Stratton Park Message Board

Disclaimer:
1- this may have been discussed before
2- no lawyers were hurt in the writing of this post

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Marie-Elena had a post under another topic, and was writing about activities in the old neighborhood. It made me stop and think –WHERE WERE THE LAWYERS???

Just think of all the unsafe activities that we did, that your risk assessment people would recoil in horror at just the thought of! Look at 102 playground – an injury paradise! Six foot high stainless steel slides – besides the risk of falling down on diamond plate steps, what about the 2nd degree burns you would get in the summer when you were the first one down. How about the sand box? Every cat in the area used it as a toilet1 Today, you wouldn’t think of letting your kid play in a sandbox without a lid. The seesaw and swings that were placed over blacktop – although a cushion was added later. Who thought of monkey bars? If you didn’t break your arm on the fall, you could at least smash your jaw, and some teeth, on the metal pipes on the way down! We will not discuss a ball field on black top. Or climbing the fence to play football on the grass of PS102

What about all your “attractive nuisances” like the lot on Beach Ave. I can’t tell you how many times I fell, got cut on glass up there. Today, the owner would have to fence the place or get fined and sued! The statues in front of 1574 Beach - what if we fell???

Other stuff like making forts and go-carts out of old wood –splinters and rusty nails are dangerous!!! Sledding down alley stairs filled with snow on cardboard – danger incarnate! What about riding our bikes down the ramps on 102, without helmets into Taylor Ave – what were we thinking??? Running between parked cars – I remember one time, some kid ran out between cars in front of Vinny’s Pizzeria and slashed open his chest on the tail fins of a ’59 Caddy. Who would make a car that dangerous?

Yet…we all survived and thrived! We are, (at least I am,) probably better off for it!!!

Great post!
I agree and I am surprised that we survived. and with avoiding all the dangers we did not get "obese"
Les

just reading about and thinking about all the stuff that we used to do. how about he neighborhood bashes. don't tell the kids. lol. all i can remember is that we always had fun. how about running away from Mr. Murphy's dog trying to get your bike into the carriage room before they locked it up. hell climbing the fire escapes to get into the house becuse you forgot you key. we were always doing something. i remember walking down to korvettes, i'm lucky my kids walk. amazing. i don't want to rank on my kids but we do spoil them. they have fun themselves, it's just a different kind of fun. the kind of fun, tht we, now as parents, worry about, because weknow what we did when we were their age. ha ha. why do they think they never get away with anything, becuse we invented the excuses. ha ha. i have to say i do amaze my kids at times. happy easter to everyone.

I guess it was Marion that wrote this Posting:

I really like this posting. It really shows the attitude difference between yesterday vs. today in stark contrast. Some people might say it shows how far we've come as a society, but I don't agree. A more accurate description might be it shows the "woosification" of society and our youth since our time of childhood. I think there might have been some easy common sense things that may have been worth doing to safen up our playgrounds when we were kids, but society has gone way overboard trying to protect our kids from every bump, bruise and tumble. I think this effort is ridiculous and begins to rob kids of essential experiences of growing up. I'm not talking about pain, I'm talking about experience, maybe protecting yourself from pain. As usual, we've taken things to ridiculous lengths.

This blows me away. I saw a segment on HBO Real Sports the other day where they talked about a real movement afoot in school sports where some school programs think that the wise thing to do is to eliminate all competitive sports from their curriculims because they think its psychologically harmful to expose preteen and teenage children to failure, which is what happens in competition. Instead sport activities should be geared so that all participants win and no one is "scarred" by the experience of failing to succeed. Can you believe it? How does this ready them for adulthood, help prepare them to succeed in an increasingly competitive world? Perhaps if they let their boss know that giving the promotion to that other employee who performs better will hurt their feelings, maybe he'll give to them afterall?

Or maybe I'm fussing about nothing. Our kids will be just fine as long as we make sure they wear their helmets, eye protection, protective elbow and knee pads as they sit in the den playing their X-boxes and computer games, as long as they're not of a competitive nature. Never mind that the games may be excessively and incessantly violent, graphically ~~ or otherwise obscene. We wouldn't want to restrict their rights by telling them that participating in this behavior was offensive to us and people around them, would we?

In my opinion, our job with our kids is to be a parent, not a friend, they've got lots of those. Often times that's very hard to do, especially when there's an easier path. But that's what they need. I don't think they need someone to solve all their problems for them. They're a lot better off if you can teach them how to get them solved for themselves. Our most important job of all is to prepare them as best we can to take care of themselves in life. So I actually believe there comes a time in the life of your kids where if you find yourself paying your kids bills or buying them things (new car, whatever) that they should be able to take care of themselves, by doing so you are actually hurting your kids as I see it. Teaching them to be self-sufficient is critical. I don't think parents today see that as a critical lesson, and that's one of the primary reasons why we have much more dependent children who live with us longer before they strike out on their own. Even when they do eventually move out, they are usually not content to start out with second hand stuff, or even go without some stuff initially. They must have everything new, and name brand. And usually the collective family indulges them. That's a big difference from when we were moving out of our parent's homes. We slept on matresses, or had telephone company wire spool coffee tables, or cinderblock entertainment centers with 2 x 12 shelves in our apartments, or goodwill furniture and built from there, and were very proud of what we had. It was a great adventure and we wouldn't have had it any other way.

I believe this "earning" concept (rags to riches) made our eventual achievement more fun and satisfying, but by giving and doing too much for our kids it gives them a sense of entitlement instead. They don't have to earn it.

So I've heard lots of people say kids today are different than when we were coming up. But are they building them any different genetically? I don't think so. Kids are kids. I think if they are different, it's because we are doing something different while raising them. In other words, we're raising them different, it's our fault and we can change it.

I hope I haven't bored everyone to death.

Eddie

Eddie,

Not Boring at all, I am at work and I happened to log on and was checking posts and I thought what you had to say was great. I always felt that one of the best things we could do for our kids was to allow them to fall on their ass and figure out how to stand up again. Probably one of the best things about growing up where we did or maybe at the time we did, was that our parents were involved to a point but we were not under a microscope, we picked our own friends and fought our own battles. When we played a game we won or we lost. If we lost and we hated to lose, we figured out how to play it better.

Beth

Beth

You hit the nail right on the head. Our parents were busy struggling to maintain the status quo rather than to get involved in the day to day minor details of our lives. And I mean that in a good way. That promoted growth in us because it left us to learn how to stand on our own two feet like you said. On our streets we had to fend for ourselves, didn't we? And without a net...or helmet!

Eddie