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Can you believe it?
Every day this country goes father downhill. These days there is no end to stories about how American’s can’t cope with the pressures of modern life. For an old Coot its hard to understand. It’s not like the good old days. So many of these things used to be taken for granted. Kids didn’t need safety equipment to go bicycle riding. Parents could be trusted to ride in a car and hold a baby at the same time. Kids used to ride in the front seat of a car – WITHOUT SEATBELTS and without risk of death from the life-threatening air bags. It’s hard to believe that we have lost so much judgment that the government will arrest us and threaten to take away our children if we even think about acting like a responsible parent from my childhood would act. I’m talking about the 50’s here.
When I look around, it’s hard to see that much as changed. Parents these days look responsible. They stand up. They walk and talk. There isn’t any obvious sign that they are inferior to my parents but you can’t argue with the government any more. And the government tells us that parents these days can’t be trusted to safely raise their children without serious help. Hillary was right. These days it takes a village of bureaucrats to raise a child.
My wife and I resisted.
We tried to do the right thing by our kids. I did get a helmet for the younger one just to shut up my nosy neighbor but I never made him wear it. He had his share of bumps- he broke a leg learning to slide into second base and a got a concussion from high school football but he never had anything more than skinned knees from riding his bicycle. The other one surfed. I wonder when the government will insist on helmets for surfing. I am sure that somebody is working on it.
Anyway my kids risked life and limb in our household because of my wife’s and my carefree parenting style. They grew up to tell the tale just like my brothers and I survived our helmet less and seatbeltless childhood. Perhaps the trauma they suffered explains why they are still unmarried and childless but it’s hard to know.
But there is more!
Anyway, each day we seem to discover more inadequacies of modern day parents. Just today, I learned that some eager PhD student in Texas has discovered that parents can’t even manage to pack a lunch for their kids. According to his rigorous study of packed lunches at a nearby preschool, those parent can’t even manage to pack a safe lunch for their kids. It seems that they were all at an unsafe temperature- whatever that means.
I remember sack lunches.
My mom packed lunches for us from time to time. Usually there was a sandwich- either peanut butter and jelly or bologna, an apple, a bag of chips and either a candy bar or some cookies. I never remember getting scalded or frozen eating one of them and those are the only unsafe temperature options I can think of. Mostly those lunches were ice cold if they had been in the ice box overnight or room temperature. The worst case was having the candy bar melt which was messy but not unsafe. I just can’t figure out what this PhD student knows that a parent doesn’t about feeding their kid a sack lunch What I do know is that generations of Americans thrived on sack lunches before this rigorous study discovered the peril in sack lunches with a pretty high survival rate.
Are we doomed?
What this new generation of parents is doing wrong is hard for me to know. Maybe it’s the result of the failing education system or maybe somewhere along the line, the tradition of American parenting self-sufficiency was broken- possibly in the 60’s when black became white and the other way around. All I know is that America seems to be doomed. Nobody seems capable of independent action and responsibility any more and this rigorous study of sack lunches just confirms the fact. The way things are going the only way to fix the problem is to just get those inadequate parents out of the way. Dumb as parents seem to be these days, they might not even notice.
