Your Kids Will Be Pussies

Post HERE wonders if the current generation of kids is hyper-parented/over-protected. I'm not a parent (that I know of, heh heh heh) but I've had a front-row seat for several years now, and I'd say the answer is certainly 'YES.' In capital letters.

But that's probably the way it's always been, each generation softer than the previous one. For all the freedom/neglect of the '70's kids, our grandparents were probably still calling our parents pussies. "You're smothering the bastards!" And their parents said the same of them, and on and on. Try reading a novel or short story set in Victorian England - any time there's more than one child in the story, take it to the bank that one is going to die, and will be buried/forgotten by lunch. How the shit goes. Mostly I remember when I was a kid, there was nothing more thrilling than our parents being outta the house for a coupla hours:

I’ve noticed this has become even more prevalent in the present generation, kids wanna be around their parents all the time. What the fuck is this? I had a woman in my office a few years ago, and she had two kids. One 13 years old, one 12. EVERY day, like clockwork, at about 3:30 the phone would ring and it’d be these two idiots, calling their mom and sniveling “when you coming home? We’re booooooooored, come home!!!” They actually wanted her to quit her job so she’d be at home all day for them!! Is this the saddest thing you’ve ever heard in your life? “Gee, I’m bored. Hey, you know what would liven things up? Hanging out with a coupla 100 year olds…maybe they can give me some more lessons on right vs. wrong! Yaaaaaaaaaaay!!!” All my brother and I wanted when we were kids were for our parents to get the fuck outta the house. Which I would think was fairly normal. And when you’re a kid, one hour equaled approximately 4 days in adult time - nowadays if you tell me I have one hour to do anything, I just say “aw, fuck it” and sit in a chair waiting for the hour to be up. Probably thinking about Valerie Malone at the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. Or the generalized binomial theorem. But back then, if it was 4pm and your parents were coming back at 5pm you had plenty of time to build three forts, set up a pretend newspaper complete with printing press and editor and do a complete re-enactment of Star Wars, word for word. Mostly, you were just thrilled the adults were outta the house. We had an agreement with our parents when my brother and I were kids: they’d let us go out on our own all day long, and we wouldn’t tell them how close we had come to getting ourselves killed. Clean, simple, everyone was happy. Unlike today’s generation of pussies...READ MORE