Yeah, I have to say, who is raising these kids? We are. If they are coddled, it's our fault

It's not yours or my fault that so many parents want their children to live in a safe sterile bubble in a vain effort to keep them safe from any and all harm.
Coddling is really stifling to their natural development and it really needs to stop. Otherwise, we'll have more and more maladjusted adults suffering from gimme gimme syndrome and the plethora of mental illnesses that seem to be chic these days. Where they all sit around comparing which antipsychotic drugs they've been prescribed. