<p>Kids today are so accomplished. They extract more from life than any of my classmates did in the 1980s. The world is open to them in a way that I never imagined. Many of the old prejudices are almost gone from this generation. Quirkyness is allowed; in some places celebrated. Much of the assembled knowledge of the world in available for downloading in 5 seconds.</p>
<p>Yet,
The downside, of course, is that expectations are higher, and free and unstructured time lessened, and perhaps things are a bit less forgiving (say, the admissions process!). No one plays baseball unless the team has uniforms and a sponsor. </p>
<p>And no one can spell "definitely."</p>
<p>On balance, though, I'd take today over my childhood in the 70s and early 80s.</p>
<p>I wouldn't trade anything I experienced! Everything made me who I am today. There are good & bad things about every generation. On the whole, I think I would be happy no matter when I grew up.</p>
<p>I do wish younger children had more free time. Time to run around the yard, climbing trees, playing 4 square and hopscotch, ringing a neighbors door bell to see if the kids could come out and catch lightening bug. </p>
<p>Playtime is so structured with after school activities, that I am not sure many kids know how to make their own entertainment. My daughter was a dancer, so she had class 3 days a week at the age of 5 and by the time she was 8 she had class 5 days a week plus rehearsals. She never has regretted her years at dance and will tell you it was the best time of her life; I still have to wonder what she has missed.</p>
<p>At the same time, I think kids with too much unsupervised free time tend to get themselves in trouble; so there I am happy my kids were kept busy.</p>
<p>Somewhere around 2000, after the many school shootings in the late 90s, I read an article that detailed some of the less-publicized shootings that took place in decades prior to that-- going back to the 60s and 70s. So evidently the "good old days" weren't quite as good as one might think. (Granted, it was not so epidemic as it is now.)</p>
<p>I don't think that unstructured time has disappeared. Adults are the ones who structure the kids' time. My kids went to kindergarten in the morning, played all afternoon. Once they went to school all day, they'd come home and play when school was over. I kept all kinds of craft materials around & they would make stuff. S dressed up in costumes & pretended he was a superhero until he reached kindergarten age. While the days of walking to the park unsupervised are over around here, our backyard was a good second. The neighborhood kids would play on the swingset or in the giant sandbox. The slip & slide was often out. If they were bored, they were told to find something to do ... and they did. As they got older, they rode bikes, hopped on pogo sticks, rode skateboards, hit or tossed balls, etc.</p>
<p>I won't put down other's choices, but I think it's important to realize that it isn't so much that kids "can't" have unstructured time. If they "don't," then the adults in their lives made a choice ... if it seemed like a good choice to make, then there should be no regrets.</p>
<p>My son had lots of unstructured time too, though I was able to stay home with him so that probably made it easier. He could entertain himself endlessly--still can--with books and other things. I don't think I've ever heard him say, "I'm bored."</p>
<p>I agree that it is probably easier when one parent stays home (I was able to, also). However, I had plenty of friends who worked. Some chose daycare options in which their kids had lots of unstructured play time. Others chose options that had the kids involved in structured learning at a very young age, for the majority of the day. Whatever a parent decides is fine, of course. I just felt the need to point out that unstructured time is not really a thing of the past ... there are just more opportunities to structure their time for those who want to partake.</p>
<p>Yes, sometimes I do long for the good old days. (exclude all ugliness and prejudice.) The days when a well-rounded child would be able to go to a great school. Now it takes "super-kid" with all that we parents know that entails. I long for lazy days with grandparents, now gone, sitting, one knitting and one smoking his pipe, watching their grandchildren adoringly. I long for the idealistic people who admired achievement over making money, you know, when true success was measured by the content of the character. I long for the days when cheaters never prospered. I long for long, happy summers, without the need to go the latest, greatest summer "learning" camp. No SAT prep, no AP classes, just good old-fashioned regular math and history and english. I long for the days when aspiring to become a teacher was admirable. Not everybody has to become a doctor. Remember when we just participated in P.E.? Did we even have club sports? Mostly, I long for the days when we seemed to make more time for each other as human beings. "Come and have a cup of coffee" was graciously accepted.</p>
<p>My kids had plenty of unstructured time. They did some afterschool things - chess club once a week, soccer practice no more than once a week, once a week music lessons the occassional afterschool course that interested them. They didn't get any more activie in middle school or high school. Until the oldest was in fifth grade and we moved their favorite activity (weather permitting) was to take the hose and play in our 8 foot square sandbox. They both also spent a lot of time reading.</p>
<p>As to the question - I don't long for the good old days, but I do think that my African childhood is something I'm sorry they couldn't have. We had horses in our backyard, road bikes all over the place, explored the bush...</p>
<p>^^^^ honestly that sounds much more structured than when I was a kid .</p>
<p>Pretty much the only structured actvity for kids younger than middle school age was girl scouts/boy scouts after school. There were clubs that met on Saturdays ...4H, hockey, private tennis,sailing,skating. For the most part the kids who did these were wealthy ,except for 4H
The rest of us played outside in the neighborhood... going door to door to get a game of whatever we were playing going.</p>
<p>Parents had to tell us when to come in, not to go out and play.TV was for rainy days or days that were too cold or snowy.</p>
<p>We spent more days playing board games or cards than having the all too familiar parent shuffling from " organized play " we have today.
No schedules whatsoever..unless there was a dentist or doctor visit.
Just endless hours of simple pleasures.</p>
<p>We had freedom from fears of the dark possibilities of what strangers could do to us.
I do feel that our kid's generation has missed out on the plain old fun we had.</p>
<p>
[quote]
We had freedom from fears of the dark possibilities of what strangers could do to us.
