Samantha Bee on summer parenting now and then (then being the 70s)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

On the indignity of being expected to watch our children and have concern for their brains. This is the funniest thing I’ve read in a long time. If you’re a Gen-Xer with kids this is for you.

A Long Summer for “Weary Tiger” Mothers

[QUOTE=Samantha Bee]
I am a child of the 1970s. What that means, in short, is that my childhood summer vacations were spent languishing in front of the TV watching Phil Donahue and eating Boo Berry until my skin turned purple. Nobody cared if I read. Nobody cared if I wore sunscreen, or pants. I was like a house cat; my parents barely even knew if I was still living with them or whether I had moved in with the old lady down the street who would put out a bowl of food for me. In the '70s, parenting was like a combination of intense crate-training and rumspringa, so I would typically spend June through September burnt to a crisp and wandering listlessly around the city, verging on scurvy.
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2

I loved that posting.

I have to agree, what ever happened to letting kids actually be kids and do aimless play with friends? I can remember pickup hockey games in the winter on a little pond out in the middle of a patch of woods about 10 minutes walk from the house in one direction, sledding on a hill on the golf course 10 minutes walk in the other direction. I can remember heading out with a snack and my cross country skis along the trail created by ripping up a railroad between Caledonia and Avon. In summers I can remember bicycling halfway to Leroy to meed up with my friend Marc, and turning around and biking the 40 odd miles to Fairport to meet up with Matthew and bombing around the Fariport/Pittsford area, and biking home again. Yup, we were young, silly and did double centuries on our bikes on weekends or randomly in the summer. We had an empty lot on the corner that my brother and other kids did pickup baseball and touch football games. More random pickup games than organized Pop Warner or [blanking on the little league guy name] and other than my pony club and dance, and my brothers violin lessons, we didn’t really do specific ‘enrichment’ activities.

3

When I was about 5, in the late 60s, I got a gash on the bottom of my foot one summer from a broken milk bottle on a neighbor’s front porch (no, we were not hillbillies). These days, it would result in a visit from Child Protection and maybe a lawsuit. Back then, I got a band-aid and had to actually wear shoes for a few days.

4

At the ripe old age of 7 in 1979, I remember being allowed to walk over to the neighborhood pool 3 streets over and spend the hours of 9-noon at the pool, then home for lunch & more sunscreen, and back to the pool at 2:30 or 3 (didn’t want to catch a cramp!) and then back at about 5 or 6, at which point, I usually played with my neighborhood friends in the front yards of the street until it got dark. Sometimes, if the weather was bad, we’d play Atari for hours, or just break out various toys and have fun. Generally, if we could, it was tackle football in the front yards, or swimming at the pool for the majority of the day.

Someone’s parents may have kept a half-assed eye on us in the frontyards, just to make sure any broken bones were reasonably quickly treated, but for the most part, we set shit on fire, beat the crap out of each other in various ways, fell out of trees, and did a bunch of stuff that modern-day helicopter parents probably won’t let their kids do in high school!

5

I feel sorry for kids today and I wonder how having little or no “own time” will affect them when they’re older.

While I had good parents, I was left on my own quite a bit as a child. One of the first things I was taught was that the world doesn’t revolve around you just because you’re small.

Bri2k

6

Circa 1970 my parents would drop us off at the movies or the amusement park Astroworld - all day long! We rode our bikes all day and came home at supper time. After dinner we would go back outside until the porch light flipped off and on - bedtime.

As teenagers we slept until noon, ate junk food and watched TV until late at night.

7

Me too! Except it was more like 4 miles for me.

8

My kids are having that summer.

We both work. They are 11 and 12 (almost 12 and 13 - they have late Summer/early Fall birthdays). They won’t kill themselves (this being the Dope - they aren’t LIKELY to kill themselves - its possible, but not too likely). There are few Summer programs once you are past elementary school.

