How Did We Survive Our Childhood?

5,000 hits! This is a milestone I’m excited to celebrate with my husband as a guest writer! He blogs over at Cella’s Sweets which is also the name of his bakery. (You can check out his cool creations on Facebook.) I also wanted to do something else fun to celebrate 5,000 hits so be looking for a giveaway, too! Hope you enjoy the post!

As my daughter continues to grow up, there are tons of things that I have to worry about. I don’t mean four year old boys pulling up on their tricycles and whisking her down the hill. I’m talking bigger things, things that will keep her safe and healthy and aid her in developing mentally. Things like: is she eating enough vegetables? When do we turn her car seat around? Why doesn’t she know her times tables yet? When do I introduce her to the Mario Bros.? All these choices make me wonder one thing, HOW DID WE SURVIVE CHILDHOOD?

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I mean come on, as infants we slept on our stomachs in cribs covered in a lead-based paint. We got a little older and we rode in the back seat with the seatbelts stuck under the seat half of the time. We grew up on a steady diet of whatever fast food joint had the coolest toys at the time. None of us had “flame retardant” clothing. We had toys like Lite Brite, a toy that took a flammable piece of patterned paper and placed it 4 inches from a thousand watt bulb to make the colored dots glow. We watched cartoons that strapped rockets to a coyote on roller skates, and taught us that if you got shot in the face during “wabbit season,” the only consequence was a black face and your hair slicked back. There were chemistry sets which allowed unsupervised children to mix chemicals in a test tube to see what happens, and don’t even get me started on lawn darts and M-80s.

via cowancollectionanimation.blogspot.com

The funny thing is our parents wanted the same things we want for our children. They wanted us to be as safe and smart and healthy as possible. Phrases like, “Why don’t you go outside and play?” and, “You won’t get any dessert if you don’t eat your peas,” were heard often in my house, along with “Stop hitting your brother,” but that’s for another day. They read books to us with hidden messages like “The Cat in the Hat” (use your imagination and clean up when your done playing), and “Ferdinand the Bull” (being different is ok). They would count with us and teach us to spell. They would stay up late helping us study for those hard subjects like… spelling and math. They always made sure we were buckled in before we left the driveway…when the seatbelts weren’t stuck. What I’m getting at is that they cared.

So if our parents did care, and I can still rattle off a list of what now seems obvious dangers, what harms are we subjecting to our children? Will my daughter look back and wonder why she was allowed to play with the iPhone as a toddler, or will studies show that infants should be bound from the ankles and hung from the ceiling for optimal safety while sleeping? Fortunately, with the internet (and I’m sure our kids will look back and say “I can’t believe they put our pictures up where total strangers could see them”) information is at our disposal. There are sites that give us safety recall information so we can limit the dangers in what toys or products our kids are using. There are studies on TV’s affect on our children and sites to help them develop mentally. We can even keep track of the ever- evolving food pyramid.

I guess what I’m getting at is every generation cares for their family in the best possible manner. Our generation is fortunate in that in our Google.com era information is at our fingertips, and we have tools to protect our children like no other generation, to stimulate our children’s minds like no other and to keep our children healthy while under our care.

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