So what has changed?

[Mark Wilson]

Born in '87.

I was in the "Come home when the streetlights come on" generation.
Video games existed, but our imagination was far better.

Then Pokemon happened, and we all started playing outside...with our gameboys.

The most feared person in the world was your mother and you ALWAYS respected your elders. Now, kids have no respect for the people who raised them.

The most memorable phrase of my life was "I brought you into this world, and I can take you out just as easily"

 

[IconBasser]

wow. SOOOO many curmudgeons in this thread

I agree with the idea that the introspective/anti-social types always had some form of quiet entertainment that they would prefer to outdoor activity. I usually chose to read books rather than play football. Also, I don't think kids are really that much less active than they were before. The only difference in that respect is that instead of playing in their front yards, children are usually part of organized sports teams sponsored by cities, and spend their time at organized practices.

 

[Metal Matt]

I wonder what has changed in regards to safety. Kids not walking to school, Halloween being held at 2:00 in the afternoon, no one hitchhiking. Dangerous people have always existed, but what makes them so much more prevalent now?

They aren't and I doubt they ever were , but I remember when I was in elementary school in the 90's, we had all this "stranger danger" BS taught to us. That we shouldn't talk to strangers, shouldn't go near them. Basically everyone out there could be a bad guy, so you shouldn't trust them. My parents never acted on this garbage, and I was able to go outside and play without supervision for the most part. I don't know what sparked this stuff, but it's disgusting that entire generations of kids were/are basically told to not trust anyone they don't know. I don't know if it's still taught in schools now, but it probably doesn't need to be since every kid is fixated on a TV screen playing xbox. Don't gotta worry about strangers when you never go outside.

I was born in 87.

 

[elgecko]

If you think you're at the tail end of kids who played "outside", then you obviously don't remember life before this...now get off my lawn!

 

[FilterFunk]

Also, I don't think kids are really that much less active than they were before. The only difference in that respect is that instead of playing in their front yards, children are usually part of organized sports teams sponsored by cities, and spend their time at organized practices.

I definitely have to disagree with this. I was born in '62, and I can assure you that our play area extended FAR beyond our front yards. We walked, or rode our bikes, to our friends' houses, neighborhood schools, colleges, parks, etc. Our bikes basically made the entire city our playground. There were few chubby kids, and fat kids were very rare. Plus, there were school sports, Pop Warner football and Little League baseball, so there were plenty of organized sports as well. I understand young people getting tired of hearing about how things were different back in the day, but in many cases, they WERE very different. That's not just an old guy looking at the past through rose-colored glasses; it's the way it was.

 

[jmattbassplaya]

I definitely have to disagree with this. I was born in '62, and I can assure you that our play area extended FAR beyond our front yards. We walked, or rode our bikes, to our friends' houses, neighborhood schools, colleges, parks, etc. Our bikes basically made the entire city our playground. There were few chubby kids, and fat kids were very rare. Plus, there were school sports, Pop Warner football and Little League baseball, so there were plenty of organized sports as well. I understand young people getting tired of hearing about how things were different back in the day, but in many cases, they WERE very different. That's not just an old guy looking at the past through rose-colored glasses; it's the way it was.

Gotta agree with this and I'm only 21. I remember when I was young the neighborhood was always full of kids running around outside. We almost always had a a daily football game, kickball game, or baseball game after school in one of the coves, and you could always see other kids riding bikes, playing basketball or street hockey, or just running around pretending.

You really don't see that anymore, and I'm honestly amazed how empty the neighborhood is every time I come home from college. And it's not that the kids aren't there - they are - they just don't play outside like kids use to. It really makes me sad.

 

[Tommygunn]

Gotta agree with this and I'm only 21. I remember when I was young the neighborhood was always full of kids running around outside. We almost always had a a daily football game, kickball game, or baseball game after school in one of the coves, and you could always see other kids riding bikes, playing basketball or street hockey, or just running around pretending.

You really don't see that anymore, and I'm honestly amazed how empty the neighborhood is every time I come home from college. And it's not that the kids aren't there - they are - they just don't play outside like kids use to. It really makes me sad.

This was my exact point. Kids do not play outside anymore. Like at all.

 

[lowendfriend]

I was born in early 1951....

I never remember NOT having TV (albeit B&W and only 2 channels)....I Love Lucy ran its first episode when I was about 9 months old.

We used to compete for who had the most transistors in their transistor radio.

We played in little league and wiffle ball in the street >>till the streetlights came on<<<. That was the Big Signal to Go Home.

We walked to school over a mile each way (and came home for lunch!).

We rode bikes that were made of heavy steel and must've weighed 50 lbs.

Cowboys and Indians and Superman (yeah the original with George Reeves).

