Over the last few weeks, the AZ vaccine was made available to Gen Xers and, in Canada at least, most of us rushed to get it, because as many people recognized, those of us in Generation X are pretty devil-may-care, that’s how we were raised, and we don’t give a f*ck. Blood clots? I’ll take my damn chances if it means that people stop getting sick, small businesses can open, or I can have a graduation party for Kate. So I decided to repost this satirical look at the way our childhoods were different from kids today, originally written almost 5 years ago when kids were allowed to hang out on playgrounds without masks. I hope you enjoy…
I was watching the news at lunch on Thursday, and there was a feature on “playground safety”. A very serious and sincere woman was instructing parents on how to “inspect” their local playground to make sure it was safe for their children. Her following gems of wisdom made me realize how much the lives of children have changed since I was a kid:
1) “Make sure the playground equipment is on a soft surface such as sand or wood chips.” This is so that, in case of a fall from the monkey bars, it’s less likely the child will suffer a broken bone. Well, in my day, we didn’t have “playground equipment”. There were swings and slides, and they were usually on concrete pads, and if you happened to fall off, it was no skin off anyone’s knee but your own. The best piece of playground equipment from my childhood had to be the giant metal rocket at Churchill Park. You had to climb into it via a metal ladder that went all the way up through very tight openings to platforms at different heights. The whole structure was on a slight angle and the top platform was probably 20 feet off the ground, which made it all a little disorienting, but you were encased in a metal cage (picture a rocket-shaped Wicker Man), so it was perfectly safe unless you lost your footing and slipped off the ladder. But see, all this taught us to be CAREFUL. It was like when hockey players used to play without helmets—they thought twice before trying to block a slap shot with their heads. Now, it’s just a free-for-all, with pucks flying everywhere, and kids leaping from platform to platform or swinging maniacally off stuff without a care in the world. Really though, in my day, we had better things to do than be all supervised on a playground. The best playground in the world when I was a kid was a construction site. I remember the good old days, racing around among the nails, concrete blocks, and roof trusses, then a gang of us would swing down into the basement through an open window, and play tag. Was it dangerous? F*ck yes, it was dangerous. One time when I was too small to get in and out by myself, the neighbourhood kids swung me in, then forgot about me later when it was time to go home. After a couple of hours, my mom started to get worried and, eventually a search party found me. Sure, it was scary being down there by myself, screaming for help and whatnot, and sure, I have an intense fear of climbing through tight spaces like windows or holes in metal platforms, but it made me TOUGH. Not like these babies today.
2) “Thoroughly inspect the equipment to ensure there are no damaged areas or sharp edges.” This is good advice for today’s playgrounds, which are all made out of plastic and easily broken. Or vandalised. But that was the great thing about the slides and swings of my youth. They were sturdy and iron and medieval-looking and held together with giant bolts and chain ropes. You couldn’t damage them if you tried. You would literally need a gang of kids wielding sledgehammers to even dent the slide in my neighbourhood. Was the bottom edge sharp? Sure. Was it rusty? I would certainly hope so. Otherwise, what was the point of getting a f*cking tetanus shot?
3) “Teach your children about the ‘zone of safe passage’.” What the playground safety expert meant by this was that parents need to assist kids in observing other children swinging and running, and figure out how far away they need to be from them to not get kicked or knocked down. When I was a kid, no one taught you that sh*t—you learned via the school of hard knocks, pardon the pun. In other words, if you ran by someone on the swing set and got a foot in the face, you very quickly learned the “zone of safe passage” on your own. There were no adults screaming, “Veer left, Tommy! Veer Left!! Remember the zone of safe pass—Oooh!” Our parents taught us one rule, and it was the most important rule of all: “Never chase a ball onto the road. But if you’re already playing on the road, move when you see a car coming.” That was their wisdom, and it saved my life many a time. Actually, both of my parents saved my life at one time or another. Mom saved my life at a baseball game. It was before the age of netting to protect the spectators, and a fly ball was coming straight for my head. She stuck out her hand and deflected it away. The bruise on her hand later was a very good indication of what might have happened to my skull if she hadn’t been so quick-thinking. She also saved my brother from drowning on more than one occasion. My dad saved my life one day when he happened to look out a bedroom window and saw me dangling by the collar from the branch of a pear tree in our backyard, slowly choking. I’ve never seen him run so fast. Thanks, Mom and Dad, for helping me survive to adulthood.
