Posted on 06/17/2015 4:35:26 AM PDT by HomerBohn
With all of the ridiculous new regulations, coddling, and societal mores that seem to be the norm these days, it’s a miracle those of us over 30 survived our childhoods.
Here’s the problem with all of this babying: it creates a society of weenies.
There won’t be more more rebels because this generation has been frightened into submission and apathy through a deliberately orchestrated culture of fear. No one will have faced adventure and lived to greatly embroider the story.
Kids are brainwashed – yes, brainwashed – into believing that the mere thought of a gun means you’re a psychotic killer waiting for a place to rampage.
They are terrified to do anything when they aren’t wrapped up with helmets, knee pads, wrist guards, and other protective gear.
Parents can’t let them go out and be independent or they’re charged with neglect and the children are taken away.
Woe betide any teen who uses a tool like a pocket knife, or heck, even a table knife to cut meat.
Lighting their own fire? Good grief, those parents must either not care of their child is disfigured by 3rd-degree burns over 90% of his body or they’re purposely nurturing a little arsonist.
Heaven forbid that a child describe another child as “black” or, for that matter, refer to others as girls or boys. No actual descriptors can be used for the fear of “offending” that person, and “offending” someone is incredibly high on the hierarchy of Things Never To Do.
“Free range parenting” is all but illegal and childhood is a completely different experience these days.
All of this babying creates incompetent, fearful adults.
Our children have been enveloped in this softly padded culture of fear, and it’s creating a society of people who are fearful, out of shape, overly cautious, and painfully politically correct. They are incredibly incompetent when they go out on their own because they’ve never actually done anything on their own.
When my oldest daughter came home after her first semester away at college, she told me how grateful she was to be an independent person. She described the scene in the dorm. “I had to show a bunch of them how to do laundry and they didn’t even know how to make a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese,” she said. Apparently they were in awe of her ability to cook actual food that did not originate in a pouch or box, her skills at changing a tire, her knack for making coffee using a French press instead of a coffee maker, and her ease at operating a washing machine and clothes dryer. She says that even though she thought I was being mean at the time I began making her do things for herself, she’s now glad that she possesses those skills. Hers was also the room that had everything needed to solve everyday problems: basic tools, first aid supplies, OTC medicine, and home remedies.
I was truly surprised when my daughter told me about the lack of life skills her friends have. I always thought maybe I was secretly lazy and that was the basis on my insistence that my girls be able to fend for themselves, but it honestly prepares them for life far better than if I was a hands-on mom that did absolutely everything for them. They need to realize that clothing does not get worn and then neatly reappear on a hanger in the closet, ready to be worn again. They need to understand that meals do not magically appear on the table, created by singing appliances a la Beauty and the Beast.
If the country is populated by a bunch of people who can’t even cook a box of macaroni and cheese when their stoves function at optimum efficiency, how on earth will they sustain themselves when they have to not only acquire their food, but must use off-grid methods to prepare it? How can someone who requires an instruction manual to operate a digital thermostat hope to keep warm when their home environment it controlled by wood they have collected and fires they have lit with it? How can someone who is afraid of getting dirty plant a garden and shovel manure?
Did you do any of these things and live to tell the tale?
While I did make my children wear bicycle helmets and never took them on the highway in the back of a pick-up, many of the things on this list were not just allowed, they were encouraged. Before someone pipes up with outrage (because they’re *cough* offended) I’m not suggesting that you throw caution to the wind and let your kids attempt to hang-glide off the roof with a sheet attached to a kite frame. (I’ve got a scar proving that makeshift hang-gliding is, in fact, a terrible idea). Common sense evolves, and I obviously don’t recommend that you purposely put your children in unsafe situations with a high risk of injury.
But, let them be kids. Let them explore and take reasonable risks. Let them learn to live life without fear.
