UnderNewManagement

As a child you heard your family tell stories that begin with ‘when I was your age’ and you promised yourself that you would never do that to your children. Now I am 32 and have started telling my kids the ‘when I was your age’ stories. I understand my dad’s frustration at seeing me upset at my childhood hardships and he was just trying to teach me that he had hardships in his youth and he was able to overcome them. Now I see those frustrations in my son and I am finding it hard to tell him about how hard I ‘had it’. I can see that he does not have the responsibilities that I had, and, he does not have the freedom that I had either. I grew up in the time of people starting to lock their doors. There was no fear of child abductors at that time. My brother and I would ride our bikes all over the city where we lived. Several Saturdays we would leave at 10am on our bikes and not be home till 3pm or later. We never got in trouble for being gone. Now, my kids go out to play and they have to ‘check in’ every half-hour. There are flyers about child molesters ‘in your neighborhood’ and Michael Jackson on the news everyday, if my son thinks he has a hard life just wait till he is an adult.