I feel like reposting something from 2006, "For Those Born Between 1930 and 1970":

Me, born in the late 1950's and all this applies!

And, we had a party line out in the country where I grew up, only used the phone to talk to a distant relative now and again.

And old Doctor Lynch made 25 mile house calls in emergencies.

:hi:

I know I sound like an old harrumpher....but I think it must be very hard on today's kids, in terms of their mental and emotional development, to have so little freedom to goof off and to organize their own play. And all the gadgets! How does anybody grow his own imagination these days, surrounded by x boxes and a gazillion cable channels and all the rest of it?
I like this post! Thanks.

except:

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!
(in my town everyone that wanted to play generally got to play at least 3 innings of each game)

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of.
They actually sided with the law!
(there were some bad kids with bad parents)

As far as these generations being so great for the world as adults, I think they also produced plenty of people who are also helping to screw up the world.

I almost want to re-name this email "The Way Things Ought To Be, Part 2" by Rush Limbaugh.

Disclaimer: my childhood years ended in 1980 when I became a teenager. So I am qualified to bathe in the warm fuzzy glow of nostalgia before draining the tub.

"First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant."

Survived, yes, but at what cost? I knew quite a few kids who were fetal alcohol babies. So I dispute any notion that this is something we could safely return to doing. Ask any special ed teacher today about the kids they teach who were born with defects owed to mom taking a few too many belts while pregnant.

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

Many cribs were stained wood, with no lead. But even with leaded paint, babies weren't in danger because they lack the motor skills and/or teeth to make leaded paint an issue. They weren't able to stand up and gnaw on it, or reach out and peel off a bite. It's young children exposed to leaded paint that led to reforms in paint composition.

"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."

I sure wish I had a helmet. I can remember two times I fell and got a helluva goose egg on my noggin, with one of those resulting in a concussion. I think if helmets existed for young bicyclists back then, parents would have grabbed them up. In fact, I bet the bicycle helmet is an innovation no doubt created by one of the inventors the author of the email waxes orgasmically about at the end of the list. I love irony.

"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."

Just because we experienced and survived all or most of these things listed, doesn't mean they weren't stupid or unsafe. I certainly remember losing several classmates over the years due to them not wearing a safety belt, and I remember one of our star football players in high school tragically dying because... he fell out of a truck.

"We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle."

Yeah, and water out of a bottle tastes better. I am betting just about every bout of diarrhea me or my friends ever had was related to our drinking from a hose. That doesn't mean it should be banned or never done. But given a choice, kids with water bottles have it made.

"We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank Kool-Aid made with sugar, but we weren't overweight because, WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING or WORKING!"

I'll concede that being active kept me and and my friends from being obese. But I also know that my diet was a bit more varied than the one listed. You know... things like vegetables, fruit, etc.

"We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVDs, no surround-sound or CDs, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or chat rooms.......WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!"

Yeah, but we had TV, and we watched our favorite cartoons together. Or talked about The Six Million Dollar Man at recess the next day. Our parents reminded us that they didn't have TV for most of their youth, so the above screed is just an updated version of that speech. And AGAIN, weren't all these inventions given to us by the very innovators the author celebrates?

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

I didn't, and nobody else I knew did either. We PRETENDED to eat such things, however. Any kid stupid enough to have eaten actual worms or mud pies was usually the weird kid in the neighborhood everybody avoided.

"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."

Nope. My mom was just like the one in "A Christmas Story" who wouldn't let me have one for that very reason. But you know what? Just like the author is fond of saying, I TURNED OUT OKAY! I had cap guns when I was 10, though. They were more fun because they made noise, and only threatened my ear drums instead of my 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!"

... where we then proceeded to watch TV until my friend's mom (or my mom if it was my house) told us to turn it off and go outside. Nothing has changed all that much. Just substitute "TV" with all the innovative gadgetry listed in the previously covered screed above.

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

I lived in one of the most conservative, traditional places in all of the U.S. back in 1975 when I first tried out for Little League, and we ALL made the team. Maybe in other places this wasn't true. But I did not live in some PC utopia as the author fears. But you know what? I TURNED OUT OKAY for someone who automatically made the team.

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

Why do I get the feeling that the person who wrote this would be the first to scream "My little Johnny is a GOOD BOY who would NEVER do anything like that!" while the police are hauling him away. In a few hours, she'll have his bail posted. It would kind of be like Sarah Palin saying that her daughters would never get pregnant before marriage because she raised them to practice abstinence, and only permissive liberal parents let their kids have wanton unprotected sex.


"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."

Not to belabor the point, but I LOVE bringing up the fact one more time that these adventurous sorts are the ones who gave us all the goodies the author deplored so passionately in her fit of nostalgia for simpler, gadget-free times. Leave the kids alone. Who says their childhoods are any less rich and rewarding than ours were?

Things really were better in the old day. I know it's true cause back then I didn't have to pay bills.

I really loathe that big steaming pile of an email, and I'm always glad to see it crushed.

Yeah, lead paint poisoning and fetal alcohol syndrome are things to wax nostalgic about. :eyes:

But it is a bit of truth...

I noticed it didn't included set off blasing caps and shot roman candles at each other.

This needed to be debunked.

