Today’s kids making safer choices

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/09/2017 (3238 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s back-to-school time, and all you modern, nurturing parents know exactly what that means, don’t you?

It means that you can crack open that family-sized bottle of vodka and start pouring celebratory martinis, because summer vacation is officially over and for the next 10 months teams of crack education professionals will be responsible for keeping an eye on your children and ensuring they do not cause some manner of nuclear meltdown in your neighbourhood.

I am only joking, of course. Under federal law, modern “helicopter” parents are legally required to hover within three metres of their kids at all times, even during school hours, to ensure their charter rights are not violated at recess and they do not divert from the career path you planned out in kindergarten that will result in them becoming the heads of major international corporations.

It was different when I was a kid. Back then, parents were only obligated to be around their kids during the actual birthing process, after which they could basically hand over the problematic child-rearing process to television programs such as The Beverly Hillbillies and Gilligan’s Island.

The way it worked when I was a kid was that, as soon as summer vacation officially arrived, your parents would punt you out of the house so that you could go outside and “get some fresh air,” which, in practical terms, meant “go and live in the woods where you will be raised in the wild by wolverines.”

When back-to-school time rolled around two months later, our moms would poke their heads outside a window and begin screaming our names at a decibel level that would turn a heavy metal band green with envy.

During the actual vacation period itself, we baby boomer kids were expected to trek into the woods, where we would bond with gentle woodland creatures and — I wish I was making this next bit up — attempt to shoot each other in the head with our BB and/or pellet guns.

It was a stupid, mindless, dangerous activity, which means kids during the freewheeling 1960s could not get enough of it. Sure, we dropped like (bad word) flies, but all that fresh air — along with the odd puncture wound — was really good for us.

In contrast, modern youngsters are not allowed to even look at photographs of pellet guns because some of those pictures would have extremely sharp edges and could give you a nasty paper cut.

And do you know what is even more dangerous than shooting at your friends with mostly non-lethal weapons? Well, when we went back to school we were required to buy geometry sets containing a protractor and a compass, which is a pointy thing you can use to draw circles during math class, but mostly we used one for the purpose of stabbing each other in the head. 

If modern kids are required to draw circles, they can just have their computer tablets and smartphones do it for them. Also, it is hard to stab someone in the eyeball with a cellphone.

But I do not wish to give you the wrong impression of what kids were like during this carefree period of history. Along with shooting and/or stabbing each other, we prehistoric kids also engaged in the following fun summertime activities:

• Using magnifying glasses to fry ant hills on extremely sunny days;
• Licking batteries and drinking out of the same Orange Crush bottle;
• Not wearing safety helmets and using leftover Halloween fireworks and firecrackers to blow up our plastic army men.

Fortunately, times have changed. Modern kids do not have time to do the stupid things we used to do, because they are too busy taking hot yoga classes, learning how to laugh in an ironic manner and communicating with each other via the internet, which is another thing we did not have back in the day.

No, in pre-internet times, if kids wanted to learn about anatomy via looking at risqué photos, they had to steal their parents’ Eaton’s catalogue, then hide in a fort made out of old cardboard boxes and flip through the underwear section.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not longing for the “old days,” when kids like me were forced to subsist on diets consisting primarily of Twinkies and gallons of Kool-Aid, into which we poured so much sugar that it would cause us to bounce off the (bad word) walls like rubber balls fired out of a cannon.

The part I really do not miss about going back to school is that it was a time when everyone was convinced we were about to be nuked into oblivion by something called “the Soviet Union,” which meant we spent days in class practising something called “duck and cover,” which involved us hapless kids hiding under our desks and covering our eyes with our hands to help us survive a potential atomic-bomb attack.

It’s different today. Sure, just like in the 1960s, modern kids have to worry about the possibility of tinpot dictators like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un turning the Earth into something resembling a flaming marshmallow. But at least they know it would be a total waste of time to hide under their desks.

Because modern kids have 24-hour access to the internet, so they know that would be a stupid thing to do. For the record, they should also skip licking batteries and drinking from the same soda pop bottle, too.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca