How childhood has dramatically changed over the years
Barbara Binland is the pen name of a senior, Julie Grenness, in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. She is a poet, writer, and part-time English and Maths tutor, with over 40 years of experience. Her many books are available on Amazon and Kindle.
Another little baby boomer was born. Maybe our mothers smoked or drank during their pregnancies. Moreover, our mothers took aspirin or Bex, ate fish from tins, and had no ultrasounds or pre-natal testing.
Having been born, we were swaddled to the max, and cradled in bassinets and cots, painted with lead-based paints. We grew up in homes with no locks on cupboards or doors. We were given toy guns and loved playing cowboys. For transport, we rode on pushbikes or tricycles with no helmets, and bounced around in cars with no seat belts or child booster seats.
In daily life we were told to ‘go and play’, so we mucked around in large backyards, drank from the garden hose, shared drinks, and ate mud pies in the vegetable patch. We grew brown to the great summer sun. It was all good for our immune system, according to our old Grandpa. Hence, potential skin cancer these days.
We all took our lunch to school, sandwiches of white bread with real butter. We ate home baked cakes cooked with real white sugar and full cream milk. We ate musk lollies and lolly cigarettes. We were always playing, no one was checking constantly on a mobile phone where we were all day. We had no watches, or smart phones. When the street lighting came on, we went indoors for dinner of meat and three vegetables, home grown. We ate fruit from our fathers’ fruit trees.
What is more, we studied at schools in large grades. No laptops, no computer, no internet, or even calculators for doing Maths. We had to use our brains. We had no GPS to find our way around the suburbs to seek our friends, who all lived nearby.
We climbed trees, scraped knees, got cuts and broken bones, and got into ‘trouble’ at school, or when ‘father’ came home. No one got litigated. Lots of times we spent happy hours making up games with tennis balls or skipping ropes, and boys made go-carts, and had slingshots. We made our own fun.
So, what changed all that? Why, we became the generation that stopped Vietnam, had flowers in our hair, and along the way, invented technology. This is our legacy, we were the inventors. Thanks to the demise of the brick veneer or weatherboard dwelling, the great suburban dream, many millennial children are growing up in multi-cluster homes, with no back yard.
They play in the concrete driveway, or online. They are constantly supervised by their mobile phones. For friends, they travel to sporting complexes, under heavy escort, to play in approved sporting teams. Their education is that of the 21st century, a visual graphic and communicative approach. We had to learn with rote page turning in a limited range of text books. Norms change. But we all survived. Somehow.
Any of this ring a bell? What are your nostalgic memories of your childhood, now we are all ‘grown up’? Share your stories in the comments below!