About two or three days a week, there is a Grandma in the house. The other two or three days a week, they get their “70s child Summer” - BooBerry isn’t there (but they go through a LOT of Frosted Flakes, ramen and frozen pizza). There is cable - so ENDLESS stupid Nick and Disney Channel shows to replace Phil Donahue. My son runs through the neighborhood (my daughter is more of an indoor kid - she did spend three weeks at camp this Summer to prevent scurvy ;)). I get text messages “Mom, can Sarah come over?” “Mom, I’m going to Alex’s”

And, get this, I know LOTS of kids who have summers RIGHT NOW just like the ones my kids have. You wouldn’t know it from watching the media - but there are a TON of parents out there with kids who are too old for child care programs, or who can’t afford child care programs.

Hell, we have SLEEPOVERS where we tell parents “you know, we work, they’ll be alone when they get up tomorrow.” And the parents say “OK” - and we’ve had the same thing happen when our kids have slept over.

9

I used to get on my bike at age 12 and be gone for the day. I’d go a mile away to see two horses in a field. Despite a (crappy) electric fence, I would actually go over the fence into the field to hang out with my equine buddies. One stepped on my foot and I have a big scar to this very day. I never said anything about it of course - today, lord knows what would happen! Tetanus shot, plastic surgery stitches, lawsuit?.. Then it was off to a big hill, go flying down like a bat out of hell (I can’t count the number of times a driver would slam on the brakes and yell at me to get out of the road!) There are three swimming pools in the yards in back of my house. I have not heard a peep from anybody out there in a week. Did they all go away somewhere? Are they inside playing videogames? A mystery!

10

That made me giggle. After the eldest spent an hour working on her multiplication tables and another hour reading she left to roam the neighborhood with her friends. It’s four hours later and I think she’s across the street playing with Emily.

Maybe. Perhaps. Possibly. I’ll fetch her in a hour or so. An eight year old is entitled to some unsupervised fun now and then.

11

My oldest son just got back from 3 days of camping with his step-grampa. I made him take a shower, and he is now out and about looking for his friends.

My youngest is watching Cartoon Network. I think his brains may be leaking from his ears.

12

Whatever happened to summer camp (sleep-away or some program at the local Y)? Why aren’t the teenagers working?

I’m not in favor of helicopter parenting, but I wouldn’t want my hypothetical imaginary children watching garbage television and eating junk food, either. And they would be FAR better off staying far, far away from some of the kinds of neighborhood kids I was acquainted with in my own childhood (the kinds that like to hit each other, set things on fire and are not above stealing things if they think they can get away with it). :eek: :frowning:

13

Well, in MY area most of the jobs that used to go to teenagers are now being done by former professionals who lost their jobs during the Great Recession and are doing crap work just to get by.

Meanwhile, funding cuts have hit the summer camps, parks, pools, and other programs of that sort.

14

Meh. I remember the 70’s too. I remember biking over to Burke Lake Road and hiding my bike under a bridge so I could hop a train into Springfield and buy a hotdog at the gas station there. Yes we had hotdogs at home, what’s your point? And I could have knocked on any door in a half-mile radius of home and expected to be welcomed, helped if needed, and probably also fed.

I also remember the media being full of the horrors of poor little latch-key children. These poor abandoned mites were completely unsupervised sometimes three hours each day between the time school ended and the time Mother got home from work. All those evil Liberal Mothers who dared to provide for their families rather than suffer with lovely humility and watch their children starve while their husbands ran off to do coke with the bosses secretary.

Everyone was certain that TV and atari would turn us kids into blind albino cave dwellers. We didn’t go outside nearly enough, and had no major chores like our farming ancestors did. It was an absolute travesty that most of us didn’t get up at 4am to milk cows and muck stalls. And we were all going to be horrid drivers because we hadn’t had early training runnign the tractor.

Puh-lease. There is always someone fussing about the styles of other parents. There is always someone who saw a certain style once and thinks it’s the reason our country is going to pot. For that matter, there is always someone who thinks our country is going to pot.

The kids are fine. They can fight their own battles, and most of them will. They will demand and receive freedom and responsibility to exactly the extent (or near as their parent(s) can guess) that they can handle it. And there will be a few bad households, and a few surpassingly wonderful ones.

