Pre-Boomer Musings

Experience tells us if we overprotect our children they end up missing what life is all about.  Give them too much and they appreciate little.  Fear of failure causes them to fail, making this a self-fulfilling prophesy. Pre-boomers (those born between 1930 and 1945) remember life when it was real, rewards were for achievement and everyone seemed to have fun while growing up.

These observations prompted me to compile a list of things that are absent from today’s high tech, high anxiety and high pressure world:
- Kids playing in front of their homes.  Is this because there are more people looking to harm them or because the news scares parents to death?
- Home-made skate carts and scooters.  Fruit creates are cardboard rater than wood. Nobody uses clamp-on skates anymore (we used broken skate as the wheels).  And mom and dad are working too hard to spend time building it so they just buy one of the shinny, expensive, motorized versions.
- Girls jumping rope or playing hopscotch on the sidewalk.  Except for the inter-cities, this pastime has all but vanished.  Forget about double-dutch.
- Playing stickball in the street is history.  Kids want to play on manicured fields with everyone receiving a trophy just for showing up.  What happened to the tradition of where the winners get the award and the rest of the kids learned they had to try harder or switch to another sport?
- Cap guns.  Our mom’s were not too keen on BB guns, but these were okay for the younger boys.  Remember the smell that rose up as you worked your way through the whole roll of caps.  The fumes were probably bad for us, too.
- Marbles are now used in vases to hold tall flowers in place.  Gone are the days when kids drew a circle in the dirt and shot marbles until someone took the spoils of victory home.  That is, the other guy’s marbles.
- Fountain pens were not only writing instruments, they were status symbols.   There was an entire ritual to filling and preparing the pen to write, much like filling a pipe with tobacco.  Neither of which are seen today.

The list goes on and includes things like: wash hanging out, people working on their cars, hand lawnmowers, kids drinking from the garden hose, white wall tires and tinker toys, erector sets or home chemistry kits.  New Seniors thought these to be commonplace occurrences or the way things were done. 

Unfortunately, people have retreated to their homes and the safety of the Internet, where far more predators lurk than in our own neighborhoods.  Therefore, playing outside has become a big deal and involves the parents who make it an even bigger deal.  And playing with a friend requires careful planning on everyone’s part.  Dropping by a friend’s house or starting a pickup game of some sort with a bunch of kids is a thing of the past.  Aren’t you glad for the memories of the simple pleasures of our youth?

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