Whatever happened to "Go Outside And Play ???"

Granted, I grew up in the sixties, but sunny day, rain, snow, whatever, you were told to go outside and play. You'd meet with friends because they were out to play, and you just went and did stuff.
(these are the days that every boy had a pocket knife and you didn't get suspended from school if you tossed them at a tree at recess.)
It was expected behavior for a kid.

In the summer you had to come home when the street lights came on, and in the winter you built snow forts and cedar branch shelters to hang out in with your buds.

When it was warm enough you stopped at the river with all your friends and went skinny dipping before someone's mom started hollering for kids to come home for supper. But if it was still light, you went out after supper for a while before you had to sit down and do homework.

We only had a couple shows we could watch on TV, but Saturday morning was filled with cartoons until noon. Then on Sunday we went to church and fidgeted for an hour or so until we could get out of that uncomfortable suit, put on some jeans so you could go out and play again.


I see the kids today and they live in the house.
They watch TV, surf the net, play video games, but they just don't seem to get out and make their own fun running around building forts and playing with friends.

The end is nigh folks.
The next step will be just to plug them in at birth and turn them loose at 18.

My kids still play outside when the weather is decent.
My daughter will meet up with her friends and go shoot hoops or take some music outside and they dance. Or she takes out my youngest girl to play at the park with her.
My boys..now that's a different story. Ages 7& 10(this weekend)..I can't keep these two inside at all.
They are avid bug hunters, frog finders, capturers of spiders, amateur geologists (by the rock collections in shoe boxes under the beds), and treasure hunters of the highest caliber..whether it be a bird feather, a penny, or a pencil.
Everyday when school work and chores are done..these two book it outside, come in for dinner..then their out again.My oldest son takes them for walks in the bush nearby, looking for animal tracks, pointing out different trees and plants, and looking under rocks for salamanders.
I don't own a video game for them..I despise the things.
I remember days of being out all day. Geez I wanna be 9 years old again.

It's nice to see that some kids still get out to play.

And yes AD, I think I'd give anything to go back and live those days again.

reply to post by anxietydisorder

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I grew up in a place like you too anxietydisorder, and I've wondered the same things. You would really enjoy a book by Richard Louv called Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder. In it he discusses the very examples you cited, and talks about the hows and whys of todays children.

Caveat to all this: if you live on the south side of Chicago, you would be naturally leary of sending your kids out to play. But even those in affluent living circumstances, right next to natural areas, seem to shelter their children as well.

The reason many people allow the kids to say in front of the TV is it has become the babysitter. Parents who are to busy to deal with their kids set them in front of the TV. Other parents can't get over the fear of their kids being outside by themselves. With all the missing children these days someone people are unwilling to take a chance of having their kids out of their sight.

Heck I am leary of even letting my kids go to school let alone go outside by themselves. Kids these days not only have to worry about strangers, but also have to worry about their classmates. For some reason kids today are more voilent than they use to be.

I remember going to school with no fear of being shoot at school. Now you have to wonder what are going on in these kids head. Heck I remember the Adam Walsh movie and that still movie still scares me. I am 28 years old and still to this day do not let my kids go play outside without me. When they are older I will fear better about letting them play outside without me maybe.

"Heck I am leary of even letting my kids go to school let alone go outside by themselves. Kids these days not only have to worry about strangers,"

This is a bit of a myth, the danger from strangers is actually not much worse than it has been for 60 or more years, and this is way more eclipsed by the chances of someone in your family or a friend being the problem, that is far far more likely.

My mom used to "ground us outside" growing up. Only worked in the summer though. And when she really did ground us and make us stay in, it never lasted. We'd go from being grounded for three days to not being grounded at all after about 30 minutes because we would drive her nuts.

I have a hard time motivating my teenage daughter to go outside, and she used to be so athletic and was outside all the time. But we moved into a new neighborhood, gave up our pool, and she really has no one here her own age to hang with outside. But, we camp a lot and she loves to stargaze and play tennis, we just have to be more creative with her.

My son, however, is outside all the time. And there are a bazillion kids in the neighborhood his age who start ringing the doorbell by 8:00 am every morning. And we are lucky to live in a neighborhood where the kids run in packs and really look out for each other. I love that for him

It's really hard for kids now days to understand where we are coming from, with only four tv channels and no electronics when we were young. They really can't comprehend that, I don't expect them to. We have to quit blaming our kids for not being able to fully appreciate what life was like without all of that stuff. We just have to teach them to value simplicity and pass on our love for the outdoors and nature.

And yes, the world has changed. I was telling my sister the other day that I could not imagine having to grow up in this world, with all of the pressures and dangers that our kids have to face. Specifically teenage girls. I just can't imagine.

Rush

Ahhhhhhh the good old days. Not only that, but I had a bullet collection of live rounds. I used to bring live ammunition - once an AA round to school - and the only thing that happened to me was the teacher "held it" for me until time to go home. That was after I got the chance to pass it around to all my friends.

