moonglowWere We the Last Kids to Play Outside?
February 16th 2008 14:20
Over coffee the other day, two friends and I were lamenting the state of today’s children. When I say children, I mean anyone from the age of eighteen down – I wouldn’t want to leave any youth group out of my lamentations. It all started with the observation of how very suddenly, girls got trashy. And when I say trashy, I mean super trashy. I don’t mean that in a Grandma kind of ‘in my day, skirts were never that short’ way – I mean pancake make up and eyeliner worn to school, I mean weekends spent walking around shopping centres sporting slogan tee shirts proclaiming their hotness; I mean bandage skirts and Bratz push up bras for the prepubescent (yes they exist, for the flat-chested adolescents out there who feel inferior, yes I find that weird and yes I feel the need to warn them that small boobs are for life, you’re always going to feel inferior to the more femininely proportioned, deal with it). And I mean Myspace documenting it every step of the way.
Of course, we had to cover the joint ‘I never dressed like that at 16’ diatribe and then ponder where everything suddenly plunged into Supre (we think about two years after we finished school, kids suddenly stopped spending their McDonalds earnings on the Body Shop and started funding Supre’s plight to dress all adolescents like they’re turning tricks as an after school activity. Which, let’s face it, they very well could be.
We quickly reached, in resigned tones, how fast kids seem to grow up, and how it gets faster with every passing year and, inevitably, we got around to the ‘well I was never allowed to do that when I was that age’ introspective trawl through our pure childhoods. We swapped some war stories, rolled our eyes at how scandalous smacking has become (and never has it been so necessary) vowed to smack our children if they were naughty, and all soberly agreed that the promise of ‘or I’ll tell your father’ was enough to instil the fear of the devil in us all.
For the purposes of this column, and because a good bitch about the youth of today isn’t complete without one, allow me a brief trawl through my rich and varied childhood …
I am an eighties baby. I grew up with cubby houses and cabbage patch dolls, with a bike and a mini menagerie that fell under my sister and my tender care. I grew up with my imagination. We simply weren’t allowed to be bored. Not with the vast backyard we had, not with endless Enid Blyton books at our fingertips, not with the butter cake to perfect (which I never did) or the swing set my father had built in the lone spell of DIY I have ever witnessed. When it got dark we begged for a sleepover with our friends from down the road, and spent the evenings attempting to hold séances, playing hide and seek with a torch or devising a dance routine to the cassette of the moment (mine was, mortifyingly, Olivia Newton John’s ‘Back to Basics’ Greatest Hits).
I am prepared to put it out there – I think we were the last kids to play outside – or, more accurately (so as not to offend the parents out there who forbid computer games and encourage backyard cricket) products of the types of childhoods we had are a dying breed. An endangered species.
See, I didn’t grow up with a Game Boy or Grand Theft Auto (or is it Grand Auto Theft? I can never remember) or Nintendo or a Barbie laptop – in fact the computer held no lustre for me until the discovery of ICQ when I was 14. (I cannot lie, at my most physically awkward, ICQ gave me a social life I probably wouldn’t have had otherwise). I didn’t get a mobile phone till I was 16, and my first laptop, at 17, was a birthday present on the provision I worked my ass off for my final year at school. And let it be said, this was at a time when laptops didn’t feature alongside the list of textbooks and PE uniform, and mobiles were confiscated if they ever left the locker. Obviously they did, but my point is, mobiles are now confiscated only if they ring in class. I mean, what?
It’s not that these technological delights didn’t exist, of course they did. We had a computer, sure, and it came with some CD Roms (bet you haven’t heard that term in a while) – I became intimate with San Diego Zoo if I was outstandingly bored on a rainy Sunday and occasionally attempted some terrifying game that comprised of avoiding a faceless hermit and obtaining bizarre hidden treasure. It’s just that they weren’t as ubiquitous as they are now nor deemed as necessary for a child’s development – or, more aptly, for their entertainment because Mummy and Daddy forgot to say no a few too many times during the formative years.
