Is society today producing kids who are less respectful and less sensitive than 50 yrs ago? Do parents over protect and pander to the whims of kids? Why did this happen?

I have always felt overwhelmed and completely frustrated that it seems our kids have forgotten what its like to be real Aussie kids..ie ball games..footy..family time fishing etc..

Are we living in a society that ,via the media create a world that is frightening and uncertain to parents that they pass this fear onto their children.

I know for myself alone that my kids dont have the freedom I did as a child and Im sad about that.

OZGIRL, your heading is one that is very topical for me at the moment.

I started to write something about my own experience and then realised I was turning it into something I didn't want it to be. I'll take a break on that and see if I can come up with a better approach to writing about this stuff.

Hopefully not to long because I think that this topic is important.

Cheers
R0bert

It is a very different world now compared to the 50s and 60s. Back then we all had peace of mind. Today we can all see that things are building up to a very ominous point and that this is going to affect us all very soon.

Of course this rubs off on our kids and it is bound to be a large part of the cause for more rebellious behaviour.

We can’t help but pass our fears onto our children, both directly as parents and teachers, and via the media where really seriously bad-news stuff is just inescapable.

Ludwig, some of my favourite authors did much of their writing in the 50's and 60's. When they take the time to reflect on the world they lived in a common theme was a very real concern that the cold war could errupt into total destruction of the earth at a few minutes notice. In the USA normal people built bomb shelters in the back yard and stockpiled supplies in case they were fortunate/unfortunate enough to survice the first hours of World War III.

The impression I have is that the world did come very close to a large scale nuclear war on a number of occasions.

I've not read much Australian material from that period but suspect that the cold war concerns were much less pronounced here but still present just as concerns about terrorism are less pronounced here than in the USA today.

It's an interesting point you make but it does not gell with my understanding of the period.

Cheers
R0bert

You make a good point R0bert. But I think it is a different level of perception today to what it was then.

Most of us in Australia didn’t really appreciate the threat of nuclear war at the time and we can only see how grave the situation was when we look back on it. Yes we knew of the potential for Armageddon at the push of a button, but we somehow had faith that it wouldn’t happen or that if the nukes did fly, it still wouldn’t affect us too much downunder.

But today, we just get the feeling that things really are terminal to our way of life… and that rising fuel prices and climate change are highly tangible examples of it progressing in real time… not at some point in the future.

This stuff has got to play havoc with a developing brain

In the goode olde days, we used to take off in the morning[getting away from a nagging parent with jobs] and we would not come home until tea time. We walked miles to and from school, took cut lunches that often tasted awful by lunchtime, then after jobs, played out in the street until driven in by our stomachs.
We did all this in safety, any one interfering with kids then would have been literally lynched. There were no Civil Libertarians to protect paedophiles,drug smugglers.
But we were taught a strict respect for law, society and our parents. In fact all grown ups were accorded courtesy, it was inherent in us.
We KNEW we had to behave in a certain way or we would be punished. The sight of a policeman rendered in us all, a desire to be saintly.
That's the way we were.