Kids Today Will Never Comprehend the Hardships We Suffered
It’s a Completely Different World Today
Yeah, I know. We heard the same thing from our parents.
“We had to walk 10 miles in the snow uphill both ways to get to school.”
We didn’t believe it then, and our kids wouldn’t believe it today.
But it’s an entirely different world today. The difference between my childhood in the ’60s and ’70s vs. my parents in the ’30s and ’40s wasn’t huge.
We both walked to school. They listened to the radio, and we watched TV. We both got all of our knowledge from books. And we both grew up eating a mixture of home-cooked meals and what passed for convenient foods at the time.
Wait! You can put canned fruit in Jell-O? Who knew?
The gap wasn’t that huge. But the gap between 1970 and 2021? Massive.
We could try to run that old routine about walking to school, but we wouldn’t even get to the snowy hill part.
“When I was a kid, we had to walk to school…”
“What? You had to walk to school? Did you live in a cave?”
I have lived nearby and passed schools daily all of my adult life. I can’t remember the last time I saw a kid on foot approaching or leaving. Yeah, I know, it’s a different world. A world of stranger danger and playdates, but still.
Imagine this. You are at school, say 7th or 8th grade. You and your mates are hanging around out front before school starts. Planning your daily academic achievements. Or how to skip biology. Suddenly an SUV pulls up (what’s an SUV?). The driver hops out and opens the back door allowing a child to exit. What would you have thought? This rich kid has a chauffeur.
Now, pass by any school (if you can) in the early morning hours. You could watch hundreds of SUVs and mini-vans pull that same maneuver. All of the kids are driven nestled in the back seat watching videos until they are chauffeured to the front door and allowed to walk alone but monitored that last twenty feet.
I see school buses every day, and I see children on them. But based on the line of cars at every school, I don’t know who is riding them. That must be a humiliating experience.
I understand. I rode the bus once. Once. Now, granted, I lived about a half-mile from my elementary school, and my Dad walked me there once.
Once.
Dad, I got this, ok?
But high school was 3 miles away on the other side of a 4-lane highway. (That was as big as they got back then.) I walked to and from there almost every day for five years. And my parents were less concerned about what someone might do to me than what I might do to somebody else.
Then, we got home and ‘went out to play.’ That meant yelling that exact phrase as you ran out the door. And came home three hours later when supper was ready.
“Where have you been?”
“Playing.”
“What have you been doing?”
“Nothing”
“Have you done your homework?”
“Didn’t have any.”
Remarkably, I managed to get through twelve years of school without ever having any homework.
Today, the designated parent would pick them up in the SUV, drive them to the mall and pay a few hundred dollars to let them build a teddy bear or dress their American Girl, then maybe go for a manicure or buy a new wardrobe.
At the start of each school year, my parents bought me three outfits and a pair of shoes. What was left of those clothes became my summer wardrobe. Socks and underwear? Those were Christmas presents.
After dinner, we would watch TV. One TV. Three channels. With Commercials. And you watched the shows, after much argument, in the order they were presented. With commercials. But there were twenty to thirty episodes of each show. Then you watched them again during summer reruns.
“But what if there were two shows on at the same time.”
Hence, the argument. And the loser got to see them next summer.
Kids are shocked that we didn’t even have a remote control. But the fact is, you didn’t need one. You turned it on and changed channels. And likely wouldn’t touch it again for three hours when we went to bed.
Then my parents would watch “The news.” That’s right; if you wanted to know what was going on in the world, you waited until six or eleven when it all got crammed into thirty minutes. And ten of that was the weather. Which was no more accurate sixty years ago than it is today. Or less accurate, for that matter.
Of course, in between playtime and tv time was dinner. Some folks grew up eating a lot of home-cooked meals. Me? Not so much. My parents were very much into convenience. Which wasn’t that convenient back then. Why? There was no microwave.
I remember when my Dad’s office got a microwave oven. It was in the late ’60s, and no one had heard of it, much less owned one. He tried to explain it to me. Something about cooking with soundwaves. It was a ginormous metal box that looked like something out of Lost in Space.
But we didn’t have one. I think I owned my first microwave around 1980. Just before I got my first VCR. The point is, we had frozen dinners back then too. They were called TV dinners. And you had to cook them in an oven for about 30 minutes. To be honest, I’ve eaten some today that aren’t any better. But you can eat crappy food in 3 minutes instead of half an hour.
And popcorn. Popcorn was a once-a-month treat. Well, before Jiffy Pop, anyway. It was a major operation requiring careful measuring and monitoring and messed up half the kitchen.
But not as much as homemade ice cream. Today, people talk about homemade ice cream with a gleam of nostalgia in their eyes. Maybe a tear. But, I’m here to tell you that’s a load of crap. Plan A: Tear open the end flap from a half-gallon of Sealtest peach ice cream and enjoy.
Plan B:
- Assemble all the equipment and ingredients to make ice cream.
- Buy about 100 pounds of ice and 200 pounds of rock salt.
- Sit outside, no matter the weather, and crank the thing for bout four hours.
And at the end, you get a soupy mix of cold milk and frozen peaches.
Kids today don’t even have to tear open the end flaps.
And knowledge. I was an inquisitive child. My Dad ran out of patience by the time I was about six.
“Look it up!” was the stock answer.
Look it up meant wait until Saturday when he dropped me off at the library while he went to the grocery store. I got to spend several hours ‘looking it up.’ It started with a card catalog and the Dewey Decimal system and ended up with me hauling a stack of books home.
Today, kids have the combined results of all humankind’s knowledge on a device in their pocket.
And they still won’t ‘look it up.’
I remember one Saturday, the library was closed. I don’t remember the reason, but I do remember the discomfort and sadness. My thirst for knowledge would have to wait another week.
Try this. When the kids aren’t looking, unplug your Internet router for about five minutes.
Your kids will be in total panic, packing up for end times and the zombie apocalypse.
I don’t envy the kids all of this. In fact, I wish them luck and success. They have so much that we lacked.
I guess the only question is, are these things that they don’t have to do or things that they don’t get to do?
previously published on Many Stories