How well do you remember the movie Home Alone?
As the holidays roll around and television morphs into an unrelenting showcase for Christmas cheer, my oldest son and I found ourselves watching Home Alone—one of the quintessential films from my own childhood. Who among us of a certain age doesn’t remember Macaulay Culkin’s adorably goofy face sandwiched between two hands as he bellowed that trademark “Ahhhhhhhh,” the sting from his father’s aftershave a little too much for his tender skin to take?
Back in the old days, Home Alone had enormous cache because its premise was at once terrifying and thrilling. The idea of being left alone by your parents—without your siblings to boot—promised the joy of pizza toppings entirely of your own choosing as much as the reality of having to fend for yourself. In Kevin McCallister’s case, it also meant the need to protect your home against the onslaught of two bumbling burglars after a perfectly delicious microwaveable Kraft Macaroni and Cheese dinner.
In 1990, the premise was a stretch, to say the least. But there were mitigating factors. The bustling extended family and the relatably distracted parents allowed us folk of that previous generation to suspend disbelief far enough to deem forgetting your youngest child an omission ever so slightly within the realm of possibility.
Fast forward to 2014, the infamous age of hovercraft parenting, and the movie comes across as a sub-genre of fantasy. And not simply because of the whole leaving your kid behind in the face of an international vacation bit. Rather because in the course of twenty odd years—a mere blip in the time-space continuum—there has been a sea-change that makes certain features of the film’s parent-child relationship virtually unrecognizable. A guilty mother desperate to get back to an eight year old who has been mooching about by himself for three days? That we get. The set of circumstances leading to said situation? Not so much.
Consider this truncated version of the scene that takes place after Kevin, tormented by his older brother, wreaks drink-spilling havoc in the kitchen:
Mom, grabbing Kevin’s wrist and shaking it: What is the matter with you?
Kevin: *Offers explanation.*
Uncle, with sneering emphasis on the last word: Look what you did, you little jerk.
*The camera pans to a room full of disappointed faces.*
Mom: Kevin, get upstairs right now!
*Mom escorts Kevin out of the kitchen, there is arm tugging involved, though Kevin seems to go somewhat willingly. More talking ensues, during which Kevin calls Mom “dummy” and is ushered up to the attic.*
Kevin, with faux remorse: I’m sorry.
Mom, without batting an eyelid: It’s too late, get upstairs.
Kevin: Everyone in this family hates me.
Mom: Then maybe you should ask Santa for a new family…Just stay up there. I don’t want to see you again for the rest of the night.
Kevin: I hope I never see any of you jerks again.
*Mom shuts the door, rolling her eyes.*
My own son, of ages with Kevin, sat watching this scene unfold, slack-jawed in disbelief. As soon as the attic door closed, with Kevin duly chastized behind it, he turned to me and said, “OMG she is so terrible.” He spoke of mother McCallister in the way you might if you were fingering a fossil: the basic size and shape of the object is the same, but the essence has long since been transformed.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m no saint of a mother myself. I have a similarly sized gaggle of children and, given half the chance, I could see myself letting them cross the Atlantic in coach while I sat sipping champagne in first class, intermittently pinched by the feeling that I might, I just might, be forgetting something. Or maybe not…Which is why we have to admit to some kind of tectonic shift in the childrearing plates between then and now.
For I have no memory of being comparably shocked by the scene myself. And I doubt parents watching the film when it originally aired considered it out of the ordinary either. John Hughes was a gifted cultural commentator, known for putting his finger smack dab on the pulse of whatever blood was coursing through society’s veins at a given moment. Eight year olds were doing a lot of things in 1990 that they sure as hell aren’t doing today: being banished to the attic is only one of them. Riding their bikes around the neighborhood and doing their homework all by themselves are two more.
I think about this a lot: the gap between our own childhoods and how we are raising our kids now. What is gained from the difference and what is lost. Home Alone captures it in a nutshell.
Lost is the freedom children had to exist without constant adult supervision and the responsibilities they assumed earlier as a result. The whole concept of the movie is a metaphor for these liberties; every piece of the puzzle as to how Kevin gets left behind speaks to them. The kids were all expected to get ready and out to the car on their own steam. It was the older cousin in charge of counting heads, not the parents. It was the boy from next door, clearly allowed to roam the streets at will, whose head was mistakenly counted instead of Kevin’s. And even though Kevin is dubbed the baby of the family, his behavior, once abandoned, illustrates that this is an eight year old who has certainly lived more than ten minutes of his life without the presence of a grown-up.
Gained is the sense that our children are precious in a profound way that doesn’t need to be triggered by leaving them 4,000 miles behind. We know now about the negative psychological effects of shaming them—of referring to them as jerks, for instance—and of laying hands on them, even grabbing or tugging. We treat them as valued members of the family, whose voices are heard, and we take care that their punishments are proportional to their crimes. We work hard to create intimate relationships with them, to attune ourselves finely, which has consequences that run in both directions. It means my son might not “obey” me, as children were expected to obey their parents in the past. But it also means I probably won’t be forgetting him on our next holiday.
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