ArcaMax

My daughter and her best friend started their own business. They made business cards and put the QR code to their Red Cross babysitting certification on the back. Their first client was a neighbor with a toddler who came to our house, where I could watch all three of them, and be a business respite program. I overheard one of them lament after two hours on one of the first nights, "We can't even sit down for a minute."

As their generation would say, I loved that for them.

That's not coming from a place of sarcasm -- maybe a touch of schadenfreude, truth be told. It is watching them gain growth; they're evaluating what work looks like, and how children are work. Their school has built in similar experiences for them as well. Starting in fourth grade, they are assigned kinder buddies. The older kids read to the younger ones and do other activities, such as scavenger hunts. My daughter reported that one of her buddies was "squirmy," but over the year, he settled a bit more and began to listen to her.

The next year, she had a little girl who might have been more after her heart and vice versa. During pickup, my daughter had pointed out that kinder buddy, and over the months at the pickup line, I watched that little girl peer up at my daughter when she walked by, trying to catch her attention. My daughter would give a little wave if she saw the little girl, and the little girl would wave enthusiastically back.

The kinder kids usually come out first, and they are shockingly small compared to my "grown" fourth and seventh graders. For the kinders, their backpacks are nearly as large as they are. When I see them wobble by, their straps slipping from their shoulders, I think about how much we load onto them: notebooks, lunchboxes, water bottles. And then I think about what else we've loaded onto their generation, things invisible but heavier than any backpack could hold: drills, alerts, whispered reminders about where to hide, how to be quiet, and how to survive.

I wonder every now and then: How many of those backpacks are bulletproof?

I woke up to an article praising the middle schoolers in that Minneapolis church. Kids were saved by the buddy system, as some of the middle schoolers hustled out their little buddies or shielded them in the chaos of the bullets; children saving children. We talk about their bravery as though it is inspiring, but it's really damning.

My daughter thought babysitting was hard work. She's right. However, the harsher truth is that, in this country, childhood is even harder work still. I want her to learn patience, empathy, and the weight of responsibility, but not like this, in a world where the buddy system isn't about sharing a book, but surviving a shooting.

We've handed them responsibilities they should never have to bear, while we shirk our own to fight their reality. We tell them to buddy up, to carry bulletproof backpacks, to run and hide. We dress it up as preparedness, but it's really abandonment. We've decided to accept a world where children are trained for war zones instead of classrooms. In America, we've decided guns matter more than children, and our kids are the ones left carrying the weight of that choice.

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Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com. To learn more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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