"We survived? Well, not all of us did."

He got hit by an SUV that swerved into the bike lane. His helmet was a mess, but he survived with a minor, non-head related injury.

I hate the stupid false sentimentality of this piece.

George Carlin. http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=7309396

I know my grandmother would not have given her 3 year old son aspirin during his fever if she knew what we know now. I'm sure many kids did not die from Reye Syndrome and could even make an argument like the ones in the OP about their own health and well being. But some people did lose their babies and other mothers apparently decided that their children were too precious to risk suffering such a horrible loss like my grandmother did.

Most of the families i know who had young children during those times had some sort of terrible loss or tragedy due to things that are no longer issues. Accidents, deaths and permanent disability and this is just among the people i know personally. From my own perspective those are not good enough statistics to take unnecessary chances with my own children.



I do agree that children need to be directed to play outdoor more.

:)

And when we grew up, we played pool, had beers at the local pub, various sports with friends, even hiked a bit in the parks, good times.

Thanks for the post, reminds me I need to get out, have a beer, and play some pool again :)

My little friends and I used to pretty much do all of that.

I loved to climb things like street signs and once even my elementary school's flagpole. I remember how my friends who knew I was up there laughed and laughed when our teacher frantically wandered around looking for me. I guess it hadn't occurred to her to look up. :evilgrin:

How in the hell someone can wax nostalgic over lead poisoning, fetal alcohol syndrome and traumatic brain injuries is beyond me. Disgusting.

And it's usually good for a flame war. I was born in 1972, but my life took a reset when I was 20 and I remember very little before that time. Or at least I don't choose to recall it and have set up unconscious mechanisms that keep me from doing so. :hippie:

Lead poisoning, head injuries, fetal alcohol syndrome... There's got to be a happy medium. I grew up in the '50s and we did a lot of that stuff. No seat belts, no bike helmets, drinking from the hose, running around the neighborhood relatively unsupervised -- and I don't know anyone who got killed or seriously injured (until high school), but the potential was there. We just got lucky. I do think kids are sometimes too supervised and hovered over now; they need to put down the Wii and get off their chubby little butts and play outside more. And mommy doesn't have to be there every single second, organizing play dates and being sure the kid doesn't skin a knee or something. On the other hand, some of the safety measures that have been developed since the '70s are a damn good thing and have saved a lot of kids.

early morning until dark. We argued about pitches and how many fouls a guy was allowed. Somehow we worked it all out. Once, when I was 10 (1964)the pitcher got hit right in the chest with a line drive. Apparently the impact caused a heart attack. He was eventually all right, but no parents told us to stop and none came over to supervise us after the incident. Our parents just told us to be very careful. My brother, while playing catcher with no protective equipment, caught a bat in the teeth knocking out his upper front ones. The older kids stopped the bleeding and brought him home. He had two silver teeth for years after that and no-one thought of law suits. We learned to take care of ourselves and resolve emergencies and issues on our own.

Sorry man, I just can't see that as a part of that era I would ever want to go back to. But that's because of the volunteer work I do with the Doe Network (their group profiles long-term missing persons and unidentified decedents, people who aren't usually counted in the numbers of people who were *known* to have been murdered after hitchhiking).... the word "hitchhike" in their database comes up with 165 hits.

Maybe I've gotten a bit paranoid after reading tons of real life stories were people disappeared without a trace... but they did happen. I have picked up a hitchhiking couple once, but that was because there was a woman with them. And even then, I used my cell to call the friend who was expecting me in the town three hours away from there and gave her their names off of their IDs. They weren't offended at all that as a single female I took precautions before picking up a hitchhiker -- said they'd had a nurse pick them up who not only gave the names but the numbers and addresses off of the IDs when she called her husband to let him know what was up....

Not to mention a complete disregard for the environment:

disposable diapers, plastic water bottles, plastic soda bottles, plastic bags...oh and have you visited Pensacola Beach lately?

:eyes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9N2E93VzQSA&feature=related I'm 43 and i'm turning into this guy. :rofl:

They actually sided with the law"

So true -you just have to look at people like George W Bush, Dan Quayle et all as perfect examples of that

Oh wait...

....just sound like a grumpy old crumudgeon.

No wonder I smoke like a chimney! And no wonder I was born with a freakin' stroke that left me with neuropsychiatric issues!!!


Back when I was little, little was known about the health hazards of SWP (smoking while pregnant).

Too bad the kids who died and got maimed in those decades didn't get a chance to read it.

thats the description of my life
does this also explain the lack of pragmatic thinking of younger ideolouges?
you learn a lot of important world skills when you have a 2 day bottle rocket war

Things were as good as they could be for the times we lived in and I never thought of this "email" as right wing crap.

I didn't take this to mean that progress isn't good, just that kids don't have the freedom they used to have at least in the same way.

Thanks for posting this. :hi:

edit clarification

You mean like Barbara Bush? Yeah, that's a convincing argument for the "good old days".

In 1934 my sister died of rapid onset pneumonia waiting for Doc Lynch to show up.

The good old days weren't.

Seen this before, but it is all true.

My first bike had no brakes...and we lived on top of a hill!:rofl:

I still haven't got a good answer from my mom on that.