The only worry I had was that Old Man Miller might be hiding out behind the shed trying to catch us running through his garden when we played “Tag” in our back yards.
If you grew up in the ‘70s in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Our childhood was essentially a 1950s childhood, a great time to be a kid.
We played outside all day long in the summertime and no kid was ready to come home for dinner or when the street lights turned on.
We had zero involvement in the adult world. There was one television in our home and it broadcast the news an hour or so a day, but we never watched the news.
Most broadcasting was family oriented. I still have fond memories of going grocery shopping with my dad every Thursday night and arriving home just as the credits for “The Waltons” began to play.
We’d enjoy Snyder of Berlin potato chips — the giant aluminum-foil family-sized bag — and French onion dip as my sisters and I gathered around to watch the show about John Boy and his large rural family making their way through the Great Depression.
The closest thing we had to social media was the CB radio it took me weeks to save up for.
I dubbed myself “The Trail Blazer” and chatted with other “good buddies” into the wee hours about trivial things.
We lived simple lives in what appeared — to us, anyhow — to be a simple world. Our suburban world was free of chaos and suffering, because we weren’t exposed to it.
It’s not possible for children to just be children that way anymore — because children are immersed in the awfulness of the adult world through 24-hour news channels and social media.
One of my nephews is now 24, but I remember something he did that never could have happened in my childhood.
My sister was driving him down the highway in heavy rains and he began to panic because of a sensationalized documentary he saw about hurricanes on the Weather Channel.
He believed that hurricanes happened regularly and that he and his mother were going to die for the simple reason that a cable channel had to over-dramatize its content to draw in viewers.
Now add social media into the mix.
Kids are getting the same sensationalized news adults get — and the same often-wrong information — through their social media feeds.
Now, in the aftermath of another horrendous school shooting, there is great national sadness, but nobody is surprised — least of all our children.
School shootings are ever present in their minds, reports Yahoo News.
I had trouble enough focusing on my lessons. How do kids focus now when, every day in class, they wonder if they may be shot?
Last December, NPR reported the U.S Surgeon General issued a stark warning about the state of our children’s mental health.
There is a direct link between the proliferation of social media platforms and the many mental and other issues our youth are suffering, according to a recent National Library of Medicine study.
The shooter in Texas used social media to broadcast his horrible intentions.
How I wish our children could be free to be happy, anxiety-free kids again — as we were when our only worry in the world was that Old Man Miller might be hiding out in his garden.
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Copyright 2022 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.
Tom Purcell is an author and humor columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Email him at [email protected].
“How I wish our children could be free to be happy, anxiety-free kids again — as we were when our only worry in the world was that Old Man Miller might be hiding out in his garden.” I will second that.
I was born in 1953, so I grew up during the 50’s and 60’s. I grew up on a small farm with the usual farm and domestic animals. It was my Grandmother’s place—my Mother and myself lived with here until she remarried when I was 9. I guess I grew up somewhat as a pioneer—there was no running water and no bathroom. The two-story farmhouse was heated by wood and coal—and it was open doors and windows in the summertime. Life was simple and I thought it was the best. And let me tell you, Granny was the best Southern cook in the world—did a lot of her cooking on a cast iron wood stove. So many good memories.
Today’s kids are threatened, bullied, coerced, brainwashed, and propagandized to such an extent that they can’t imagine a world like the one I lived in growing up. I had Looney Tunes, Lassie, Rin-Tin-Tin, Westerns, playing outside every chance I got, enjoying fun times with cousins and friends—Disney was actually Disney. Today, it isn’t just the shape the world is in, it is Leftist politics, ideology, and agenda that has sabotaged childhood. I don’t know that it can ever go back to how it was when I was a kid, but it would sure be nice.
Kids back in the 50’s when I grew up were anxiety free because most had a mother AND A FATHER whose authority was based on the acceptance of the truth, and we kids allowed them to rule because they earned our love and trust by showing proper example that never wavered from the good, and a genuine love and respect for the worth of each other.
The coddled single parent co-dependency Child of today is dependent on the guilt ridden anxious parent indeed for whatever he wants. The parent is useful to the child, but where there is only utility, there is often very little real love. Just as in human affection, where there is merely an eros or an erotic gratification, a sensual love, there is not necessarily any deep affection. One is interested in the other only on account of the pleasure that the other gives. Children often can only be interested in the utility that the parent provides. They expect the parent to do everything for them as children and when they grow up, they expect THE STATE to do everything for them as their created Child-in-an-adult-body entitlement raising. Just how do these who never learn the art of Self-governance of emotions, let alone self-restraint from the most learned evil need to take control be trusted to properly handle a gun and respect the lives of others he just views as tools to be used for his immediate needs and pleasures?
Parent(s) no longer know how, to be parents, Or want ot.. THEY Prefer being their kids “BEST FRIENDS”..