When talking to a couple of other Citizen staff members in the lunchroom, there were several comments regarding the amount of electronic gadgetry kids have these days. The amount of time they spend on the couch with these gadgets, how a lot of parents use them as a babysitting tool, and ultimately how fat some of these kids arses are getting because they dont do the amount of exercise we used to do back in the day.
Even though I did a lot of exercise when I was younger, we also watched a fair amount of TV on the same TV we had for 26 years, because just like winter here where it is miserably cold outside a lot of the time, we had a miserable amount of rain for a lot of winter.
However we only had one TV and if my parents were in the room we had to watch what they wanted to watch.
Now lots of homes have a number of TVs and one other thing we never had as kids, the Internet.
This in itself is another form of TV, also accessible through the phone, TV and computer.
Dont get me wrong, I have a big TV, a cell phone, laptop, netbook, iPod shuffle for my exercise music and an Arhos 5 that I use for different things.
My wife also has an iPod for her exercise - we dont like the same music - and my phone also has the capability for playing music and movies.
However, lately we have started limiting the amount of TV our son watches and seen what this has done for his behaviour, his activity levels, our interaction and his creativity.
Because when he is not allowed to watch the TV or go on the computer he has to find something to do. We do not offer ideas for him to do. We just say, you have plenty of stuff in your room to do. Find something. Use your imagination.
If we give him something to do all the time he will rely on us for his own entertainment.
He is now reading more, and making up things to do.
When I went into his room last week - I only tend to visit his room once a week as it makes my parenting job a lot easier - he was cutting cars out of some magazines we had. He was then gluing them on to large sheets of coloured cardboard and spent hours doing this.
This resulted in me doing my own set of cut outs on cardboard with him. Him on one side of the table and me on the other.
I recently got my Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition for my cutouts and he got a new Top Gear magazine for his.
His collages are now pinned to the ceiling of his bedroom above his bed, and mine are in a similar place in my bedroom.
The problem is that technology is part of our everyday existence and will become more so over the years.
I remember travelling to our summer holiday destination, roughly 18 miles away, when I was younger. There were five kids in the back seat and my parents in the front seats of a Fiat 500.
My mom had the TV on her lap as there was none where we were going.
There was no time to whine that we had nothing to do, because with five of us we spent all our time arguing about who was sitting on who and whose finger was in whose nose. And I know if we did whine my parents would have told us to get as close to the window as we could then breath on it.
Now you can practice your art work, we would be told.
I dont even remember the place we stayed at because we spent all day and evening playing on the beach, swimming, catching crabs in the rock pools or fishing off of the pier.
My parents used to tell us to get out and not to come back until we were hungry. Which is basically what we did.
We found things to do.
When we moved into our second house, the one my parents still live in today roughly 45 years later, I dont think we even had a black and white TV.
To amuse ourselves we used to dig holes in the back garden as big as we could. When my dad built the shed we would climb the clothsline pole, walk along the top of the wall, which butted up against a barbed-wire fence, to get to the top of the shed and run and jump as far as we could off of the shed onto the dirt in the garden, trying to avoid the holes, and we did this for hours.
There were no helmets, elbow pads or even taking turns. You jumped when you were ready.
On occasion you missed the dirt and landed on your brother or your friend.
No big deal.
When we got bored of that we would go to the neighbouring factory, nick lots of rolls of discarded cellotape - the factory made cellotape - and unravel them then roll them into a soccer ball.
The neighbour used to take our real soccer ball if it would go into his garden and burn it in a 100 gallon drum in his back yard. Thankfully he wasnt our neighbour for very long. Turned out he didnt have the balls to live next to us.
We would go to the swamp at the bottom of the road and catch frogs and tadpoles, throw rocks at the rats, throw stones at the passing trains, and basically goof off.
If we were doing anything we werent supposed to do, we got a clip on the ear or a smack on the head. If it was bad enough, the wooden spoon would come out.
It was a different kind of parenting and one I think we are sorely missing in a lot of ways today.
Now we are the bubble-wrap generation and lots of parents dont want to parent. They want to be their childrens friends. That is why the kids tell their parents what to do and why some use technology as a babysitter.
It is also why some of these kids cant fit their young arses into the desk
provided for them at school.
