Kiddie Season

As I get older, I appreciate the cycle of the seasons more than I ever have. As a child I knew only two seasons: cold (school) and warm (summer vacation). But now I appreciate the subtle shadings of the lengthening day as spring ripens into summer, the trees' gentle preparation for sleep come autumn, the dry, dusty sweet-smelling meadow grass of high summer.

And I've learned about the seasons that never made it into the almanac. Rain season, for example: in California, both cherished and hated. Also sunshine-and-wind season and its close companion, pollen onslaught season. Not to mention skunk season, bunny season, t-shirt season, prom season, tourist season, hairy backpacker season, teenage hormone beach party season, wildfire season, and more. There's a regular time of the year for each of these.

Right now? It's Kiddie Season. With a vengeance.

Kiddie Season is that portion of the year when your children transition from one state to a new, more complicated, hopefully more mature state. It takes place around September, that month when the kiddies conceived two winters earlier -- probably on a rainy night when there was nothing better to do -- become full-fledged toddlers and begin to make their parents' lives hell. And the parents have to figure out how to cope. Often, they take classes.

At this moment, on a Thursday night in September, I'm sitting in a meeting room at St. Bob the Informal's Presbymethertarian Church. Rhumba's teaching a class and I'm her moral support. Usually the class has the place to itself. But tonight we found the church overrun by bawling, crying, whining tiny tots and their parents.

I watched the parents attempt to wrestle the kids into the arms of a squad of sturdy babysitters so they could leave for a bit and attend some sort of class. The kids fought and resisted and screamed like the hardcore prisoners-of-war that they were .

"What's the class?" I asked a brisk gentleman with a clipboard.

"Positive Discipline for Children," he replied amid the screams. I retreated to the conference room, but they're still screaming out there.

I do appreciate kids. They're our future. Our crying, mewling, screaming, undisciplined, future, excreting vile substances and biotoxins from every poorly-controlled orifice. God bless 'em. And God bless their parents, too. Better them than me.

Kiddie Season's also the time when school starts and your growing spawn have to adapt to a new school, new teacher, new friends, new responsibilities. And you have to adapt to their adapting. And it's during Kiddie Season when 15,000 undergrads return to UC Santa Cruz, including 3 or 4,000 freshmen. All of Santa Cruz becomes a vast coming-of-age play-pen for the university's young charges.

Last Friday was Move-In Day for dorm-dwellers at the university, and the hordes of offloading parental unit vehicles clogged the West Side traffic flow all the way down to Mission Street. That evening downtown was full of demi-adults: full-grown, but with unformed features, like giant embryos. Some wandered the streets in packs, while others still walked in formation with their family units: mother, father, and occasionally a younger sibling.

On Move-In Day evening, such families jam downtown restaurants like El Palomar -- booth after booth of family membes all focusing their attention on the Chosen One who will now go off to Learn and Have a Career and Not Be A Complete Idiot, Thank You.

In just the few days since then, the students have spread out into the community and taken part-time jobs. That's why the kid behind the counter takes twice as long as usual to make your sandwich this week, or the cashier at the natural food store can't make her cash register do what it's supposed to. Bear with them, they're still learning.

The business I work for hires college students for various jobs, and the interviews are going on now. They leave the doors to the conference room open, and I hear every word. And trust me: if you want to believe the world is going to hell, you need to listen to an eighteen- year-old college frosh respond to job interview questions. Truth be told, I was exactly that clueless when I was their age, and so were you. It's just too depressing to remember, so we try not to.

Yep, it's Kiddie Season all right. And thanks to the university, Kiddie Season in Santa Cruz is nine months long this year and every year. The kiddies will always be with us, and they have a lot to learn while they take their classes and brew our coffee and wait our tables and cross the street without looking both ways; and while they drive like idiots, chase after sex and figure out what to do once they catch it, and, last but not least, have long ludicrous arguments about the meaning of life in coffee houses.

But what I want to know is this:

Is it too late for positive discipline?