Nine. Seven. Four. How is that possible? My kids are growing up. I can remember holding them in the hospital when they were just born. And now I'm fussing at them for raiding the refrigerator. I tell my little girls almost every day to stop growing up. They're at the perfect age right now. They're at the perfect size. The world isn't the mean, cold place that you and I live in. Santa Claus is real. Dreams can still come true. Hopes have not yet been dashed. Hearts haven't been broken. So, stop growing up, damn it! Enough already!
I'm sure this is true with every generation, but it's so much different for my kids than it was for me. I'm willing to go on record, though, that Gen X's kids have a WAY different childhood than their kids are having. I'm reminded of this daily. A few days ago, Briar and I walked to the big kids' school to join them on their walk home. We met another mom who is a good friend of ours and we chatted on our walk. The subject of the kids walking to and from school by themselves came up. I should mention a few things to give y'all some perspective. We can see the kid's school from our house. We can hear the screams from the playground from our backyard. The mom I was chatting with lives right around the corner. Our neighborhood is incredibly safe and friendly. The kind of neighborhood you'd want to raise your kids in. So why were we even having a conversation about a couple of 9-year-olds and a 7-year-old walking a few minutes to school? Because this ain't the 80's! And today's world is a dumpster fire!
When I was my kid's age, I would be gone from the house for hours a day. Literally gone. And my parents had no idea where I was, who I was with, or what I was doing. That wasn't out of negligence. It was just how things were in the 80's. We came home when it was dark. I can't imagine that today. Jess and I talked about that yesterday. I asked her if she could imagine not knowing where our children were for hours. We both shook our heads and agreed it was unfathomable.
Is that me being one of those clingy, helicopter parents? Is the leash I'm keeping them on too short? I don't think so. I know the world we're living in. I've been around the block a time or two. And it's my job to protect them. Keep them safe. But am I being too protective? We all have to fall. We all have to bleed. We've got to get our scars. We have to earn them. Without those scars, the adult world is going to chew them up and spit them out. But then, this isn't the 80's. So, what to do? I know every parent wrestles with this question.
My kids were whining and complaining about how bored they were yesterday. A quiet, laid-back Saturday with nothing to do. The kind of Saturday us adults, or at least the older ones like myself, dream about. And the kids were miserable. They wanted to be entertained at every second. I had to explain to them that being bored was a part of life. And then I launched into stories of my youth. I told them that when I was their age, we didn't have streaming, smart TVs. No cell phones. No tablets. When I was their age, we were bored. A lot.
Every Christmas, as we're watching the Grinch for the 30th time, I tell the kids how good they have it. Back in the 80s, the Grinch would come on ONCE. And if you missed it, tough shit. Gotta catch it next year. There was no 24 hours of A Christmas Story. You caught Ralphie once and then he was done for the year. These spoiled kids get to flip through a dozen streaming services and watch whatever the hell they want the minute it pops into their brains. And then when I pick classics like Emmet Otter, they clear the room because it's too old and boring. The River Bottom Nightmare Band boring? Seriously?!
We definitely were toughened up as kids in the 80s. We got our scars. A lot of them. I remember the slide at my elementary school in Fayetteville. In my mind, it was a good 30 feet tall. I'm sure it wasn't actually that tall. But it was a big one. And it was metal. And that sucker would get hotter than the pits of hell in the spring. Third degree burn kinda hot. We slid on it anyway. I mean, basically every piece of playground equipment back then was metal and jagged and dangerous as hell. In no way suited for small kids to play on. But we did. And we survived.
My big kids are constantly asking me to sit in the front seat. They're getting close to the age and height where it's safe for them to be up there. Of course, I say "no" as I'm strapping Briar into her car seat. I doubt the Space Shuttle of the 80s had seats and harnesses and straps as secure as the modern carseat. When I was their age, I don't remember there ever being a car seat in our car. Again, not out of negligence. We just didn't think securely strapping your small children into a giant, heavy box of metal that went 60 miles an hour around other giant boxes of metal going at the same speed was that high on the list of things we should be doing. Shit, let 'em sit in the front seat. Seatbelts? No way, man. We didn't wear seat belts when I was young. No air bags. It seems crazy now. We survived.
Every time we go outside to play and hang out, I crank up my music, which I'm sure most of you know, is full of 80s tunes. And I always wax nostalgic, telling the kids stories of my childhood. I told them that when I was their age, I only watched one TV station. And I would watch that station for hours and hours at a time. That station was MTV. I told the kids that back then, every song that you listened to on the radio had a video to go along with it. These videos were like mini-movies. And there was a station on TV that played these videos non-stop, 24 hours a day. So rather than listen to Spotify, back then we would sit in front of the TV and watch the music we were listening to. Of course, after trying to explain this to the kids, I jumped on YouTube so I could show them what I was talking about. The first video I showed them was A-ha's "Take on me." They loved it. We then watched "Don't come around here anymore" and a few others. They got bored. They walked away. Not me. I kept watching videos. I loved it. And these spoiled kids today can pay something like $15 a month to literally listen to almost everything that's ever been recorded. Back in the 80s, if you didn't own it, you weren't listening to it. Nowadays, if it pops into your brain, you're just a click away from listening to it. But not only that, you can see a bunch of other bands similar to the one you're listening to. You can listen to those bands. You can branch out and discover. Back in the 80s, you had to hope the music nerd at the record shop made good suggestions about what you should check out if you were going to buy so-and-so.
I could go on and on about life in the 80s, but I'll save that for future posts. The point I was trying to make here was how different childhood in the 80s was compared to my kids' childhood. And how that is proving difficult to navigate for the Gen Xers who have a foot in the past and another one in today's screwed up world. We'd love to let our kids live like we did. Get those scars. But we know those days are long gone. The scars of today are from social media. It's a different childhood. So the best we can hope for is to do the best we can. Hopefully the stories we tell of childhood in the 80s will be mildly entertaining. Maybe our kids will look at us with amazement at how we could live in such weird times. Maybe they'll even think we're cool or perhaps heroic for turning out to be such badasses having survived growing up in the 80s.......
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