Has it got that bad that.... a rear family matter

Rob Keeble

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Location
GTA Ontario Canada
we now need a school that teaches parents how to take kids to the playground at the Park. :(:huh:

Last week i sat with Linda through her morning breakfast television show. This channel has a roaming reporter visiting various sponsors events/sites to promote whatever it is they doing. ( Call it what it is an attempted camouflage of commercial promotion being endorsed as a news item).

Well i could not believe my ears and its driven me crazy ever since. Over the weekend we got together with a large group of our local friends for a travelling supper and over the coffee i brought up the subject and no one else had heard of it but they were all amazed. All of us are at the age where the kids are in the launchpad to life either having just finished schooling and now working or still at tertiary education somewhere.

The very idea hit me between the eyes but the final coup de grace was when the lady enlightening viewers as to the content said one important thing they had to teach Moms was "Mom put your phone down when going to the playground and keep an eye on the kid"

At that point i asked Linda if we could change the channel as i could not take it anymore. The social change was just too much for my pea brain to handle.

I never had the greatest parents by any standards and i don't think i was ever supervised, i caused all sorts of mayhem even burning down our garage (none of it deliberately) ended up in hospital several times in my life for self inflicted damage of some sort or other. But i sure learnt a great deal and have tried to let my sons have similar freedoms within certain bounds and norms same as i was given.

But has the obsession with the phone gone so far as to warrant that we now need to have parenting classes on how to take a child to a public playground.

Unfortunately i was so shocked out of my wits at the time that i did not catch the name or location of the business running these classes. Part of me thinks this is a consequence of someone tapping funding available in our Province from all sorts of government sources for any non profit social organization that has a cause that impacts the community and is being used as job creation. If this has been run on April 1 i would have thought it an April fools joke.

Whats your thought on this subject are things among new parents really that bad. Where have we gone wrong as a generation in producing offspring that feels they need to be told how to conduct a play session for their kid at the local park.
 
in my experience with my kids and some others that i know well, i think the way of life has changed from we had and expect for others to do today.. i have one SIL that comes to visit and if he isnt eating or cooking he is on the phone doing games or reading and what ever but he isnt walking or working or just puttering on something outside.. when i was a kid growing up the new fad was to raise kids like Dr. Spock said to do and a lot of folks did.. mine didnt it was old school and that is why i am the way i am today.. in my kid raising time, i did the way i saw and made some changes that i felt necessary.. and now they are in the drivers seat and they both do it differently than i did, and one is completely different from the other so as i see the world today is that tomorrow is going to be a completely differnt society than what we had rob. just one simple example is that in my area you cant find school kids that want to work during the summer months, a few will mow grass but not any hard work, i found one neighborhood boy age 14 that would work some and his dad was my friend and was raised the same as me.. so i am going to just trod along and do it myself and if i cant then it wont get done. i dont know how they younger ones can think that this money tree that mom and dad have provided for previous years is going to keep them going at the young adult years..???
 
"Mom put your phone down when going to the playground and keep an eye on the kid"

Well, Rob, at least it was GOOD advice. Kids don't come prewired with our experiences and even when we program them properly (or so we think) the outcome is often more than unexpected. You certainly have been there, done that recently.
 
That blasted cell phone - hmmmmm.

It is far more important than

1) paying attention while driving
2) watching the kids in th eplayground
3) paying attention to the company you are with (your friends)
4) cell phones MUST be answered at any cost - MANDANTORY - whenever and whereever it rings.

I wonder - did HAL make it into the cell phone?
Will we eventually get a computer chip implanted into our head?
Will - we get --- er --- programmed?
Are we to become ---- CYLONS?

No ohhh NO --- please don't let my mind wander on this one.
 
Well Rob.

I also had a sort of unsupervised childhood which earned me some stiches in head when we made stone throwing wars, or when I fell off a tree that I had been climbing all summer, it just happened that I fell on the last day of holydays when mom was packing and getting ready to come back home.

Having said so, and having not seen the program, maybe the intention was to draw attention to the fact that kids are easy prey for kidnappers, pedophiles and so forth. My mom used to tell us never ever accept sweets from strangers and run away from anyone we didn't know who offered anything to us.

I think that nowadays we have the two sides of the coin, parents who are completly irresponsible and do not supervise at all (and not educate) their kids anywhere and parents who are so obsessive protective towards their children that turn them into stupid beings uncapable of solving the smallest incovenience in their lives such as tying their laces or stand up to get a glass of water. Which eventually turns them into the most selfish, arrogant and insolent beings. Curiously enough both ends lead to similar sort of results.
 
