When we older people read the paper today or listen to the news, some of us have a difficult time imagining that kids are responsible for vandalism in schools and cemeteries, that a large percentage of our youth need daily medication to make it through a day and that many youngsters are overweight.
When our children were young, we sometimes said they had selective hearing. They heard what they wanted to, and ignored the rest of what we adults said to them.
Sometimes I think that as we get older, we have selective memories. We tend to recall the happy times of childhood, the good and not the bad. Still, there is much about today’s world of childhood that seems foreign to older people.
There have been several graveyard desecrations recently, and children have been the cause. A cemetery was the last place children of my generation would venture, except under duress for a family funeral. Oh, some kids roamed through neighborhood graveyards, to scare each other, but I don’t recall that the purpose was to do damage and violate the graves. But that has changed.
Summer is here, apparently some youngsters don’t have enough electronic equipment to keep them occupied and so they’ve ignored the playgrounds, skateboard parks and other amenities provided by our tax dollars and taken themselves into the cemeteries to knock over and destroy gravestones, prove they can write (obscenities) and generally show their disrespect.
And the fact that some of these vandals are girls and that somehow seems more shocking, proves the kind of thought process in which I was raised. Girls of my generation had housework to do if they ran out of imagination.
Youngsters have vandalized schools in neighboring towns. We senior citizens ask why? No answer that makes sense results. Nothing to do was never a reason (or excuse) in my day, for there was always something to do. Our parents saw to that.
Many in my peer group, on hearing news of trashed schools and destroyed monuments, immediately have a loss of memory of anything similar happening when they were young. Were we really so well-behaved, or are we afflicted with selective memories?
We’re warned frequently about ticks and Lyme disease. From my childhood I easily remember hornets, black flies and mosquitoes, but not ticks. I don’t remember ever hearing about ticks, and I sure don’t remember a physical examination on coming home from an afternoon playing in the woods or by the brook. I do recall getting scoured with Fels Naptha soap, “just in case” of an encounter with poison ivy. We don’t hear much about that today, though.
In the days of my youth, kids didn’t take medication to calm down. Trips to the doctor’s office were extremely rare and mostly for broken bones.
The term hyperactive was unheard of. Similarly, I never knew anyone (until I was grown) who had autism. Few of my childhood friends are remembered as overweight. Most class pictures from those days show a lot of bony knees. I knew children who had polio, whooping cough and a very few of us wore glasses. It seemed that everyone, at one time or another, had measles, mumps and chicken pox. Today, those illnesses are history.
In this country today, most of our young people do not suffer from polio, smallpox and other childhood diseases of days gone by, thanks to scientists and researchers from my generation. We old folks deserve a pat on the back.
I know I am getting older, but I remember childhood as mostly pleasant. Selective memory at work. This was proven during a conversation I had with a 10-year-old. He listened to me talk about “when I was a kid” and what we used to do, and then, looking baffled, he said, “Did you used to call it fun?”
Maybe selective memory is what keeps so many of us on our toes and ready for the challenges of today’s world.
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