Of course, it helps that what was once so not done is now perfectly acceptable – I refer, of course, to practices such as Gameboys at restaurant dinner tables, everyone under the age of 16 not emerging from their bedrooms at family gatherings because their keyboards are sutured to their fingers and their Myspace accounts sutured to their sense of self.
See, I just don’t know whether kids are getting more and more spoilt and thus pushing the parameters of social normality – and getting their way … or, in a time of More More More and Now Now Now, social constricts are loosening and the kids are simply living up to what isn’t expected of them.
Of course, we had to cover the joint ‘I never dressed like that at 16’ diatribe and then ponder where everything suddenly plunged into Supre (we think about two years after we finished school, kids suddenly stopped spending their McDonalds earnings on the Body Shop and started funding Supre’s plight to dress all adolescents like they’re turning tricks as an after school activity. Which, let’s face it, they very well could be.
We quickly reached, in resigned tones, how fast kids seem to grow up, and how it gets faster with every passing year and, inevitably, we got around to the ‘well I was never allowed to do that when I was that age’ introspective trawl through our pure childhoods. We swapped some war stories, rolled our eyes at how scandalous smacking has become (and never has it been so necessary) vowed to smack our children if they were naughty, and all soberly agreed that the promise of ‘or I’ll tell your father’ was enough to instil the fear of the devil in us all.
For the purposes of this column, and because a good bitch about the youth of today isn’t complete without one, allow me a brief trawl through my rich and varied childhood …
I am an eighties baby. I grew up with cubby houses and cabbage patch dolls, with a bike and a mini menagerie that fell under my sister and my tender care. I grew up with my imagination. We simply weren’t allowed to be bored. Not with the vast backyard we had, not with endless Enid Blyton books at our fingertips, not with the butter cake to perfect (which I never did) or the swing set my father had built in the lone spell of DIY I have ever witnessed. When it got dark we begged for a sleepover with our friends from down the road, and spent the evenings attempting to hold séances, playing hide and seek with a torch or devising a dance routine to the cassette of the moment (mine was, mortifyingly, Olivia Newton John’s ‘Back to Basics’ Greatest Hits).
I am prepared to put it out there – I think we were the last kids to play outside – or, more accurately (so as not to offend the parents out there who forbid computer games and encourage backyard cricket) products of the types of childhoods we had are a dying breed. An endangered species.
See, I didn’t grow up with a Game Boy or Grand Theft Auto (or is it Grand Auto Theft? I can never remember) or Nintendo or a Barbie laptop – in fact the computer held no lustre for me until the discovery of ICQ when I was 14. (I cannot lie, at my most physically awkward, ICQ gave me a social life I probably wouldn’t have had otherwise). I didn’t get a mobile phone till I was 16, and my first laptop, at 17, was a birthday present on the provision I worked my ass off for my final year at school. And let it be said, this was at a time when laptops didn’t feature alongside the list of textbooks and PE uniform, and mobiles were confiscated if they ever left the locker. Obviously they did, but my point is, mobiles are now confiscated only if they ring in class. I mean, what?
It’s not that these technological delights didn’t exist, of course they did. We had a computer, sure, and it came with some CD Roms (bet you haven’t heard that term in a while) – I became intimate with San Diego Zoo if I was outstandingly bored on a rainy Sunday and occasionally attempted some terrifying game that comprised of avoiding a faceless hermit and obtaining bizarre hidden treasure. It’s just that they weren’t as ubiquitous as they are now nor deemed as necessary for a child’s development – or, more aptly, for their entertainment because Mummy and Daddy forgot to say no a few too many times during the formative years.
Of course, it helps that what was once so not done is now perfectly acceptable – I refer, of course, to practices such as Gameboys at restaurant dinner tables, everyone under the age of 16 not emerging from their bedrooms at family gatherings because their keyboards are sutured to their fingers and their Myspace accounts sutured to their sense of self.
See, I just don’t know whether kids are getting more and more spoilt and thus pushing the parameters of social normality – and getting their way … or, in a time of More More More and Now Now Now, social constricts are loosening and the kids are simply living up to what isn’t expected of them.
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