( Call it what it is an attempted camouflage of commercial promotion being endorsed as a news item).

First we must realize that "News Shows" are not actually "the News" they are entertainment shows that use News items as their source material. This covers nearly everything you see on television including the extreme right or left wind "shows" that claim to be "finally telling you the straight story" under the guise of "the News" :rofl:.

At that point i asked Linda if we could change the channel as i could not take it anymore.

I don't even have TV at my house but, even with my minimal exposure, this is a common occurrence at LOML's house. :D
 
I gave up on TV a long time ago. It was simply too antagonizing watching what they now consider programming, and all of the lies--wow.

I still like to catch some Hawwia-5-oh (and old cowboy movies) on YouTube though.


You have a good business head on your shoulders Rob, whatever you teach your kids as they grow up will be wise and good for them.


Your son who didn't want to repair the car, but ended up restoring it with you is case in point. I'm sure he learned a lot more than

car repair and how to weld up a couple of peices of sheet metal.


Not a lot of jobs for kids these days in the states, probably the same where you are at. Might want to think about discussing

with one of them possibly buying a small business like a bar and running it.

With someone with your business acumen, I could see that as being a rather good future.

:)
 
My childhood was leave the house at 7:30am on my bike and be back by dinner time. Occasionally I'd stop by the house with my friends on bikes for lunch that I'd cook for them (delicious bacon on white bread and lots of mayo...yumm).

If I ever had kids and lived where I do now (in the middle of nowhere), I'd let them do the same. I'd have (sad) second thoughts about it down in the burbs of SF.

It all basically makes me sad about how protective and guarded we have become and unfortunately out of necessity.

What I really am curious about is how the younger generations will describe their childhoods to their children...will it be they only had 10MB/S downloads?
 
I guess Id be going to prison today, because when my son was 7, I taught him how to shoot and purchased him his own chipmunk rifle.
always supervised by myself, but today, many would consider this a dangerous thing.
I let him ride his bike at 7 and go visit his friends who might have lived 1/4-1/2 miles away.
I don't think I was as cimfortable with my daughter going place at a young age
but then again, its the world we created. We have no one to blame but ourselves.
btw, both my children survived and are two well adjusted successful young adults, so Im guessing teaching your children about responsibility and making the right choices are something else that might be long gone in todays youth.

besides, they think they've been totally independent, but you know when they left, 10 minutes later Id call the home where they were going just to make sure they were there, maybe a few more calls during the day to make sure they were still there, no one had to know, but it was peace of mind for a parent.
My wife still calls my kids today, for the same peace of mind, what are doing, where are you going, hows this one, did you see that one...........hows work, hows this, hows that, as a parent, you cant get that rid of that feeling of having to make sure your children are alright, safe, ok, feeling good, you just don't make it so ovbivous, but they know. Mom, Dad, Im fine, everything is great, the job is great, my bf/gf is great, life is great, I love you, stop worrying.
 
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Allen you are so correct. When my Dad was alive even up to age 96 he would still be calling me and asking how my business was doing how my leg was doing, never mind that he also wanted to know about the grandchildren even friends of mine he met during a visit or function.
After this ?news item I called my 26 year old son in Nova Scotia and asked him the hypothetical question as to what he would do if he had a little Johnny re going to classes to learn how to take him to the park, or letting him go unsupervised, and i was pretty impressed with his comment. He came back to the point we all have been making about many things not just this specific issue. He said two words...common sense. He said it would all depend on the area he lived in how he would handle his kids. It was a great feeling to hear him use those words, it told me i have done something right and that he knows their meaning. But it still wont stop me from doing what my Dad did for me all his life. Parents who have to "schedule" time to be with the kid, well :dunno:.

