Who's tougher? "Them" or "us"?

At times I want to simply pull my hair out of my head. I have two young teen-age boys that often leave me exasperated. But, after all, that is part of "their" job as teen-agers to drive their parents crazy, right? But what really gets me going is that I often find myself echoing my own parents as I talk to them.

You know the drill. "In my day, we'd walk two hundred miles through waist deep snow, fighting off wolves, just to get to school". I must have heard that sort of thing from my folks when I would complain about getting up for school to walk a couple of miles. These days, the kids complain about walking two blocks to catch a bus to school.

In my day, we'd have sore arms carrying an armful of books around while todays' kids have designer back-packs and they complain. We would have several hours of homework and they complain about a few minutes of what I can only describe as "busy work" and they gripe as if they were having their teeth pulled without novacaine.

We would bust our butts delivering the morning newspapers, mowing lawns in the summer and shoveling walks in the winter just for a few bucks. Todays' kids don't do any of that and yet they complain about how tough they have it. As far as I am concerned, todays' kids are "wimps" compared to my generation. Is this just my misconception? Is it really tougher for kids today?

Keep in mind, in the seventies, we had drugs, guns, gangs too. We also had a draft waiting for us when we graduated from high school. We certainly had pressures too. So what am I to think?

I think it depends on your deffinition of tough. Each Generation has less physical challanges but more mental. As far as work goes I think it would be safe to say we had it worse, I was working in the fields picking cucumbers and tomatoes when I was 6-7 years old. And that wasnt for spending money it was to help feed the family.

But my kids have tech jobs that baffle me and had homework that I couldnt even understand much less help them with.

Its just two different worlds, more than two if you go back to OUR parents time, or THIER parents time, etc.