Kids, boredom and societal change

[Faith-manor]

I will say we spent nearly every weekend at the beach because my parents loved it, and prioritized it. Of course it helps that an annual state park pass was so heavily subsidized by tax dollars that it was something like $5. Even now an annual pass is only $20. So they did make an effort, and if they couldn't do it, my grandparents would make the effort. We also went up in the winter and hiked the beaches, watched the ice form, etc. Again, they liked doing that so we were able to do so. We lived about 20 minutes from Lake Huron. My kids also grew up this way. Interestingly, we had two young men on our rocket team at one point who live right here, so very close to those state parks and water/beaches, who at that time, had never ever been to the lake. That was shocking to us. To live in Michigan and never frolic on one of these inland seas is just mind boggling. But, their parents were farmers which is 7 day a week/365 job, and also absolutely hated traveling and being away from home. So if it was not an activity in practically their own backyard, they were not participating. When we found that out, we made sure the 4H Stem Club (rocket team was just an extension of that) had excuses for research projects on Lake Huron so they would have field trips with us.

Maybe my parents were just more heavily involved with activities than average which was then conveyed down to me, and I married someone who was enthusiastic about that as well.

[Mrs Tiggywinkle Again]

It was hovering around 40 degrees today so I bundled the kids up and drove to an elementary school to play on the playground. I figured we could do something, be outdoors, and escape the mud.

However there’s a fence around the playground and the gate was locked. I asked on our Facebook local site and it turns around that school playgrounds are no longer open to the public.  That is so wildly different from my childhood and is the sort of thing I’m talking about.

We drove another ten minutes to a public playground so it was okay, but it’s frustrating. I couldn’t find open bowling anywhere either—but to be fair, most bowling alleys have closed.  I have to believe there’s just no longer interest, because things would be open if they were making money and people were going to them?

[wendyroo]

I grew up in a fairly rural area...I could walk 10 minutes to a very small playground, or 30 minutes to our very small library, but any real shopping or activities were a 30-45 minute drive away. I was on the bus for an hour each way, so I didn't have much time on week days to get bored, but weekends and vacations were pretty empty. There was a movie theater in town, but we didn't have money for those types of activities.

We had an acre of land, so I could play outside, but there wasn't really anything to do out there - the roads around my house were gravel, very hilly, with no sidewalks and very fast traffic, so it wasn't safe to ride bikes anywhere. There weren't other kids around; I only had one much younger brother. We didn't have dirt bikes or snowmobiles or anything. Once I was old enough, I could (was forced to) cut the lawn with the tractor, but that wasn't exactly a boredom buster.

My mom didn't let us participate in any sports or clubs that ever met during family/chore/homework time (evenings and weekends), so other than a brief stint in girl scouts, I was never in organized activities.

I was bored a lot, but it didn't take long for me to start using that time for academics. The library was right next to the post office (where we had to pick up mail from our post office box), so I could check out new books every other day or so all summer. I think my parents also felt guilty that they could not support my academic strengths, and that our rural school wasn't doing much either, so they were always willing to buy me math workbooks from the grocery store. I could spend hours and hours trying to figure out how to add negative numbers and then checking myself with the answers in the back. My mom had a big roll of newsprint, and she would let me write and solve h.u.g.e long division problems, like 20 digits divided by 3 digits. That could fill up a summer afternoon. Once I was older, I spent a lot of time solving math problems from old competitions...even though there was no way I could actually compete. Unfortunately, the further ahead I got academically, the more time I spent bored at school.

I also turned a lot of time spare time toward making money. My parents were always vehemently against paying kids for any chores, so that was never an option. But by ten I was getting paid by a couple neighbors to act as a mother's helper, by twelve I was babysitting, by 14 I had my first off the books "real" job, and by my sixteenth birthday I had bought myself a car and gotten a real on the books job that I had to drive to. That is also the age I started leaving school after lunch every day to take dual enrollment classes, so I was a lot less bored by then.

