So glad I...

[CaithLynnSayes]

[Ceka Cianci]

My boys don't have phones..  That picture on the left pretty much sums up where I can find them most times in the summer when it's hot out or warm or even cold.. hehehehe

I always wondered, what would it be like having a girl.. Then found this.. hehehe

The part where they are having wine at the table ,I about fell out of my chair, because it's so true.

 

Edited May 15, 2022 by Ceka Cianci

[Coffee Pancake]

Grew up playing in a river.

As an adult knowing what's in that innocuous looking crystal clear water.. there is no way in hell I would recommend anyone's kids go near it. At least one of our friend group had long lasting health issues as a result.

Complaining about kids looking at their phones all day is no different from complaining about the kids who lived in books. Let them do what they want.

[Sid Nagy]

Do as I tell you, not as I do.
That never works.
One can't tell kids to not smoke with a cigarette between the lips.
One can't tell kids to not drink with the bottles of booze piling up in the home bar.
One can't tell kids that they have to read books, when ones only book is there to level the kitchen table.
Etc. etc. etc.
Kids pick up what they see from others, especially their parents and family.

Edited May 15, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Theresa Tennyson]

2 hours ago, CaithLynnSayes said:

Mmm hmm...

You absolutely didn't grow up staring at a television while people writing in newspapers said that your generation's brains were turning into mush...

[Ceka Cianci]

21 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

Do as I tell you, not as I do.
That never works.
One can't tell kids to not smoke with a cigarette between the lips.
One can't tell kids to not drink with the bottles of booze piling up in the home bar.
One can't tell kids that they have to read books, when ones only book is there to level the kitchen table.
Etc. etc. etc.
Kids pick up what they see from others, especially their parents and family.

For us it's always been best for us to show them why or explain to where they can understand why something isn't good for them or dangerous..It works much better than just saying quit! now git outta mah hair!

 hehehe

We can only raise them the best we can with the mind that, when it comes time where they go out into the world on their own.. That we have them as ready for the world as we can.

That is gonna be very hard when the first one let alone any of them, reach that day when they move out.. Even if they just move down the road.

As a mother, I have so many cringe moments just looking into the future that keeps me on my toes about my boys.. I even have guilt when someone say's things like,a mother gives life.. Because I also gave death, because it comes for us all and that really weighs on me when I think of that happening to my boys one day..

 

I'm gonna stop now.. I'm already getting worked up about it again..

But i agree with everything you've said wholeheartedly.

 

[Sid Nagy]

This place definitely needs a hug button. like Cris's place.

Edited May 15, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[CaithLynnSayes]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Complaining about kids looking at their phones all day is no different from complaining about the kids who lived in books.

I fail to see the mental gymnastics you're pulling here. Books teach you something. Tik Tok, doesn't. Well it does, but not in a good way.

[junique Tigerfish]

2 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

For us it's always been best for us to show them why or explain to where they can understand why something isn't good for them or dangerous..It works much better than just saying quit! now git outta mah hair!

 hehehe

We can only raise them the best we can with the mind that, when it comes time where they go out into the world on their own.. That we have them as ready for the world as we can.

That is gonna be very hard when the first one let alone any of them, reach that day when they move out.. Even if they just move down the road.

As a mother, I have so many cringe moments just looking into the future that keeps me on my toes about my boys.. I even have guilt when someone say's things like,a mother gives life.. Because I also gave death, because it comes for us all and that really weighs on me when I think of that happening to my boys one day..

 

I'm gonna stop now.. I'm already getting worked up about it again..

But i agree with everything you've said wholeheartedly.

 

Absolutely beautiful.Very well said.We can only do our best.Mine are all grown now,all still have 2 legs and 2 arms.And now grandkids.Now I know why I had kids in the first place.Lol.

