A Different Childhood

I'm often the grumpy old man who drones on about how much better everything was in the old days. In my day, we didn't have to have parents taking us everywhere after school and monitoring all of our activity. We organized our own football, basketball and soccer games, mediated our own conflicts and broke our own bones and we LIKED it. We rode around the neighborhood on our bikes, built our own  army forts and dirt bike tracks and no parent knew where any kid was until dinnertime.

This was good because we learned to figure stuff out on our own. When there was a dispute about whether the teams were fair, or if something was a foul, we kids had to develop the leadership skills to resolve it. We didn't have the luxury of appealing everything to an adult. If we needed more people to play the game, we knocked on doors until we found them. We learned to be problem solvers.

I look at my kids today and think how different they are from me at that age. Brita and Leah are both in their school musicals. My parents couldn't have forced me to do that for anything. While I was good at organizing after school activities with my neighborhood pals, the thought of auditioning for a play would have terrified me. My kids think it's no big deal to join a group of strangers for a semester just to be in a rock band (organized and coached by an adult of course). I just wanted to come home from school and hang out in my comfortable neighborhood.

In high school I was the nerd who enjoyed reading history books while I watched sports at night, or playing war games with myself in the basement because nobody else found that interesting. My kids are the nerds who want to be involved in every extracurricular activity. I loved sports but didn't dare try out for anything because I was afraid of failing, or having a social interaction. Maybe kids today aren't afraid of failing because they get so much (often dishonest) positive reinforcement that they really do think they can do anything.

Things have changed since I was a kid but I should admit they are just different, not better or worse. My kids are light years ahead of me at their age in some areas. I'm sure my parents thought they were raising a bunch of spoiled brats because we didn't have to milk cows or feed rabbits every night after school. We somehow turned into productive human beings regardless. But I still reserve the right to complain about kids these days because that's what a grumpy old man like me does.