[SKL]

About climate / weather - muddy yards are still legitimate places to play.  Am I the only boardie who used to make “mud pies” etc.?

[kathyl]

5 hours ago, Pawz4me said:

Same. I can count on one hand the times I can remember an adult doing anything for the sole purpose of entertaining kids. Mostly those times were my aunt taking her kids, my brother and me to a movie. I can't say that other families didn't do more because I don't have any memory of that. But I know mine didn't.

Yep. I remember quite a few kids getting into quite a lot of trouble, and in hindsight I feel sure boredom played a big part in that. Kids will figure out something to do when they're bored, but it won't always be something productive or positive. Of course some of that comes back to supervision or lack thereof. I was raised when kids were pretty much left to their own devices in most every way--no expectation of parental entertaining, but also very little supervision.

 

5 hours ago, Corraleno said:

Same. I've been wracking my brain trying to think of anything my parents ever took us to, and other than occasionally going to the beach in summer (where we were left totally unsupervised), the only thing I can think of is one time they took us to a drive-in to see a really violent movie that wasn't exactly kid-friendly — and then we got yelled at for chewing popcorn too loud, lol. The idea of taking us ice skating or to a bowling alley or even to a friend's house or to after-school activities just wouldn't have occurred to them. If we couldn't get there on our own by bike (and pay any admission fee with our own money, which we never had anyway), then we didn't go. I think it was a combination of poverty and just the overall hands-off approach to kids that was common at the time.

 

Same here.  I can probably count on one hand the number of times I went to a bowling alley or skating rink or whatever when we were growing up (60's and early 70's).  We mostly played outside year-round.  Bikes, other kids, basketball goal in backyard, and anything else we could come up with on our own.  We would go see the latest Walt Disney cartoon movie when it came out, but that was few and far between.  Oh, and they took us to all the Clint Eastwood movies because my father loved them and they didn't want to get a babysitter.  🙄  

I took piano lessons and baton lessons so I practiced those.  Parents joined a pool one summer so we could learn to swim, so I rode my bike to that (alone) and learned to swim, kind of.  Mostly, though, we had WAAY too much time on our hands and I, personally, got into some rather destructive stuff with some of the girls I played with.  No idea what my brothers were doing.

I always felt like I might have been fine if my mother had encouraged me to read a lot more by taking me to the library and talking about the things I was reading.  She used to go and get piles of books for herself and for my father, but I only remember a couple of times that she took me to the library.  And I loved it and wanted to spend a long time there, but as soon as she found her own books she was rushing me out the door. 

With my own dc, I didn't take them to places like bowling alleys or skating rinks.  Dh would drag us down to D.C. to "look at all the rocks" (as dc described it) when he could.  lol  But when I wanted to take dc somewhere without him, I would load them all up in the car and drive out into the nearby national forest or to a nearby field or a local sledding hill or a cheap pool or to an empty ps playground (or to the public library) or somewhere - ANYwhere - where they could act like kids and yell and run and do crazy stuff to their hearts content. 

Mostly, though, I worked with them - cleaning up our property/house, hauling all of it to the dump, teaching them how to cook and clean, teaching them how to sew, teaching them how to shop, teaching them academics, always teaching and encouraging ...

I just never felt the need to entertain my kids, I think.  They seemed to do that on their own.  

Edited January 2 by kathyl

[Mrs Tiggywinkle Again]

49 minutes ago, SKL said:

About climate / weather - muddy yards are still legitimate places to play.  Am I the only boardie who used to make “mud pies” etc.?

We played mud factory as kids. We had this drainage ditch with tons of rock and mud and played like we were turning it all into chocolate candies.

My kids are(mostly) now too old for that, and the problem is that the things they want to do at 13 and 11 would be go karts and dirt bikes, but they’ll sink into the mud.  At their ages over winter break, we were sledding, snowmobiling, snowboarding.  I live someplace where it is several degrees warmer on average than it was when I was growing up and the average days of heavy precipitation has increased 60% according to Cornell University(http://www.nrcc.cornell.edu/services/blog/2023/11/15/20231115_extreme_precip_northeast.jpg).  The weather is different, there are fewer indoor spaces for tweens and teens such as bowling alleys or roller skating rinks or even the mall, and other than the library(which has its own issues due to unhoused populations), a significant decrease in the third spaces that are available to that age group.

