KIDS TODAY WOULDN’T LAST A WEEK IN THE 1960s-’70s

By Jim Pfiffer

When I think back to all the stupid and dangerous things I did as a kid in the ‘60s, I’m amazed that I’m still alive and have all my appendages.

Back then, there was a general lack of childhood safety regulations and a parental philosophy of, “Play nice and try not to kill yourselves.”

Take seat belts, for example. Our family station wagons had them, but they were buried deep in the cracks between the seats, along with A&W french fries, pre-1964 silver quarters and Lincoln Logs. We never wore them.

Air bags? As if. We WERE the air bags.

We didn’t have today’s expensive child safety seats. My seven sibs and I sat in flimsy seats made of Naugahyde and U-shaped tubes that were hooked over the top of the back seat. They were called “booster” seats because, in an accident, they boosted us into orbit. They had cute plastic steering wheels to let us pretend that we were steering if our station wagon veered off the road and barrel rolled down the side of a cliff.   

Today’s kids wear bike helmets. My skull was my helmet, as I pedaled my Schwinn Stingray bike with a sissy bar, banana seat and high-rise Harley Hog handlebars as fast as I could, sometimes riding with no hands and eyes closed, to show off and to feel the wind, and sometimes telephone poles, in my face.

Today’s playgrounds are padded plastic marshmallows. Ours were playgrounds of peril, rusty metal, chipped concrete, lethal heights, monkey bars that broke femurs, seesaws that could catapult us into the next county, and metal slides so hot on a July afternoon that they pan-seared the bottoms of our thighs.  

 I recently overheard a Mom scolding her toddler son for playing in the dirt. 

When I was a kid, we ate dirt.  

Modern kids scrape their knees, and there are incident reports, trips to the ER, MRIs and a trauma counselor. If we skinned our knees, we stopped the bleeding by rubbing cinders on them and got back to dodgeball. If we pulled a ligament or broke a bone, our gym teachers and coaches told us to “run it off.”  

There was no concussion protocol. We were not taken out of the game when we banged skulls. We called it getting “your bell rung,” and we were back on the playing field as soon as the ringing stopped.

Our toys tested our ability to survive in the wild. We impaled each other with sharp-pointed Lawn Jarts, suffered third-degree burns from Easy-Bake and Creepy Crawlers ovens. We broke bones, twisted joints and cracked our craniums skidding along wet Wham-O Slip ‘N Slides. We had chemistry sets with real chemicals that could blow off the rear wall of our garage.

There were no helicopter parents tracking us with apps 24/7. Our parents loved us, but they were more like distant blimps – booting us out the door on summer mornings with orders to be home before the streetlight came on.

We didn’t depend on our parents for rides everywhere. We were free-range chickens that walked and bicycled. We hitchhiked, alone and at night and hoped the driver didn’t have an ax and shovel under his seat.

Kids today sip triple-filtered spring water from insulated bottles. We drank warm and stale water from garden hoses that tasted like an old Goodyear retread.

Today, kids have playdates in adult-supervised and structured day care centers.

We played on railroad tracks, jumped into shallow creeks from stratospheric heights, had rock-throwing fights, played Cowboys and Indians with BB guns, experimented with cherry bombs, M-80 firecrackers and quarter-sticks of dynamite that could send a garbage can into the stratosphere.

These 21st century kids eat organic fruit snacks, Kale chips, Uncrustables, and tubes of dairy-free frozen yogurt.

Our diets were nutritional nightmares laced with Red Dye #2, cyclamates, saccharine, candy cigarettes, TV dinners, fried Spam, Pillsbury Space Food Sticks and Hi-C fruit juice that had more sugar than sugar bowls. Even our sugar had sugar in it. 

We weren’t afraid of peanuts, we tolerated lactose and we thought gluten was the past tense of glutton.

We did our homework using cumbersome encyclopedias, newspapers and the Dewey Decimal system. Today, kids ask Siri, Alexa, and ChatGPT.

Yes, our rough and tough childhoods were pressure-cookers of unsafe recklessness, dangerous toys and secondhand smoke, but they forged us into tougher and more resourceful, and often limping, adults.

So, the next time I hear kids complaining that they have it rough, I’ll smile and show them my scars, burns, skull divots and remind them that when I was a kid, “childproofing” meant taking “The Pill.”

Get more of Jim Pfiffer’s humor columns at his “Full of Wit” blog https://fullofwitblog.wordpress.com/. Learn more about illustrator Filomena Jack at www.FilomenaJackStudio.com.