Crazy Kids or Am I Too Old?

Is it just me or have the kid’s gone crazy?  I look at some of the things my kids and my nephews are doing and try to think back to when I was their ages.  Were we really that bad?  I would say comparatively speaking we were not.  Things were different back then though.  Discipline was a mandatory thing, paddling’s happened at school (hope mom and dad don’t find out), and we had a certain behavioral expectation.  The majority of the time we did not do something we thought we might want to because of what our parents might do to us if we got caught.  We did not have Xbox, PS2, PS3, GB, GBDS, or any of the rest of the alphabet soup to take away and TV was only 3 channels—when we got to watch something besides the news it was a special thing.  So what did they have to work with?  Yup you guessed it…we got spankings, stood in the corner, sent to our rooms (which was a terrible place back then—all we did was sleep in there!!), or were assigned extra chores.  There weren’t any of this “time out” or bad marks…we were the ones that got the bad marks on our butts.  Was that a bad thing?  In retrospect I think not.  We had manners.  I would never have dreamed of cussing out a teacher, or yelling at my mom in the grocery…it just was not done.  The consequences were far too great.  We might lose our precious Saturday morning cartoons or have to stay in our room (you know-the dungeon) all weekend with nothing to do-not even a book!  The other thing we had over them is that we were creative and we were without all those computer games, and game systems, and other nifty electronics we can’t live without today.  We actually had to think of things to do.  One of our favorite things to do when I was a kid (we had a dirt backyard-no grass to cut) we would create mazes in the dirt, complete with safe spots and dead ends or we would build our fantasy houses complete with 2 car garage and swimming pool—and we had books!  Oh my god the places I went as a kid, and without ever leaving my yard.  Kids today have no imagination or creativity short of finding more intricate ways to cut themselves to deal with how bad their life sucks.  That isn’t to say that it was all good for us either, just not as bad as it is today.  Kids today think they have it bad…I have news for them.  They have it way better than we did and yet somehow, we ended up better off for it.