People over 25 should be dead...

RitaZ.

Move on don't hesitate, break out.
Joined
Sep 20, 2000
Messages
10,251
People over 25 should be dead.

To the survivors:

According to today's regulators and bureaucrats,
those of us who were
kids in the 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's probably
shouldn't have survived.

Our baby cribs were covered with bright colored
lead-based paint.

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 pickup truck on a warm
day was always a special
treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from
a bottle. Horrors!

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from
one bottle, and no one
actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank
soda pop with sugar in it,
but we were never 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 street lights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day. No cell
phones. Unthinkable.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out
of scraps and then rode
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 64,
X-Boxes, no video games at
all, no 99 channels on cable, video tape movies,
surround sound,
personal cell phones, personal computers, or
Internet chat rooms.

We had friends! We went outside and found them.

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

We made up games with sticks and tennis balls
and ate worms, and
although
we were told it would happen, we did not put out
very many eyes, nor
did the worms live inside us forever.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend's home 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.


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

This generation has produced some of the best
risk-takers and 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.

And you're one of them!

Congratulations.

:teeth:
 
:D :D :D DH ALWAYS SAYS I AM LIVING IN THE WRONG ERA...AND WHILE I DO ENJOY THE POGRESS WE HAVE THESE DAYS, IT IS A BIT OVERWHELMING.
THANKS FOR THE REMINDERS RITA!
HOPE YOUR DOING O.K.
PAM
 
Do kids play outside like that anymore? (I don't have kids, so I don't know) I remember playing outside everyday that we could until it was dark and we had to go home. :)
 
:D

This is an awesome thread! I'm an elementary school teacher and it scares me to see the way kids do things and react to things, as well as some of the parents. My childhood in the late 70's and throughout the 80's were filled with many of the mishaps and adventures mentioned in this thread. Times have surely changed and I hope that when I have kids of my own someday, they will somehow be able to relate to my experiences as a child.

::MickeyMo Mickey76::MickeyMo
 

Funny,,,,,,,,someone just emailed this to me at work the other day. Times have changed.......we did all of the above when we were kids. During the summer, my mom never saw us until dinner time. We didn't even go home to use the bathroom, since she would probably find something for us to do, like dishes, (no dishwasher), vacuum or some other chore. We would go to friend's houses to use the BR.......just as long as we didn't use our own.;)

ANd we all grew up just fine. I wish the kids today had such freedom. My kids were never into a lot of sports and after school stuff, but their friends are. So they end up staying home most of the time, unless a another friend from school gives them a call. Living where we do, everything has to be driven to. Their friends from school may live on the other side of town which may be 2 or 3 miles away. Which may not have been much when we were kids, but now with increased traffic, nuts on the road, as well as some wooded areas, you never know who may be lurking. Its sad that it has come to this, when kids can't even ride their bikes to a friends house. Maybe I'm just being paranoid sometimes, but if anything happened, and we do hear of teenagers going missing. Its not just smaller children that bad things happen to.
 
Do kids play outside like that anymore?

No. :(

I had a lot more freedom than my kids have and will probably ever have.
 
kids still play like that in the neighborhood where i grew up, tamie. :) places like that do still exist.

whenever i read something like this, i always feel like recoomending this book:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...104-2172667-3943135?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

things in the "old days" weren't always so great. and just because everyone who grew up with lead paint on their cribs didn't have problems, doesn't mean that some (maybe even a large number didn't). same with seatbelts. or many other things on that list.
 
I've seen this somewhere b4. Amazing how much things change aint it?

These are my Good Ole Days. The days when i went hom from school changed out of the uniform and mom actually kicked us out of the house. Oh the horrors if that happened today. When it was time for dinner, dad just came outside and whistled. We could hear him 3 blocks away(yes 3 blocks) and we'd run home.

Nowadays, kids are scheduled up the wazzoo. No more 1 sport a season thing, just pack it all in. Calendars to schedule who plays with whom. And video games to fill the time. Bleh:p

I want my future kids to have a childhood like mine, or as close to it as possible. AND NO VIDEO GAMES. Dh and i grew up without them and so can they.


