When I was a kid (not to sound like one of the joke emails that gets passed around), kids played outside all day. Literally. Little girls sometimes ran around topless, just as the boys did, until they were at least 3 or maybe 4. Fast food existed, but was not something we got often; spankings were. We said "please" and "thank you". Our worries were whether Mom would cook dreaded liver for dinner and did we really have to come home when it got dark. Especially if Mom was cooking dreaded liver for dinner.

Now, as my generation is somewhere along the spectrum of raising their own children, kids are dressed like miniature adults, many advertising a major sportswear maker (talk about brilliant marketing). They have play dates, and parents wouldn't dream of turning their children loose on the streets for an entire day. Fast food is the norm, much to the endangerment of our health. I read that some little girls are hitting puberty at 4. I also read that the meats we eat are full of hormones and antibiotics. The fruits and vegetables are laden with pesticides and taste nothing like the produce our parents enjoyed (according to my dad). So why the surprise that our own hormones are so altered and antibiotic resistant strains of whatnot abound? Why the suprise that we're allergic to everything and asthma, something my childhood friends had never heard of, is quite common?
Why the surprise that our health is in the toilet, if we are what we eat? It's not even safe to drink the water.

Spankings. Well, we just don't go there much, for fear that we'll be labeled abusive. Kids don't even try to stay out of the way of traffic anymore, they know that if a driver hits them, the driver is at fault. I've seen adolescents just dare a driver not to stop. What they don't seem to consider is that if the driver were to hit them, the damage would be done. Perhaps they feel injury or even death would be an improvement over the boredom they currently experience. I'm using sweeping generalizations here, I realize that not all kids are in this boat. Far too many, though, are.
Kids worry more. State assessment exams, gangs, weapons and drugs in school. Keeping up with the Jones'. They honestly believe they're deprived if they don't have an X-box. Perhaps they are. After all, we've burned the books we grew up with and rewritten tales encompassing consequence to reflect bright and shiny happiness. What else are they to do for entertainment?

The figurative they say America has become a service-oriented country. If that's the case, we're in mighty deep trouble. Service of quality seems to be rapidly on the decline as multitudes of children who have everything but what they really need reach adulthood and their worn out parents struggle just to keep going.
The desire to provide a better life for our children is honorable. I have a hard time seeing what our kids get now anything resembling a better life. They're less educated, less sociable in a positive sense (do you know your neighbors?), more depressed, staying at home longer because there's no way they could afford their own apartment, and generally less healthy than we, the kids who ate dirt. Now we wouldn't think of allowing them to eat dirt. It might have uranium or plutonium in it. Heck, so might the tomatoes.
Our children aren't just angry, they're infuriated, and rightly so. What happened? Where the hell are we going from here? Does life really have to be so hard plastic?


My kids grew up with fast food and video games, too.
As the saying goes, we do the best we can with what we have at the time. There is some truth to that.  I just believe we can do better than this.
Anna