Children lost something along the way
Technology has separated children from nature, and from risk.
The video below was posted by Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, with the comment:
THIS CHILLING VIDEO MIGHT MAKE YOU KICK YOUR KIDS OUT OF THE HOUSE — TO PLAY OUTSIDE
It’s one of the more depressing statements about what has happened to childhood.
I don’t want to turn this into one of those “When I was a kid, I had to walk 4 hours to school…” type of things.
It’s just the opposite.
It’s about the freedom we had. To fall. To bump our heads. To compete. To get physical.
“Just be home by dinner” used to be the norm, now it could get a parent arrested or get child services involved.
Something very important was lost along the way.
We never let our kids have Nintendo, Gameboy, or any of what in the 1990s were all the rage. They hated us for it at the time, but now thank us.
The technology now, particularly the internet, should bring people together, but I think it isolates people in important ways.
And I don’t envy today’s children for it.
Someone more or less my age sent this to me a while back:
No matter what our kids and the new generation think about us,
WE ARE AWESOME !!!
OUR Lives are LIVING PROOF !!!To Those of Us Born
1925 – 1970 :~~~~~~~~~
TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED THE
1930s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and ’70s!!First, we survived being born to mothers who may have smoked and/or drank
while they were pregnant.They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes.
Then, after that trauma, we were
put to sleep on our tummies
in baby cribs covered
with bright colored lead-based paints.We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles,
locks on doors or cabinets,
and, when we rode our bikes,
we had baseball caps,
not helmets, on our heads.As infants and children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, no booster seats, no seat belts, no air bags, bald tires and sometimes no brakes.
Riding in the back of a pick- up truck on a warm day was always a special treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle, and no one actually died from this.
We ate cupcakes, white bread, real butter, and bacon. We drank Kool-Aid made with real white sugar. And we weren’t overweight.
WHY?
Because we were always outside playing…that’s why!
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day.
–And, we were OKAY.
We would spend hours building
our go-carts out of scraps
and then ride them down the hill,
only to find out we forgot the brakes.. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.We did not have Play Stations, Nintendos and X-boxes. There were
no video games, no 150 channels on cable,
no video movies or DVDs,
no surround-sound or CDs,
no cell phones,
no personal computers,
no Internet and no chat rooms.WE HAD FRIENDS
and we went outside and found them!
We fell out of trees, got cut,
broke bones and teeth,
and there were no lawsuits
from those accidents.We would get spankings with wooden spoons, switches, ping-pong paddles, or just a bare hand, and no one would call child services to report abuse.
We ate worms, and mud pies
made from dirt, and
the worms did not live in us forever.We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls, and
-although we were told it would happen- we did not put out very many eyes.We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them.
Little League had tryouts
and not everyone made the team.
Those who didn’t had to learn
to deal with disappointment.Imagine that!!
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!
These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers, and inventors ever.
The past 50 to 85 years have seen an explosion of innovation and new ideas..
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.
If YOU are one of those born
between 1925-1970, CONGRATULATIONS!You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives for our own good.
While you are at it, forward it to your kids, so they will know how brave and lucky their parents were.
Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn’t it ?
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Comments
Love it!
I grew up in the 1970s…..the era of Evel Kneivel. We would spend all day long building ramps and jumping our bicycles, and seeing who could jump the furthest. Occasionally today you see some kids on bikes doing all the stunt stuff at a skate park, but they ride for 5 minutes and piddle around on their iDevice for 30 minutes.
Okay- I didn’t mean the video. That is sad.
I did so many things. Made trails, forts, tried to dam a creek and fell pretty hard and hurt my arm – got to stay out of school for a day! Rode horses, got thrown, drove a go-cart all over, and of course, my bicycle…. climbed trees, played kick-ball with my friends, so many things. It was a good time! Oh – and got to make a bed in the back of the station wagon while we went on a cross-country trip. That was so comfortable. I absolutely loved it!
How ironic you should post this today.
I was one of the children who lived in Montgomery County, MD when the Lyon sisters disappeared.
And that event, truly, changed my world – and the world of all our children – for all time.
After that, our parents – and the schools – were afraid that we would be next. And walking to Wheaton Plaza, playing till dark, staying out with friends all summer long, riding bikes and going to the local Country Boy store (a short walk from Wheaton Plaza) were all steeped in fear, forbidden.
Was it the hippies and anti-establishment movement? Was it that this was a DC suburb – and of course the government had to start regulating everything to “keep the kids safe”? Or was it that we no longer trusted our neighbors, our “sex, drugs, rock and roll” “freedom” anti-war, pro-SDS, Watergate-steeped, weary culture?
“It’s 10 o’clock…..do you know where your children are?”
Who knows why. All I know is…that’s when we started being afraid to play outside; when our parents were afraid to let us go free all day; afraid to walk anywhere anytime – day or night; started looking at everyone with suspicion, no matter how well we knew them. We lost our childhood innocence, our trust in our fellow man, our neighbor.
