QOTD: Where do kids play?

[bokonon]

tree climbing! how come no one mentioned tree climbing? we used to climb trees, rollerblade, skateboard and bike all day and go to the corner store and buy a tin of icing (yes i know it's unhealthy, but we were kids, we didn't care) and sit down to eat it by the train tracks and make the train engineers blow the horns. then we would go home and build a fort out of pillows and blankets and watch movies in it and eat "crazy sandwiches" which consisted of cheese, dill pickles, hot peppers and mustard.

i really wonder what's wrong with the youth today that they are experimenting with sex instead of eating crazy sandwiches.

[dancingbear]

one thing i have noticed in newfoundland compared to ontario....

is children (like when i was a kid) still go to the corner store by themselves. 6, 7, 8 year olds etc. This difference however is rapidly degrading. i'm not a parent, but would be so worried letting my nine year old out of sight.

kids for this reason dont play as much outside. this is why childhood obeisity is reaching an epidemic and it is becoming a huge focus in pediatrics.

[Ms.Huxtable]

How often do you actually see kids playing in public play grounds? Rarely. So where are they in our urban settings?

[PalacePrincess]

God, does anyone remember that movie "Kids"? Sunshine's post reminded me of it. I remember watching it thinking "is this sh!t for real?!?" I'd still like to think it's the exception rather than the rule.

wanna know something really scary? the first time i saw kids, i was about the same age as most of the characters in the film. i remember thinking wow, this is really dead on and true to life, they really managed to capture what it's like to be a teenager nowadays (to a certain extent of course... i didn't know any 8 year olds doing whippits, and nobody i knew had HIV -- THANK GOD, since everybody seemed to date all the same people -- but the scene where the young girls are talking about sex with each other was spot on, people that young having sex at all, everybody out doing drugs & getting all fu©ked up was quite common -- sadly, even guys molesting passed out girls was true to life). i saw the movie again a few years later and it made me absolutely sick to my stomach, i couldn't even make it through the whole thing. what upset me so much the second time around was not just the content of the movie, but remembering my reaction of "yeah, that's true.. and that's true too... and wow that is totally dead on" the first time i saw it, because so much of that movie IS sick, and it IS sick that people that young experience things like that.

kids are already light years away from where i was back then too. my younger brother is just out of high school, and i couldn't believe some of the stuff he'd tell me kids are doing. kids are getting into harder drugs at an earlier age than ever, gangs are suddenly a real life thing, not just something happening in l.a., i've read in countless places that teenagers all over the place have oral sex parties (head is the new kissing), the way kids dress these days (that is disgusting about the kiddie thongs, ms. hux!), heck, CHILDREN 10 and under are dyeing their hair! wtf?

it's sad that kids don't get to be kids anymore. i thought our generation was in the age of plastic and we grew up on a completely different planet than the one kids are living on now. ::