We actually had to cut our family's lawn with (get this) a reel type push mower.

Elvis was this new Rock N Roll sensation in the pre-Beatles years.

At 6, I rode street cars by myself (transferring in downtown Pittsburgh) to get out to Carnegie Museum out in Oakland (PA) and learned to refuse drinks offered from paper bags on the bus or streetcar.

We could actually go out on Halloween and trust that people wouldn't put razor blades or needles in our apples or poison our candy. (I do remember when those things started to happen though.)

Unrelated neighbors would keep an eye out for you and set you straight if they saw you up to something.

Technology began for me at about age 7 or eight when I built a telescope at Buhl Planetarium and got a mail order kit to build a crystal radio that needed no batteries to operate! (how's that for green?).

I watched Alan Shepard take the first suborbital flight in space.

Of course, watched every launch thru and including Apollo 13....live.

I shook hands with John F. Kennedy.

I was Number 125 in the first year of the draft lottery (they went to 125 that year but not all of 125's batch....not me.)

I worked at McDonalds when you had to make the french fries by hand and carry 100 lb sacks of potatos out of the basement. They only served hamburgers and cheeseburgers when I started.

And now after working for 46 years, I'm retired...just got home from a gig. Looking for a boat and checking out the bird migrations on Cape Cod. Yeah!

No charge for this Kindle version of my biography....

 

[jmattbassplaya]

I was born in early 1951....

I never remember NOT having TV (albeit B&W and only 2 channels)....I Love Lucy ran its first episode when I was about 9 months old.

We used to compete for who had the most transistors in their transistor radio.

We played in little league and wiffle ball in the street >>till the streetlights came on<<<. That was the Big Signal to Go Home.

We walked to school over a mile each way (and came home for lunch!).

We rode bikes that were made of heavy steel and must've weighed 50 lbs.

Cowboys and Indians and Superman (yeah the original with George Reeves).

We actually had to cut our family's lawn with (get this) a reel type push mower.

Elvis was this new Rock N Roll sensation in the pre-Beatles years.

At 6, I rode street cars by myself (transferring in downtown Pittsburgh) to get out to Carnegie Museum out in Oakland (PA) and learned to refuse drinks offered from paper bags on the bus or streetcar.

We could actually go out on Halloween and trust that people wouldn't put razor blades or needles in our apples or poison our candy. (I do remember when those things started to happen though.)

Unrelated neighbors would keep an eye out for you and set you straight if they saw you up to something.

Technology began for me at about age 7 or eight when I built a telescope at Buhl Planetarium and got a mail order kit to build a crystal radio that needed no batteries to operate! (how's that for green?).

I watched Alan Shepard take the first suborbital flight in space.

Of course, watched every launch thru and including Apollo 13....live.

I shook hands with John F. Kennedy.

I was Number 125 in the first year of the draft lottery (they went to 125 that year but not all of 125's batch....not me.)

I worked at McDonalds when you had to make the french fries by hand and carry 100 lb sacks of potatos out of the basement. They only served hamburgers and cheeseburgers when I started.

And now after working for 46 years, I'm retired...just got home from a gig. Looking for a boat and checking out the bird migrations on Cape Cod. Yeah!

No charge for this Kindle version of my biography....

Really cool stuff I'd love to hear more about peoples' lives from the good ol' days (if you don't mind me saying that).

 

[LiquidMidnight]

I wonder what has changed in regards to safety. Kids not walking to school, Halloween being held at 2:00 in the afternoon, no one hitchhiking. Dangerous people have always existed, but what makes them so much more prevalent now?

Social scientists call it the availability hueristic. Basically, the ability to imagine a situation as being vivid and easy to imagine makes a person think it has a greater chance of happening than what it really would. It's kind of like people who are afraid of flying on a plane due to a crash, even though they're statistically more likely to be involved in an automobile accident.

I don't want to point out any single cause without empirical support, but as Jmatt pointed out, the media does its share of damage, particuarly with shows created to scare middle America such as To Catch a Predator.

They aren't and I doubt they ever were , but I remember when I was in elementary school in the 90's, we had all this "stranger danger" BS taught to us. That we shouldn't talk to strangers, shouldn't go near them. Basically everyone out there could be a bad guy, so you shouldn't trust them. My parents never acted on this garbage, and I was able to go outside and play without supervision for the most part. I don't know what sparked this stuff, but it's disgusting that entire generations of kids were/are basically told to not trust anyone they don't know. I don't know if it's still taught in schools now, but it probably doesn't need to be since every kid is fixated on a TV screen playing xbox. Don't gotta worry about strangers when you never go outside.

I was born in 87.