[Mishlait]

Grew up in the 90's in a part of the city where they were just start to build houses. I had neighbors next to my house, but right in front of it, it looked like a wasteland: thorny plants and even abandoned broken cars included. I was too young to be allowed to play with older brother's friends, and in the neighborhood there were only girls my own age that refused to play with me. So I spend my childhood building mud castles, cutting thorny plants with a metal rod and pretending it was a sword, exploring 'the wasteland' with my loyal german shepard (Who would have known I'd be playing Fallout without knowing it), or riding my bike.

Because I was active, moving and running all the time, I excelled at sports, and if I was ever taken to a park, I would be at the top of a tree, dangling like a monkey. I'd play Street hockey with my older cousins because I was stubborn enough to learn how to skate at 5. We'd also make flower crowns and try to collect bugs and frogs before setting them free.

Now, I don't wanna sound like these 'back in my days...' kind of person, but it truly breaks my heart to see how my 6 year old nephew is able to use a tablet or smartphone like any capable adult, but then when he gets up he stumbles. When he trips and falls he cries uncontrollably cause he isn't use to have scraped knees. Take him to a park and he doesn't know how to use the monkey bars or can't even sit properly on a swing. And he's not the only one. I have a HUGE family (We Mexicans are like that, what can I say), and most of the kids are like this. I've taken as a personal challenge to teach every nephew and niece how to play outside or do simple tasks or just how to play sports, but yeah.

I can't really blame the parents. In some cases both of them work, and after a long day out and trying to provide for their family, they come home to relax and spend as much time as they can with the kids, watching a movie or helping with homework. No time to teach them the basics. Also, while I was working as a private tutor, I noticed how schools are focusing more on technology instead of teaching them basic things and motor skills. Such a shame.

[Quistess Alpha]

2 hours ago, CaithLynnSayes said:

Books teach you something.

By that logic you could argue that kids should be watching anime, because most of them were adapted from light novels which are ~oh so educational books.

[Silent Mistwalker]

2 hours ago, junique Tigerfish said:

Absolutely beautiful.Very well said.We can only do our best.Mine are all grown now,all still have 2 legs and 2 arms.And now grandkids.Now I know why I had kids in the first place.Lol.

The best part of being a grandparent is you can always send them home!

[Scylla Rhiadra]

This kind of thinking is so unfortunate. It's unfair, and it's also terribly misinformed.

To begin with, as others have noted, most Gen Xers spent much of their youth glued to TV sets. I know I did. According to a Nielson data report from 2015, the amount of TV that children watched actually dropped since the late 60s, from 54 to 32 hours a week.

The kids I know personally get out lots. I see them in my neighbourhood -- which is a downtown residential one -- at the parks, walking, running, and playing basketball or street hockey. And the provision of public parks and playgrounds in urban centres, at least in my experience, has improved vastly since when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s.

Kids are reading a lot. The number of young adult books published annually between 2002 and 2012 more than doubled, and the market for reading for kids and young adults has only expanded since then. New genres of literature, such as "New Adult Fiction," have been developed to grow with the millennials who started reading with Harry Potter or The Hunger Games. Web sites and platforms such as Goodreads and Young Adult Books are immensely popular and busy with young people talking about books, and I know of a number of popular book bloggers who cater to a younger audience. And then, of course, there are things like fanfiction sites and NaNoWriMo that are also available to aspiring writers.

Kids read, to some degree, differently today -- they do read novels and poetry (especially slam poetry), but of course they are also reading shorter form stuff on social media sites. They follow podcasts and bloggers on a variety of subjects, ranging from the admittedly trivial to the really informative. I'd wager, actually, that young people actually read more, by sheer volume, than at any time before. And if some of it is dross, a lot of it isn't. (And the vast majority of what older people consumed was dross too, after all. If you watched Dallas or The Flintstones, you're in no position to cast stones.)

Finally, kids inherited this information age environment . . . from us. They didn't invent the internet, and they didn't invent social media. We did -- and made damned sure that it was appealing enough to a younger audience that we could be sure of profiting from their attention. And it's not as though Gen Xers aren't consuming much of this same crap themselves.

It's a different world, in some ways, today -- but the kids are alright. They're more socially aware, and often more media-savvy and critical as consumers of information than my generation was. They're going to be just fine.

