How Did We Survive

How did we survive

When I think about all the safety measures we take today to keep our children from getting hurt, I cannot help but think about my own childhood, and what we went through. I remember sitting on the back fold down door of a station wagon on a trip to town and back in Wisconsin as a twelve year old child with my two cousins and I hanging on to each other, and we never thought much about the danger.
We rode in the back of pick-up trucks, or I used to stand in the back of my Dad’s large delivery truck holding on to a rope tied to the side as he maneuvered through the Chicago streets like a professional taxi driver.
Then there was the shock machine, a device we came across as children that operated with a six-volt dry battery. It had two metal pipes that had wires attached that ran back to the machine. There was a small mechanism that you could slide back and forth to increase, or decrease the amount of shock you would receive from holding onto the pipes, and we would hold the two pipes to see who could handle the biggest shock. Sometimes it would cause your muscles to contract, and you could not let go, as it would make you double over into a ball. This is when everyone around you would laugh as you screamed to turn it off. We did not know it was suppose to be used by a doctor for shock therapy, but we survived.
We would run roughshod through the neighborhood all day until dark, walk home from school at lunch, or play in the street, and we survived.
We played Mumbely-Peg with knives, and a game where we would throw a knife into the ground next to the other person’s foot, and he would have to move that foot out to where the knife was in a game we called stretch.
Sketching on the back of cars was a favorite winter past time. This was where we would grab onto the back of the car bumper as the driver tried to negotiate the snow covered Chicago streets, and you would slide along in the snow hoping for a sharp turn that would send you flying as you let go.
We would Play outside long after dark, had no seatbelts, bicycle helmets, or a safety council for toys, but we survived.
We had no problem carrying a pocketknife to school, so I do not know how we ever made it through first grade alive.
How did we survive without cell phones, computers, I-Pods, remote controls, cable TV, and electronic games?
We had toys that ran on imagination, not batteries, and we learned how to survive, or we died.
Have we regulated common sense out of our children? Do we protect them so much that now they go through life thinking that they are safe from outside influences? How many kids today have been exposed to dangers just enough to learn common sense, on how to stay away from trouble?
Would I change anything today? No, I believe we have to do everything we can to protect our children from the ever growing dangers of society, but I do not think it would hurt to try and instill a little more common sense into them in the process, because trust me they will survive just as we did, and all the rules and regulations sometimes can not take the place of a little common sense.

Robert L. Murdoch 05/07/10