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.
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....
Bump!
Great article.
Great post, thanks.
Such an important issue — for parents and even grandparents to be aware of — plus when any of us are in a position to choose policies that could be ‘overprotective’ (and this happens a lot for working people on committees, who go to meetings, who vote, etc) we should take a deep breath and advocate, to be concise, FREEDOM.
vannrox rocks!