I was asking Linda last night about how her mom and dad had dealt with her and her brothers regarding supervision. She said you crazy, we would do crazy dangerous things they did not even know about. Her and her brothers would "steal" the old Morris car they had in the garage and go joy riding on the local mind dumps in and around their area. And the car was a bit like a Flintstones car you needed a foot out the door often to get it going. All her family have done very well for themselves. None in jail. :D
In my childhood we were a couple of blocks away from pretty dangerous mine dumps no one realized this at the time. Back in those days they used cyanide to do gold separation and the process was anything but efficient, as evidenced by the fact that a huge part of gold production by a large mining company in SA today comes from the reprocessing of prior gold mine dumps. They get 7 to 9 grams per ton from some of them. And many actual active mines don't get that kind of yield with a great deal more effort.
There were no fences around the property and we wondered onto them without anyone blinking an eye. It was like going to the beach the sand was as fine as you would find on a corral beach atoll and yellow in color. Take a piece of cardboard box and toboggan down the side of the slopes. :rofl:
There were what i can only imagine to be toxic ponds of water that would pool at the base and between old wrecks that were illegally dumped there. We would take an axe and hack the roof off and use it inverted as a raft not much different to the story of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. If we got hold of two we would have pirate wars between us, all the while exposed to the risk of sharp metal edges where we hacked the car rood off. Fundamentally we had one key ingredient back then and that was imagination. With no TV etc to do it for us, and only one movie on a Sat afternoon per week, we would have our imagination run away with whatever was on the big screen the prior week.
Pellet guns were obtained in my case very much against my parents wishes through barter at the local "swop shop" or what we would call pawn broker today. Birds were shot in the midst of no other wildlife but we ate every morsel of those robins. :rofl: and that after we had washed them clean after plucking and rinsing in the toxic water. (don't know if it was but what are the odds of rainwater that has washed off mine dumps that used cyanide not being contaminated.) We survived.
We built tree houses that fell on our head due to improper construction, but we learnt from it and through trial and error overcame the obstacles and felt the reward of triumph in doing something oneself. We also had our fair share of nut jobs. We lived at one time with limpet mines going off at random in what you would call a diner so what could be worse. We built our soapbox cars from salvaged child prams (baby buggies) with improvising being the order of the day. But years later when called on for Military service had already experienced the motto of the Marine Corps (Adapt Improvise and Overcome).
But we were free and experienced the freedom and had to manage ourselves and the risks and consequences. I don't think my parents had the awareness of the risks that we do today they were too hard at it trying to keep a roof over our heads and put food on the table.
Within reason i have tried to allow my sons the same "range" but with way more oversight simply because we are more aware and hopefully better educated than the prior generation.
I may have landed myself in trouble a few times by ending up in hospital but my sons have managed to do that by being involved in organized fully structured and supervised sports which I observe so many parents today think is the answer. There are risks in living. And to live with no risk is not to have lived at all in my view.

Just consider how many of us put off enjoying a hobby until we retire. Then retirement comes and as human nature has it we become concerned about whether the accumulated savings will be enough to see us through. Then a couple of years later the person passes away having not enjoyed a thing. The only person who scored from that persons life is the stock broker that looked after the savings.
 
@ Scott , Thanks but I know i don't need to worry about my son that worked on the car, he is going into third year at University this year working to complete his Civil Engineering degree and has been doing the real deal during the summer at a decent size company and he got the job all by himself and to say they delighted with him is putting it mildly. But he has already figured out a strategy to establish a stand alone company in the future with some of his friends in the same faculty given the demand and opportunity to do so. That don't mean i wont have him learn the hard way what the value of a $ is and how hard it can be to make it but easy to loose it. ;)
 
Allen you are so correct. When my Dad was alive even up to age 96 he would still be calling me and asking how my business was doing how my leg was doing, never mind that he also wanted to know about the grandchildren even friends of mine he met during a visit or function.
After this ?news item I called my 26 year old son in Nova Scotia and asked...


Here is some lolz:)

 
yeah, my grandfather used to tell me those stories, how hed walk 8 miles a day to school, uphill, in the snow, with cardboard stuffed in his brothers shoes because he got hand me downs, and never owned a pair of his own shoes until he was 12.
and then walk home, again, uphill

now, my wifes grandfather, grew up in minsk, he ACTUALLY lived that lifestyle, not enough food, not enough clothes, shoes, nothing, but he never said anything about it.
 
when i was a kid i couldnt go down the road a 1/4 to half mile to play with neighbors unless we had permission and was dropped off but i could wander in the woods and be miles away during the day:) miss those days wish i could go back..
 
Har har har

I freeked out when I was 5 when I noticed the trucks outside had 4 wheels.
I got all my brothers hand me down toy trucks and they never had all 4 wheels, so I thought it was normal until I saw some real trucks and realized they were different.
I figured 2 or 3 was enough to push it on the floor. It always sucked being the 2nd son, hand me down jeans, tee shirts, baseball gloves, bicycles, whatever he outgrew, got passed down to me.
 
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