4) “Smoking is now banned on playgrounds, so be vigilant and remind those who might not be aware.” NO SMOKING?! What? I’m sorry, but the only reason that I’m only slightly asthmatic is because my lungs were toughened up by years of second hand smoke (and first-hand as well, of course—it WAS the seventies). It’s funny how attitudes change over the years. When I was a kid, ANYONE could buy cigarettes. I still remember my mom giving me a note and a couple of dollars, and sending me to the local store to buy her a pack of Rothmans. I’d stand there in line with the other 6 year-olds, shooting the sh*t about the latest Barbie outfits, or what construction site or vacant lot we’d be meeting at later, or what vacationing family had left their milk door unlocked, then spending the change from the cigarettes on sugar candy. (Milk door, in case you’re wondering, was a tiny door next to the actual door. The milkman would open it from the outside, put the milk in, then the family could open a second door from the inside and get the milk. If you went on vacation and forgot to lock the milk door, you were an open target for the neighbourhood kids. The smallest one, usually me, would squeeze through the opening and let the others in. So if you came back from a trip and all your cookies and cigarettes were gone, you knew you’d forgotten to lock the milk door.) But people back when I was young were not as knowledgeable about the dangers of smoking. In fact, my mom, like many women, smoked through both her pregnancies. Of course, she’ll tell you she’s glad she did, because otherwise, my brother, who has a Ph.D., and I would be “insufferable” and much taller than his 6’1” and my 5’6”. Now, of course, some women are so paranoid that they won’t eat peanut butter if they’re pregnant because it “might cause allergies”. I say expose ‘em early and often—it’s the best way to toughen them up. I remember once being told off by a colleague when I was pregnant with Kate for drinking a Pepsi. No, not because it wasn’t a Coke—she said, “Don’t you know what the caffeine might do to the baby?” I was like “Hopefully keep her awake all day so she doesn’t kick the sh*t out of my stomach tonight when we should both be sleeping.” I feel terrible though—she might have gotten MORE scholarships to university if I’d gone with Pepsi Free.
Overall, I just think that monitoring your child’s every move is counterproductive to childhood. And of course, I’m exaggerating about my own youth—my parents took very good care of me and my brother, but not in that “in your face” kind of way. My dad calls it “Carefully supervised neglect,” which to me, means that you let your kid be a kid, but you’re always there to stop the baseball or the drowning, as the case may be. Personally, I’ve tried to embrace that saying, but I get that it’s not always easy. The world seems to have become a more scary place than it was 40 years ago, or maybe as an adult, I’m just more aware of it now than I was when I was young. All I know is that the first time Kate wanted to go to the store by herself (it’s just around the corner and she was 10), I had to stifle every protective instinct I had. She was gone about 30 seconds when I broke down and begged Ken to act like a stealth ninja and follow her at a safe distance so Kate wouldn’t know he was there. Ken, of course, obliged, and came back to report that she was fine—that she had made it safely through the four-way stop and was on her way home with some sugar candy and a pack of smokes.
Quilt Update: 7 rows complete and 13 to go. You can see the pattern starting to form, maybe?
mydangblog 
I love this, the swings a favorite and only at our school, which had swings and a teeter totter. No playgrounds in the country but had barns, attic and woodshed, fields, brooks and woods which we always had free rein in. Any injury was your own fault and no sympathy. My dad smoked three packs of Lucky Strikes every day but none of us had ill effects, probably because he worked as a machinist during the day and dairy farmed in early morning and night. Good memories 😊
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Jumping out of the hayloft onto a pile of hay–another great GenX pastime!
