This blog was inspired by an email I received from a friend recently and was reminded of earlier this week.
The other day I overheard a conversation in my local coffee shop of two mothers talking about the urgent need to buy their 9 year old boy his first mobile phone, just so she could reach him and know he was safe. It got me to thinking how on earth I'd made it through my first 50 years without this attention to my whereabouts.
When I was 9 I would leave home in the morning and play all day long and as long as I was home when the street lights came on that was fine. No one could reach me all day, yet I was OK.
I used to get up to all sorts of mischief: building go-carts and crashing them into bushes, racing my bicycle with little or no brakes, falling off Tarzan swings, and the likes. But I lived to tell the tale.
I ate loads of cakes, Mars bars, white bread, real butter, bacon and drank juice with real sugar in it, and yet I was as skinny as a bean pole. Could it be I was always outside in the fresh air, playing all day and burning it off?
I drank water coming out of the garden hose and shared my juice bottle with all my friends and yet, believe it or not ,no one actually died from this. There was no such thing as childproof lids on medicine bottles or childproof locks on doors, and when I rode my bicycle the wind was going through my hair, unimpeded by a helmet.
I didn't have a Play Station or Nintendo DS, there were only 3 channels on the TV, no CDs or DVDs and no computers or internet chat rooms, and certainly no mobile phones. Instead I had friends and we were outside playing!
Myself and my friends would eat worms and make up games with pointy sticks, yet we didn't die of food poisoning and we all still have our eyes.
We had freedom, experienced failure and success and had responsibility and we learned how to deal with it all . . . before we were even teenagers!
Wow! To think, I survived all that without a mobile phone!
Kind of makes me want to run through the house with sharp scissors!
The other day I overheard a conversation in my local coffee shop of two mothers talking about the urgent need to buy their 9 year old boy his first mobile phone, just so she could reach him and know he was safe. It got me to thinking how on earth I'd made it through my first 50 years without this attention to my whereabouts.When I was 9 I would leave home in the morning and play all day long and as long as I was home when the street lights came on that was fine. No one could reach me all day, yet I was OK.
I used to get up to all sorts of mischief: building go-carts and crashing them into bushes, racing my bicycle with little or no brakes, falling off Tarzan swings, and the likes. But I lived to tell the tale.
I ate loads of cakes, Mars bars, white bread, real butter, bacon and drank juice with real sugar in it, and yet I was as skinny as a bean pole. Could it be I was always outside in the fresh air, playing all day and burning it off?I drank water coming out of the garden hose and shared my juice bottle with all my friends and yet, believe it or not ,no one actually died from this. There was no such thing as childproof lids on medicine bottles or childproof locks on doors, and when I rode my bicycle the wind was going through my hair, unimpeded by a helmet.
I didn't have a Play Station or Nintendo DS, there were only 3 channels on the TV, no CDs or DVDs and no computers or internet chat rooms, and certainly no mobile phones. Instead I had friends and we were outside playing!Myself and my friends would eat worms and make up games with pointy sticks, yet we didn't die of food poisoning and we all still have our eyes.
We had freedom, experienced failure and success and had responsibility and we learned how to deal with it all . . . before we were even teenagers!
Wow! To think, I survived all that without a mobile phone!
Kind of makes me want to run through the house with sharp scissors!
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