Posted on 08/05/2013 4:40:05 AM PDT by Kaslin
You can drive through residential neighborhoods and never see a single child out playing. We should worry about what this means for the future.
There are still kids in those neighborhoods to be sure; you can see them at the schools getting dropped off by their moms. Few kids seem to walk to school anymore. My old elementary school got rid of the bike racks and turned the enclosure into a garden.
Maybe it’s the phenomena of helicopter parenting. It’s not the cool helicoptering of Wagner and “Ride of the Valkyries” but the lame kind of Barney and songs about feelings.
These kids do nothing without their parents hovering over them – in fact, you hear of college kids referring to their parents as “their best friends.” Gag me.
I went back to my hometown on the San Francisco Peninsula over the Fourth of July. When I grew up there in the Seventies, before Silicon Valley, it was solidly middle class. We weren’t poor, but we weren’t rich. It was a big deal when my parents got a second car; everyone had a station wagon, invariably American made.
Kids were everywhere. We played games on the street – baseball, tag, army. We left in the morning and came home for dinner. There was a big woods behind our house and we’d disappear into it all day, returning with cuts, scrapes and the occasional gopher snake.
But today, nothing. The neighborhood has changed – the Fords and Dodges are now BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes, and minivans replaced the wagons. I know there are kids there, but you never see them. Where are they? Lurking inside the million dollar houses? Doing what?
I went walking in those woods again. There was no sign anyone else does. A wonderland is just outside these kids’ backdoors and they never visit.
My own kids come to me and talk about “playdates,” as if childhood is supposed to be a set of pre-planned enrichment experiences instead of improvised entertainment. Can’t they just go over to their friend’s house and see if Kayden or Ashleigh or whoever can come out and play?
No, I’m told, it’s too dangerous in our affluent neighborhood. And if you look at the Meghan’s Law site for any neighborhood you’ll believe it. All these little flags pop up, each some form of registered sex offender. So, instead of driving these degenerates away, we conform and constrict our lives to accommodate their presence.
I asked a cop friend I served with in the Army if this was just paranoia. He said he wouldn’t let his kids play on the front yard unless he was out there with his Remington 870. That answered that.
So kids cluster in their houses, playing video games, watching the tube, waiting for mom to walk them to the park or go on some pre-planned activity. And they do homework – little kids come home weighed down with more homework than I ever had as a high schooler.
The school seems good – it honored our warriors and I haven’t detected much lefty propaganda. However, the school did send home a supply list that – I am not kidding – included “Multicultural Crayons.” I guess you need that in case your art project requires just the right shade of “White Hispanic.”
All the parents think their kids are special, and if they can’t be special through achievement, I notice many are special because of some alleged “issue” or “problem.” It seems to me that a lot of the problems boys get labeled with relate to them acting like rowdy, rambunctious boys. Drugging out an exuberant lad can be a lot easier than dealing with him.
The kids’ experiences are so limited, though that’s certainly a function of us parents being busier than our parents ever were. We used to take two-three week family vacations, camping across the country. But that’s just not in the cards for most families today.
By age six I was shooting guns; I now have to find someplace probably 50 miles away to train my kids on the basic firearms skills all American citizens must know. Oh, and today parents will ask, “Do you have guns in the house?” as if that would even be a question. None have ever asked me that – I guess they just assume it – but if they did I’d look at them funny and say, “Of course. I’m an American.”
My kids have a Nerf arsenal that would make Charlton Heston proud. Some parents don’t let their kid play with war toys, meaning the burden of defending wimpy special snowflakes like their brats will eventually fall to the next generation of Schlichters, as it has for the last few generations.
That’s my real worry – will Americans of the future be able to compete, both in the boardroom and on the battlefield? I think at least some of them will.
Since 9/11, I’ve had a chance to serve with many young people. Call them Millennials or whatever, but they have faced every challenge and earned the right to be mentioned in the same breath as the heroes of World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
Maybe I see the cream of the crop – military standards are so high that only about a quarter of young people can qualify physically, morally and academically to enlist. And maybe these young warriors self-select as those who aren’t satisfied to stay safe in a tight, comfortable, smothering cocoon.