I remember the whole "don't talk to strangers" bit when I was a kid too. Funny enough, they never told us why not to talk to strangers. The concept of molestation was not even close to being on my radar. I wasn't rich, so I knew that ransom was out of the question. I honestly thought, "Wow, there must be a lot of people out there who want to have a child so bad but can't, so they'll resort to kidnapping one!"

 

[Batmensch]

I was born in 1954.

In 1960 my family moved from Montreal, Canada to Syracuse, NY. Because I only spoke French and had no experience with them, I was the only white kid on our block who would play with the black kids in our neighborhood. Of course this must have raised more than a few eyebrows among our neighbors, since back then black and whites rarely associated with each other. Being a little kid I didn't care about that, besides, I had no idea what they were saying anyways! Syracuse, being a northern city, was more liberal that more southern locations, but that didn't mean there was no racism at all, just a little less than cities south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Today I see black and white kids hanging out together like it was nothing at all. They play together as children, they date, marry, raise families of their own, and nobody thinks anything of it. It amazes me at times when I think about it, that in my own lifetime one of the biggest taboos in society is no longer around. Now that's progress!

Same here, more or less. Born In ireland in '54, moved to Montreal Canada in '55- move to SE PA about 1962-63 lived in a town that was pretty much divided in half racially (there was actually an almost visible dividing line between the black and the white neighborhoods) but the grade school I went to was mostly black. Me personally I didn't even think about race all that much except for what I was seeing on TV about the civil rights struggle.
Yeah it's different today, not quite as bad, but racism is still out there, it's just a little more well hidden, since it's not as socially acceptable as it once was.

 

[stratovani]

I remember being in the Boy Scouts in the mid-60s. On camping trips we used big heavy canvas tents that looked like they came from the Civil War, with no floors and heavy wooden tent poles. Our cookware was a small nesting mess kit which was no different from the ones GIs used in WW2, with one side permanently black from the campfire soot. The Scout uniforms were made of heavy cotton, and you sweated like crazy in them. Some Scouts had the summer uniform, which were slightly more comfortable, but we weren't rich, so I had to make do with my winter uniform during the summer. I had an "all-season" sleeping bag, which meant that I cooked to death in the summer and froze my butt off during the winter. The toilet was a ditch dug a couple of feet into the ground, with a tree trunk to sit on and a roll of toilet paper hung on a twig, with mosquitos buzzing around your butt as you sat over the tree trunk dropping one. With all this, did I have fun? HELL, YEAH!

 

[HEIST]

Ok, there's also this. My sister and I were raised where when we're not in school we're playing. Riding bikes to friends' houses etc. echoing what everyone else has done...and then my baby sister was born. She's 10 years younger, and when she hit grade 4 my mom let her walk home from school alone. The school is a block away. Our neighbour came knocking on our door to lecture us on how it isn't safe to let your child be unsupervised and it isn't good parenting. (we lived in the safest community EVER)

Now my sister gets driven to her friends' houses instead.

It really is the parents that makes the call whether you're allowed to do this or that. In my first post I said I found that the biggest difference is that the parents are not allowing their child the same kind of freedom as two decades ago.

 

[drummer5359]

I was born in 1959 in the south hills section of Pittsburgh. (A mid-sized city.) When the weather was nice I was outside riding bicyles, playing games, or sports, just hanging outside with friends.

In the winter months I had books, music and art to keep me busy. I think that it helped to make my generation a little more well-rounded.

And, some of us still find time to read, draw, play music and play sports to this day. (That didn't keep me or my friends from becoming computer literate.)

 

[hbarcat]

There is no doubt at all that far fewer kids are active today than in the past and it is clearly due to the almost universal practice of staring at a video screen of some kind or another for hours every day. Either watching one of a multitude of TV channels, playing video games or using the computer. It's virtually replaced running around outside as a way to spend time.

It's also replaced other once nearly sacred activities such as eating dinner together as a family. :scowl:

My teen daughter and her friends won't go outside at all if it's too hot or too cold or too windy or if it's dark or anything else other than 100% comfortable. They're all a bunch of marshmallows and most of them don't know how to do jack **** for themselves. If it doesn't come in a box and can be simply unwrapped and thrown into the microwave then they don't know how to cook it. It's no wonder to me that the unemployment rate for 18 to 25 year olds is so high . . . they have few marketable skills.

Now get off my lawn!

 

[TheSuzie]

Arcades have changed to the point that I would likely not go near one again. Everything is so loud and electronic sounding. I feel like I can't even hear the sound of people having fun in such a place. No clanks and rattles, sounds of rolling balls etc. No pauses in the action followed by an exclamation point. Everything has constant music built in. Feels like one is caught audio crossfire.

And now after working for 46 years, I'm retired...just got home from a gig. Looking for a boat and checking out the bird migrations on Cape Cod. Yeah!

No charge for this Kindle version of my biography....

