Kids - Blog Gang Post

Kids today just don’t know how good they have it.  My kids complain all the time.  They want a phone, they want an iPod, they want to be taken seriously.  They have so much that I didn’t have as a kid.  I didn’t have a TV in my bedroom.  I didn’t have a laptop (never mind the fact that they didn’t exist).  We didn’t own a Wii or a Nintendo.  I was lucky to have a record player sitting on top of my laminated white dresser set.  I had to buy LP’s and 45’s.  Keep in mind it was still the age of 8-Tracks and Beta max.

(If you are reading this and have no idea what I’m talking about, then I have nothing to say to you.)

But… when I was a kid, we had things that the kids today will never have.  We had trust.  We had imagination.  We had safety.

We left in the morning on our bicycles and came home at noon for grilled cheese sandwiches.  We left again after lunch and returned at dark for dinner.  Our parents had no idea where we were.

We used our hands.  We collected discarded scraps of wood and old painting tarps and built tree houses in the woods.  We braved frozen snow and ice to carve out igloos at the end of snow-plowed driveways.

We had sleepovers and stayed up late drinking hot chocolate and telling ghost stories.  We held seances and questioned the Ouija Board.

We played house and played school and played stewardess and played waitress.  We played office and played clothing store.

We hung posters of Shawn Cassidy and Lief Garrett on our closet doors and read Tiger Beat magazines while we listened to Andy Gibb on the record player.

Our cries of, “Mom, I’m bored” were always answered with, “Go outside and play.”

We knocked on strange doors and asked if there were any kids home that could come out and play.

My kids?  My kids can’t go outside in our front yard unless they are all together.  My kids have to tell me every minute of the day where they are, who they’re with and when they’ll be home.  My kids sit for hours and watch TV and play computer games and rarely use their own hands to build anything.  My kids download songs on their iPods and don’t know what it means to save up allowance so you can go to the record store and buy a 45 that they’ll listen to over and over again until the needle on the record player scratches it up so bad that you have to save your pennies again and go buy another one.  My kids tell me they’re bored and I can’t say go knock on some neighborhood doors and see if there are any new kids around.  It isn’t safe.

Was it any safer when I was a kid?  I mean, really?  Probably not.  Maybe we just didn’t hear about every missing kid and every murder and every child molester who was paroled and living on our street.  Do we have it better today knowing these things?  I’m not so sure.

We were innocent as kids.  My kids aren’t.  Some of it’s good, some not so good.

Kids had it great back then.

Kids have it great now.

I think that’s the lesson: Kids have it easy no matter what year they are living in.

It’s us grownups that have it hard.