Kids These Days

Contrary to popular opinion I actually grew up as a fairly normal kid. I had my issues, sure - not every kid is blind in one eye, and I couldn’t keep up with my other friends because I had some heart trouble (ventral-septal defect for you smarty pants out there) - but other than that I was fairly normal.

My friends and I used to play the usual games kids played, games like tag (and it’s numerous variations (loved freeze tag, but what is the deal with TV tag?), dodge ball (and the REAL version: army dodgeball), football (always tackle, no pads, 24+ kids to a team and all at the same time), “beat-each-other-with-sticks,” etc... We’d make up games that usually involved throwing a hard object at one another. (Another personal favorite was our absolutely brilliant test of manhood - “Put honey on a bunch of bread and then attack the swarming bees with baseball bats”)

Shit, during the winter we had good ol’ fashion snowball fights and employed special weapons such as the hoard of snowballs that would be stored in the freezer overnight, and the devastating ‘snow-shovel’ catapult with icicle spikes installed. 

Basically shit wasn’t fun unless someone could get hurt. And if we got hurt, we got up and did it again because otherwise we lost that fucking game.

So what the fuck happened to kids today?

Parents are so paranoid anymore that it takes all the fun out of being a kid, and by association all the fun out of being an adult. When I see a parent with their kid on a leash at the mall I don’t think, “God I miss those days. Those were good times.” Instead I want to smack the parent upside the head for not being able to pay attention to their own offspring. Our metal death-swingsets have been replaced by ‘playscapes’ that you’d think came out of the Rubbermaid factory.

I remember Halloween nights with the neighborhood streets flooded with kids, every neighbor handed out candy (or crab legs in one instance.) Now, there is hardly anyone handing out candy, let alone decorating, and all the kids are Trick-or-Treating at special ‘safe’ places. I saw a bunch of kids this year running around collecting candy at Westland mall, but it as very few. 

When I was a kid we played outside, we got dirty, we got hurt, and we are stronger for it. If the current trend keeps up our kids will soon be overly sterilized apathetic blobs. I’ll drop the gauntlet here and now  - “Most kids are pussies, prove to me otherwise.”