Hope all you dads out there had a great day. My kids and I had fun all weekend. Tomorrow it’s back to the usual child slave labor (to hear them tell it): having to clean their rooms, eat all their fresh and delicious food at meals, and not fight with each other during their vast amounts of play time. I know, the poor tortured souls…. икони
We plan to inflict the same torture on our kids again tomorrow.
If they only knew how many of us old folks would give anything to change places with them for one day. Oh, to be a child once again and enjoy unlimited free thought and feelings. maybe that is why so many of us try to go through a second childhood.
“enjoy unlimited free thought and feelings’
Sorry to interrupt your stroll down memory lane… but have you talked to kids recently… they live a world of stress and contradiction and constant insecurity and doubtful future.
The world we grew up in is GONE.
Even though we all know how free and easy our kids have it today let there be no doubt that when they recall woe-be-gone tales of their childhood to their children they will lament how they walked a mile to school in snow drifts up to their necks and they labored with household chores from dawn to dusk. When in reality occasionally we took their video games away and sometimes we restricted their computer time.
“they live a world of stress and contradiction and constant insecurity and doubtful future.”
Charlie, obviously we are not privvy to what you tell your children but hopefully that is not the messaging they pick up from you. Parents should shield their children from adult anxieties and societal imperfections until such time they are adequately prepared to deal with them. And although we are not with our children 24 hours a day a parent hopefully has enough influence over their children to reassure them that the parents will provide them with the appropriate tools to deal with lifes complexities as they arise.
I don’t tell my children fairy tales about equal opportunity and justice. I don’t tell them honesty is rewarded or people play fair. I tell them the truth. They see it every day, hear it and live it, anyway. You might as well teach the truth.
Oh… you are talking about kids growing up in Utopia…. I mean Suburbia.
Diane, I take it you don’t believe your parents walked a mile or more to school. I take it you think they had it as easy as you did…
May I recommend: The we Never Were. By Stephanie Coontz