What Do You You Miss From Childhood?

[glatt]

We have kids on Halloween, but only a dozen or so. All kids from our street. We take our daughter out onour street too. It's pretty cool that it's still alive in our neighborhood. (Arlington, VA)

I miss packs of kids roaming around the neighborhood unsupervised. Now, kids have to set up play dates in advance, and parents are always there. When I was a kid, we had no fences in the back yards, and we had the run of the entire neighborhood.

Also, bikes. Kids today don't ride bikes like we did. We would just ride all over the place. A mile or two away from home, without telling our parents where we were going. You just had to be home for dinner.

I'm convinced that the world is just as safe today as it was when I was a kid in the 70s. You just hear about the bad stuff more. People over-react and over-protect their kids.

But I think there is something about youth that just makes life fun. Even though kids are doing different stuff today, I think they are having fun doing it. The only real harm I see today is that most kids have little or no free time. It's the free time that sparks curiosity and lets kids do crazy and inventive stuff to fight off the boredom. I can't imagine the current crop of over-scheduled kids producing someone like this: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/