Now, mothers run around behind their children with purses full of bandaids, lysol, and anti-bacterial lotion, disinfecting anything and everything that might possibly come in contact with their little angels, and hysterically spraying neosporin on every little cut or scrape that they get. Of course, this prevents the children from ever building up immunities against real infections, and when they do run across one, they get sick big time.
And people wonder why children get sick more often and have more allergies now than they used to...
And we could play all day as long as we were in before dark. And all the moms had implied permission to punish someone else’s kid who misbehaved. And then call the mom who typically ‘doubled down’.
Thos were the days.
Ping list for the discussion of the politics and social (and sometimes nostalgic) aspects that directly effects Generation Reagan / Generation-X (Those born from 1965-1981) including all the spending previous generations are doing that Gen-X and Y will end up paying for.
Freep mail me to be added or dropped. See my home page for details and previous articles.
I used to lay in the backseat window well of our Chevy Belair, ate raw cookie dough, and never owned a bike helmet.
I played outside until dark - that’s 10pm in the summer in Kentucky, roamed the woods completely by myself, and was allowed, at age 5, to visit the toy aisle at JC Penney alone.
I won’t let my kids in their own front yard unattended...and that’s one reason why there is a Pit Bull always on guard in my yard.
My brother’s and I are survivors of the 50’s. Our parents let us ride around without seat belts. For a special treat the next door neighbor would pile a bunch of us in the bed of his pick up and speed around country roads. Didn’t he know we could be ejected???!!!! We’d put on roller skates and let another kid pull us by a rope attached to his bike (which had special sound effects from a deck of cards attached to the spokes with clothes pins). I remind my mother she’s very lucky we didn’t all sue her for child neglect and abuse.
1970s child here (born ‘63)
We had some much freedom parents today would flip over. I do with my own kids. The world seemed safer back then, but who knows... that “nice guy” who hung out near my elementary school and taught the kids to play soccer turned out to be a pedophile; nobody questioned it at the time.
Then again, most of what we did wasn’t necessarily lethal - although it could be — but it was not always harmless: run around freely, bike rides, car races, rope swings, dope, beer, ... my parents didn’t have a clue.
Here’s the downside of the no-dangers world of today’s parenting: kids are immune to the little dangers, so they expose themselves to larger dangers to compensate. For example, I’m convinced that the promiscuity of today’s youths is related to the sheltering that keeps kids from figuring out things by themselves. Without the gradual exposure to sexuality through free interaction when young (”be home by dinner”), kids go without healthy adult-free mixing and go straight to purely adult-free matching. Just a theory here.
I think that the “X” sports is a result of this phoneomenon. We got out our agression on bicycles and skateboards without having to jump rails. Kids today are either confined to the park or go wildly footloose on their own.
Add to it all youtube, and you have a bizaar mixture of nannyism and inmates-running-the-asylum. It must be enormously confusing for today’s kids.
If you grew up in rural Colorado the gravy days went on into the 80’s.
Had to remove a BB from a friend’s cheek after a dust-up with some older kids. Missed his left eye by about an inch and a half. Bottle rocket wars were an annual event. A few of us owned actual firearms before we started junior high and had permission to hunt on our own. Shotgun shells were about $5 a box at the corner hardware store/soda fountain. We could legally purchase and use chewing tobacco. You didn’t want to chew at school though, because if you got caught the principal made you eat your can of snuff. Amber Alerts? Didn’t need ‘em. Everybody knew everyone else in town, and the kids were armed.
Sigh...
Jim Carroll - People Who Died Lyrics
Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
G-berg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of hepatitis in upper Manhattan
Sly in Vietnam took a bullet in the head
Bobby OD’d on Drano on the night that he was wed
They were two more friends of mine
Two more friends that died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room
Bobby hung himself from a cell in the tombs
Judy jumped in front of a subway train
Eddie got slit in the jugular vein
And Eddie, I miss you more than all the others
And I salute you brother
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
Herbie pushed Tony from the Boys’ Club roof
Tony thought that his rage was just some goof
But Herbie sure gave Tony some bitchen proof
“Hey,” Herbie said, “Tony, can you fly?”