Edited May 15, 2022 by Scylla Rhiadra

[StarlanderGoods]

1 hour ago, Quistess Alpha said:

By that logic you could argue that kids should be watching anime, because most of them were adapted from light novels which are ~oh so educational books.

I was about to say this, I did read a lot of books as a kid, but honestly, most of them were garbage.  Its not like something becomes GOOD just because it was printed, and the good books I read were mostly for school and didnt get to apreciate them properly until I was an adult.

Also, I love the blonde kids playing in a pristine creek, being photographed by the adult that was watching over them, as if any considerable number of the population grew up with all those advantages. I had to make my own mud to get dirty when I was a kid.

[Luna Bliss]

Balance in all things...seems to be the key.

Screen addiction is a 'thing', but I'm not sure how many kids (or adults) are affected by it:

Screen Dependency Disorder: The Effects of ‘Screen Time’ Addiction

https://nhahealth.com/screen-dependency-disorder-the-effects-of-screen-time-addiction/

[Silent Mistwalker]

Dunno whatchu talkin bout. I'm still makin mud pies.

 

 

Edit: See the one in the very back (top)? I call that one Rocky Road.

Edited May 16, 2022 by Silent Mistwalker

[Katherine Heartsong]

I grew up in the 60s being promised flying cars. I want my darn flying cars!!!!

[Rat Luv]

Why would anyone want to go in a stream?  It's full of shopping trolleys and dead dogs, and poo 🤢

But checking your DMs with your friends while waiting for a taxi to go to a nice restaurant without mud and dead dogs is cool 😎

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

7 minutes ago, Rat Luv said:

Why would anyone want to go in a stream?  It's full of shopping trolleys and dead dogs, and poo 🤢

And those are just the more heavily moderated livestreams, some of those twitch channels are way more toxic than dead dogs and poo!

[Ayashe Ninetails]

I did both. My inner 6+ year-old paleontologist made an absolute disaster area out of my backyard with a single wood-handled shovel that gave me more splinters than it did fossils or dinosaur bones. I made holes so deep I got stuck, I rarely ended a day not caked in hard-packed dirt, I convinced myself I could dig my way through the entire world and come out the other side and set out to prove it numerous times (even wrote stories about it like I was teaching the world something new, LOL), I dug my way under the fence separating my best friend's backyard from mine so her dog could come and assist in my endeavors, I got yelled at for digging too damn close to the flowers on the "good side" of the yard, I climbed trees, I fell face first off a swing set and magically did NOT break my nose, I did that thing where you'd swing yourself to the highest point and leap off into the air because apparently all kids are Superman...

And I also spent rainy days camped out under the dining room table with snacks watching Faerie Tale Theatre and Saturday morning cartoons. Participated in the Summer Reading Program at the library and challenged myself to read 10-20+ books every summer vacation. Got my hands on an Atari and wasted whole afternoons playing Frogger and E.T. Once I discovered computers, I got hardcore addicted to the C128 and wasted entire DAYS playing Kawasaki Music Synthesizer (which was my very first introduction to music production, which is still a major hobby of mine), Windham Classics games, and everything else under the sun. I owned various musical instruments and practiced to death despite sucking at them terribly (definitely more of a computer music kinda kid). I wrote more stories. I taught myself to draw. The computer obsession saw me through the development of Geoworks all the way through today's modern Windows. Sierra Games through modern MMOs. And consoles? Ohhhh how I played the hell out of them thar consoles...

In between all that shenanigans, I still got dirty. And accidentally lost control of my body (as one does when hyped up on sugar) in the middle of a cartwheel downhill and flew out into traffic. And did all that goofy dangerous "omg I'm still alive?!" stupid stuff kids do.

If I had to say what I miss doing most as a kid - the safer indoor activities had a larger impact on who I am today. I did initially plan to make paleontology a career, but nah, I'm too much of an indoor nerd. I've rolled around in enough dirt for a lifetime.

