Before the advent of TV, Internet, Console Games, how did parents keep from getting nagged constantly by kids (teenager, babies)
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Kids used to spend countless hours doing this crazy thing called playing outside! ;-) When not given the option of wasting away their childhood on sitting in front of an electronic device all day, what other choice did they have? The good thing is, it can still be done. But if they have already been exposed to video games and such, parents might have to go cold turkey on them. We sold our video games systems. That did the trick fairly well. Of course, we still get our fair share of nagging to watch TV, but they now know that only happens after they have worn themselves out playing outside for a decent amount of time first. Just a matter of a bit of retraining is all! Good luck!
I've never heard of a curfew siren. Was it a town thing?
My siblings and I were called home by my Dad standing on the driveway and and whistling for us to come in. Something he'd learned herding sheep as a kid. (It worked.)
I've never heard of a curfew siren, either. The street lights were enough for us to know it was time to at least go back to our yard, and this was in the 90s.
I've never heard of a curfew siren. Was it a town thing?
My siblings and I were called home by my Dad standing on the driveway and and whistling for us to come in. Something he'd learned herding sheep as a kid. (It worked.)
LOL. My best friend's dad did that all the way into high school.
I've never heard of a curfew siren. Was it a town thing?
My siblings and I were called home by my Dad standing on the driveway and and whistling for us to come in. Something he'd learned herding sheep as a kid. (It worked.)
Hi, yes, it was a town ordinance that no kids were allowed on the street after curfew. I don't remember when they stopped doing that, but by the time I was in high school it didn't happen any more.
Oh, and there was a 12:00 PM alert as well, same siren. The dogs would go crazy and howl when the noon siren went off every day.
I've never heard of a curfew siren, either. The street lights were enough for us to know it was time to at least go back to our yard, and this was in the 90s.
Not all of our streets had lights yet (come to think of it, not all our streets were even paved yet and when we got curbs everybody in town got excited), so that's probably why we had the siren, and why after some years went by, we didn't.
Nag my parents? Hahahahaha! Nag my parents? Hahahahaha! Now that's funny!
Yeah, I can just see asking a friend, "Why did Kenny have to stand up all day today at school?" and the answer coming back, "Oh, didn't you hear? He nagged his parents."
I was born in the late 50's and in my heyday the 60s there were at first only 2 black and white TV stations we could reliably get in our town and there were maybe 7-8 shows we HAD to see together as a family and talk about: Honeymooners, Rikki and Luci, Red Skelton, Jackie Gleeson, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, and later the original Star Trek with Shatner. This was small town northern Ohio so in winter we'd add a few more shows and summer maybe skip them all when it was really nice out. 90% of the time we'd be outside: tennis ball baseball or softball on a makeship field in summer, basketball in late Fall-Spring - we'd even snow shovel off the driveways to play in winter. In our teens we'd fortify ourself with one of our Dad's hijacked whisky or a friend of mine's dad's homemake brandy so we didn't freeze! We didn't cause Mom and Dad ANY problems because we were NEVER home.
Another activity was "War", which was a great game of imagination set over an empty field and wooded area probably at least 20 acres or so that much later became a subdivision. However during the 60s it was just high weeds, pine trees, and a running creek. We'd form two armies of neighborhood kids and go off to hide or and them go on mission, ambush and engage each other and basically act out the news of the time - US Green Berets vs Viet Cong. We'd have games that would go a week or more and even have casualty reports (usually just bloody noses and knee scrapes). There was also a bigger creek/small river a mile away which was loaded with crawfish. Being stupid Yankees who never heard of Cajun food we didn't know you could eat them. We just caught them and kept them a couple of weeks in tanks as pets tll they died and threw them out.
In my early teens in the early 70s they built the first freeway in the area and for a year or so in late construction period we had a blast riding our bikes miles and miles on the good concrete surface with no traffic. It was really an idyllic time without video games and only minimal non-cable airwaves TV for a kid to grow up in the great-outdoors. I do have to admit that I finally did succumb to a Donkey Kong arcade addiction much later in the early 80s when in grad school. The way I grew up did stick with me and even in my 50s I enjoy hiking in the mountains, kayaking, mallwalking, pingpong, read magazines and novels (old fashioned books not Kindle, and limit my cable TV and don't play video at all. Must confess to a weakness for internet forums!
Last edited by bamba_boy; 06-02-2014 at 12:53 PM..
Hmmm....When I was growing up in the 60's/70's we read, played cards (solitaire, "war", spit, go fish, hearts..heck we even build card houses on the dining room table) or dominoes (or created designs to start a chain reaction of tripping dominoes) or board games (for inside play, when it was too hot, too cold, too dark or rainy). Outside we rode bikes, played in the "crick", played Barbies, played some variation of tag, red rover, ghost, mother-may-I, brought out the record player and lip synched to songs while putting on a show on the deck as The Partridge Family (LOL), made bead or macrame friendship bracelets, cut open the seams of our jeans and inserted fabric triangles to make "elephant" bell bottoms... etc etc.
My kids grew up in the 2000s (in their 20s now). We had video games but it wasn't a big deal. The only "rule" I ever had to establish was no playing during the week during the school year. But that was more "preventative" and I don't remember that it even came up. My daughter wasn't much interested and my son was (and is) more of a sporty-outdoorsy kid so while he enjoyed video games, it was mainly something do do at night or in bad weather (which we don't really get for long enough periods here to make it an issue). They did pretty much the same stuff as I did growing up - a few tweaks/updates but not much was different from me to them - with the exception of a neighborhood pool. We didn't have one growing up - they did so they did go to the pool quite a bit.
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