On Thursday, Mick Kearns wrote an excellent article titled A Little Old School Parenting that I thoroughly enjoyed reading and I would like to use my column to add to the discussion of parenting (new and old), technology and the good ol days.
Kearns wrote that as parents, we are increasingly relying on technology to babysit our kids and that our children these days get less exercise and have lost the ability to play. There is a tendency when discussing "kids nowadays to glorify the way things were when we ourselves grew up and to think that the way our parents or grandparents raised their children is automatically better than the way that we are raising our kids now. Like Kearns, my brother and I played outside for the better part of the day coming inside only when we got hungry, hurt or bitten by a bug. After dinner, we could go outside and play until the streetlights came on and we always had to be within shouting distance of our house.
Looking back, we thought that we were unsupervised and just looking after ourselves but actually, our parents knew exactly where we were at all times. We only got into trouble if we hurt each other (sorry brother) or if our parents couldnt find us.
We spent hours playing outside and we also watched television. I have met people as an adult whose parents didnt let them watch TV growing up. I find it really interesting that my friends who were not allowed TV while growing up dont have the same cultural references as the rest of the TV hogs. If you get a group of people around my age together discussing growing up in Prince George, there are similarities in our experiences: Sunday night was bath night, The Racoons and the Wonderful World of Disney. We watched the same Saturday morning cartoons and we mostly remember the terrible, department store Canadian show Todays Special with the mannequin Jeff who came to life after the store closed. If we were early risers, we could watch the Adventures of Hercules or the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. If we were lucky, we could rent He-Man and She-Ra episodes or Thundercats from the local video stores.
My friends who werent allowed TV, are missing out on a unique nostalgia that coming from finding your old favourite television show and watching it with your kids on Teletoon Retro and discovering that it is an embarrassingly, terrible show.
Im not advocating plunking our kids down in front of the television or computer for all hours of the day because that can create unhealthy, socially inept children with attention problems. However, I propose that it is also completely unrealistic to remove all technology and television from our kids lives. The best chance our children have at being successful in this world is by incorporating technology into their lives in a healthy way. I think that if you grow up in a house where ice cream and chips are always available, you are less likely to binge on these treats as an adult. The same is true of technology. We need to be able to get out and play and read and cope with the increasing amount of technological time-sucks in our modern world. We cant pretend it isnt there and if our grandparents had television growing up, they would have watched it too.
