Were They That Much Better?
Those good old days...
Do you remember your childhood? Perhaps you look back fondly on it now. If you are a Boomer, you may recall playing baseball in the sandlot with your friends, hearing the Beatles for the first time, and being more afraid of your parents than outside threats. X'ers like me maybe remember playing tackle football on the nearest field, thinking Danny Zuko was the coolest, and having a lot of time to hang out with friends.
Kids today will have different memories.
Everything is structured for children now. There are leagues for kids as young as five where "back in the day" we played in our yards or at the playground at that age. Outside threats seem far more real today -- kids need to worry about guns in schools and gangs and stuff we didn't have to worry about.
Things seemed so much better then.
But were they really?
I don't know.
My son has played in little league since he was five and a half. He's been taking Tae Kwon Do even longer. He's in camp this week. He'll be in two more camps later this summer. His entire life is structured and organized for him.
I didn't have that structure. Neither did most of the kids in my generation. Sure we had fun -- playing pickup games and hanging out and stuff. But you know what? Kids today also have so much fun. That it's for a league and not on a sandlot is irrelevant.
I listen to my father tell stories about all the street gangs New York had when he grew up. Perhaps there weren't guns, but there sure was trouble. Gangs had died by the time I was a kid. We had something far worse. We had drugs. And we had the free time to take them, too.
True, there are serious problems today's kids face and will have to face in the near future. That doesn't make the old days better. Times have changed. The information we have at our fingertips wasn't available to our parents or grandparents. If it was, the outside world would have seemed as dangerous to them as it does to us as parents today. Maybe even worse.
The old days weren't necessarily good. They're just old.
Do you remember your childhood? Perhaps you look back fondly on it now. If you are a Boomer, you may recall playing baseball in the sandlot with your friends, hearing the Beatles for the first time, and being more afraid of your parents than outside threats. X'ers like me maybe remember playing tackle football on the nearest field, thinking Danny Zuko was the coolest, and having a lot of time to hang out with friends.
Kids today will have different memories.
Everything is structured for children now. There are leagues for kids as young as five where "back in the day" we played in our yards or at the playground at that age. Outside threats seem far more real today -- kids need to worry about guns in schools and gangs and stuff we didn't have to worry about.
Things seemed so much better then.
But were they really?
I don't know.
My son has played in little league since he was five and a half. He's been taking Tae Kwon Do even longer. He's in camp this week. He'll be in two more camps later this summer. His entire life is structured and organized for him.
I didn't have that structure. Neither did most of the kids in my generation. Sure we had fun -- playing pickup games and hanging out and stuff. But you know what? Kids today also have so much fun. That it's for a league and not on a sandlot is irrelevant.
I listen to my father tell stories about all the street gangs New York had when he grew up. Perhaps there weren't guns, but there sure was trouble. Gangs had died by the time I was a kid. We had something far worse. We had drugs. And we had the free time to take them, too.
True, there are serious problems today's kids face and will have to face in the near future. That doesn't make the old days better. Times have changed. The information we have at our fingertips wasn't available to our parents or grandparents. If it was, the outside world would have seemed as dangerous to them as it does to us as parents today. Maybe even worse.
The old days weren't necessarily good. They're just old.
posted by E-Luv at 10:38 AM
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