Posted on 08/05/2013 4:40:05 AM PDT by Kaslin
I walk for exercise in a suburban neighborhood and find the same thing, seeing a child outdoors anytime is rare. Even when the weather is perfect.
In my upper middle class neighborhood, just over the Philadelphia line, kids play outside all the time. Big kids are seen playing basketball and/or walking to the park to play. Little kids are in their yards running around or playing on their swing sets. The kids walk down to the Wawa, the pizza place, and the new "fro-yo".
One other change is homework. My kids barely had any growing up. Today's kids have a couple of hours, so you're just not going to see the kids outside as much during the school year.
I have driven past a beautiful public pool in a distressed neighborhood a couple times this summer on my way to court and no kids are in it
but poor people don’t teach their kids to swim
In my neighborhood you actually find kids outside during school vacations or on the weekend all the time. Most of them are riding their bikes on the street
Good for them, perhaps there is hope somewhere....
they've been replaced by dogs. My street has countless DINK (double-income no kids) couples. both go off early in the AM to work in their BMW's, and their nice, 4-bedroom home is occupied by the dogs. So in sum, I see Americans work hard to provide a nice home and future for their dogs.
As a kid in the 60s and early 70s, I’d leave the house on bike at 8 AM and ride around rounding up a group of guys for baseball, football, creek swimming,fort building, bike riding, etc. My mom generally had no idea where I was until dinnertime. I’d wolf down dinner to go back out for a few more hours til it got dark. We made bike ramps, tree forts, rope swings, bows and arrows, slingshots, and a host of other things that would horrify parents today. In nice weather, my buddies and I rode bikes 2 miles to school, without helmets and body armor. We left early to play kickball (unsupervised) on the playground before school, and would race to beat the bus home. Kids today don’t know what they missed. Our neighbor has a portable basketball hoop in his driveway for his 10 year old son and his buddies. The hoa told him to move it, and he refuses to. I love seeing the kids outside playing ball.
Heck, my parents kicked me out of the house during the day on the weekends, and basically told us to come back for lunch and dinner, and they didn’t want to see us until then.
And besides, who wanted to stick around the house and get stuck doing chores, anyway?
The times to and from school were when my kids were most communicative about what was going on. No cell phones at that time, so our time in the car was uninterrupted.
I shared a room with my brother, who I idolized as a kid. He was a great big brother who let me hang around with him and his friends. He was an all-state middle linebacker in high school, but still made time to invest in me. Over 40 years later, we are still best buddies, and I cherish the memories of sharing a room with him. I laugh when I see people with 3 kids think they have to move so each of their kids can have their own room.
I’ve thought this often that I never see kids playing outside. It is rare. We never had huge yards or playgrounds but we played outside. I never see that anymore in neighborhoods.
the beautiful pool in a distressed area just might be closed because some kid took a dump in it and when they reopen, it just happens over and over again
that’s why we stopped going to public pools- parents are lazy fools who let their kids run amuck and pee and poop in the pool
sanitation, ewww
Look Towanda- floating tootsie rolls!
Yes, in my Town, it is not so much a safety/security fear, although that is part of it, it is a more fundamental breakdown in the community web...kids are all very scheduled with specific activities, and their friends are not the kids next door, they are kids from those specific clubs/groups. We sent our kids through the back yard to see the neighbors kids their age and the mom threatened to build a big wall if we ever did that again, saying we interrupted Johny's speech therapy and Sarah's downtime before lacrosse practice.<\p>
our neighborhoods used to be the ties that brought us together, not anymore. People are solitary and selfish now, their kids not playing in the neighborhood is one thing, and the same holds for adults in the neighborhood, they don't help each other out either. With no ties through neighborhood, none through church, you end up with dysfunction. Growing up we knew every kid in the area, the parents all knew each other, supported each other in different ways. I wonder whether a kid like the shooter in Newtown, CT would have fallen through the cracks like he did if neighbors were paying attention to each other.
So many parents feel so very righteous about personally attending to the task of getting their kids to public school.
But it isn’t the bus driver who under color of authority fills their heads with obscene ideas.
Not trying to hijack the thread, FRiend...but a lot of parents CAN'T do sh!t about the bad behavior. Want to know why? Three little letters: CPS.
Nowadays, if a parent actually disciplines their little Johnny or Jane (as in with a good butt-whipping), all the kids have to do is go tell the teacher or school counselor that "Daddy (or Mommy) hit me" and CPS will swoop in like white on rice to take the kids away from their "abusive" parents.
I (unfortunately) know from personal experience. We did get our kids back rather quickly when they realized we'd done nothing wrong. However, they'll still have their eyes on us, likely until the last child leaves our house.
Parents can't give proper discipline anymore. And we wonder why kids are turning into little sociopaths.
Through the years the liberals have made it all but impossible to lock up dangerous criminal predators. The perverts and murderers are free, the kids are not.
Lazy and afraid “let’s be our kids friend” parents enable the kids to stay inside where its “safe” and sit on their butts watching mind-numbing TV and video games. The other kids are driven here and there to over supervised and over controlled “safe” soccer games.
There is now very little opportunity for a kid’s curiosity to be free to discover how nature and things work. That just would not be “safe”.
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