Guess I’ll just have to play in my own personal, sterilized Ball Pit.
Enjoy that snow!
You have a wailing two-year old in Baltimore you need to comfort. So get your ass her pronto, missy.
I laughed so hard and so loud at you that I scared the poor kid half to death.
There are some pretty cool things that I would have liked (heck, I wish that Big Wheels were around when I was a kid). And computers. And cable television. In the summer we saw so many damned reruns of bad tv. But still the things you would get you’d have to trade for the bad things that weren’t in our world:
[ul][li]HIV[/li][li]Steroids (I know Hank Aaron wasn’t on the juice when I watched him hit 715)[/li][li]Herpes[/li][li]Sports leagues instead of pick up games[/li][li]Dirty creeks (we used to spend many an hour playing in the creek)[/li][li]Both parents at work so at least some time is spent with “strangers” as caregivers.[/li][li]Eating fastfood more than once a month (I may have considered this a treat at the time… now: BLECCH!)[/li][li]Heavy, dangerous traffic[/li][li]Guns in school[/li][li]Loss of “innocence” at an earlier age.[/li][/ul]
That’s just a few off the top of my head. It’s not as if the world was fully idyllic when I grew up, mostly in the sixties and seventies, but it did seem a simpler place. For every good thing that is better you’ll end up trading off for something that is worse.
Well, from what I can tell, most of the girls over age 11 now dress like strippers. I wouldn’t have minded that…
Well… I’m 22, but I had a lot of older toys growing up. I swear that has to be what is wrong with my nephew. All of his toys were extremely loud and he loved things that made noise. But you know he’d play with anything anyway in his younger years.
Nowadays there is all KINDS of crap that I never had. He has his own videos, etc… I don’t envy any of it. My favorite toys were Ninja-turtles at a certain age. I played outside a lot too.
I guess it does depend on your age though. I would have like to have had the internet in my early teen years. Well… I did actually, but nobody else did. It seems like all kinds of kids are on MSN or AIM nowadays, which seems cool to me.
Nothing. I spent my childhood playing outside. I feel sorry for kids today, actually. Playing outside is too dangerous - much safer to huddle next to the warm, protective glow of a monitor.
Gosh, thanks so much for comparing my life choice to a couple of incurable diseases.
There’s more than one way to have a happy childhood, you know. And having more, rather than fewer, caring people in your life is not necessarily a liability.
[QUOTE=Shirley Ujest]
I’d rather shove snow up my anus QUOTE]
While that can be fun too, I don’t think it is appropriate for a child.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to denigrate any decision that a parent has made nor did I mean to equate those things. I was just trying to point out that for everything that comes in the “plus” column there are going to be things that might be seen in the “minus” column. Not all childcare is provided by good, loving people. Women having more life choices is IMO a good thing, but it inevitably means that what I would have seen as “mommy time*” becomes time spent with someone else. When it’s a choice then I’m fine with it. When it becomes a “need” I’m a little less positive about it.
*Another positive is that it has become more acceptable for stay-at-home dads. So this could now be called “parent time”. But when I was a child it was all but unheard of.
Ooh! I thought of one!
DVD’s. I really like DVD’s. Every once in a while I’m “forced” to bring out an old VHS tape, and it sucks sucks sucks! I can’t believe we ever thought the picture and sound on those pieces of crap was anything like “a movie at home”! Plus, I’ve always been geekily obsessed with the minutae of flim-making, so I love all the commentaries and special features.
We really did stuff when I was a kid. Played kickball. Rode our bikes to the strip mall. Rode our bikes to the pool. We played jumprope. We played Chinese jumprope. We played jacks. I used to play double solitaire with this friend of mine and we were both really good and fast at it.
I had some neat toys. A Lucky Locket Kiddle. I really loved that.
I had skates that attached to my shoes. I did some pretty scary skating down the hill of my driveway. I really used to do stuff. What happened to me? Now I’m afraid to do anything. I hardly let my daughter go anywhere on her own, and we live in a safe town, basically.
The first song I remember noticing from the radio, and I must have been in about 5th grade, was “Sugar.” Was that the Archies? I loved that song!
This is gonna sound weird, but: Dental insurance. And fluoride treatments.
My folks couldn’t afford to get my “baby” molars filled, since it would be expensive and they were sure the things were going to fall out within the year anyway. Well, they didn’t. They just rotted in my mouth, got infected, had to be “lanced” to drain and then extracted. If there’d been fluoride treatments, maybe they wouldn’t have gotten cavities in the first place, and even if they had, they’d have been filled when the cavities were small if we had dental insurance, saving me nights and days of pain.
Oh, and immunizations for childhood diseases like measles.
And already-made water. Why, when I was a child, we had to make our own water by banging hydrogen and oxygen atoms together. But do young people today believe me when I tell them that? Noooooo.
The playgrounds.
It seemed like all the playgrounds of my youth followed the same sterile layout: swings, slide, monkey bars, spin thingy cause much pain when fall off 'around. And it was always on concrete.
