Posted on 10/03/2010 7:23:17 PM PDT by Immerito
NEW YORK — Second-graders who can’t tie shoes or zip jackets. Four-year-olds in Pull-Ups diapers. Five-year-olds in strollers. Teens and preteens befuddled by can openers and ice-cube trays. College kids who have never done laundry, taken a bus alone or addressed an envelope.
Are we raising a generation of nincompoops? And do we have only ourselves to blame? Or are some of these things simply the result of kids growing up with push-button technology in an era when mechanical devices are gradually being replaced by electronics?
Susan Maushart, a mother of three, says her teenage daughter "literally does not know how to use a can opener. Most cans come with pull-tops these days. I see her reaching for a can that requires a can opener, and her shoulders slump and she goes for something else."
Teenagers are so accustomed to either throwing their clothes on the floor or hanging them on hooks that Maushart says her "kids actually struggle with the mechanics of a clothes hanger."
Many kids never learn to do ordinary household tasks. They have no chores. Take-out and drive-through meals have replaced home cooking. And busy families who can afford it often outsource house-cleaning and lawn care.
(Excerpt) Read more at thechronicleherald.ca ...
I agree, but some parents don’t teach their children these things. Not only that I would much rather see a class on every day life skills than on sex education
” If American parents need government to do what they are unwilling to do, i.e., educate their own children in “basic life skills,” as is their parental responsibility and their parental right, then we as a society have far more serious foundational problems than young ones who can’t write in cursive, balance and reconcile a checking account register, or tie their own shoes. “
The government only turns kids into helpless liberal pansies.
> “Parris Hilton island?” <
Mameluke! Surely you jest? With a name like “Mamelukesabre,” I KNOW you know better.
Yeah, I could see a new Recruit stepping on the “Yellow Foot Prints” and asking the DI: “Well, like ya know, Mr., does Parris really, really live here? Like, that would be awesome, ya know.”
By the time I was five years old, I was changing my own diapers.
” I was taking my clothes to the laundromat in a wagon when I was 9 or 10 years old. Course I could also go to the store and but Pall Malls for my dad back then too. “
In 1964 when I was 10, my parents both worked full time, so my older brother (12) would do the housework, and I would mow the lawn, and make a complete dinner for everyone. Today, my father and mother(both college professors) would probably be locked up for child abuse ;-)
My son was was taught to tell time with an analog clock.
To this day (31yrs) he refuses to have a digital clock in the house or on his body/WC.
I remember being told we had to learn to tie our shoes before we would be able to enter Kindergarden.
Spent the whole summer working on that task.
You can't have credit card companies and mortgage companies setting out to trap the clueless into debt, doing great $$$ profits with high interest rates, and then have the taxpayers bail them (the banks) out when it all falls apart and they default. Not unless you want to provoke a communist revolution here as a response to outright legalized theft.
The pro-TARP Republicans somehow rationalize this as making sense, and everything is fixed by complaining about those that defaulted, and claiming TARP Republicans 'saved the economy' (Obama says this now too as he is one.)
Co-rrect
I was born in 64 but as a kid in the 70s I grew up much the same way. We mowed grass, did housework, made dinner etc. It helped that we were in a small town with a grandmother and great grandmother only a couple blocks away but we were pretty much on our own and free to roam when our chores were done.
South Bend, Indiana was a small town then. Mostly rural, except for Notre Dame, where my dad was a prof.
I raised three sons to be very self sufficient around the house. Wish I could say the same for the girls they date. Unfortunately, the career driven girls they date these days never took interest in such things and say they don’t plan to give up their careers even when children come along. If the gals have never been taught and don’t take an interest, all of the household responsibilities will fall on my sons. That, or they’ll survive on fast food in filthy living conditions.
Piffle ... not if you expect correct spelling, grammar, sentence construction, or organized thinking.
No, it was just a ruse. A simple trick to make them think the TV was plugged in when it actually was not. So for a week they couldn`t play video games on the big screen because they thought something was wrong with the tv. If they used their brains they could have looked behind the tv and seen that old alarm clock was plugged in instead of the tv ( which they eventually did do after I hinted to the tv being unplugged...the 10 year old actually figured it out not the 14 year old , LOL ). By the way, this is a projection tv not wall mounted. Just a big box type of tv that sits on the floor and has wheels, easily moved.
I periodically challange these kids like this, especially when they upset me for some reason. One , it serves as a punishement. And two, it creates a challange for them to overcome or figure out.
Unfortunately, most of the time they fail the challange. My wife thinks I am mean when I do these things but I am trying to get these kids to overcome their lack of drive and ingenuity, which I believe is a product of their technological driven lives.
I think your idea to plug in the clock was an ingenious one.
Your kid’s future bosses (or they themselves, if they develop the ingenuity and drive to form their own companies) will thank you someday.
Heck yeah! I would have taken that bet.
/s
OMG that is hilarious!
I’ve noticed that too. It’s purposeful. They save money and you have to buy laces.
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