I was visiting some friends today and what struck me was complete lack of imaginations kids have today. They get easily bored. Unless there is internet, video games or TV around they don’t know how to entertain themselves.
To be fair there are here and there few that play basketball around corners but friends I saw today for instance (and it is similar with many others I know) don’t even let their little man go there out of fear that such kids might have bad influence on him. By the look of it not only witnesses can be too limiting, sometimes modern parents are so cautious that I’m afraid kids are being turned in alternative humans with weird ideas about reality. I guess I was lucky in a way that only one of my parents was a dub so I had considerable amount of freedom but in any event my mom was never too much after me anyway and similar story was with just about all of my peers back then. So I tend to think that there has been a fundamental shift in parental paradigm since I was a kid. I’m starting to think that today’s parents are becoming so permeated with fears that is all bordering with neurotic.
So what happens is that kids are never too far from where parents can see them which often means indoors "fun" of video games, internet and TV. But how are they ever going to completely grow up if they are not allowed usual kid’s mischief?
I’m really wondering what happened, because today’s parents must have been kids when I was too and chances are they've had similar amount of latitude and freedom for expression. So I thought let us parents have conversation and remind ourselves what we were like when we were kids and what it did to our development.
Ok I’ll start by admitting I was one of those geeks that built model airplanes and small rockets and loved to read till early hours in the morning basically falling asleep of exhaustion. But that was not all by a long shot. We used to play a lot of soccer and basketball back then. In fact, these were pretty much the only two sports we knew about back in Europe at least in early beginnings. There was this larger property that was never sold while I was a kid and we (kids from that street) turned it on one side into football field and on another a basketball court. Hell we used to spend hours there. In evening we would still hang around there many times lighting bonfire under the stars and talked until parents would chase us home one by one. But those conversations and talks we kids had are still some of the fondest memories of my childhood.
During summer time, I used to spend at least a month at my grandparent's place. Hell the sense of adventure and freedom you get when away from parents is, well really fulfilling. Had my parents really knew what I would get up to back then they’d probably gotten a heart attack even back then lol. There was a great lake near by as well as a medium sized river, not only that I went fishing but we often would swim in rather dangerous parts of the river, would try catching snakes and other small ‘beasts’, yup we used to make even our own bows and arrows that got quite some pieces of equipment over the years. Not only that, we made so many of those tree houses that I lost the count, often in trees by the water.
In winter the whole lake would freeze over and we played hockey. Nope, we never had ice-skating boots we did it in your regular shoes that mysteriously needed to be repaired so often that parents would wonder if something was wrong with the company that produced them.
I’m not saying everything I did I would love to see my daughter doing but on the other hand you have to let them be kids after all this is the only time in their life they will have chance to be just that.