Perhaps this is an odd time to bring this subject up, after all we're still in the grips of winter, but according to a recent survey, more than 80 percent of all children in the U.S. never play in their neighborhoods without adults present. The Hound remembers in his youth, just a decade ago, that he gamboled quite frequently in neighborhood parks, yards and of course, The Rockpile.
The Hound assumes many youngsters in this area grew up with something similar to The Rockpile. It was a pile of dirt, mixed with a few rocks and boulders, pushed to the end of the block while subdivisions were under construction. One could even leave his and her Tonka trucks overnight after a tough day of playing killdozer.
Ah, youth!
But the childhoods of today's youth are being tethered by, you guessed it, TV and computers. Or, they're driven around to adult-organized activities by their parents, i.e., soccer moms and dads. And in the San Francisco Bay area, home of Silicon Valley and our computer industry, more than 90 percent never play outside. While that seems a little high to The Hound, nevertheless this is what Playborhood.com, an online commmunity for parents who want their kids to play outside.
Kids today don't even play pickup baseball games. Playborhood laments that most of kid activities are pushed by adults and children don't interact quite the same as they did even a decade ago when The Rockpile was being used for tunneling and King of the Hil, until they flattened it to put the road through to the next subdivision block.
So when it gets warmer, maybe in July, tell your kids to get their faces away from the screens and "get outside". After all, no play makes Jack and Jill boring creatures in adulthood who depend on spell check to make sure their stories don't have spelling errors. Not that we pay attention to that sort of thing.
oh the memories - if only it were the same today as it were yesterday. I guess it is depending on the city that you live in, but for the most part it's unfortunate that you cannot let your kids play outside unsupervised nowadays, I mean you can if you want to be looked at as a bad parent. The state of the world today is way worse than it was 20-some years ago when I was a kid playing "king of the hill", or playing "army" with all of my friends outside in the woods....... I definitely agree that the kids should 'get outside' once the weather gets nice - heck even now with the proper clothing on, but unfortunately kids nowadays have to be supervised in a much larger way than we were years ago.......
THE HOUND SAYS: Is it because parents are afraid of all the nutjobs out there or, as you point out, "you're looked at as a bad parent"? In my book, bad parents let there kids skip school, beat their kids or abuse them. Bad parents aren't the ones letting their kids play with other kids and not at structured "play dates."