Saturday, March 28, 2009

Running With Scissors


Some people think, if you never had kids, you're not entitled to have any opinions about raising them. Well, too bad! I think many kids today are over-indulged, over-scheduled and over-coddled to their future detriment. They are subject to too much fantasy and not enough reality (and I'm not talking about tv shows)! They rely on their parents to schedule their play time and expect mom or dad to provide their entertainment, parents who won't do ANYTHING or go ANYWHERE without their kids. I have a friend who admits she hasn't seen a non-kids movie in a theater for 10 years.
Well, it wasn't like that for me or my generation and, for the most part, we turned out okay.
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they
carried us.
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.
Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were 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 children, we would ride in cars with no 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 and NO ONE actually died from this.
We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soda pop with sugar in it, 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 thebushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on tv, no DVDs, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no i-pods, no Internet or Internet chatrooms..........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. ("You'll put your eye out, kid!") 10 Bonus points if you know where that quote is from!
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!
Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!! This is one of my biggest peeves - the "everybody wins" philosophy. Oh, if only that were true!
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!
This generation has 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
HOW TO
DEAL WITH IT ALL
!
You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up askids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good.
Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it?!

2 comments:

  1. AMEN!!!! We used to play football with a pinecone, baseball, using whatever trash we could find as bases, and never complained about not having stuff. We played from morning to night, played, using the back porch light, and pissed and moaned when we had to come inside. We rode our bikes everywhere, and NEVER wanted our mother to take us anywhere. I feel sorry for the children of today, technology and political correctness has created a society of stepford children!

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  2. And we would ride our bikes and play down the street all summer long. There was no fear of "weirdos" lurking around for little kids. When the heck did that become so prevalent?

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