I’ve believed for some time now that we Americans are turning ourselves into a nation of infantilized wussies. Seriously. We worry constantly about achieving “closure” for every little childhood trauma, we dress ourselves in soft ‘n’ cuddly fleece outfits that resemble nothing so much as overgrown jammies (all they need are the sewn-in feet), and we’re downright obsessed with safety. Cops pulling you over for not wearing your seatbelt, those obnoxious seals that have to be removed from all of our food and medicine containers, warnings on the sides of our coffee cups that the contents may be hot (duh!)… it’s enough to make me want to run out and do something positively reckless, like run with the bulls in Pamplona or wave freshly baked cupcakes at the women coming out of Gold’s Gym.
I really worry, however, about what we’re doing to our kids with all this safety nonsense. Maybe I don’t have any room to say anything on this subject because I’m not yet a parent myself, but when I see some little tyke dressed in a tiny little suit of protective armor just to go ride his bike or use her rollerskates, it just makes me sad.
Which is probably why I reacted so strongly to the following bit of electronic flotsam that washed up here on the shores of Simple Tricksia. It arrived in an e-mail from one of my parents’ friends, so I imagine it’s probably supposed to be aimed at the Baby Boomer demographic. However, I think we folks who grew up in the Groovy ’70s and Awesome ’80s (at least the early ’80s) can relate, too. Just imagine all of the following being read by Dana Carvey in his Grumpy Old Man voice:
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes.
Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paints.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking.
As children, we rode in cars with no seat belts or air bags.
Riding in the back of a pickup on a warm day was always a special treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.
We shared soft drinks with four friends, from ONE bottle, and NO ONE actually died from this.
We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter, and we drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we weren’t overweight because WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.
We would spend hours building go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
We did not have Playstations, Nintendos, X-Boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video-tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms… WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!
[Ed. note: okay, so this one doesn’t apply to us ’80s kids very well, since we were the generation that first experienced videogames and movies at home. However, I suspect today’s rugrats are a lot worse off in the media-overload department than we were.]
We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.
We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.
We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.
We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!
Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!
This missive wrapped up on a rather shrill note which I won’t reproduce here, a denouncement of government regulations and an equally distasteful pat on the back for those almighty Boomers — who, when you think about it, are basically the generation that created all the regulations and corresponding fears to begin with, to the detriment of us all, I think.
Don’t misunderstand my point in posting this stuff. I’m not opposed to reasonable regulation of things that might hurt us or of taking sensible steps to increase safety. I just think that when we won’t let our kids roam the neighborhoods unescorted for fear they might get kidnapped or injured, when we obsess endlessly over all the bad things that might happen to us (rather than rationally examining the statistics and realizing how astronomically high the odds are in our favor), then maybe we might want to reevaluate where we’re headed as a society. Just a thought…
I see your point, but I disagree with your conclusion. I’m thrilled that my kids are growing up in this age, where distance and cost are not barriers to communication and research is so easy that it’s almost harder to not know something than to look it up. What’s more, I’m not thrilled because of all the things they can do with this technology, I’m thrilled because they’re going to grow up assuming it exists, and their generation is going to invent the next set of cool things, treating its existence as a given.
Of course progress has downsides. What doesn’t? But let’s remember, most of those warnings and protective seals are there to protect the manufacturers from lawsuits, not the consumers from injury. And a lot of parental paranoia is to avoid being seen by the neighborhood worrywarts as “those parents that let their kids run around unsupervised.” My kids are still a bit young (6 and 3) for all day go-cart building, and I generally keep an eye on them at all times, but if they’re in our backyard playing and I’m in the house, that’s OK with me. I believe in a gradual increase of freedoms, so as to balance safety with self-confidence.
I’m sure our parents had issues like this to balance as well. But the restrictive stuff melts away in our mind, leaving only stuff like the above behind…
Those are some good points, Brian. At first I thought along the same lines as Jas, but like he previously pointed out, we’re not parents. I’m sure actually having kids makes a HUGE difference in how one looks at things like bicycle helmets, etc. Yes, our parents used to let us get on our bikes and take off until sundown, but there weren’t half as many cars on the roads back then. I’d be down right terrified to let any child (my own or otherwise) ride down the road I used to live on, and when I was a kid we were up and down it all day long.
Well, Anne, keeping the kids off Redwood Rd. would be one of those reasonable concessions to safety that I mentioned earlier, considering that traffic along that road has increased about a hundred-fold since we were kids. That’s just common sense. But it still makes me twitchy to see some poor little kid all armored up with elbow and knee pads and helmets just to go ride his or her bike in the park. It seems like overkill to me. I know this isn’t a position I can defend rationally — of course the kid is safer that way and of course you ought to keep your kids safe — but it just seems wrong that they should have to be so concerned with such things when we were not. It’s as if we’re mapping our grown-up neuroses onto them. Again, I know this isn’t rational, that parents are supposed to be afraid for their kids because the kids aren’t yet sophisticated enough to see the danger, that there are statistics, etc., etc. Still bugs me, on some deep-down, lizard-brained level.
Brian, as always you make excellent points, and they’re not easy ones to refute, in part because you make them so elegantly and reasonably. And also, because I’m not speaking from the perspective of someone who is actually around kids much, I tend to feel like I’m talking out of my hat on this subject.
