This piece came from one of you, Marion Hillman who is also 84.
So in tune with my memories of childhood. And like me, perhaps like many of you, she wonders if we lost something with our cleanliness, and excessive fear of risks.
It would be interesting to hear what you all think.
“CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL BORN IN 1930’s, 1940’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and Early 80’s !!! First, you survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a tin, and didn’t get tested for diabetes. Then after that trauma, your baby cots were covered with bright colored lead-based paints. You had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when you rode your bikes, you had no helmets, not to mention, the risks you took hitchhiking .. As children, you would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.Riding in the back of a van – loose – was always great fun. You drank water from the garden hosepipe and NOT from a bottle. You shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this. You ate cakes, white bread and real butter and drank pop with sugar in it, but you weren’t overweight because…… YOU WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!! You 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 you all day. And you were OK. You would spend hours building your go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out you forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, you learned to solve the problem . You did not have Playstations, Nintendo’s, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no text messaging, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms……….YOU HAD FRIENDS and you went outside and found them! You fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents you played with worms(well most boys did) and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever. You made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although you were told it would happen, you did not poke out any eyes. You rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them! Local teams 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 you out if you broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law! This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL BORN IN 1930’s, 1940’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and Early 80’s !!! First, you survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a tin, and didn’t get tested for diabetes. Then after that trauma, your baby cots were covered with bright colored lead-based paints. You had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when you rode your bikes, you had no helmets, not to mention, the risks you took hitchhiking .. As children, you would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.Riding in the back of a van – loose – was always great fun. You drank water from the garden hosepipe and NOT from a bottle. You shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this. You ate cakes, white bread and real butter and drank pop with sugar in it, but you weren’t overweight because…… YOU WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!! You 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 you all day. And you were OK. You would spend hours building your go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out you forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, you learned to solve the problem . You did not have Playstations, Nintendo’s, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no text messaging, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms……….YOU HAD FRIENDS and you went outside and found them! You fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents you played with worms(well most boys did) and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever. You made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although you were told it would happen, you did not poke out any eyes. You rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL BORN IN 1930’s, 1940’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and Early 80’s !!! First, you survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a tin, and didn’t get tested for diabetes. Then after that trauma, your baby cots were covered with bright colored lead-based paints. You had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when you rode your bikes, you had no helmets, not to mention, the risks you took hitchhiking .. As children, you would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.Riding in the back of a van – loose – was always great fun. You drank water from the garden hosepipe and NOT from a bottle. You shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this. You ate cakes, white bread and real butter and drank pop with sugar in it, but you weren’t overweight because…… YOU WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!! Yowould 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 you all day. And you were OK. You would spend hours building your go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out you forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, you learned to solve the problem . You did not have Playstations, Nintendo’s, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no text messaging, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms……….YOU HAD FRIENDS and you went outside and found them!
You fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents you played with worms(well most boys did) and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever. You made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although you were told it would happen, you did not poke out any eyes. You rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them! Local teams 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 you out if you 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. You had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and you learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL! And YOU are one of them! CONGRATULATIONS! What do you think of this e-mail I received? Any truth in it? 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 our lives for our own good. And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were.”
Suspect we shall hear from someone who knows the statistics for child health for our era. Probably tell us that Kids are safer and healthier now!
But I do wonder if they are as tough, as streetwise and able to judge for themselves as we had to be? Maybe savvy in a different way, in a different world, drugs, social media, porn?
And too are they as healthy in the sense of being pretty immune to the basic bugs of life. Figures on all those aspects would be interesting.
Marion ends with a plea to share her piece.
I support her. It is a conversation I would love us all to be having with young parents, todays kids, teenagers and among ourselves. And with the professionals.
I got three repeats of this, one after the other! Perhaps what we didn’t learn was how to manage a computer?? Anyway, it was enjoyable and had some truth in it. I think children of every era make their own lives, we just aren’t in tune with the whole social meeja thing, and phones and websites to which today’s kids are addicted. Mostly, I think they’re neither better or worse off than we were – just different. Good on ya!
Difficulty with a computer YES the jargon seems to defeat me! Glad to read iit even 3 times!
Yep, we lived and survived and had lots of fun doing it!
Thank you for an interesting viewpoint.
I agree that that the discussion is a good one to have with our children etc. but I wonder if our glasses have become rose tinted as we look back over the years. That whole, ‘it never rained during the summers of our childhood’, syndrome.
I certainly do not want to return to an era where children didn’t wear seat belts in a car, and didn’t wear helmets on a bike, I also do not want to return to a time when pregnant women were encouraged to drink and smoke and when I would have lost my two sons due to diabetes.
I also do not want to return to a time when racism and bigotry was seen as acceptable, ‘No Blacks or Irish,’ signs in windows, a time where back street abortions were often the only option for, ‘fallen women.’
I think there is good and bad in every generation and our role as parents, grandparents and citizens of the world is to take the good from our pasts, the ‘den making and worms’, part of childhood and to incorporate them in the our present.
We have not got it right – not even close – but please let us not ‘diss’ a generation because we do not understand them or that they play with different toys to us. The child playing on her computer may be the scientist in the future that finds an algorithm that saves many, many lives.
To conclude I welcome the picture you attached with your article – it clearly shows modern children doing a bit of stream exploration and being very much amazed by their findings!
Let’s not blame them if they return home to spend an hour building an Ancient Egyptian online city. Surely the beauty of today’s society is that we can do both.
Let’s take the best of our past, incorporate the positive from our present and create a future we can all feel proud of.