Posted on 02/02/2018 10:36:29 PM PST by vannrox
It’s the generation that God forsook because it forsook God.
Thanks for posting.
Some related material:
The Overprotected Kid (2014)
A preoccupation with safety has stripped childhood of independence, risk taking, and discovery—without making it safer. A new kind of playground points to a better solution.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/04/hey-parents-leave-those-kids-alone/358631
Why Do We Over-Parent? What Anxious Parents Need to Know
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3546452/posts
Glad I’m old.
I had a .22 Bolt Action Rifle and single shot .410 Shotgun when I was eight years old. I also rode my Schwinn Stingray without Wearing a Bike Helmet.
I’m not even going to get into the many years my Parents drove me and my Brother around in a four wheeled death machine with no Seat Belts and a Dashboard made of steel.
How I’ve lived to tell the tale is obviously a miracle.
Did I mention the Chemistry Set I got for Christmas when I was ten years old? Isn’t Mercury fun to play with?
As they say in the UK:
Health and Safety
Going Crazy.
When I was six in 1951 I was given a dollar. Me and a buddy would take the bus to town, $0.05. Go to a double feature, $0.10. Go to the Boys Club and have lunch with money left for activities all afternoon and still have five Cents to ride the bus home at 5PM. That was normal in those days.
Wish we all could go back to those times. I didn’t grow up then, but better than now in few ways.
Liberals....
Quicksilver won't hurt you, but Mercury vapor will. So the lying RATs banned thermometers and thermostats containing the liquid metal, but forced us to have the toxic fluorescent light bulbs.
Idiots!
Well, what the Lord wants is the most important thing of all. We weren’t ever expected to camp out here forever.
The growth of inner space, otherwise known as the information technology age, has led to a more sheltered culture as well. Who cared about mercury vapor from the residue of busted fluorescent lamps in a leaky if not well aired out house whose residents were outside it more than inside of it anyhow?
But with the growth of inner space has come an exponential growth of communication between its pockets. The computer screens and smartphones, before which we all now sit or lay down, bear witness to that.
I’m pretty sure I would have been sitting down inside a lot more if we’d had the kind of computers and internet that we do now. Going outside was the way to get diversion. Now we can type in http://whatever and voila, hours and hours of content of every kind and we don’t have to budge. Even smartphones need to be charged eventually so it’s back into the building — books never ran out of power as long as there was light. And more such things.
I swear, if farm kids were so inclined, they could take over this country one day.
I wonder how much a feminised and fatherless society has to do with this?
There is such a large difference in the experience of generations growing up in the post WWII era and those growing up today that it is almost impossible for most youngsters of today to understand and accept as truth a grandfather’s tales of “the way it was”.
That 1950’s style childhood freedom might still exist to some extent in small towns and for kids raised on farms but it isn’t even a believable tale for most kids of today.
Kids today who aren’t permitted to walk to the corner store or a few blocks to school cannot comprehend what it was like for children their age to walk back and forth to schools a mile or more away or walk a paper route of several miles every day.
It wasn’t unusual to see a couple of young boys walking down the street carrying their rifles to go shoot some squirrels in the woods or plink at rats at the local open dump.
Today they send kids home from school for making the letter “L” with their thumb and forefinger.
They are tearing down old homes in my neighborhood and cramming three huge homes on the same lot. I’m guessing 1.2 million dollar homes with 10 feet between them (5’ code to the property line) on all three sides!
Partly due to property values, but also I’m guessing as most folks just sit at home with their devices now.
I lead a boys outdoor adventure troop made up of about 60 young men from 5-17.
We get outside as often as possible and always include unstructured time. In November, we had a weekend trip to a camp that had a large play area with homemade swings and trees to climb.
The 5-8 year olds had a couple adults in their cabins with them. Beginning with the 9 year olds, they were on their own.
I got up around 6 am and looked out. It was about 20 degrees out and the play area was already loaded with happy, exuberant and excited kids. Hours of unstructured play.