And the things you can do in a rural neighborhood you can’t do in a suburban or urban one.

The one thing I’m certain of is that it does no good whatsoever to sit around whining about the symptoms of change. Neighborhoods are not what they used to be. Deal with it. I know for a fact that there are three convicted pedophiles living within a half-mle radius of our house. Celtling will not be knocking on random doors.

It’s different, we adjust. Our kids get more attention than we did. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. We do not live in denial about the bad people in our midst nor do we take unecessary risks with our kids. That’s a bad thing . . . why again?

We are more likely than our parents generation to be raising our children on purpose. We give more thought to it, and plan better for their futures. Mostly this is because we are older tthan our parents were. I’d much rather be a kid now.

15

Meh. I grew up in the '70s and '80s. If I walked down the street to a neighbor’s house or got off the bus at another kid’s house after school without telling my mom first, I got yelled at and told to come home. I did get to wander the wooded area around our house, at least.

16

Well,

Kids usually age out of day camp at about 12. After that, day camps don’t want them - they aren’t controllable for the sixteen to eighteen year old “counselors.” My daughter will go from attending Girl Scout Daycamp this year to being a “camp caddie” (i.e. a teen helper) next year and can do that through high school

But camps are expensive. Day camp was $130 a week through Girl Scouts. Sleepover camp was $500 for the week (it WAS horse camp, but its still $300 for a week without horses for a basic camp through a non-profit like YMCA or Scouts). Daycare “camps” are really pricey.

As for working, in addition to the shortage of jobs - particularly “summer jobs” (i.e. McDonalds needs lunch staff year round, not just for the summer so that isn’t a good “summer job”) there is the transportation issue. For teens with access to public transportation, maybe the situation is different. For teens in the 'burbs - its often a LONG bikeride (and sometimes a near impossible bikeride) to get to a job.

Transportation to daycamp can be an issue as well. For my daughters camp she got on the bus at 8 and got off at 4. But the bus ONLY picked her up at the local high school - twelve miles away. So an adult had to drop her off at 8 and be there for her at 4pm. Most grownups don’t have schedules that flexible. When they were younger (second and third grade) we had them in a summer program at the community center. We paid extra so they could be there before 8 and after 4. But it was eight miles out of our way to get them there.

17

Because there’s no jobs. Look around next time to stop for a burger and see if there’s anyone under 20 working fast food. Even paper routes are now done by grown-ups in cars, not 12 year olds on bikes.
Some teens are working in family businesses, as I did, but most don’t have even that opportunity.

18

Nothing happened. Those things still exist.

19

My cousin has that life. And she hates it immensely. She’s even trying to get pregnant so she can have that family bond she misses so much. Her dad’s always off getting drunk and trying to get a replacement wife. She, on the other hand, is depressed because she won’t let anyone help her with the grief of her mom dying. There is no one there for her in her regular family, and so she shuns everyone else who tries to help.

I honestly think you guys overly romanticize your youth, or at least overstate your freedom. Life without anyone caring what you do sucks.

20

I think that you may be confusing “not needing to know where you are and what you are doing every minute and confirming that all of it will raise your test scores and lower your cholesterol” with “life without anyone caring what you do.” My parents do, and did, love us unconditionally and enthusiastically. We almost always ate supper together. However, on long summer days my mom would drop me and my younger brother (ages 12 and 10? 10 and 8 maybe?) at the public swimming pool which was a huge dammed up creek with a paved bottom that turned into a creek again and pick us up approximately 8 hours later. I recall hanging out with a friend who lived near the creek and “body-surfing” down it for miles. We also slept until noon, stayed up all hours of the night, and ate junk food. It was fun. We felt loved. We also felt free. One time my brother and I accidentally started a fire with fireworks in this dry canyon area and pretended to be amazed onlookers when the fire truck came. There were no cell phones, so it wasn’t like people were used to being in constant touch anyway. Ahhh. I can’t imagine doing this with my kid (who is now just 3), but I’m glad I got to.