She should mind her own business! I think it's great you take your kid to the forest
As for a time to live in it wouldn't matter but the place is more important. I'd like to live on the American frontier, be a trapper or something
Youngsters
- Thread starter rik_uk3
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She should mind her own business! I think it's great you take your kid to the forest
As for a time to live in it wouldn't matter but the place is more important. I'd like to live on the American frontier, be a trapper or something
Well you've all provided me with a compensation for age by reminding me of how it used to be in my childhood. And I used to be able to stand outside watching Spitfire shooting down German bombers and play hide under the table and dodge the shrapnel- so much more realistic than play station.
When I was a kid we sidn't have a community - far less "community organisers". We had neighbours. Some we liked, some we didn't. Some were nice - some were crazy, . (Some old ladies were witches and we tormented them).
The coppers just gave you a clip round the ear (and took bribes and were racist).
People smacked their kids without fear of prosecution (and fellahs came home from the pub and knocked their wife around without fear of prosecution)
Boys were proper boys (and bullied the "soft" kids because they weren't proper boys)
They were good times when outdoor types could be free (and horrible times when misfits could be driven to the point of self harm)
The coppers just gave you a clip round the ear (and took bribes and were racist).
People smacked their kids without fear of prosecution (and fellahs came home from the pub and knocked their wife around without fear of prosecution)
Boys were proper boys (and bullied the "soft" kids because they weren't proper boys)
They were good times when outdoor types could be free (and horrible times when misfits could be driven to the point of self harm)
She should mind her own business! I think it's great you take your kid to the forest
As for a time to live in it wouldn't matter but the place is more important. I'd like to live on the American frontier, be a trapper or something
Cheers. She loves nature. Always asking questions like. "What is nature's soap" and "can we have moss at home to clean my shoes?".
So with that, I'm happy to live here, right now. I have a lot to learn about the outdoors and bushcraft, but to see my daughter eager to learn and take things in its priceless.
She's happy to pass an hour or so playing on her tablet, but she'll soon put it down if we're off to watch the sunset in the woods with a hot chocolate. Or be up early to watch the sun waking up in the woods with me. Just with the others were as enthusiastic.
touched by nature
If I had to chose a time to live in it would have to be one that had - few enough people that nowhere was overcrowded, a food base that meant that no one went too hungry, had good enough medical facilities and dental facilities that suffering was limitted, no all devouring wars (some kind of level of war is always around), no mad politicians in total control (they have always been around though), good enough clothing technology to keep me warm and dry (ish), a degree of personal freedom from having to work 24/7 to survive, decent sanitation (and soft loo paper! - mind you that could be good supplies of soft moss!)...
The more I think about it the more it is NOW! ... but you need to choose your location carefully!
Certain places have all devouring war, mad politicians in control, poor health care, poor food supply, crushing poverty, overcrowding, poor sanitation etc etc...
Semi remote parts of the Western civilization in the 20th - 21st centuaries sound good to me
Strangely enough that is where/when I have and am living!
Lucky me!
Take the responsibility to chose how and where you live, bring up your kids, educate them and you can have the ideal - NOW!
The more I think about it the more it is NOW! ... but you need to choose your location carefully!
Certain places have all devouring war, mad politicians in control, poor health care, poor food supply, crushing poverty, overcrowding, poor sanitation etc etc...
Semi remote parts of the Western civilization in the 20th - 21st centuaries sound good to me
Strangely enough that is where/when I have and am living!
Lucky me!
Take the responsibility to chose how and where you live, bring up your kids, educate them and you can have the ideal - NOW!
Very apt bit of Dickens
Rather than the opening of Voltaire's Candide "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds", perhaps his conclusion is better "we must cultivate our garden".
I subscribe firmly to the belief that
"We are not as the world makes us, but the world is as we make it"
Our children can still run and play out and come in grubby and happy and tired, if we choose to live in the way that people did when that was more commonly true. If we choose not to, that is also fine, but its a little disingenuous to then bemoan the world of fear, rules and social engineering that we ourselves have created.
Elen Sentier
Bushcrafter (boy, I've got a lot to say!)
Yup! Ditto! and hopefully more kids are being allowed to get back to that. It's good to see the pix of children on here out doing the stuff I did at their age
Not sure this bit has changed much BR. Maybe in that it's no longer just the boys doing the bullying.
When the current generation comments on how boring we must have been growing up with out those things I like to just say, "Nope. We didn't have any of that. We had to go out and invent it."
