In what ways has U.S. culture changed since you were young? (beach, divorce)
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There have been a few posts about teaching students to learn to live their life. I completely agree. When I was in high school I had to take an economics class. .....
My jr. high and high school years were 1950 - 1956. There was a home ec classed - girls only, a shop class - boys only. However, one day a week the girls could do a shop class and the guys could do a home ec class.
My major way of learning to live (and many other students did this as well) was work. Kids often worked. If dad ran a snack counter, his sons or daughters eventually starting working in it after school and on Saturdays. If your father was a farmer, you were expected to take a big hand in doing the farm work...and since farmer's wives were still doing things like canning, their daughters helped. My own female cousins who were born on farms learned to milk cows, feed the animals and herd them in for milking; their brothers learned to plow with a tractor, drive a team of horses, milk cows, etc. If you lived in the town you might get a job clerking in the Five and Dime, working in a drug store, being a delivery boy, and some girls were steady baby sitters, etc.
There were two major benefits of working as a teenager. The first was earning your own money, of course; the second - and I think maybe more important - you learned to deal with adults who were not family members or school teachers. Being a home delivery paperboy for eighty customers early in jr. high was a major eye-opener - about how people behaved with a subordinate kid and with each other, and the real gutty part of some people's lives - people dying, chronically ill, mentally ill, abused, lecherous, alcoholic.
I learned more about growing up from working in my jr. high school and high school years than I did from my parents during those years. And as others have said, kids were out alone from an earl age and no Mommy or Daddy was doing the helicopter routine when you started working. If I saw Mr. X giving his wife a few slaps or Mrs. Y snarled and then puked on the front porch because she was drunk when she came to the door. You could tell Mom or Dad, but their bottom line was that you delivered the paper, kept your mouth shut, took the money and got the hell away from people like that asap. And that's what you did.
Since my mom didn't have her own car until I was 10 or 11, all us kids were frequently sent to the store to pick up some needed item, especially if mom discovered she needed something while she was making dinner. This developed another whole set of skills in us at very tender ages (not to mention the ability to get to a grocery store, buy whatever it was, and then get back home quickly).
Yes, this definitely brings back memories for me. I'm sure there were days when my mother sent me to the store more than once. It was mostly bread, milk, lunch meat, and dog food. The neighborhood store was only around the block and I would usually ride my bike. The problem was pedaling up a hill carrying a gallon of milk in one hand.
The flip side of children being expected to be more self-sufficient, to seek their own entertainment and so forth, is that parents (and especially the fathers) were less obsessively consumed by the tasks of parenthood. This meant that adults could socialize amongst themselves, in matters not directly related to tending to their children. Today it seems that unrelated adults only meet outside of work at the kids’ soccer-practice. “Back in the day”, there were numerous adult functions. Adults had hobbies and so forth. This also meant that those persons who didn’t have children, didn’t suddenly lose their friends, when the latter became parents. It also meant that venues such as restaurants, movie theaters and the like, didn’t revolve around catering to families with children. The culture was, in short, less child-centric.
Everything feels much more like a rat race. I live and work in a small metro, but there is tons of job-related stress that just didn't seem to be around here a couple decades ago.
I'm noticing that the vast majority of comments are reminiscing on how US culture was better in times past. I'm not saying that is untrue, but I have to wonder if maybe the past is being romanticized to seem better that it actually may have been?
Could be. We didn't know anything when we were kids. Historical perspective is only gained with age.
I remember when I was nine or so I thought nothing about being on my own after school. Anywhere I could walk to, I could go, and no one was keeping track of me. Pretty cool, actually.
Anyway, there was a firecracker-type product that came out with a string at each end. You pulled on the strings and made a small bang. A friend and I saw the possibilities. There was a mean lady who lived a couple of doors down and across the street, so we tied one to her mailbox so it would startle her when she opened it.
Well, she called the police. A cop came out and gave us a fake stern talking-to (I could see he was grinning behind his hand at my mother) and we were suitably subdued and chastened.
No one told us that a woman named Rosenberg might feel harassed, even if it's just by little kids. We knew nothing about the war or 6 million dead. With the distance of time, of course, I have compassion for this no doubt long-dead matron.
As a corollary, do you think culture changed more from, say 1960 to 1980? Or 1980 to 2000? Or 2000-today?
I think the pace of change keeps accelerating and will continue to accelerate into the future. Look at cellphone and internet technology and how they have changed our culture in the past 20 years. They had much more an impact than anything in earlier time spans. For example, how much did television, telephone, or computer technology change in the 1960 to 1980 time frame?
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