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I was so relieved when we moved to the PNW that kids here actually do play in the rain, they have to! But back down south, yes, it was like the rain would melt them.
My current pet peeve is parents who think their child might die of dehydration or starvation without constant snack and water breaks. My daughter's ballet class is an hour long, they have two water breaks. My 3yr old's 45min soccer class has three and all the parents are anxiously waiting on the sidelines to ply their child with fruit snacks and juice. I'm all for drinking while exercising but really. And the constant snacking is silly too, your 8yr old does not need two mid-morning snacks and then one in the afternoon too. Somehow we survived (and were skinnier!) on just the occasional after school snack.
Ahhhh another PNWester! Yes, our kids do go out in the rain....course, that depends on whether it's a heavy fog, drizzle, light rain vs downpour. LOL.... Only in the PNW do we have 14 different "types" of rain. Many a time you'll hear visitors exclaim that "People around here don't have enough sense to come in out of the rain." We reply..."This isn't rain, it's just a little drizzle! Besides, if we ran inside every time it rained, we wouldn't get anything done! We might be sweet, but we're not sugar and we WON'T melt." Heck, most locals around here, unless they're commercial fishermen, don't even own raincoats. Also, in my neck of the woods, many of us have woodstoves and some sort of clothes drying hooks/hangers on our hearths. You come in, peel off the wet sweatshirt, hang it by the fire....warm up by the fire, grab a dry, warm sweatshirt and back out you go......repeat process in 45 min. LOL
IMO the kids have not become wimps the parents have. We buy into everything someone else tells us is bad for either us or our kids. Parents say is no longer the "last word" when it comes to the way our children our raised. There are so-called experts who influence or "advise" on how we should communicate, interact, socialize, etc. with our kids. Our children are living in a "soft" world where everyone plays team sports and no one wins, yet when they do finally keep score if one team destroys another team its now considered "poor sportsmanship". Kids don't have to do what they are told instead they "debate" the rules with their parents because some expert said we have to be more in touch with their feelings as children. Chores? As long as there is time for other social activity. In my kids school district they frown on giving homework on Fridays to elementary school because it cuts in on their possible activities during the weekends. This kind of accomodation bites us as a productive society in the rear because these children grow up with a false sense of entitlement when they enter the job market (What do you mean I have to work weekends?).
This falls right into kids expecting to get paid for doing ANYTHING around the house! They don't think it's THEIR job to clean up, etc. Is it any wonder kids are graduating from high school and don't know how to wash their clothes, cook their food or budget their money? Is it any wonder young adults go out and purchase a home and go head over heels in debt because they can't fix anything at all in their own homes? Of course they can't, they weren't "interested" in what their parents were doing on weekends....after all, their parents were boring....they never wanted to go anywhere or do anything on the weekends. They always thought they had to be doing something around the house! That's the mentality of young people today. Go have fun when you're not working....hire someone else to do that stuff for you! Ugh..... it worries me. I remember being resentful as a kid....I had to cook many of the meals because both parents worked. I had to help in the garden. I had a list of chores to do every day....and God help me if I got something called a "poor work slip". No one checked my homework....ever! But you better believe I never had a missing assignment...I would have been dead meat! LOL Missing assignments= poor work slips=dead meat! When I moved away from home I was soooooo capable, so independent. It took a few years, but I finally realized how much my parents really loved me and what an incredible favor they did for me. It would have been easier to just "do it themselves"....but they didn't. They taught me how to do things. I will always be grateful to them for that. Because of them, I was way ahead in the game of life. Oh.....and it didn't matter what the weather was doing....if there were outside chores to do, you sucked it up and got it done...as quickly as possible....you didn't dawdle...and it was okay to get dirty doing it! LOL
My mother bought me a chemistry lab from a place that was going out of business. It was a great learning devie. I made the tar come out of cigarrettes and then borrowed some pot from a burn out frind of mine and made the tar come out of that (only to find out that I was making some really nasty drug - he asked me to make more). Then I made gunpowder, guncotton, Nitroglycerin and finally a form of TNT. It was all very informative and instructional. I only blew up the basement twice and melted a huge snow bank once, but I never hurt anyone.
Why are parents so namby pamby today?
I* am just as bad. My son is not going near the forumula for Nitro.
My mother bought me a chemistry lab from a place that was going out of business. It was a great learning devie. I made the tar come out of cigarrettes and then borrowed some pot from a burn out frind of mine and made the tar come out of that (only to find out that I was making some really nasty drug - he asked me to make more). Then I made gunpowder, guncotton, Nitroglycerin and finally a form of TNT. It was all very informative and instructional. I only blew up the basement twice and melted a huge snow bank once, but I never hurt anyone.
Why are parents so namby pamby today?
I* am just as bad. My son is not going near the forumula for Nitro.
Not saying that your son would do this, but it's probably a good thing that parents today won't let their kids near anything that would be explosive as they may actually use it to harm someone. Back in my day kids came to school with big old buck knives strapped to their legs and hunting rifles and shotguns in their vehicles. But back then those things were used to hunt and gut animals, not humans. When we had a beef with someone we would duke it out, now a days kids shoot it out. But back in our day we weren't subjected to the violence that kids today are. For example we had *******, Astroids and Donkey Kong, now they have Grand Theft Auto and other murdering, raping, rampaging video games. (I don't buy a ton of video games because of the content so I don't know all of the names) Movies and television have also gone the way of the dark side compared to what they were like in my day.
Last edited by wyoquilter; 11-17-2009 at 09:32 AM..
Reason: Edit, I don't know why there was *** for the word F r o g g e r.
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