I live in the village my father was born in. My mother lived in the next one across the river. When I was little we wandered the entire parish......parish is around 22 square miles, and the neighbouring Blantyre one too.
It was normal.
It's not now.
The population here has at least quadrupled, for a start. It often seems like every scrap of land is being built on.
The roads were quieter, lot less traffic, mums mostly stayed at home, people worked on farms, not just a small family in the main house, loads of workshops, good public transport network, old footpaths and droveroads were well used, and there was little disposable income. TV was not multiple channel 24/7; it actually closed down so the folks who made it work could go home and have dinner and sleep
The world has changed; in many ways we are incredibly rich, but we've lost that cheerful feralness that grubby inquisitive children thrive in, and instead there's a spitefulness and a nasty edged greed, must have, throw away, total lack of self confidence and courtesy and respect for anything except £££ among too many people; and that's not just children.
It's easy to say we didn't have much; there wasn't much to have. Now babies are given computers and know how to work mobile phones before they can write.
Different world.
This forum is full of people to whom the outdoors is often as necessary as breathing, so we're kind of biased; it's still hopeful though, because it means there are a lot of people making huge efforts to give their children a hands on, play in the mud, paddle in the burn, play with a stick, dig through the earth to Australia, climb highest tree, type childhood, yet still encouraging them to thrive in this very modern world
I'm not a grandmother, but I've said it before; if I were and they come to visit me they best come with playing clothes because they will get dirty
cheers,
M
That sounds awful familiar. I grew up in a very rural area surrounded by aunts and uncles and cousins. There were a gazillion of us, and we would congregate in the kitchen of my grandparent's farmhouse most mornings when we were off school, for a big mug of hot tea and a slice of bread and butter (made by my grandmother - the butter that is).
After that we would be unceremoniously turfed out of the house and told to go and amuse ourselves. Cue badly made treehouses, dams, and hay-bale-houses, as well as dissections of roadkill and (God help us) experiments with petrol bombs. (Well, it was in the news a lot.)
The thing is, we were trusted to do our own thing and get on with it. We had accidents, fights, duckings, bike-crashes, and quite a few of us ended up with bruises and stitches and a couple of broken bones, but by and large we had an ecstatic childhood, spent entirely out of doors, on bike, in woods, and on rivers, and we are all now in our forties, still in touch, and we all still marvel at it.
The other thing is, my cousins have all reared their children according to the mores and practices of this current technology blighted generation - not because thay realy want to - but because peer pressure is so high, they just can't let their little darlings be without an ipad at the age of twelve.
For (Edited out). Kids can't just be kids anymore.
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Well! I am a father for the first time recently and my lad will be getting a new smart TV and hopefully a nexus 7 tablet very soon!!
There is nothing wrong with having gadgetry especially since it will most likely become a major part of their life in the future. I mean how many of you are typing on this here computer/tablet/smart phone, possibly while they are stuck in an office supposedly working?? Oops! Did I just confess to something??
There is nothing wrong with having gadgetry especially since it will most likely become a major part of their life in the future. I mean how many of you are typing on this here computer/tablet/smart phone, possibly while they are stuck in an office supposedly working?? Oops! Did I just confess to something??
I had assumed that, given the exact question "At what point in history would you like your kids to grow up in?" by the age of 18 he would be "grown up" and then be able to pick a different time to be an adult in.
If I breached time travel protocol I am sorry.
I know we are better fed, more long-lived and generally better cared for than at any point in previous history (unless you have the misfortune to have been born in some country east of Moscow and south of Gibraltar), but I don't think I'm alone in thinking that something has been lost.
My Mum nearly died of scarlet fever in the forties, and I personally knew one guy who contracted TB when I was at primary school. All that has gone now, along with smallpox and polio. And all right, if you were a teenager in 1914, thinks were starting to look a little precarious; but that's not really the point.
We're talking about the way life is lived right now. And I do feel that kids are missing something which was taken for granted thirty years ago: freedom. Back then you were credited with a little sense, and left to use it. Not a bad thing. Nowadays booze, porn and consumerism is pretty much hardwired into a lot of kids.
My Mum nearly died of scarlet fever in the forties, and I personally knew one guy who contracted TB when I was at primary school. All that has gone now, along with smallpox and polio. And all right, if you were a teenager in 1914, thinks were starting to look a little precarious; but that's not really the point.
We're talking about the way life is lived right now. And I do feel that kids are missing something which was taken for granted thirty years ago: freedom. Back then you were credited with a little sense, and left to use it. Not a bad thing. Nowadays booze, porn and consumerism is pretty much hardwired into a lot of kids.
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