I come from a time when kids carried pagers around in high school (lol, the 90s were so stupid), so I can't really comment *much* on phone-to-the-face culture as that's not my generation, but as long as they've got varied interests (which many kids still do, even if they're more indoorsy), I'm sure they'll be just fine. Toss them a pencil and paper and a Bob Ross video or something and they're good to go (seeing as how there are so many very young illustrators and artists with their commissions open on Twitter, this seems to be fairly common).

Edited May 16, 2022 by Ayashe Ninetails

[Coffee Pancake]

5 hours ago, CaithLynnSayes said:

I fail to see the mental gymnastics you're pulling here. Books teach you something. Tik Tok, doesn't. Well it does, but not in a good way.

I grew up split between being shoved out the house because it was "character building" and hiding away in books that were old before I got them. Got online as soon as I struck out on my own and have been in full on catch up mode ever since. The world turned out to be a much bigger and richer place and I had been deliberately kept from it because my parents didn't approve.

The people I grew up with who didn't get online are the same nationalist sexist racist drunks they were at 18.

Sod the river. No one ever became a better, smarter or more socially aware person by wasting their days sat in the mud, as though that was a better baby sitter than the TV. 

Give the kids phones, give them all the tech and access to information their chaotic little minds can handle, bury them in glimpses of other lives, other people who don't look like them, frantic stupid games and shiny fads they can burn though in a week. If they wanna zone out and watch endless hours of tiktok, so be it, it's far better than the crap we did when we zoned out. Sure, they wont turn our just like you, and that's a good thing, because their world doesn't look anything like the one we were brought up for.

"We played in the mud, those of us who didn't catch some terrible illness or almost drown turned out just fine" .. and yet here we are .. here, of all places. Growing old in a ponderous make believe world pretending we're in our 20's all over again. Why? because we don't fit out there.

[Ayashe Ninetails]

1 minute ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Sod the river. No one ever became a better, smarter or more socially aware person by wasting their days sat in the mud, as though that was a better baby sitter than the TV. 

I remember when my gen got criticized for being too addicted to TV (we were the MTV generation after all). And too addicted to video games. And not going outside enough. Every gen gets complained about, really.

I do think there's value to being exposed to both outdoor and indoor activities (whether that's through summer camp, glamping, school sports, rolling around in a river somewhere behind the house, trampling someone's flowerbed and having to replant it oops, etc.), but I do agree with you that getting a sense of a world outside of your own at an early age is more crucial in today's world. From what I've seen, it seems like kids still enjoy doing all of those things.

[Rolig Loon]

I grew up in a semirural area in a time when adults would call each other on the phone (yes, a land line, and it was a party line too), but we children were expected to keep our hands off it.  There was no such thing as a home computer yet. We didn't have a TV until I was about 11 either, but friends down the road did, so we could ride our bikes down there to watch Mickey Mouse Club. Otherwise, we were just running around outside like idiots most of the time. 

Mom had a big, loud bell that she could ring when she wanted us to come home, so the rule was that you either had to stay within hearing range of the CLANG! or you had to tell Mom whose house you were going to. Then every once in a while she'd pick up that phone and call around to see where we really went.  Most of the time that meant we stayed within a half mile or so of home. Usually. There were lot of kids in those days, so we tended to run in packs (girls, boys, dogs .. ) and play endless games of tag or hide and seek, or just goofy kid stuff. In winter, we still spent most of the fun time outside, making snow forts and sledding through the trees on a killer hill in the area. I remember reading loads and loads of books and watching dragonflies during the quiet times when there wasn't anyone else around to play with, but my strongest memories of childhood involved dirt, scraped knees, and tangled hair.  Things changed as I got to be ten or eleven years old, but those grade school years were pretty much unorganized kid time, somewhere in the great outdoors.

[Silent Mistwalker]

1 hour ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

Superman...

Pffft. I was Cat Woman making fantastic leaps and always landing on my feet. 

Archeologists never die, they just keep on digging. 🤭

[Silent Mistwalker]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

because we don't fit out there.

Hey, I don't fit here either so... we're even? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