How Did We Do It?

You've seen them plastered all over the net; in concert with yesterday's post I found another internet treat addressing this very same issue with some salient comments intermixed.

If you are in your 40s and 50s, considering today's pampered and coddled children never allowed to fail, don't you wonder how you managed to survive your childhood?

Yeah, me neither.

Consider:

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, our cribs were painted with lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our pushbikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

Riding in the back of a pick-up on a warm day was a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hoses and NOT from a bottle.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle, and no one died from this.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soft drink with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING.

We would leave home in the morning, play all day and, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on, despite no one being able to reach us all day, we were fine.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times,we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 399 channels on cable, no videotaped movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms -- we had friends, and we went outside and found them.

I bought green plastic soldiers and made wars all over the back yard; headquarters was a cardboard box. The grass was the ocean. I was popular because I had all the Tonka and Matchbox and Dinky cars and trucks.

Myself and the local kids would go down to the Metropolitan Army Navy store at the corner of Fair Oaks and Marconi on our bikes, buy our green helmet liners, web belts, canteens, shovels, ammo pouches, boots, and then ride to Ancil Hoffman park with our plastic handguns and plastic rifles and shoot the crap out of each other, roll down hills, clutch our chests, then argue over who was dead and who wasn't, who got shot and who didn't.

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

If one mother said one thing, it was like our own mother said it. We knew when we were in trouble. We knew the moment it happened one mother was telephoning the other -- and we were in the Doghouse.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, paste from the jar, and no one died.

We were given catapults for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

All the kids in the neighborhood couldn't wait for late winter, when we could pull up the long green weeds in the field behind our houses and have dirt clod wars.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them.

We built go karts out of Briggs & Stratton engines, and mini-bikes out of the same engines. Pat Green and I built a mini-bike with an engine that had no brakes but we could disengage the clutch; we used our feet to stop.

Our school teams had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that.

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law.

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever.

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

• Failure is normal; success is the exception.
• Then came the government;
• Then came regulations;
• Then came the hordes of attorneys;
• Then came the lawsuits;
• Then came the "educators;"

And I would posit: what have we created? Are our children better for all of this, are they better equipped to take on a world economy and world competition?

Many of you are parents: I'd like your answer.

BZ