A lot is said about how easy kids have it lately. I could go on and on about practice tests and trophies for 11th place. I could rant and rave about getting rewarded just for doing homework and walking around with $500 gadgets that I can't afford to have myself. I have bitten my tongue more times than I can count when hearing my child tell me about all of the television they watched at school that day. (I mean really... tv watching was a BIG deal when I was in school. You had to wait for the teacher to roll in the one tv assigned to your grade level. And, it certainly wasn't an animated cartoon... it was probably an old video demonstrating the enthralling process of water turning to ice.)
What we don't talk about often, though, is how much harder some parts of childhood are now. I hear about things happening with kids these days, and I cannot believe it. They worry about things (and their parents worry about things) that never occured to me at the ripe old age of 10.
I didn't give my weight a second thought until after high school. I ate Wendy's bacon cheeseburger meals ever single day for months without ever considering the fat content. Now, kids are calling each other fat and squeezing their rolls in elementary school. Little girls are worrying about what they look like in their jeans long before they should think about anything other than whether their pants are comfortable enough to roll down a hill in. Plastic surgery should still mean switching heads on Barbies until you're well past graduate school!
And, when I was in high school, I looked like I was still in high school. Pass any set of teenage girls now and see how many of them look like they're on their way to work instead of heading to Home Ec. Yes, there were certainly kids in my school that were well put together all of the time, but they weren't put together by Vogue magazine. What's wrong with looking like a kid while you actually are one instead of squeezing your middle age self into Juicy sweatpants and cleavage plunging tops?
Twenty years ago, if you wanted to spread a rumor about someone, you had to say it to someone's face. In fact, you probably had to say it to a lot of faces if you wanted to make an impact. Then, if you were "lucky" enough to spread the rumor, you got visited by the "victim" or friends of that person. And, you got your a$$ kicked. Bullies weren't anonymous. Now, any punk can get online and say anything to hurt someone. Facebook, Twitter, texting, email, and everything in between can be used to destroy someone's reputation. And, the poor soul who's been targeted is helpless to stop it. Fair is fair and right is right... unless you have internet access.
And, our stupidity wasn't chronicled for everyone to see. No photos exist of the complete nonsense I did as a teenager - nothing to save for posterity. (Unless you count the yearbooks or old Glamour Shots.) Yes, children do some remarkably foolish things now; but, so did we. There just weren't cell phones and digital cameras around when we were doing them. If there had been someone with an I-phone around when I was speeding around curves with my friends sitting outside the window of the car or singing out loud way off key to R. Kelly or Boyz II Men, it probably would have been on YouTube. And, I probably would've wanted to die. And, I would probably have become a lawyer just so I could sue to have them all taken off of the internet before my children learned to Google me. But these kids will snap a picture of themselves doing the dumbest thing they can think of and make it their profile pic in a heartbeat. They pose naked in front of a mirror so that they can send it to a boy they like. And, once they hit "send", it's out there. For everyone to see. It's there for that boy to forward to everyone they know, to be forwarded to everyone they know, and on and on. Until some creep in Romania has it as their screensaver in their basement apartment of their mother's home.
Sure, kids have a lot of things handed to them on silver platters. They are coddled and babied more than I was as an infant. However, they are also navigating roads we never set foot on. So, maybe we should offer advice more than complain. And, maybe we should spend more time trying to help them through these times before we point out how much harder it was when we were kids.
Then we can get back to talking about why in the world fifth graders are allowed to re-do assignments when they don't get a perfect score. I could go on and on and on...
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