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And swinging on ropes from one to another, not mom approved 😄
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But so much fun!
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Oh yes
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Everything’s supposedly safer today (like children’s toys and playgrounds) but paradoxically the world has turned more dangerous. Kids are more resourceful and flexible, and laid-back but generally less independent and educated. I see it in my students daily, regardless of the country.
I don’t worry about them, they’ll manage just fine. I’m worried about the future of this planet and where we’re headed.
(Blood clots? What are blood clots?)
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I sometimes wonder if the reason kids are so micro-managed today is because we always knew we were one step away from potential disaster. But the kids are all right:-)
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The times have changed, that’s all and apparently they’re picking up the things they find beneficial for themselves only. They don’t give a crap for the community and society at large.
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Aaahh, childhood memories. My playhouse was my grandpa’s barn with all sorts of dangerous stuff around. When we moved to the “city” mom thought nothing of sending six year old me to the neighborhood store for bread or milk or whatever. I walked to school alone; crossed railroad tracks and sometimes crawled under trains to cross the tracks. We were tough! 😁
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That we were! And definitely a little reckless sometimes too, haha!
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By the way, I can’t comment on your blog now for some reason! I really liked your computer post, just so you know!
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Thanks. I think I have that fixed now…still working on getting the “like” button fixed. That is, until it locked up today with a “disk full” message. MS tried to do an auto update, maxed out storage, and choked. Can’t do shit with it now. Looks like a trip to the techy guys for a bigger hard drive or a new one.
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🤣😝…As a fellow GenXer, I’m with you on all of your comments. Hell, we’d drive 15 miles just to go to a playground with one of those burning man metal rockets! Hang upside down, twist, turn and fall off into a sandpit (the only soft surface the playground had, hello.).
Then hang onto splintered wooden seesaws with metal handles baking in the sun all day. And don’t get me started on how many times I fell off a metal merry-go-round, going about as fast as elementary school kids could push it. Monkey bars make of teal as well, I mean I agree we learned how to be careful, be self sufficient and help out friends who got hurt on these childhood play things. What do kids now do? They are coddled and told what not to do, therefore they have no social coping skills. Kids today wouldn’t survive our childhood, don’t even get me started on how we didn’t have cell phones, cable tv or Apple Music 🙄.
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Those spinning metal things–we called them ‘tea kettle lids’ and the game was to see who could hang on the longest without puking! Good times:-)
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Good times indeed!
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Playground equipment? I played on the exposed rusty pipes in the girls’ bathroom at school, until I got caught and was told, “You know, we have a playground!” But what fun was that?
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Same, with my lit cigarette hanging from my lip!
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I’m not a parent so I don’t really know what it’s like but intellectually I get that parents walk a very fine line. Statistically the odds of anything happening to a kid are pretty low but no parent wants to risk their kid being a statistic either.
And I also get that parents need a break or they’d have a breakdown and you can’t be a good parent when you’re sitting in the closet drinking olive oil.
And it’s a harder world in some ways now. When I was a kid we had a giant truck tyre on the playground. It was a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Guess what we didn’t have then but have now? West Nile virus. And also possibly malaria.
Playground equipment is much too cheap and easily breakable now, though. They really need to bring back the sturdy, potentially dangerous stuff because the risk was educational.
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Yes, there are a lot of things back then that we didn’t have to deal with–but a lot of things that we did, which led to us being more cautious parents today. I think before we had access to so much media, it was easier to see the world as less dangerous, but now we know everything, and it’s scary.
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Not only that but our slides were made out of sheet metal that absorbed all the sun during the day and if you were dumb enough to forget and sit down without scootching your legs up so only the seat of your butt hit the slide and then go you screamed all the way down and laughed so hard as you stumbled off into the sand. We had grass under our swings and slides. No concrete for us lol that was too fancy for kids who were jumping off their swings or trying to swing high enough they flew around the top and under on the swing. No one I ever knew did this although I am sure there was some kid somewhere who had done so in our fevered imaginations. We were allowed to roam the streets and neighborhood ditches and backyards. Today T is 12 3/4 and I still have to stifle the nerves when he goes out to meet his friend for a walk. And I use to walk in and get my own smokes at 12/13/14/15 although when lazy I would send my brother with a note asking for cigarettes lol and he came home with candy.