[Pam in CT]

2 hours ago, SKL said:

About climate / weather - muddy yards are still legitimate places to play.  Am I the only boardie who used to make “mud pies” etc.?

Nope. And my two youngers and the two kids next door designated a patch between the houses as "mudville." They kept a bunch of Tonka trucks out there all summer, built roads between cairns they declared to be "apartment buildings."  If it didn't rain one of them would drag a hose from one of the houses to **make** the mud.

I mean, it only lasts through age 7 or so.  But pretty hilarious while it lasts. 

[Heartstrings]

5 hours ago, Mrs Tiggywinkle Again said:

It was hovering around 40 degrees today so I bundled the kids up and drove to an elementary school to play on the playground. I figured we could do something, be outdoors, and escape the mud.

However there’s a fence around the playground and the gate was locked. I asked on our Facebook local site and it turns around that school playgrounds are no longer open to the public.  That is so wildly different from my childhood and is the sort of thing I’m talking about.

We drove another ten minutes to a public playground so it was okay, but it’s frustrating. I couldn’t find open bowling anywhere either—but to be fair, most bowling alleys have closed.  I have to believe there’s just no longer interest, because things would be open if they were making money and people were going to them?

We play on school playgrounds all the time.  Some people think we’re weird for doing so which I think is weird.  
 

Bowling has priced itself out, if you ask me.  Someone was telling about spending over $100 each to go bowling with another couple.  That’s not a price I’m willing to pay to bowl.  We only go when we can use the Kids Bowl Free program and only need to pay for shoes.  An adult pass is only $40 and you can add at least 4 adults.  

Edited January 2 by Heartstrings

[Faith-manor]

9 hours ago, Heartstrings said:

We play on school playgrounds all the time.  Some people think we’re weird for doing so which I think is weird.  
 

Bowling has priced itself out, if you ask me.  Someone was telling about spending over $100 each to go bowling with another couple.  That’s not a price I’m willing to pay to bowl.  We only go when we can use the Kids Bowl Free program and only need to pay for shoes.  An adult pass is only $40 and you can add at least 4 adults.  

Yes, I think bowling is going the way of the dodo because it used to be an activity folks could afford. I looked up the average prices and it was $4-6 to rent the shoes, and $12 a game or $40 an hour per person. So three kids bowling for one game would cost $48, and it doesn't take that long to bowl a game, hardly worth the trip and money. It would be over $120 for those same kids to bowl for one hour! I guess the one bowling alley left around here is all league based. People pay annual dues to belong to the leagues. I don't know how that is priced out. League players usually own their shoes. But, they also spend a lot of money, typically, on cocktails and food. They have no leagues for anyone under 16.

I am still really steamed about the tennis courts at the park not allowing kids, and actively sending city police to run children off. If they have a tennis racket a balls, let them be. How the heck are they supposed to learn? 

Also, the school play grounds here are now fenced and gated, locked up. When we were kids, this was not the way, and everyone went to the local school yard to play on the weekends.

As always, low income kids get punished the most for societal changes like these.

I hadn't really thought about it much until this thread because we don't have our grandsons here, and our kids are grown so it isn't something of which we were aware. Looking into it makes me concerned. It seems like so many kid spaces are gone, and what is left is ridiculously heavily regulated. I am not happy about the invasion of retirees into our local political system with their "I don't care about kids" mentality. I feel like I need to put up some billboards, place some ads that say, "Be kind to kids. Someday they will be running your nursing home!"

[frogger]

Sorry about the locked playground. That is disappointing. 

[Pam in CT]

This thread has turned in a way that makes me SO SAD.

