The day we started emulating the British cultural values, was the day our country started to deteriorate.
Kids will be kids.
this describes me!!
Had to grow up fast in those days.
I used to walk home from school with my friends. Then we’d play outside—biking, or exploring the woods, or building tree houses from spare lumber that was lying around. I pulled the nails used to build the tree house out of old crates or anywhere I found them, then pounded them straight and used them over again.
One huge maple tree behind our apartment building went up more than four stories high, and I used to climb up to the top of it and walk across between the split trunks on a pretty thin branch. I have a natural fear of heights, but I managed to work around it and get it under control.
One of my friends had a divorced mother who used to spend most of her evenings in a bar across the street, and I remember I sometimes went over with him to the bar to persuade her to come home when it was his bed time. No one seemed to mind a couple of kids walking into the bar like that. My friend usually got himself dressed and made his own breakfast in the morning, since more often than not his mother was sleeping off a hangover. We always seemed to get to the bus stop in time to catch the school bus.
We played with knives at school. I always carried a pocket knife. I also had a pineapple hand grenade that my uncle gave me when he came back from the front—with the explosives removed from it. I took it to school a couple of times to show my teachers and classmates. No fuss.
One thing I enjoyed as a kid was getting a flashlight, going down to the outlet at the nearby bayou, and entering and exploring the concrete ‘storm drains’ that ran underneath the neighborhood. Cobwebs, slime, cockroaches. I walked many blocks ‘underneath’ the streets. Gloriously spooky.
My parents would not have approved, had they known. But, when you were a kid back then, there seemed to be adventure awaiting around every corner. Watching “Tarzan” movies each weekend and reading “Sgt. Rock” comic books, I think it just instilled that sort of thing in you.
I just don’t see kids outdoors or doing much of anything anymore. Are they all inside with their smartphones?
1. The rise of the perpetually annoyed class
2. The successful project by lawyers to turn anything that is usual or unusual into a lawsuit.
3. The unwillingness of judges to shut down stupid lawsuits.
4. The willingness of juries to award good sized money to plaintiffs who were plainly at fault in their injury.
5. Too many families without fathers.
6. Cable tv.
All of these have contributed to the demise of our children’s adventure based childhood.
When I built a tree fort for my kids in 2000, I decided to make it 6 feet tall (instead of the 2-4 feet they usually do today). Nobody got hurt, but we did have some parents who were nervous their kids came out to play in it.
A summer for me was this: riding my bike (without a helmet), tackle football (without a helmet), sandlot baseball, motorcycling (again no helmet), swimming, fishing, mowing lawns (with a riding lawnmower at 10), boating and shooting my BB gun in my backyard.