Kids these days . . . Date Thursday, April 25, 2024 - 11:08 PM PST Topic Rant Kids these days are soft. When I was a kid, we were disciplined, and fit, and tough. Now, kids are unpunished, lazy, and over-privileged. I mean, I’m nineteen years old, and I am very naïve—I could hardly be considered world-weary, and in some ways I'm still very much a kid. . . make that many ways. But even now, there are a few things that make me feel old—like the fact that I don’t get a sucker at the bank anymore, and that I actually like butterscotch and artichokes and tapioca pudding, which used to look like fish eyes. . . I know, pity me, pity me. There’s more, though. That my friends are getting married and having babies (the two don’t seem to be correlated), that my parents’ backs and knees and memories are already shot, that everyone has died or is dying of cancer. So yes, childhood is a thing of the past, so it’s with authority that I speak of it with indignation: things used to be run much differently. Kids have in fact become soft. In my day, parents were allowed to punish their children. If we back-talked, we got a spanking. If we lied about the use and whereabouts of the matches, we got a spanking. Drawing on the bedsheets with crayons definitely deserved a spanking. Our parents told us that all this discipline was good for us. We didn’t believe them, of course, but they were absolutely right. Discipline did do us good. After a good spanking, we didn’t smart-mouth anymore. We didn’t start fires, and we certainly didn’t color the bedsheets green again, or any other color for that matter. But now, spanking is “abuse,” and there are many projects dedicated to delegalizing it. Even the United Nations wants Canada to make spanking unlawful—as of this year, Canada is obligated to make periodic appearances before the U.N.’s Committee on the Rights of the Child. The committee has said Canada should “adopt legislation to remove the existing authorization of the use of ‘reasonable force’ in disciplining children.” There was even a Supreme Court case regarding spanking—Donald R. Cobble, Jr. vs. Commissioner of the Department of Social Services. Cobble argued it was his God-given right to discipline his child, but the state agency disagreed, likening Cobble's “tough-love” discipline to “child abuse.” Kids today can’t even receive proper punishment without a concerned activist’s intervention. Children also used to be healthy. My third-grade recess was a time for playing tag. It was a time for making touchdowns and running away from cootie-infested boys . . . it was our A.D.H.D.-given nature to get some exercise. Yeah, every class had a fat kid (ours looked like a tomato), but the rest of us had too much inborn hyperactivity—and if we didn’t, P.E. class forced it out of us. Now, however, children are fatter than ever. Kids are lazy. Childhood obesity rates have doubled in the past decade. The reason for the growing number of growing waistlines is inactivity. I read somewhere that only twenty-five percent of schools today have P.E. classes, and that the amount of kids enrolled in P.E. classes has declined by some thirty percent. School must not be as fun--if there are too many fat kids, they’ll miss out on making fun of the fat kid, because everyone will be a fat kid. This is sad. Kids used to be tough, too, but now they’re wimpy as Wendell on The Simpsons. I blame a single food item: crustless bread. When I was a kid, we had to either eat the crust or get rid of it. Eating this horrible brown bread-scab built character; it taught us how to deal with discomfort. If eating the crust simply wasn’t an option, we had to find a way to get rid of it, and there were only two ways to do this. Option one was to give it away, which required good negotiation skills to coerce a sibling or parent into eating it. Option two was to sneak the crust off the plate. This improved our wits, because deviousness improved our problem-solving skills. We bettered ourselves, whether we hid the crust under a napkin or slipped it to the dog But instead of using their brains, today’s kids are catered to. All a parent has to do is head down to Albertson’s and buy a loaf of crustless bread. For $3.19 a loaf. No longer can bread prompt emotional development—without crust on the table, kids don’t improve their characters, their bargaining skills, or their critical thinking abilities. If this trend continues, kids ten years from now will be seventy-pound beasts who sit on the couch all day, while their parents serve them pre-chewed feasts on silver platters. It’s about time people start spanking their kids. It’s time to make kids run during fourth period, and it’s most definitely time to stop adulterating bread. This article comes from Shmeng http://www.shmeng.com/ The URL for this story is: http://www.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=682