But for me that’s what this subject comes down to, really, what things feel like. Specifically what it feels like to be a child of the ’70s now living in the year 2006. And to nostalgic old curmudgeons like myself, it always tends to feel as if we’ve lost something. Innocence is the obvious concept to reference in these terms, but maybe it’s really just the sense that we (the curmudgeons) know what the hell is going on around us. Oftentimes, I just don’t get the way people, especially younger people, think these days…
It’s not just the computers and gadgets, although that’s part of it. It more like there’s been a sea-change in how people actually see the world.
But what do I know? After all, I’m just talking out of my hat…
If it helps any, my kids (survey sample size: 2 out of hundreds of millions) don’t find things like helmets & knee pads restricting at all. All they care about is whether they’ve got Spiderman printed on them (or whatever the hot character is at the time).
You’re comparing the world through your adult eyes to your memory of the world through your kid eyes. Kids today don’t have the former, so the latter doesn’t suffer by comparison.
Also of note: every generation goes through this. Remember – your parents generation ran radio and newspaper ads (and even lobbied Congress, if I remember correctly) that music from heathens like Elvis Presley and The Beatles were destroying the moral fabric of America, and reminiscing about the more innocent, Perry Como days…
Not my parents, Brian! My mom is a dyed-in-the-wool Elvis fan. 😉
I view it as the prerogative — nay, the obligation! — of every generation to tell the generation coming up behind that everything’s gone to hell and it used to be much better before they were born. I am simply fulfilling my mission as The Chosen One, as the Chosen One before me did. Of course, the rub is that we Chosen Ones are always ignored, just as we ignored the Ones who preceded us.
By the way, who is the hot character for emblazoning on bicycling armor these days?
I think we lament for the way things used to be, because we took them for granted and didn’t appreciate them for what they were. And now that we’re dealing with grown-up issues like war and the devastation of natural disasters, etc, we want to go back to the simpler times and want our kids to have those same simple times. Like you said, Brian, the “armor” doesn’t bother them as long as it’s got the right character on it. It’s just what they’ve always known.
Nicely said, dear — although when you think about it in those terms, our “simple times” included things like the end of the Vietnam war, Watergate, the first big oil crunch, the Iranian hostage crisis, Three Mile Island, Love Canal, and the persistent threat of “a nice game of global thermonuclear war,” to quote a nearly forgotten movie. No wonder my parents talked so fondly of the old days in Mayberry!
That’s my point. The kids don’t realize all that crap is going on, or at least don’t realize the full extent of what all these things mean. Which is what Brian was pointing out in his first comment. All that mattered to us was riding our bike down to Jonny’s house to play ball. And that’s still all that matters to the kids, today. Yes, the world says they should be wrapped in bubble wrap and protected, and as adults it is our responsibilty to do that the best way we see fit.
Example: Last weekend at the parents house, my brother and his wife didn’t think it was a big deal to drive a mile to the store with their almost-4-year-old not in a car seat. They even let her go the half-mile home without even being belted in at all. Yes, when we were kids cars didn’t even have seat belts in them. But our parents learned it was something they could provide that gave their children a measure of safety. And I think that parents today who don’t observe the seat belt laws, even if it’s just a half mile away, are putting their kids in danger. There are just more cars on the roads now, more hazards.
See, the problem is that it’s impossible for me to argue something like that without sounding like a heartless dick, or a complete fool. As I’ve said, this is an irrational, emotional issue for me, something I just sense but have a hard time defending.
Any individual action or regulation, whether it’s seat belts, biking helmets, or seals in our medicine bottles, sounds perfectly reasonable when you’re just talking about that one thing, a solution to a single problem. Each of those solutions would seem to make the world incrementally better by preventing (or at least reducing) a specific harm.
The problem as I see it is when all of these individual things add up and become a cultural phenomenon. I’m not thinking in practical terms of saving a kid’s life, but in more generalized, even metaphysical terms, of what it says about a society that is so overly concerned with — or perhaps I should say overly conscious of — safety.
(Of course, as Brian pointed out a while back, you could argue that many of these “improvements” are less about consumers and individuals than they are about corporations trying to ward off lawsuits — or, he cynically added, to sell us more safety products — but even the fact that people are so much more sue-crazy than they used to be says something about where we are as a society.)
I just can’t help but think that our society is becoming generally more paranoid and, well, wussy.
Jason: The hot character right now is a kid called Danny Phantom, who has the ability to “Go Ghost,” which basically turns his outline to white and his internal colors to clear, and allows him to pass through walls & fight other ghost-like creatures. Unfortunately for Danny, some of his (grade-school?) classmates also have secret identities as “Ghost Fighters” (or something like that), so they try to kill him when he’s invisible, but are happy to play around with him when he’s opaque.
And we thought the Wonder Twins were weird…
Re: the good ol’ days – next time you hear your parents telling you about how great things were, remind them that they used to hide under their desks in grammar school to protect themselves from atomic bombs (desks were, apparently, better made in those days).
The kids roll with the punches. If all your friends have to sit in 5-point carseats every time they get in the car, it never occurs to you that you’re being restricted. And yes, the occasional (short) ride in a “big-boy” seatbelt (or no seatbelt at all), is a HUGE treat. My kids have still never seen the front seat of a car. Maybe for their birthdays… 😉
Alrighty… that Phantom kid does sound pretty weird, but to a six-year-old, he’s probably pretty cool. Fickle friends, though, if they’ll play with him while he’s solid and try to kill him when he’s not. Sheesh!
Maybe the desks in the ’50s were made out of lead. 😉