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.
I walk for exercise in a suburban neighborhood and find the same thing, seeing a child outdoors anytime is rare. Even when the weather is perfect.
In my upper middle class neighborhood, just over the Philadelphia line, kids play outside all the time. Big kids are seen playing basketball and/or walking to the park to play. Little kids are in their yards running around or playing on their swing sets. The kids walk down to the Wawa, the pizza place, and the new "fro-yo".
One other change is homework. My kids barely had any growing up. Today's kids have a couple of hours, so you're just not going to see the kids outside as much during the school year.
I have driven past a beautiful public pool in a distressed neighborhood a couple times this summer on my way to court and no kids are in it
but poor people don’t teach their kids to swim
In my neighborhood you actually find kids outside during school vacations or on the weekend all the time. Most of them are riding their bikes on the street
Good for them, perhaps there is hope somewhere....
they've been replaced by dogs. My street has countless DINK (double-income no kids) couples. both go off early in the AM to work in their BMW's, and their nice, 4-bedroom home is occupied by the dogs. So in sum, I see Americans work hard to provide a nice home and future for their dogs.
As a kid in the 60s and early 70s, I’d leave the house on bike at 8 AM and ride around rounding up a group of guys for baseball, football, creek swimming,fort building, bike riding, etc. My mom generally had no idea where I was until dinnertime. I’d wolf down dinner to go back out for a few more hours til it got dark. We made bike ramps, tree forts, rope swings, bows and arrows, slingshots, and a host of other things that would horrify parents today. In nice weather, my buddies and I rode bikes 2 miles to school, without helmets and body armor. We left early to play kickball (unsupervised) on the playground before school, and would race to beat the bus home. Kids today don’t know what they missed. Our neighbor has a portable basketball hoop in his driveway for his 10 year old son and his buddies. The hoa told him to move it, and he refuses to. I love seeing the kids outside playing ball.
Heck, my parents kicked me out of the house during the day on the weekends, and basically told us to come back for lunch and dinner, and they didn’t want to see us until then.
And besides, who wanted to stick around the house and get stuck doing chores, anyway?
The times to and from school were when my kids were most communicative about what was going on. No cell phones at that time, so our time in the car was uninterrupted.
I shared a room with my brother, who I idolized as a kid. He was a great big brother who let me hang around with him and his friends. He was an all-state middle linebacker in high school, but still made time to invest in me. Over 40 years later, we are still best buddies, and I cherish the memories of sharing a room with him. I laugh when I see people with 3 kids think they have to move so each of their kids can have their own room.
I’ve thought this often that I never see kids playing outside. It is rare. We never had huge yards or playgrounds but we played outside. I never see that anymore in neighborhoods.
the beautiful pool in a distressed area just might be closed because some kid took a dump in it and when they reopen, it just happens over and over again
that’s why we stopped going to public pools- parents are lazy fools who let their kids run amuck and pee and poop in the pool
sanitation, ewww
Look Towanda- floating tootsie rolls!
Yes, in my Town, it is not so much a safety/security fear, although that is part of it, it is a more fundamental breakdown in the community web...kids are all very scheduled with specific activities, and their friends are not the kids next door, they are kids from those specific clubs/groups. We sent our kids through the back yard to see the neighbors kids their age and the mom threatened to build a big wall if we ever did that again, saying we interrupted Johny's speech therapy and Sarah's downtime before lacrosse practice.<\p>
our neighborhoods used to be the ties that brought us together, not anymore. People are solitary and selfish now, their kids not playing in the neighborhood is one thing, and the same holds for adults in the neighborhood, they don't help each other out either. With no ties through neighborhood, none through church, you end up with dysfunction. Growing up we knew every kid in the area, the parents all knew each other, supported each other in different ways. I wonder whether a kid like the shooter in Newtown, CT would have fallen through the cracks like he did if neighbors were paying attention to each other.
So many parents feel so very righteous about personally attending to the task of getting their kids to public school.
But it isn’t the bus driver who under color of authority fills their heads with obscene ideas.
Not trying to hijack the thread, FRiend...but a lot of parents CAN'T do sh!t about the bad behavior. Want to know why? Three little letters: CPS.
Nowadays, if a parent actually disciplines their little Johnny or Jane (as in with a good butt-whipping), all the kids have to do is go tell the teacher or school counselor that "Daddy (or Mommy) hit me" and CPS will swoop in like white on rice to take the kids away from their "abusive" parents.
I (unfortunately) know from personal experience. We did get our kids back rather quickly when they realized we'd done nothing wrong. However, they'll still have their eyes on us, likely until the last child leaves our house.
Parents can't give proper discipline anymore. And we wonder why kids are turning into little sociopaths.
Through the years the liberals have made it all but impossible to lock up dangerous criminal predators. The perverts and murderers are free, the kids are not.
Lazy and afraid “let’s be our kids friend” parents enable the kids to stay inside where its “safe” and sit on their butts watching mind-numbing TV and video games. The other kids are driven here and there to over supervised and over controlled “safe” soccer games.
There is now very little opportunity for a kid’s curiosity to be free to discover how nature and things work. That just would not be “safe”.
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