Nowadays, the whole school would have been in lockdown and the bomb squad called in to detonate them.

Just because you are and "adult" it doesn't mean you can't go out and play. Hell, when I was in St. Paul I'd ride my bike ten miles to get to work. For most of the way there was this bike path, and for a short duration of that path there was a bird sanctuary.

Now, I grew up with the woods, literally in my back yard. I would spend as much time as possible there. Granted, I was covered with mosquito bites, because there was a creek that ran through it, but it was the greatest. Getting back to the bird sanctuary.

I would stop right in the middle, right where the creek was and day dream for a little while. I'd see the birds, admire all the trees, bugs, and wild life. To me that's playing... The good ol' imagination doesn't have to be sapped away by unnecessary inventions if one doesn't want it to.

I also grew up playing outside, I'm in my 20's. My mother was the ringleader, she would get all the kids on the street to come up the creek with us, and we would dam it up EVERY summer, so we would have a place to swim...in return she brought freezies and popsicles for everyone.

We made countless forts in the woods, and even had rivalries with other kids on the street...sometimes they would come and wreck our forts, and we would just keep making them.

It wasn't unusual for us kids (me and my cousin) to hop on our bikes and bike around the neighborhood and get a group of kids together to play baseball at the park. We had tonnes of fun, most of us all got along together and just showed up at eachothers houses. I was one of those kids (mind you i'm a girl) who had Leatherman when i was 10 - present from my father.

Now a days, the kids on our block play in their own yards, they only bike around the block - not the whole subdivision. They make forts in the places close to the houses...NOT in the Woods like we did... We used to make little fires, and play all day pretending we were stranded...and when it started to get dark, we started walking home.

I get facebook messages from the local radiostation of our hometown... a 14 year old girl was murdered one town over, and 3 girls have been abducted in the past 2 weeks. THIS is part of the reason kids don't play outside anymore....

- Carrot

[edit on 10/8/2008 by CA_Orot]

MASS AGROPHOBIA!!

Mind crontrol, MCDownalls, Xbucks, Microsooth, MP3, Pedophiles, Cancer, sidewalks, dumbing down, Free thinking

[edit on 8-10-2008 by monkeybus]

I can still do that, walk in the bush surrounding my house. But it just lacks the fun and adventure that it did when I was a kid. Perhaps I have just lost some imagination over the years.

reply to post by AccessDenied

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Ditto that! My kids are outside with their friends everyday til dinnertime and then back out til curfew unless we have planned a family night which most of their friends groan over but it is mandatory once a week.

reply to post by silverflame

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Its harder to do when they are younger. My kids are all old enough to have a cell phone on them at all times now.. so I always know where they are and who they are with. If they are at cheerleading practice, the football game, or just at the corner grocery getting stuff out of the claw machine.. I know it.

I grew up in the 90s and I remeber the sharp decline of going outside and playing was around 1997. I was a little older then but I always base it off of halloween and how many trick or treaters we would get.

It was like as soon as parents obtained the internet and could read the news from other cities/states you started hearing about people chopping up little kids or whatever in their basement.

Its because parents are scared because of what they hear on fox news.

Personally I think things are just as safe if not safer than they have always been, you just hear about stuff happening more often because of the ease of access to information from around the world.

in short your answer is:


The Internet.

Pedos and fear induced in parents by the exaggeration of stories in the media.

It depends where you live though guys.
Here in the city my little bro goes and plays on the estates round my house and it's safe for him.
However being a teenager in this city of London, totally different story.
When I was a kid me and my mates would go around the estates doing the craziest stuff and noone would ever bother us because we were little kids.
These days, at the age I'm at now, you've pretty much gotta be watching your back 24/7 when your out because you never know what's going to happen.
Sure, as some of you will say, the media does have a part to play in making us feel like this, but I've seen and experienced too much to know that this crazy stuff is happening all about us. Lots of my friends like to stay in at night with computer games etc because it's alot safer than going out at night. What with online play these days it really has become a social activity. I can log on on a saturday night and see ALL my friends that I hang around with playing online.
Sad predicament I know but unfortunately that's the way things are these days.

My child has played outside wherever we have lived- Germany, DC, Maryland, NC. She has since she could walk. It isn't always safe, though. I had to go too, in some places that I lived. I lived in a place for 6 months that was completely unsuitable for outdoor play. I took her to playgrounds regularly to be able to enjoy the outdoors. It is more work sometimes, and some parents don't have the time or wherewithal or desire to make it possible. I'm lucky to live in the country now and have a big yard and a dog to walk, so we get outdoor time.

The media doesn't blow things out of proportion. Kids are being taken all the time. They are being victimized all the time. I can see why some parents choose to let their kids stay inside, especially single parents working all hours who don't have time to romp outside. And then there are the video games and the internet...

I grew up in the 80's and we stayed outside....Tree houses, walking the neigborhood, hide and seek.......... Most kids these days know nothing about outside, but that it leads to wal-mart to get more ps3 games...