Raise your hand if you survived a childhood in the 60s, 70s, and 80s that included one or more of the following, frowned-upon activities (raise both hands if you bear a scar proving your daredevil participation in these dare-devilish events):
1.Riding in the back of an open pick-up truck with a bunch of other kids
2.Leaving the house after breakfast and not returning until the streetlights came on, at which point, you raced home, ASAP so you didn’t get in trouble
3.Eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the school cafeteria
4.Riding your bike without a helmet
5.Riding your bike with a buddy on the handlebars, and neither of you wearing helmets
6.Drinking water from the hose in the yard
7.Swimming in creeks, rivers, ponds, and lakes (or what they now call *cough* “wild swimming“)
8.Climbing trees (One park cut the lower branches from a tree on the playground in case some stalwart child dared to climb them)
9.Having snowball fights (and accidentally hitting someone you shouldn’t)
10.Sledding without enough protective equipment to play a game in the NFL
11.Carrying a pocket knife to school (or having a fishing tackle box with sharp things on school property)
12.Camping
13.Throwing rocks at snakes in the river
14.Playing politically incorrect games like Cowboys and Indians
15.Playing Cops and Robbers with *gasp* toy guns 16.Pretending to shoot each other with sticks we imagined were guns
17.Shooting an actual gun or a bow (with *gasp* sharp arrows) at a can on a log, accompanied by our parents who gave us pointers to improve our aim. Heck, there was even a marksmanship club at my high school
18.Saying the words “gun” or “bang” or “pow pow” (there actually a freakin’CODE about “playing with invisible guns”)
19.Working for your pocket money well before your teen years
20.Taking that money to the store and buying as much penny candy as you could afford, then eating it in one sitting
21.Eating pop rocks candy and drinking soda, just to prove we were exempt from that urban legend that said our stomachs would explode e 22.Getting so dirty that your mom washed you off with the hose in the yard before letting you come into the house to have a shower
23.Writing lines for being a jerk at school, either on the board or on paper
24.Playing “dangerous” games like dodgeball, kickball, tag, whiffle ball, and red rover (The Health Department of New York issued a warning about the “significant risk of injury” from these games ) 25.Walking to school alone
Come on, be honest. Tell us what crazy stuff you did as a child.
Teach your children to be independent this summer.
We didn’t get trophies just for showing up. We were forced, yes, forced – to do actual work and no one called protective services. And we gained something from all of this.
Our independence.
Do you really think that children who are terrified by someone pointing his finger and saying “bang” are going to lead the revolution against tyranny? No, they will cower in their tiny apartments, hoping that if they behave well enough, they’ll continue to be fed.
Do you think our ancestors who fought in the revolutionary war were afraid to climb a tree or get dirty?
Those of us who grew up this way (and who raise our children to be fearless) are the resistance against a coddled, helmeted, non-offending society that aims for a dependant populace. In a country that was built on rugged self-reliance, we are now the minority.
Nurture the rebellion this summer. Boot them outside. Get your kids away from their TVs, laptops, and video games. Get sweaty and dirty. Do things that makes the wind blow through your hair. Go off in search of the best climbing tree you can find. Shoot guns. Learn to use a bow and arrow. Play outside all day long and catch fireflies after dark. Do things that the coddled world considers too dangerous and watch your children blossom.
Teach your kids what freedom feels like.
Can you imagine seeing a 12 year old driving a tractor down the road these days?
Yes, having bottle rocket fights, Burning ants with a magnifying glass, eating grapes off the vine, wild raspberries and tomato’s without washing them.
When I was on active duty in the 70s, I had a brand new 2LT for a roommate. Boy actually didn’t know how to boil water to heat a hot dog, couldn’t fry bacon, or scramble eggs. Just hadn’t been taught. Taught him to cook burgers on grill and BBQ chicken.
These days there'd be helicopters and a swat team.
When we were even younger mum would knock us up a coupla Vegemite sandwiches and point to the front door saying "make sure you're home before dark" Our lives revolved around our bikes back then (and making 'bolt bombs')Great days!
About 20 years ago we made one from an old bicycle fork and surgical tubing. A wheelbarrow of defective tomatoes from the garden were used as ammo. Local kids gathered around three adults and wanted to shoot tomatoes. A busybody called the cops. They saw what was going on and fired a few rounds too.
Had woods two blocks from home that had a creek running through it and spotted snakes, turtles, frogs, and of course captured tadpoles to take home.