But it’s a hard world, full of hard people and hard realities. Are we doing our kids a favor by protecting them instead of letting them learn that on their own? I don’t know the answer. Regardless, these kids are still missing something that many of us older folks had. Even correcting for the inevitable nostalgia that clouds our vision back into the past – childhood wasn’t perfect for anyone – it makes me sad. I’d just like to see kids playing outside again.
Ah. No one, including the writer, finds it worth mentioning that the parents are killing the kids?
Fifty five million reported surgical abortions in the US since 1973. Estimates triple that of chemically induced abortions
CDC has these statistics.
I hate that stupid phrase ever since obama used it
In 1973 the APA delisted homsoexuality as a mental disease, and life changed.
Now instead of being shunned and chased out of neighborhoods the faggots were accepted and celebrated. And with the faggots come child molestors (as every faggot is, or must be considered as, a child molestor. Cross perversion boundary and the others get crossed far more easily)
So now we have neighborhoods where perverts are accepted and our children are no longer safe. Of course we’re not going to let them out of our sight.
Then we have to add to that the rash of kidnappings and rapes. Another plague of perversion that was enabled by that 1973 decision. If we cross one perversion boundary, it’s much easier to cross teh next one. We’ve had two college girls in the last 4 years disappear from a town near here. They finally found one’s body and they are still looking for the other one. My girl is smaller than either of them. If they were snagged off the street than what’s to prevent my girl from being snagged?
If we had suitable penalties for sex criminals (death or castration come to mind) then we’d have fewer sex criminals. It used to be that child molestation was an instant 20 years. Now it’s not so sure. If the molestor is a faggot it’s likely they’ll get off with a hand slap as they are “born that way” accoridng to the rest of the faggots that have infested our courts.
This country has got to return to God and the values and ideals of our Founding Fathers else we are hopeless
My forked stick that replicated an M-1 Garand and Murial Air-Tip cigar butt from when we used to play “Army” are still around here somewhere.
(grin)
abortion?
What scares me about this “vanishing children” phenomenon is what it’s doing to kids’ imaginations. We had a treehouse when we were kids (nowadays you’d have to get an EPA Impact Analysis done and the Sierra Club would burn your house down if you drove a nail into a tree), and that treehouse was Fort Apache, a bombed-out store in Bastogne, a pioneering settlement on Alpha Centauri (and the spaceship that got us intrepid explorers there), the fast attack submarine Sea Lion or a swift three-masted corsair. We defended it with picket-fence swords, tree-branch cannons, and laser ray-guns shaped oddly like mom’s broom handles and with sound effects that left us so hoarse we could hardly ask for the mashed potatoes that night at mess call. Our imaginations soared and sometimes our games would last for days.
With all that mindpower replaced by 3-D flashing images and Dolby Surround-Sound and Mattel Scratch-n-Sniff, a machine does all the mental heavy lifting for you. And it directs you where IT wants you to go, not where the random flight of your imagination would take you.
Maybe I’m just a geezer but I’ll take my treehouse.
Know what you are sayin, A friend of mine had to stop and relieved himself in the woods on a uninhabited section of town [I think most of us have had to do that at one time or another]. He was arrested by a passing cop and is now an official sex offender. He says his mistake was admitting that he took a pee , he should have said he stopped to look at a bird..
55 million and counting
Duh
"But there's no one to play with!" I'd protest.
"Play with yourself!" she'd say.
Let’s see:
- Big gov’t that practically requires both parents to work to pay the bills = parent no longer home after school to look out for brood
- Big gov’t no longer keeping the danger/crazy at bay, releasing same upon the street w/ no accountability when the SHTF w/ their ‘feel-good’ Liberal policies
- The hoard of lawyers that have stripped communities of play areas, play grounds, community pools, etc.
- Advent of the portable electronics.
Now, as to the last point, even I, as product of this age, don’t account it for much. My parents WOULD kick my @ss out to go play and there’s only so much tweeting/Facebook/surfing/playing before it gets old, tiring or the batteries runs out.
