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 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.
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.
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.”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
My daughter rather play outside. She has a Nintendo DS and a Wii. They might get played with twice a month. Most of the neighborhood kids play outside too. My daughter, who is going into second grade, knows she cannot play in the front though without her friends or myself or my husband out there. Unfortunately, you never know if there’s a Sicko lurking. We tell her we trust her, but we don’t trust others (she knows what we mean).
She also walks to and from school, with me or with other neighborhood kids. I’m sorry if I wont let her walk alone. Again, you hear of too many kids disappearing on their way to school.
There are 2 kids in the neighborhood that rarely play outside. Their parents let them stay inside to be on their video games, ipads, other expensive gadgets instead of encouraging them to play outside. Incidentally, those are the only kids that are FAT.