My cohort of about nine boys played army on those woods. Even dug foxes with the surplus army e-tools which every dad seemed to have at least two. One time we tied up two of us as prisoners of war and put them in the foxhole, went off else where shooting clods of dirt at each other. Went home for dinner and remembered we left our friends tied up in the hole. Couple of meals taken standing “seared that memory” for us. ;>)
When I was about 8 or 9 a big storm line was being installed at the edge of the woods, the equipment being left over the weekend. Well we crawled through the drain pipes and all over the equipment including what we called a steam shovel even though it wasn’t. What did we know. So there we were in the cab making engines noises, trying to tug on the levers, when one of us pulled out a knob that started the engine. We couldn’t figure out how to shut it down and cigured we’d better scoot quickly. Talk about a fear laden week end, thought for sure we’d be discovered and get punished beyond our most horrible imaginings. Of course we ztayed as far away from the big machine. Lucked out that it just ran out of fuel before Monday morning without any adults noticing.
You did not mess with adult tools or vehicles, ever. Except when adults weren’t around...sometimes.
Explosives: Firecrackers, Roman candles, cherry bombs, M-80s, sparklers, etc.
Diving into the rock quarry pool. We said it was bottomless.
Playground fights were no big deal...unless some teachers pet or momma’s boy squealed.
BB-gun, pellet gun.
Trick-or-treating alone after dark.
Riding in the car: Lying on the bench that’s below the rear window and behind the back seat.
Setting up ramps and jumping our bikes like Evel Kenieval, rope swings over the creek that ran through town, jumping from the hayloft into the hay pile below, driving ATC’s (the trikes), BB gun wars with friends, my dad setting us on his lap so we could drive the car up and down the alley behind the house, all sorts of dangerous things we did.
One summer, probably 1969, two friends and I loaded up our packs and went on a three-day, forty mile hike on the Appalachian trail.
I had an old 16mm projector. I would use a shed with electricity, charge 5 cents admission and show the same old silent comedies over and over again. My sister sold Kool Aid for 5 cents and we had a ball.
The same kids kept coming back.
The driver cause the stack to fall once and I fell between the tractor and wagon while it was going across the rows, rather than along the rows. Luckily I landed on a bale and bounced sideways away from the wagon--otherwise I would've been run over.
I know at least two parents who were still cutting their kids’ toenails in college.
Seriously.
Disgusting.
Car seats...and seat belts? Did cars have them? I was stopped in CT for not having my son buckled in... In a 1954 Sunliner my friend owned. I told the guy it DIDN’T. have seat belts. He told me my son shouldn’t be in it then.
Did most of the stuff on the list, early 60’s to early 70’s. Also made gunpowder, smoke bombs and fireworks, some of which went BOOM :). 5 pounds of saltpeter/sugar makes one helluva smoke cloud.
Carried my .22 rifle & ammo on a plane as an unaccompanied minor. We kids were free to roam my grandpa’s 90 acre farm and shoot when we got there.
At home, I made a target in the basement from a bunch of old phone books. Shoot, then look up the bullets in the Yellow Pages.
One favorite was putting a polyethylene bottle on a stick and lighting it. It would burn and the drips make the most unusual sound, VOOP, VOOP. We would set up army men in the sandbox and simulate napalm attacks.
A 50 gallon trash burning barrel full of cattail catkin fluff really goes up in flame fast.
I did pretty much everything on that list, so did my kids, and thankfully, so will my grandkids... Other than the school stuff, because they won’t be going there at all...
Throwing rocks at living things was verboten unless it was for defense.
When I was about 12 I was sent by my Grandfather to the local hardware store for a case of dynamite and some fuse. Put it on account, unpacked it so the whole case would fit in the baskets on my bicycle and rode the 1 mile back to the farm. The good old days.
I remember we set up a ramp for jumping our bikes and after about half an hour there were 12-14 smaller kids lying on their backs in a nice neat row for us to jump over.Of course a few got landed on but no-one died.I did however bend my mates sister's bike in half on a heavy landing.Took it back to their place like nothing happened.His sister did have a puzzled look on her face the next time she rode it.
One more.At the end of our street there was a 2 acre paddock that the local council used as a temporary dump for cut down trees and such.After a few weeks of dumping there were 5 or 6 mounds of trees and branches the size of a house so naturally every kid in the neighbourhood burrowed in to make forts.Our fort though was far and away the best because ours had a fireplace.We only got to use it once and though it was indeed nice and warm it got a little out of hand rather quickly.We ended up running for our lives into an alley and huddling there listening to all the sirens.Who knew burning things down and blowing stuff up could be so much fun (though at the time we each had a pantload of bricks!)
And you didn't put a bike lock on it because no one would steal it.
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