IMHO, the most harm has been the ‘befriending’ by ‘parents’ instead of being a parent. Kids expecting chauffeuring, $$, and generally not knowing how to behave (and parents not doing SH!T about that bad behavior).
I grew up in a very rural area. Tons of orange groves and undeveloped land. Every tract of that land is residential now. Coupled with the Internet and cable TV, there’s really little need for kids to go outside, and the parents can remain watchful sentinels.
I saw first hand this weekend how our generation was affected. While I was outside covered to my elbows with grease, soaked in sweat, my brother, three years my junior, was all too quick to dismiss himself inside when the clouds broke. Couldn’t stand the heat.
What are we doing as a nation? Unbecoming a nation. The single most basic thing I sense going on is a complete loss of any hope for a better future. People feel trapped in an alien environment over which they have little control. All they can do is go through the daily routine. In the back of their minds, they’re waiting for the next shoe to drop. Everyone’s afraid of everyone else and especially afraid of the “other”, whether the “other” be a person of a different race, religion or national origin. And, considering the Leftists jack up of certain racial and religious groups, its smart to be wary. White kids in particular have a target on their backs, “This is for Trayvon”. The nation is dividing up along tribal lines and will soon divide up along regional lines. North Colorado seeking to secede from South Colorado is a perfect example. The ultimate break-up of this thing will be contentious and possibly bloody.
I take my kids to the playground (they're not old enough to walk there alone, yet). Contrary to this article, I see plenty of kids running around, going full tilt.
It's the *adults* that I see, sitting on benches, twiddling with those stupid Iphones, checking their email or facebook status for the 20th time that hour. I'm right in the middle of everything, pushing swings, flying kites, refereeing games of tag, whatever. It's fun.
As an aside, I never cease to be amazed, and saddened, at the number of kids - who aren't mine - who ask to play with me. "Will you push me?", "How does this kite work?", "Hey mister, Watch This!!", etc etc etc. They just want some attention, is all. Their parent is sitting right there, in plain sight, and can't be bothered to get off their (usually large) butt, put down the smart phone for five minutes, and give their spawn that five minutes of attention....
I grew up in Flint Michigan before it went all to hell. I would often get on my bike after loading up my pockets with some snacks and ride all day without informing my mom where I was going.
When I moved to Texas and had kids, I bought a house on a cul de sac, and my kids had free reign of our one block. I thought it was sad that they could not have the freedom I had as a kid but to give them more knowing the increased dangers in the world I would have been a negligent parent to do otherwise.
Let us all thank the libs for all their policies which have made our world a much more dangerous place in which to bring up kids.
Yep, that's the issue I have with these "helpful" sex offender websites. No differentiation between guys who got caught unzipped and watering a bush one time on the way home from a local pub.... and degenerates that you really need to look out for.
Another point, in the past we had to get out of the house to get away from siblings, usually at least three of them. We didn’t have our own room, so that didn’t get us away from the. Today, most families don’t have more than 3 kids. Fewer kids both inside and out.
And if you put baseball cards in the spokes of your
bike, you had a motorcycle,and you and the guys would ride
around “terrorizing” the neighborhood.
Funny thing is....when I got older and got a real motorcycle,
it wasn’t quite the same....
I wonder if anyone would even think that was fun today.
Writer described my childhood perfectly.
Well, he did leave out the “red dirt” bike track at the edge of the woods...pedal bike that is...banked turns & pit stops even...we spent hours...circling, racing, tangling up, falling, getting up, back to circling, round and round and round...sweat/blood/red dust made a fine salve. Mom’s standard response after coming home...”Don’t stop...straight to the tub. And the tub had better be clean when you’re finished.”.
A nearby town is closing their pool because no one goes to it anymore. It’s a small town with very little to do as it is and now there will be even less. If Moo wants to blame something for kids being fat and unhealthy, she needs to blame the parents for allowing their kids to become couch potatoes with their video games and cell phones.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.