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</p>
<p>Perhaps, but when adult family members who had drunk too much alcohol told us to get into their cars to go home, we didn't think to protest, and nobody thought to tell the adult that he or she shouldn't be driving.</p>
<p>And when relatives or bosses or adult family friends harrassed us sexually, we mostly kept our mouths shut, and if we did complain, people told us that we should learn to deal with it.</p>
<p>Less than a whole generational thing, more like half of one---I notice one big difference on the corner grade school bus stop today, as opposed to when my kids were on the same stop just 10-15 years ago. ALL the parents are there, I mean all, every day rain or shine waiting with the kids. And if it's just a minor drizzle, or below 40 degrees they drive they're minivans the 2 or 300 yards to the bus stop. My kids forbade us to be anywhere near the stop unless it was pouring or a blizzard.</p>
<p>There seems to be a lot more fear out there. Like their kids will be stolen or God knows what. The news is not pleasant. I'm sure the fears are valid but it's just a shame it has to be that way.</p>
<p>One thing I wish my kids could experience from my "good old days" is a more fun high school experience. My kids don't have any time to just hang out with friends, go to the movies, ice skate, etc. With 5 or 6 AP classes, school clubs and a job they don't even have time to get even close to enough sleep. Then I'm nagging about SAT studying.... Sometimes I just feel sorry for them They're so young to be under so much pressure. The hardest thing is, even with all this work (with great academic results), they may not get into the schools that they're working so hard to get into. Maybe they'll end up at a school that they could have gotten into with a much more balanced approach. And I know- learning is great in and of itself. BUT, in all truthfulness, if college admissions weren't so difficult, they would make different decisions on what courses to take. It sure isn't the high school experience I had (before I waltzed into an Ivy League school)</p>
<p>You all know that the "good old days" was a brief interlude that lasted from the early '50s to the early '70s don't you? High school wasn't even universal until well into the 20th century.</p>
<p>Before that, "unstructured" time did not exist. If you weren't in school, you were chopping wood, delivering newspapers, running errands, weeding, hauling coal or other forms of fuel, shoveling manure, feeding chickens or any of a hundred tasks that a family depended on to keep body and soul together. My mother grew up just after the Depression and WWII; even right after WWII it was completely routine for kids to leave school at 14 or 15 and go to work on farms or in other places that would hire teens. She left home at 16 to work as a housekeeper for a farm family; luckily for her they were flexible about her responsibilities and she was able to graduate from high school. </p>
<p>From the founding of the republic to post WWII for all but a tiny upper class, childhood was a few years of a crowded, indifferent public education and endless chores until the child could be economically self sufficient in their mid-teens. In earlier centuries, the upper class expected a very broad range of accomplishment--an educated person was expected to know Greek or Latin, be able to draw competently, ride well, build a building, sew a garment, recite memorized bible verses on command, and a whole bunch of other things depending on gender. Read a biography of Thomas Jefferson or George Washington or Queen Elizabeth--it is amazing what they were expected to learn during their teens.</p>
<p>True, mombot. My parents both grew up on farms and there was a lot of work to go around. I think they managed to have some fun though.</p>
<p>1ofeach</p>
<p>Your kids didn't really <em>have</em> to do without an adolescence. There are plenty of great schools that don't require 4 years of AP classes and a cancer cure before they'll look at an application.</p>
<p>From my discussions with my dad and the fact that we both are/went to same university, he's pretty jealous that I'm going to Colgate NOW instead of back in the 1960s/1970s. He's amazed by all the choices and opportunities that I have on my fingertips here, how the campus' party scene changed for the better, more development in the area, etc. When he went, he pretty much just studied, wrote for the paper, douible-majored, went abroad for one year in Spain, and lived off-campus in his senior year. Me? I did a lot more!</p>
<p>On the other hand, he's glad that back then he didn't have to work his butt off to earn the best grades possible. When he asked me for my GPA, I told him what it was. Then I asked him back (fair enough!). He said that he didn't even remember and it was definitely not as high as mine. I said, then how did you get in Columbia for grad school? He said, it was the only school I applied and my professors got me in there. Grades weren't all that important.</p>
<p>Oh, I was so jealous when I heard that! But of course I've heard that grad schools in the 1970s had very little funding compared to today. But even so, he'd rather take today instead of the Dark Ages just simply because we have so many more opportunities.</p>
<p>But it's...hard. Oh so very hard that we have to run pretty structured lives in order to manage our time well.</p>
<p>Of course I know they could scaled things way back. But is a brilliant , driven kid going to want to make that choice? The kids they have the most in common with are on the same treadmill. Who would they hang out with if they dropped out? Really, I was just addressing "the good old days" thread- when no one even had that choice to make. I went to the same high school my kids go to. In the good old days, my high school didn't even offer APs. There were no SAT prep classes. Even the tippy top students back in the day had LOADS of free time. Just waxing nostalgia about a simpler time.</p>
<p>I had almost no free time in the mid '70s in high school; my parents had divorced and I had a part time job for my spending money, clothes and college fund. Maybe your view of it as simpler and stress free is true for you, but jobs were scarce, there wasn't as much financial aid out there, the economy sucked and so wages were very low for teens, if jobs were available at all.</p>
<p>It's true that nobody expected much of us academically besides B's in what would now be considered laughably un-rigorous classes, but there was a lot of social and economic stress to deal with, and a lot less support available for kids with learning disabilities or depression or any of a number of circumstances that are very common both then and now.</p>
<p>I am grateful that my kids have the kind of social and academic opportunities that didn't exist in the good old days. I'm glad expectations for kids are higher, and even as much as the kids achieved, they still had plenty of time for recreation and spending time with friends. The big timesuck of a part time job was not necessary for them as we are fortunate that we could allow them to focus on academics and extracurriculars. I recognize that is a luxury and I'm very grateful.</p>