Kids Today Are Boring

Hey everyone, Happy Easter!

As I was riding down the street with my 11 and 17 year old daughters I noticed that there no kids outside playing and I asked them where are all of the kids at?  Not looking up from their individual activities of texting and thumbing through the iPod they simply shrugged their shoulders in an I dunno type of gesture.  

The next afternoon when the weather was nice I walked outside and again no children were out playing.  Reminiscing back to when I was a kid I remembered when we were outside playing from the time we woke up until the time that the streetlights came on.  It was so that on any given sunny day if a person were to ride down any street U.S.A they would see children outside playing anything from double-dutch, Chinese jump rope, hop scotch and my all time favorite kickball.

We had our own kickball league on Sycamore Street and we didn't need specialized shirts, a regulated kickball and actual bases.  All we needed for a good game of kickball is players and a ball from the local Dollar General and it was on!  First base was a knee-sized crack in the street, second base was a tree stump in the neighbor's yard, third base was a sewer cover that was in my grandmother's yard and home was an X drawn daily in chalk on the street.   My brother was the best pitcher, he could roll that ball so fast that most that would try to kick it usually ended up landing on their asses in the middle of the street.  I was the best kicker, I could kick the hell out of that little plastic ball, but where I sucked at was the running because our neighbor would always catch me.  Those were the days!  We would play kick ball all day every day, but when we didn't play kickball we played dodge-ball, red rover, freeze tag or hide and seek.

Did we get hurt? Hell yeah we got hurt I still have some war wounds to prove it!  I have a scar on my shin that was the result of me climbing a neighbor's tree and falling (my daddy told me to stay off of the tree, but I was a tomboy and didn't care at the time).  We all got hurt, but we lived to play another game of whatever it was that got us hurt in the first place.  

When we tell our kids about times past and how much fun we had just being outside and being kids, all they could say was "well that is because you were born in the olden days when they didn't have technology like the Playstation or computers." Does he think that I was born in the 20's?  The Nintendo was released in 1985 and I was a Mario Bro fanatic, but I didn't spend hours every day playing it because it was not only more exciting things going on outside, but also because my mother didn't allow us to just sit in the house all day. When the chores were done and our bodies were clean, we went outside! My mother didn't organize play dates for us because we knew how to go outside and make friends.   

My husband and I tell our children all of the time that they could not have hung with us back when we were younger, because we were tough, we didn't mind getting dirty and we actually played.  Now in the era where the kids call playing sitting on the PS3 or XBox, laptops, iPods and cellular phones they have become almost robotic and boring.  The kids these days have so much anger and catty attitudes because they don't know how to fit in and make friends with one another.  The only time my daughter has a conversation with someone is through texitng or on Skype.  What type of a life is that?  Kids today need their parents to organize play dates or sport activities in order for them to get out of the house.  Kids today are afraid of a little bit of dirt and heaven forbid them scrape their knee the world would end.  

I guess it is really not the kid's fault, it is the fault of over protective parents thinking that Little Johnny or Little Suzy would be scarred for life if they felt the sting of a rubber kick ball on their backside.  We as parents supply our children with the tools to make them lazy and robotic instead of letting them just be kids and get dirty.   I know some parents who spend $100 on kid a pair of sneakers or jeans and then get mad if the kid gets them dirty.  But isn't that what the child is suppose to do; get dirty?  I am not saying that we should stop buying the video games, iPods or cellular phones, but maybe we should set limits on things and take the kids to their very own front yard to play then maybe these kids will have a chance at enjoying their childhood just as we did.

So I say lets bring back kickball, freeze tag, double-dutch, hide and seek and lets show these boring kids how to live!

TTFN!