Have a great Sunday!
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I think you and I must have lived in the same neighbourhood!
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Same time period. Or the seesaws made of wood???? And letting go so it bounced so hard you thought your spine was going to pop out? Kids now a days would never be able to conceive how much fun a seesaw/teetertotter
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🤣🤣🤣
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We never did break that teeter totter. It hurt us worse than we hurt it.
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Remember when the person on the other end would jump off and your butt would slam into the ground?!
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Slivers too.
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Lovely! You’re really making progress. You’ll be an expert by the time you’re finished!
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I have to figure out how to sew the rows together now!
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Of course you can’t smoke in today’s playgrounds! If those wood chips caught fire there’s be melting plastic all over and untrained children trying to firefight. Those places are deathtraps!
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🤣🤣🤣That’s awesome
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we used to take wax paper and rub down the metal slides with it before sending our younger siblings to slide down. who taught us? MOM did. I think she was hoping we’d crash and burn so she could eat bon-bons and watch daytime tv…at least that’s what she used to threaten us with if we came home before dinner. NO ONE watched us…we’d wander all over town. We had to be home by the time the street lights came on. Kids today…I swear the parents are all nuts.
My quilt has 23 rows now…….I am wondering why in hades I began another one when the first one seemed to be annoying as heck and took forever to finish.
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The streetlights—the nemesis of every child back in our day! I need to work harder to catch up to your quilt!
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and with each generation it gets worse. I can’t believe all the things that my grandkids have to have compared to what my kids had compared to what we had. Have you seen the movie Idiocrasy? Scary to think that is where we are headed.
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That brought back memories! Just a kid’s story of thrills and spills is a reminder of all the stuff kids can get into! It sure was different! Love the rocket!
Wow you are really on top of the quilt! Like the blue shades. How’s the sewing? Do you find it relaxing?
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Sewing might be relaxing on a more modern machine, but my 1936 Singer is making me nuts!
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Oh Noooo! Does it have gremlins?
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Yes, apparently and they hate bobbins!
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Oh those bobbins can be full of gremlins!
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Especially the ones that look like a long bullet!
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O my yes! Is that what’s in your machine? You have my sympathy! Ugh
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We had that exact same rocket slide at one of the parks I grew up with!
And I went to the gas station on the corner to get my parents their smokes…the guys there all knew me well and I’d get some candy too! Good memories. 🙂
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“Carefully supervised neglect” might just be my favourite phrase of all time! I so get this now as a parent myself. I try to find a balance. Like, if my 3-year-old insists on climbing the 20-foot metal structure designed for teenagers? I’m going to hang around with both arms free just in case. But if she’s in the sandpit and occasionally licking her hands? It’ll do her immune system some good!
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Sounds like the perfect balance!
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It is so hard to pick a favorite hilarious part of your posts, but I think I’m going to go with standing in line with the 6 year olds waiting to buy cigarettes while shooting the sh*t about the latest Barbie outfit… Bahahahahaha! Thank you for your humor, I always know where to look when I need a laugh!
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It’s amazing what our parents let us do back then!
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#4 — lolololol surely we’ll be getting some sort of cancer from these shots — but I can say that on your blog, not on mine hahaha
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Yes, the days of risk taking and adventures, I miss those days, before kids were bubble wrapped. 🙂
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The quilt looks beautiful!
Such a great look at childhood Back In The Day. I remember us kids laying over the seat backs in our dad’s station wagon. Sometimes we pretended we were flying along the highway. Such fun! we said. But if the old man ever had to slam on the breaks, that would be the end of That. We took a lot of risks as kids…some calculated, and some just downright foolish.
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I remember going through African Lion Safari (a tourist spot here with live lions and tigers) in the back of a station wagon with the windows down! We were daredevils back then!
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