Maureen
 
As I kid I lived in a neighbourhood that had a "Variety Store" at one end and a Park at the other end! And in order for our parents not to see us go to the store for all the goodies, we would say we were going to the park, go up the other street, pick up all our goodies, run back to the park! And all this without having to cross the street!LOL

Summer was get up in the morning, grab a quick breaky, go to the park and play! When the lights came on, then we all knew it was time to come home!

Now, I won't allow my DD unless there is an Adult Supervising!

What a different world we live in! It is such a shame!

Scratch
pirate:
 
Great post!

Today's kids are soooo spoiled and coddled and then parents wonder WHY they ACT spoiled and coddled!

Just last week I overheard a mother talk about how her daughter wanted to play in the snow, and the girl cried because her snowsuit didn't fit, so she dropped everything and went out driving out at night to the store in a heavy snowstorm to buy a new suit for daughter! Good grief, is her kid such a little princess that she needed a new suit right there and then to go play outside?! God forbid she should tell her kid "no, you are not going out in the snow tonight", or just let her play without a suit. There were plenty of times I played in the snow without a snowsuit. If I got too wet, I came in and changed. Big deal! Sheesh!
 
Nothing could be more true. I think the reason we are stronger as adults was because we actually LIVED as kids. Kids today are way too coddled (mine included) - I shudder to think how they'll manage as adults.;)
 
If wanting to prevent my children from being hit by a car while walking alone (as happened to both my husband and my brother, both when they were 7) or from having brain surgery after falling from a bike without a helmet (as happened to my best friend in 8th grade) is coddling and spoiling, then so be it. The good old days weren't all that good, IMHO.

I do agree, though, that it is very sad that kids today don't have the freedom to explore that we had as children in the 60's and 70's, but times change and people adapt.
 
moinab - I don't think anyone would disagree with you that helmets, non-lead paint, or other safety precausions are a bad thing.

I think it's the lost innocence we are all talking about. And the inability for a lot of kids (not all) to find things to occupy their time rather than technology doing it for them.
 
Hi..does anyone remember the playgrounds of our youth? Everything was made out of steel. The "monkey bars" were basically cubes of steel welded together. The seesaw was made out of wood, so were the swings and they gave big splinters!!

And underneath it all was..you guessed it...CONCRETE!

LOL

I am glad things are safer. We needed seat-belts, air-bags and helmuts. The thing I have the biggest problem with is that I am unable to let my six year old daughter out front to play in our yard, without my constant supervision.

When I think of the freedom we had! Stickball, tag, hopscotch, "chinese steps"-and now, my little girl has to play underneath my watchful eye.

Freedom to play-I miss it.
 
That's exactly it - the freedom to play is gone. It's kind of scary. You drive around our very suburban neighborhood on a Saturday afternoon and see almost no kids - even though you know they live here.:(
 
The truly sad thing is that is that many of these things we lost did not need to be lost. I agree that helmets, saftey built, laws agaionst lead paint and such are all good things, but much of what we do now is a reaction to media induced paranoia. Parents don't let their kids play outside all day because they fear "stranger danger", yet the rate of crimes against children is no high now than it was in the 60's and seventies.
 
We are actually pretty lucky where we live.

Kids do play outside and mostly unattended by adults. We live on a crescent off of a dead end street. When mine were little the kids on the street all played together from teens right on down to the little ones. They had a game they invented and all were allowed to participate.

When my kids were little, I would just stick my head out the door and listen and I could usually tell exactly where they were, and if I couldn't hear them then I would go looking. Mind you I was paranoid so I would do that every 15-20 minutes. My son is now 20 and my daughter is 16.

We had a park just a bit away, actually I can see part of it from my front door, but no my kids were not allowed to go there alone. Also I always drove them to and from school, because I had to know that they got there safely.

So I guess they got a mix of freedom and parnoid mother.
 

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