As a child, I spent every summer except one at Nantasket beach. We swam, rode bikes, took sailing lessons from some town program. I walked miles and miles up and down that beach. When I was a teen, I worked part time in a supermarket and was constantly on my feet.

During the school year, all the kids in the neighborhood played together. Until we reached a certain age boys and many girls played sports together. I'm not just talking about things like kickball and "off the steps" (a whole afternoon of action from just a tennis ball) but also football and street hockey. Since I spent the school year in a much more urbanized area, we all rode bikes less and walked a lot more. I used to go for walks of several miles when I felt like getting out of the house.

I also read a lot but somehow that never got in the way of me spending plenty of time outdoors being very active.

I find it to be a totally different world now. Makes me feel ancient.

Peace,
S

 

[WalterBush]

I was born in '75. The biggest changes I've seen are all cultural or social. Technology just made those changes easier. They would've happened anyway.

Parents from my generation and a little earlier seem more interested in keeping their kids happy and quiet so they can pursue their own interests rather than raising their kids to be people who won't have their *** handed to them by life. Much easier to plug a nine-year old onto a computer than showing them how to take care of things around the house, or how to save/earn money, fix things that break, whatever. Teaching kids takes away from "personal time," which seems to be an obsession for my generation. Strange, I don't think I ever heard my parents use the phrase even once.

Technology has made escapism and communication so easy that people seem to accept cheap crap where they used to discriminate as little; sure, my dad read sci-fi pulp and I read comic books and played Venture at night after work/school, but there's a huge gap between unwinding from the day by reading the latest installment in the Honor Harrington series (or X-men comic) or playing video games for a short period of time for fun, and having Real Housewives of Wherever beamed straight to your iPhone on a lunch break before playing Farmville on your company's dime.

It's a matter of proportion rather than technology, I guess; people used to use entertainment to relax after something meaningful. Now it seems to be an end in and of itself.

Easier communications through technology seems to be double-edged; it's made superficial relationships with no depth much easier. Nothing wrong with that, but I think people are better off with one real friend rather than 500 FB friends and some people they only text. Lots of people I know will cultivate many online or text-only friends because it's easy, but can't seem to maintain one real, deep friendship with another human being because that takes work. From this, we get all kinds of problems. At the same time, people who naturally communicated anyway seem to be much more effective at maintaining active friendships worldwide, so there's a plus side, too I guess.

Dang, now I'm slightly depressed and this post is way too long. But those are the differences I've seen in the last 35 years. Much of it within the last 15.

 

[MakiSupaStar]

If you think you're at the tail end of kids who played "outside", then you obviously don't remember life before this...now get off my lawn!

Yeah this was my childhood too. I also had Pong (still got it in the box somewhere too).

 

[TheSuzie]

Parents from my generation and a little earlier seem more interested in keeping their kids happy and quiet so they can pursue their own interests rather than raising their kids to be people who won't have their *** handed to them by life.
.....

Technology has made escapism and communication so easy that people seem to accept cheap crap where they used to discriminate as little;

I think this is important as I notice that some younger relatives and friends children really lack basic life skills and also the sense that they are the ones responsible for making their own lives happen. These are not children of disinterested or uninvolved parents. The two factors I see are either parents who were not strong examples of self-determination and leadership or parents who were so overstressed that a lot of the messages got lost in the whirlwind.

As far as the escapism goes, a friend of mine wrote a play about a group of young people who had each constructed a totally different reality, a very different interpretation of the everyday world and how these people did or didn't communicate, interact and how they created reinforcement for their delusions through their interplay. I am afraid that we are headed more and more in that direction, where people don't just have disagreements about facts but are each lost in their own strange interpretation of reality that is very far off the beaten path. I am also afraid that the other pole will be to swallow the stuff that is being dished out for our consumption and that very few people will exist somewhere between those poles.

S

 

[BogeyBass]

If you think you're at the tail end of kids who played "outside", then you obviously don't remember life before this...now get off my lawn!

Awesome now my original box collection makes some sense, the Atari 2600 is the actual box i got for Christmas, and the nintendo and wanna be radio shack pong box i found later.
[Invalid or Expired Link Removed]

I was not much of a game player as a kid, i rode my bike around alot, and liked to play in the yard and be outside. otherwise cutting school and jamming at my friends garage was the rest of school days. I remember watching Mtv starting out when they actually played videos. Then remember everything changing at once in the "grunge" era. All i remember was thinking everything was lame and the songs from the 60's and 70's seemed better to me. I was also fascinated with the early space program, and thought that Mercury Gemini and Apollo mission were way cooler than the Space Shuttle. The redstone rocket is my favorite, i know apollo was big and cool, i just like the redstone and the tiny mercury capsule.