My little population, somewhat geographically sprawling town has two public playgrounds as well as four more associated with the lower and upper elementary schools and the Y, none of them fenced, all of them heavily utilized dawn to dusk; the library has a teen center for grades 6+ that is open for homework/ chess club/ rocketry club/ just drop in (with buses running to it from the schools) and is adjacent to a makers space (which the kids need to be trained in before using without a supervising adult, but once they've gone through the training they can use the equipment on their own); there is also an actual teen center in a different section of town, also with school bus service, with pool/ fusball/ pingpong tables, a community garden, etc.  And there's nothing to stop kids from utilizing the bike paths and trails that criss-cross the town, which connect directly to all the school campuses and to the Y. 

All of the municipal activities are free for the kids (the makers space charges modest materials fees).  The geography of our town (narrow winding hilly roads, no sidewalks) discourages bikeriding as a mode of transportation (which was how I got everywhere myself from grades 6-11), but the school buses run to all the major municipal spaces in town, so parents only have to organize one pickup anywhere from 5-closing time.

We don't have a skateboard park (the town immediately to our north does, and the kids who use it, use it a LOT) but there are efforts underway to establish one.

 

(We're in a high-tax town within a high-tax, high-COLA state, which surely accounts for some of the difference. But it's very, very sad to me to hear how little other areas invest in kids.  Stuff like bike paths and a teen room in the library don't cost much.)

[Farrar]

On 1/1/2024 at 12:41 PM, Innisfree said:

Appalling. 

I can understand individuals wanting to go to a nice restaurant without having badly-behaved children spoiling their meal. Some places are more appropriate for learning good behavior than others. But a child-free society in general? That’s a new concept for me. How widespread is this idea?

I've been seeing it off and on for awhile, I think in part because I'm in an urban area with a lot of childless by choice people. I think it's a growing concept among the childless that the world is geared too much toward families.

To me, that's just nonsense. On the one hand, I understand that they FEEL like there's a lot of societal pressure to be married and pop out 2.4 kids like a "normal" person and that can be difficult to deal with. On the other hand, society is actually not very accommodating toward kids and families and there isn't a ton of support for childcare, healthcare for kids, family leave and protections legally, etc. Like, there are a few tax supports and some specific welfare programs, but for the most part, having kids in the US is expensive and risky and not very well supported. It's not a society geared toward children's needs or toward parent needs. Like, at all.

[freesia]

4 minutes ago, Farrar said:

I've been seeing it off and on for awhile, I think in part because I'm in an urban area with a lot of childless by choice people. I think it's a growing concept among the childless that the world is geared too much toward families.

To me, that's just nonsense. On the one hand, I understand that they FEEL like there's a lot of societal pressure to be married and pop out 2.4 kids like a "normal" person and that can be difficult to deal with. On the other hand, society is actually not very accommodating toward kids and families and there isn't a ton of support for childcare, healthcare for kids, family leave and protections legally, etc. Like, there are a few tax supports and some specific welfare programs, but for the most part, having kids in the US is expensive and risky and not very well supported. It's not a society geared toward children's needs or toward parent needs. Like, at all.

Oh, my goodness, I find that so sad and so self-absorbed. It’s also not very understanding of community or even aware of how much they will need the next generation as they age. 

[Farrar]

Those who were taken places as kids vs. not is an interesting breakdown. My mom was definitely a fun and magic mom when I was little. We lived in a very rural area, essentially as homesteaders, and we had very little money. But she often did things to try and make magic for me. She threw me parties and came up with games, etc. And we were on a lake, so she would host other kids to come to us and swim and so forth. And she did take me to things like roller skating, etc. She made sure I was in Girl Scouts when I was little so I could do those sorts of things. Even when I was older and we were living in the suburbs and we were just so, so poor, she would find ways to take us to the beach or the mountains and camp and see things like waterfalls and other places that were free. And she shipped us off to my grandparents' and they would take me to see plays and to the circus and museums because they lived in a city.

