I sometimes think the fruit of my loins are growing up in a different world than I did. Oh, it’s still good ol’ planet Earth, Terra to you SF types, and yet it’s not. And of course, I don’t think I grew up in the same world than my progenitors did, either. For instance, space flight was the realm of Jules Verne for my father; for me it was a prime time TV event — the two things I watched on TV at school were the Apollo launches and day games of the World Series that the Cardinals were playing in. Now not only is the space program not big news, they don’t even play day games in the World Series.
And that’s nothing compared to all the other changes. Radio was the medium of mass communication for my parents; for me it was TV, and now it’s the internet. There were no electronic gadgets for my parents growing up (the refridgerator is not a gadget, it’s an appliance); I had the TV and the Hi-Fi; my children have so many I can’t keep up. There are more ways to be bored than ever before.
Childhood itself has changed, though. At least I and my parents were allowed, nay encouraged, unsupervised play. In the summer my brother and I would set forth after breakfast, return home just long enough to have lunch, return home again when my father whistled to inform us that he was ready to eat dinner, and then venture forth again until long after sundown (unless there was something good on TV, but with 5 channels to choose from, that wasn’t too often). Who let’s their children play outside after dark anymore? How many children play unsupervised or without that modern invention, a play date?
Every sport my fruit play envolves an actual team with a coach, a league, and uniforms. I never played organized sports outside of school. We played in the backyard. We never had an umpire or referee — we just argued and had the ocasional do over. At Webelos camp, when my son and his friends were playing baseball at the camp site one would call umpire. Call Umpire! I about fell out of my chair the first time that happened. And they still had about the same amount of arguing and number of do overs as we did.
I don’t remember a lot of rushing around and business as a child, except at certain times like Christmas, or my parents stressing out over a general lack of time. Not too long ago my son asked when we had our next free Saturday, and I had to tell him it was at least 6 weeks away. Hope you make it, I’m not sure I will. We have tons more physical stuff but a lot less time. People get stressed because they can’t get around to doing everything they feel they need to do, let alone just what they want to do.
And safety. Boy, are we safety nuts now. When I tell my kids when I was their age, we didn’t have seat belts, or bike helmets, and that we roamed for miles without a parent around, or could be gone for home for hours without the police being called, they look at me like I’m from another planet. Yep, we were expected to have the sense of a dog who knows how to get back to his food and bed without outside help. Kids didn’t require constant supervision then, now they have to monitored in case something, anything happens.
One time I took my daughter and some friends to see a movie, and one of the parents asked me to see the movie with them because she was worried that otherwise they might be abducted. When I was a kid, we weren’t constantly barraged with every kidnapping, abduction, school bus crash, or incident involving a kid that happened anywhere in the good old US of A. We aren’t better informed now, we’re just poorly informed on an enormous scale.
We didn’t have extreme sports because we set up ramps for bikes or sleds without a second thought. I played iceless hockey just about every recess at school and was covered with bruises accordingly — my brother was high sticked in the eye but when it healed he kept on playing.
We didn’t worry about pesticides either on our food or in our homes, we worried about bugs in our food or in our homes. We didn’t watch what we ate but we were somehow thinner. And that’s the way it was.
