I feel sorry for the youth of today

This is dedicated to those Born 1930-1979!

To all us kids who survived the
1930's 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's !!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.

As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle/can and no one actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank koolade made with sugar, but we weren't overweight because we were always outside playing.

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD's, no surround-sound, CD's or Ipods, no cell phones!, no personal computers , no Internet or chat rooms.......
We had friends and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays,
made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives for our own good.

And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave (and lucky) their parents were.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it?!

lol.. When I go back home to my mum and dads in the country with my kids, they are always complaining that they haven't got their games consoles with them and they are bored.
I am always trying to get them to use their imagination like we had to. I had so much fun as a child and had nothing indoors to keep me occupied really.
Apple fights, building dens, adventure walks.. Loved it all, but my kids just look at me like I'm crazy.
We used to bike 9 miles to spend a couple of hours in town, had to walk 2 to get to the nearest shop. My children complain when they have to cycle for 2 minutes to go to the shop.

Uhmm.. *shrugs* I'm in a good enough mood to ignore my slight germaphobicness and share a malt. I'll live.

This is soo sweet! I'm going to skip my excuses, and just say I beleive I really would enjoy doing all those things. ;)

Yea, I remember all that too. I was telling my daughter just today about the hayrides and weiner roasts we used to have when I was a kid. Not to mention sliding down the biggest hill on a hood of an old buick that had been abandoned down the street. I think we spent ever day for a week of snow days on that hood. Precious memories.

I do feel sorry for the kids today, they have never learned to entertain themselves, absolutely no imagination. And God forbid, the electricity should go out. When I was a kid and that happened, we considered it a blessing from The almighty. Not a curse that plagues the kids today.

Great post. Nice to be reminded of better days.
And like Bob, I have ''war wounds'' to prove that I didn't just exist...I lived.

Happiness
Jeannie

Those were the days. What a great thread. Times were simpler then. These days kids expect you to powder their ass way pass the diaper age.

Oh-uh... I see this is V.I.P. Adults...
But, it sounds very nice. I agree that kids these days (and I do not exclude myself) have got a cronic lack of imagination.
I was unlucky enough to be born into this generation, and I HAVE noticed the obesity rates, junk-food addiction, dismal lack of exercise and downfall of education.
But, don't feel sorry for me. I'm pretty oldfashioned. I spent the first three years of my life on a farm, which I think helped me. In my younger years, me and my sister would play with dirt, read books because we had no computer... sad, but now technology has come along...
I might as well remark that those adults that had such a good childhood are now mostly as obese as their children, at least some of them :-S Nothing good can last (sigh)
Thankful you for your post, as it gave me a vision of another world not my own.. one that I would want to give my children (hum, well, my nieces, anyway, as I doubt I will have children) :-)

//T.L.//

That's the symptom of the post-modern world.

But, while it may not be wooden go-carts and 5 cent milk cartons, it's still childhood. and I don't know if I can even begin to describe this in anymore detail because it is something that adults cannot ever fully grasp.

Your parents said the same things about you.

Ahh what happened to those good old days? My childhood was like that (although I bascially still am a child) it's waay different now though..

Your parents said the same things about you.

Yeah, but they didn't. I made kites with my father, like he did with his before me. I was taught field craft and pigeon shooting at an early age, just like he was.
That's just two examples. I remember when we got our first computer, an Atari 800XL, I think my father played on it more than we did.

Technology is the difference maker here. We, the oldies, adapted to it, you, the teens, grew up with it as a part of your lives.

We didn't grow up with a playstation hooked up to the tv or a pc in the study and although I rely on my pc now, I never forget using a bent stick as a gun to play war with 30 other kids, or run outs/manhunt/block home free all/bulldog with them until the street lights came on during the summer holidays.

At fourteen, fifteen and sixteen I was doing all these things, my sister is fourteen and what does she do? She disappears for two hours and comes back smelling of southern comfort then complains that she never gets a chance to use the pc when mum is taking to her friend on msn messenger.

I went pigeon shooting too lol although my dad used to make me and my bro go and collect them *doh. When I went to pick one up that he had shot, it started flapping around and scared the poop out of me. Some of the happiest times of my life were spent in fields, with mud up to my knees in the cold and rain.
Brushing was another thing we did as kids, used to get a little bit of money for doing it and thought it was the best job in the world, walking through woods, thistles, nettles.. getting scratched up all over.. Yeah those were the days.. Oh my.. I feel so old now hehe

I love reading this post. it brings back many happy memories lol

I guess, I was pretty lucky growing up. I was raised with 4 older brothers. All together, there were 7 boys and 2 girls. My sister and I was raised as tomboys. You had to be tough to survive the weekend practices of being the tackling dummy for your older brother's football games. And of course their was the odd summer vacations of trying to get my brothers to let me tag along with them on their trips to catch crawdads in the pond down the street. Or on their bike rides to the high school [5 miles away]. Can you imagine kids nowdays going on one of those.

Another thing, I can't get used to is, my kids saying it's cold if it's 50 degrees out. I was raised up north and I try to tell them that they don't know what cold is.
Cold is breathing in through your nose and your nose hair freezes. Cold is going outside for five minutes and it takes 30 minutes and 3 cups of hot cocoa just to thaw your toes enough to move them.
With all the global warming, My kids are lucky if they see snow that lasts more than an afternoon.

It just seems that things were so much simpler then. If we wanted to learn about something, we looked it up in the encyclopedia and dictionary.
My two youngest kids learned how to use a computer in kindergarten and they are so good at it that I have to ask them how to do certain things.

My daughter needed a calculator for school, because her teacher was going to let them use them for a test. Are kids so unintelligent that they can't do math like we did.

It's a sad world that we live in, I'm afraid.

Happiness
Jeannie

You adapted to it, really? Kudos to you! Everyone I know in the Boomer generation is terrible with technology -- unless they invented it. But I guess you're trying to say that's a bad thing. And I'm hearing you, but at the same time I'm not. I'm aware of the responsibility the media has to the public - esp children - and I'm very aware of what effects it has had on our generation - columbine is a great, extreme example - but when people outwardly decry it as 'the end of the beauty of life as we know it' (on an Internet message board) I get defensive.

And you know, Hels, some people are tree climbers and some people aren't. It may not be so much that the effects of this generation made her this way. Though I admit, I climbed trees when I was younger. But I have a brother very close in age.