But Tony couldn’t fly, Tony died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
Brian got busted on a narco rap
He beat the rap by rattin’ on some bikers
He said, “Hey, I know it’s dangerous, but it sure beats Riker’s”
But the next day he got offed by the very same bikers
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
G-berg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of hepatitis in upper Manhattan
Sly in Vietnam took a bullet in the head
Bobby OD’d on Drano on the night that he was wed
They were two more friends of mine
Two more friends that died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room
Bobby hung himself from a cell in the tombs
Judy jumped in front of a subway train
Eddie got slit in the jugular vein
And Eddie, I miss you more than all the others
And I salute you brother
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
I’m trying to make my kids childhood more “normal” ,, like we had in the 60’s and 70’s ... on the 4th of July my neighbor caught a baby gator (about 3 foot) in the pond and we had him in the swimming pool for a while ... my 5 year old was a bit leery but my 3 year old LOVED holding it...
From the article-
[“The bottom line is that things like bike accidents where a kid died because they didn’t wear a helmet, those rarely occurred. But if your kid happened to fall and was one out of 10,000 who died, you must live with knowing it was preventable,” Berman said. ]
No, today, one of 10,000 is the week’s abortion tally!
Give me the good old days!
We swam in the Missouri River, just downstream from where 4-packing houses dumped their blood and guts from the kills prior to learning such was valuable. Water had a red tinge and occasionally a cow organ chunk drifted by. Catfish the size of a small car. The river froze over and we could walk over to Nebraska in the winter. (Saved the dime bridge toll.)
Good old days
At the age of seven and a half we moved to larger house in the midst of the oil fields. My sister and I along with a dozen other kids spent our summer days free from the confines of adult supervision. We slid down grassy hills on cardboard box sleds, piled up tar covered rocks in a nearby creek to make a swimming pool, used jack knives to cut bits of tar from the roadway for chewing gum, created a variety of forts from high a top a chicken house to deep under an abandoned farmhouse.
I had a wonderful childhood.
I grew up in the woods playing Army, chopping down trees to make lean-to’s, and building ramps to jump our dirt bikes. We shot BB guns and .22s, sailed out to islands to camp without our parents, built fires, caught trout, and got into bottle rocket wars. It was a dusty, smoky, grass-stained and bug-bitten way to grow up... and it was phenomenal.
My children will be raised the same way.
Right field was the apple trees
The telephone-poled chickenwired backstop my dad made
The big maple I knew every branch on,
The tougher oak too.
Hide and seek with the mile away neighbor girls
Capture the flag at night
Lightning bugs
Stars, the moon and a Christmas telescope.
Dancing and showing off to the Music Man
Oklahoma, the console dropping platter after platter
Mom & dad in their chairs nodding appreciatively
King of the hill on the horse’s manure pile,
Digging for fat worms in it & feeding the bluegills with them
Bike for miles
No fear, truly free.
Stopping at Mrs. Burgher’s rhubarb patch –
She’d give a good fat stalk to me & I’d ride off into the ditch with sour tears.
Hiking through the woods waving sticks in front,
Tip, Rags, & Rogue smartly attending
Football, basketball, frog baseball, chicken
Snowforts, and sister
ABC’d on the steps
Cookies mom made when the bus couldn’t make it through the snow
We were kings of apple town, then
Yesirree!
Notcare had I at endless days
The ways
protected
must’ve been!
by some shimmering being.
Without reading replies, I’m wondering when the 1st argument will occur about how good it is that we have all these socialist safety-NAZI laws now “for the chhiiillllllldrennnn”.
I feel sorry for my baby boy. Bike-helmet nonsense is just the beginning.