At another campout with several troops, I walked past the baseball diamond. There was a rousing and unsupervised game of kickball among about 20 5-9 year old boys. I called a friend on the 2-way radio and said “Dave, there’s a great game of kickball going on. Only problem, they don’t have a ball.” Imaginative unstructured play.
We teach our young men to safely use axes, knives, firearms, shoot rapids, throw tomahawks, light fires, climb rocks. In other words, we actually do what most boys only dream of. Sadly, most kids don’t even know how to dream of that stuff anymore.
A while back, I read an article from artofmanliness.com out loud to the boys. https://www.artofmanliness.com/2017/06/28/23-dangerous-things-let-kids/
I was really sharing it with their parents in the back of the room. Glancing up, I was heartened to see lots of nods and smiles. (we got great parents)
Finally, President Herbert Hoover wrote an essay at one point entitled “What is a Boy.” I saw it at a museum and hand copied it. It’s how I raised my sons, and to a great extent, my daughters.
What is a Boy?
You can absolutely rely on a boy if you know what to expect.
A boy is nature’s answer to the false belief that there is no such thing
as perpetual motion.
The world is so full of boys that it is impossible to touch off a
firecracker, strike up a band or pitch a ball without collecting a
thousand of them.
Boys are not ornamental, they’re useful.
If it were not for boys, the newspapers would go undelivered and unread
and a hundred thousand picture shows would go bankrupt.
The boy is a natural spectator; he watches parades, fires, fights,
football games, automobiles and planes with equal fervor.
However, he will not watch a clock.
A boy is a piece of skin stretched over an appetite.
However, he eats only when he’s awake.
Boys imitate their Dads in spite of all the efforts to teach them good
manners.
Boy’s are very durable.
A boy, if not washed too often and if not kept in a cool quiet
place after each accident , will survive broken bones, hornet’s nests,
swimming holes and five helpings of pie.
Boys love to trade things. They’ll trade fishhooks, marbles, broken
knives and snakes for anything that is priceless or worthless.
When he grows up, he’ll trade puppy love, energy, warts, bashfulness and
a cast-iron stomach for a bay window, pride, ambition, pretense and a
bald head and will immediately say that; “boys aren’t what they used to
be in the good old days.”
Herbert Hoover
FReepers, let’s start the movement. Wake up your sons and kick them outside. Give them reasonable parameters of where they can go and tell them not to come in until...
They’ll find something cool to do. I guarantee it.
Yep - our playgrounds were on beaten dirt from use. We built tree forts with axes and saws and hammers and nails and climbed high trees 9and roofs where access was available) and had apple/slingshot/BB-gun “wars” and learned the concepts of safety by being allowed to find out that was safe and what caused pain.....and became pretty well adjusted adults who didn’t cower in fear and become emotionally scarred for life at a chalked name on some concrete on a college campus....
Yeah, sit on the curb and stare at their cell phone.
All the worse for them.
I heard a story once about a boy who walked into a 7-11 and walked past a bunch of curb dwellers. He was wearing something that was a little out of place. Outdoor gear of some type.
The curb dwellers began teasing him and he said, well, I have this gear on because I’m just getting back from a week of backpacking where I hiked 50 miles, camped on the side of a cliff and ran off a bear (or something like that)
Shut the curb dwellers right up.
Here’s another concept-Be a parent and take the phone away. Show them that they will live without it for a few hours.
Side note. For the most part, we practiced the parenting techniques in this article. I firmly believe that my job is to teach my kids to be slightly more independent every single day.
My youngest is now 18. At Christmas, we went back home to Michigan for a couple weeks. He wanted to go with some friends to the Upper Peninsula. There was a small blizzard and ice storm so I told him to remember to be careful and off they went.
Most of the UP is cellular dead zone.
Since I knew he was pretty resourceful and responsible, I gave it no thought at all.
You and I grew up the same way. We should be thankful that we made it to old age without the government directing our parents on how to raise us.
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