What Has Happened to Our Children?

By Matthew Dicks  /  Illustrated By Sean Wang 

My son is dressed like Marty McFly from “Back to the Future.” Orange vest. Jean jacket. Flannel shirt. The vest is doing a lot of work.

My daughter is dressed like a character from a fairly obscure show called “The Owl House.” In my mind, she looks like she always does: pants, shirt, knit cap. Nothing special at all. She’ll spend the night explaining to people about who she is and will likely be annoyed every time.

These children are bizarre. One is dressed up like a character from a movie nearly four decades old. The other is dressed up like a character no one has heard of before. What is wrong with these kids?

I’d be happy to purchase them a mask of any kind. Vampire teeth. Fake muscles. Plastic swords and battle axes. I’d cut holes in a sheet to transform them into ghosts if they wanted. Instead, they dress like human beings.

But this isn’t the worst part. It gets more egregious. Around 8 p.m., after visiting a dozen homes, one of them will turn to me and say, “I’m done. We can go home.” Then the other one will agree.

With half a bag of candy and at least an hour left before Halloween ends, they will call it a night and ask to return home. No matter how much urging, cajoling and ridiculing I do, they will ignore me.

I know this because I’ve been dealing with it for years. These children—who can’t keep Cheerios off the floor and only warn me that we’re running out of milk after we’ve run out of milk—refuse to press on into the night and collect as much candy as humanly possible because of stupidity like sleep, homework and being well rested for the next day. It makes no sense.

Two years ago, I finally took a stand. When Clara said, “One more house and then we’re done,” at 7:52 p.m., I stood atop a rock on the corner of two streets and said, “You listen to me. You only get so many Halloweens in your life. There are only so many nights like this when you can dress up in creepy costumes, bang on doors and demand candy. Time is fleeting, people. The end is coming. Let us suck the marrow of life tonight and get as much candy as possible.”

They weren’t wearing creepy costumes that year, either, of course. Both were dressed as characters from the TV show “Stranger Things,” which means they were dressed like ordinary kids.

Clara and Charlie listened to my oration that night, nodded at the appropriate moments and even smiled. They seemed genuinely moved. I felt like I had finally landed my message and made a difference. But when I finished speaking, Clara said, “Are you finished? We need to go to school tomorrow. We shouldn’t stay out too late.”

“Yup,” Charlie said. “Let’s head home. Sorry, Pops.”

Something terrible has happened to this generation of children. When I tell my kids stories about egging teacher’s homes, stealing candy from children much smaller than me, running from the police, getting caught by the police and toilet-papering front lawns, they think I’m a monster. They genuinely believe that I was a criminal. When I tell them about plastic masks affixed to my head by elastic bands that tangled in my hair and created rainforest-like environments between the mask and my face, they think I was living in the Dark Ages.

How can kids be so smart and so dumb at the same time?

They each have only a handful of years left before trick-or-treating passes them by. No one warned me as a kid about the fleeting nature of childhood, but even then, I felt the years rolling by faster than I wanted. But try as I might to warn them today, my warning falls on deaf ears.

Painfully responsible ears. The ears of children who are afraid to break laws, violate norms, take risks and generate mayhem.

I loved mayhem as a kid. I still do.

My children are like responsible, boring adults who worry about sleep and parking restrictions and being on time but still can’t fold a load of laundry, feed a hungry cat or turn off a damn light. Somehow, my children have become the kind of kids I despised when I was a child. I’m raising kids who I would’ve bullied at every opportunity when I was their age. I’ve failed miserably as a parent.

I know it’s too late for them. Too late for Clara or Charlie to embrace the joys of danger and mayhem. So all I can hope for—because I’m spiteful—is that when they have children someday—my grandchildren—I hope those kids shave their heads for Halloween, superglue horns to their skulls, cut holes in their best bedsheets, and dress up like devils and ghosts. I hope they sneak out of the house with three dozen eggs and 19 rolls of toilet paper and return home well after midnight, dragging half a ton of candy, looking breathless, disheveled and happy.

Matthew Dicks is an elementary school teacher, bestselling novelist and a record 55-time Moth Story SLAM champion. His latest books are Twenty-one Truths About Love and The Other Mother.

Sean Wang, an MIT architecture graduate, is author of the sci-fi graphic novel series, Runners. Learn more at seanwang.com.