Ironic that you should post on this today…..since the Lyon sisters are in the headlines all across the nation because they think they’ve FINALLY caught the beast(s) who stole them, and our childhood innocence, forever.
I pray for the Lyon sisters’ parents. And for all who need closure after this horrible, horrible crime.
It affected so many….
Hmmmmmm……
“Was it the hippies and anti-establishment movement? Was it that this was a DC suburb – and of course the government had to start regulating everything to “keep the kids safe”? Or was it that we no longer trusted our neighbors, our “sex, drugs, rock and roll” “freedom” anti-war, pro-SDS, Watergate-steeped, weary culture?”
Well it sure didn’t help……
Today’s new sex-slave trade makes me think of how mothers used to warn their daughters to beware of “white slavers.”
Technology played a part, but a small one. The leftist infantilization of these kids made them into the rudderless, lost souls they are, as well as democrat voters.
You may be aware of this already. A couple of decades back marketers discovered that if they could “extend” childhood and adolescence (infantilization) that they could influence and sell crap to people much easier…..
It’s not just the lawyers and government. Parents, the middle generation in the video, also contributed to let it happen.
Imagination is one of the greatest loses of our plugged-in Matrix ‘reality’ techno era.
As a kid of the fifties and sixties, I immersed myself in nature, created stories to play act with friends, rode bikes, went sledding, went to summer camp (where they let us kids use rifles and bows and arrows; they told us scary stories at the camp fire), I helped open street fire hydrants to cool off in the summer and then ran away when the fire dept. showed up, sold lemonade…I did what kids do and with reckless abandon outside of 140 characters-I had fun.
I did stuff as a kid I look back on and marvel that I’m alive.
As a bullet-proof teen, too.
I tromped the hills with my own rifle alone when I was nine.
And all that was the norm.
Today, my parents would be in jail.
I grew up on a dead end road, with a lovely large field at the end, hills full of trees and wild raspberry bushes, and a river across the road. You can imagine the fun we had out in the sticks. We used to build tree forts. At the tender age of six or so, in one cooperative effort, a neighbor boy was directing us – nail this, chop down that, etc. I had a hatchet, and he pointed to a sapling that needed just another blow or two to finish the job. I brought the hatchet down, but he didn’t get his finger out of the way in time, and he ran inside his house screaming. It wasn’t severed, thank goodness, just cut, but I was mortified. Despite the mishap, nobody got bent out of shape, and we all still played together.
I grew up on Fort Street, near the Detroit waterfront, between the old Fisher Body plant and the Stroh’s brewery. It was every bit as wonderful as it sounds.
In the Obama/democrat hellhole, ‘normal’ children – particularly boys – are rendered useless and dependent hysterics, while the role models of Obama/democrat hellhole are street thugs and radical Islamists.
Obama makes 1st visit by sitting president to federal prison:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/07/16/obama-making-1st-visit-by-sitting-president-to-federal-prison/
Very much like Nazi Germany in its infancy.
“Obama, first sitting President put in Federal Prison!”
There’s just got to be some still real small town paper with that headline! Or there ought to be!
Funny, just now my (step)Grandson is visiting. I haven’t seen him put down that I phone yet. Last night I didn’t have the nerve to say anything at dinner, but I should have.. all I can say is that these young people may know a lot more, but they will experience a lot less.
This points to the vast gulf between data and comprehension or understanding.
Much less wisdom.
It’s really cool that we have essentially the entire Smithsonian on our hips or in our pockets, but it doesn’t mean anything unless we synthesize the information usefully.
Let me propose a theory: Today’s social media and corrupted old media prevents the synthesization of information.
From all I’ve seen, too many know less because of the technology.
They aren’t reading history or Smithsonian web pages!
They’re wasting their lives on trash Internet like Gawker!
I was a child during World War 2. During the war, toy manufacture almost ceased completely. We had to improvise, and when we made things to play with, we were pleased with ourselves. My family had the axle and two rear wheels of an old tricycle, which we kept re-using. Since all the kids had very few toys, there were no haves and have-nots. Moreover, if you had something, you shared it because you knew that next week you would probably be a have-not.
Read “The Last Child in the Woods.” Brilliant book.
In one part, the author forced his two kids to play outside. “Put down the electronics, and go outside, and you’re not allowed back in (except to go to the bathroom).”
When the day was over, they came in with wonderful tales of finding frogs in a creek by their house, which they had never seen before!
The next day, the kids were bored, and so he said, “Go outside.” They answered, “We did that yesterday.”
The more I read the news, the more I see that my entire childhood is now illegal.
…Or offensive.
…Or hateful.
My stomache told me to be home in time for dinner.
Otherwise, I spent hours, hicking around town or riding a bike, or crawling under the mustard plants, making trails, or out shooting at ground squirrels. Or fishing, or just messing around in mud puddles and creeks.
I knew even then that the squirrels usually had Bubonic Plague so I left them out in the fields.