Now I take my kids to different playgrounds, and they have these monstrous setups with all kinds of cool things. Towers, forts, balance things, climbing ropes, bridges, the works. And they’re all set in this wood chip covered foundation. These playgrounds today rock. I love running around in these playgrounds, and I’m 33!
I’m 22 so, while I’m not a kid, I’m young enough for a lot of what you’re posting about to be familiar to me and you know what? It really wasn’t that big a deal. Steroids might cheapen the appeal of sports but as a kid, it’s still as exciting to watch a game, assuming that’s your thing (it wasn’t mine); STDs are scary, yes, but a lot of us are still celibate (I’m a virgin) and younger people aren’t automatically stupid… some of us use discretion.
I enjoyed playing in my dirty creek even when my mom told me not to. Looking back, I can’t believe I did but I never got sick.
My mom and stepdad both worked when I was a younger kid and even though my mom was stay-at-home after about age eight, I don’t remember the first seven years of my life being that horrible.
We mostly ate regular food. Pizza was a treat.
Traffic and guns were never much of an issue, even when I graduated in 2000. I’m sure my school had plenty of drugs and weapons in it but by not hanging with that crowd, it was never a problem.
I know it wasn’t your intent to turn this into a “Back in my day” type post as evidenced by your last paragraph but it just got to me for some reason… people – like my mom, for instance – that insist the world was a better place when they were a child and that the current or past couple generations has it so bad or are so spoiled or just can’t compare to their own is one of my pet peeves.
Yeah, there’s a lot wrong with the world today but very little of it is anything new. Some situations have been excacerbated, some are just now more well-known, but others are finally being put to an end or trying to, like homophobia, misogyny, spousal and child abuse, racism, and any number of others. It’s not a perfect world by any means but we’re trying.
None of this is said in anger and I’m not pointing any fingers, by the way. This is just one of my buttons and you accidentally pushed it. I just had to respond.
When our 13yo daughter was about 4yo, she asked me what my favorite video had been when I was her age. I explained that we didn’t have VCRs back then, and we had to actually go to the movie theater to see a movie at all (or wait for it to show on one of the four broadcast channels that existed pre-cable). She seemed to feel a little sorry for me, then immediately asked what my favorite computer game had been instead. 
While I’m glad to have computers, VCRs, and DVDs players today, I don’t really wish I’d had them when I was growing up. I read almost non-stop, which makes me feel a little less guilty about not reading so much these days.
As someone old enough to be your mother – and almost old enough to be your grandmother – I agree with you. People tend to forget the bad stuff and see their childhood through rose-colored glasses. Who wouldn’t want to forget when keeping the “wrong sort” of person out of your neighborhood was an acceptable thing? Or the idea that if a woman was beaten by her husband she probably deserved it because, after all, she must have done something bad to make him so angry? Not to mention smallpox, polio, iron lungs, and a whole lot of other stuff that’s now virtually unknown in the developed world.
A lot of the stuff that is bemoaned now was there all along but people didn’t know about it.
I was born in '66 and, while there was a lot that was great about the time I was growing up, there are some advantages now.
The chicken pox vaccine would have saved me some misery in my childhood! Come to think of it, we didn’t have flu shots either. I would have prefered a frozen medecine pop to some of the nasty stuff I took as a kid. I didn’t have braces, but they were a nightmare for my friends who did. They have all kinds of cool colors and softer options now. And there’s a lot more of modern medicine that I’m glad we have.
Neither did we have airbags. Heck, the car of my childhood didn’t even have shoulder restraints, just those lap belts. I don’t think we had anti lock brakes either (when did they come about).
As for toys, I know computer games are sometimes seen as the devil that keeps kids inside. However, I would have appreciated them on sick or other stuck inside days. I loved to read, but sometimes I’d crave something more interactive.
My dad once commented on how great the 1950s were. I said, “Yeah, we should bring back those Colored Only water fountains”. If you were a white male, growing up in the 50’s was pretty sweet.
The thing of it is, kids don’t really notice the bad stuff or think of it as adults do. They’re really self-absorbed and really have no concept (or else they don’t think) of things outside of their day to day enviroment. I remember when we got lectures about HIV and how you couldn’t get it if you drank from the same fountain as someone with AIDS, etc. Did I think, “What a sad world I’m living in where children are taught about horrible diseases”. No. I thought, “Well, at least this lecture is better than the math we’re supposed to be doing right now.”
I remember in 1998 when the news had stories on how to approach the Monica Lewinski thing to children. Children probably didn’t care beyond, “Why are all the adults freaking out?” At least, that’s how I would have reacted. But then I wouldn’t have cared because I never watched the nightly news and paid attention to anything the President was doing when I was eight or nine.
Believe me. A child born in 2004 will, in 2034, talk about how great it was growing up in the 2000s or 2010s and how sorry he/she feels for the kids growing up in 2034.
They were saying the same thing about children in Ancient Greece. And beyond.
Hear hear! I got chicken pox twice, then I got the measles, followed quickly by the mumps and when I got over that, I got SHINGLES.
grumble.
I still consider myself a kid (I’m 25, which means I’m a kid that can buy her own toys).