The balance was that she spent other times just utterly neglecting us. When I was little, it meant I could roam our land by myself and do whatever. When I was older, it meant I was a total latchkey kid. I think I had a very odd balance of Gex X era upbringing. But I sort of appreciate that I got a little of both. A little of the, "you are dragged to this place and that and must sit and wait," a little of the "you are the center of the universe today and we're doing fun things for you," and a little of the "I have no idea what you're doing, take care of your own self" attitude. I think having a bit of everything was probably good for me. I definitely parented differently... we're not rich, but we're so much more financially stable than when I was a kid. And I homeschooled, so that's intensive parenting no matter how you shake it out. But I think I also tried to make some balance between catering to my kids and letting them know mom has to take care of her own needs and they have to suck it up.

[Farrar]

4 minutes ago, freesia said:

Oh, my goodness, I find that so sad and so self-absorbed. It’s also not very understanding of community or even aware of how much they will need the next generation as they age. 

Yeah. I think some of the hostility comes from a place where people are ignorant of that need and some of it comes from a very nihilistic place where people are assuming the whole world will be borderline destroyed no matter what by the time they're older.

[Pawz4me]

33 minutes ago, Farrar said:

Those who were taken places as kids vs. not is an interesting breakdown.

Oh, we traveled (domestically) an absolute ton while I was a kid. But almost all of it was related to my parents' business. But there were very few vacations, and I'm sure the idea of taking us skating or bowling or anything like that simply for entertainment never crossed their minds.

[kathyl]

3 hours ago, Farrar said:

Those who were taken places as kids vs. not is an interesting breakdown.  .....

We spent a month every year with all the relatives in Baton Rouge, 750 miles away.  From there, my grandfather would take us to New Orleans, Cafe Du Monde for (REAL) beignets, Hattiesburg, Biloxi, fishing on the banks of the Mississippi River with the alligators basking in the sun on the bank, etc.  We also visited relatives in Fort Worth, Pampa (TX), CT, etc.  We regularly drove all around LSU back when you could see Mike the Tiger up close and personal on campus.  We toured some of the River Road plantation homes.  My aunt took us to see the leper colony near Baton Rouge - apparently my great grandmother had worked there.  Etc.

I also went on some trips with friends.  I spent a week at Hilton Head Island beach with a friend and her family.  Stuff like that.

I went shooting with another friend.  Her dad taught me how to shoot.  That was fun.

IOW, we still did plenty of stuff.  Just not necessarily with my parents.  I think maybe my parents just didn't really enjoy ... kids.  I'm not even sure why they had them.  😐  When we were home with the parents, we were basically on our own in a tiny town that was 5 miles from one side to the other.

Edited January 3 by kathyl

[frogger]

Disliking that children exist and wanting them secluded into seperate spaces sounds horribly selfish and there IS some of that going on but I also think there is backlash to kids who are allowed to do anything and cause problems where ever they go. I have worked a lot with special needs children so please don't think I am being overly fussy. People should be more patient in general BUT allowing kids to simply get away with disruptive behaivor all the time does cause back lash. 

[bookbard]

 There's heaps more for kids locally than when I was young - and there's a higher expectation that you'll take kids places. We lived on a farm and my parents worked all the time - we helped, played outside or read books. Nowadays there's a playground within walking distance and heaps more within driving distance, along with a few play centres (eg ninja warrior, trampolining, bowling). Oh, and heated pools with splash pads for kids. The local community organisation runs youth programs too (I say local, we're rural, it's half an hour away). 

I do agree though that screen time has changed everything. It's really hard. I'm enrolling my boy in 'summer day camp' here just for a screen break because it's so exhausting to be so constantly vigilant esp as I'm working every day. 

 If we didn't have screens my kids would be living the same sort of life as I did - outside, bushwalking, biking, lots of reading. Because of screens they're outside far less, read far less, and have to be forced to bike or bushwalk. They do creative things online of course, coding and drawing and so on. Some of it is really social (D&D online). I just accept my kids won't have my childhood, they have their own childhood.