbreak of anxiety and other mental illnesses among teens today.  By sheltering teens, we weaken them.

I suspect that camps and swimming pools have survived as they used to be largely due to a combination of tradition and need for cheap labor.  But we’d be better off if there were more places where teenagers could exercise some responsibility, and now I’m wondering how we might manage that. 

Offer your suggestions in the comments.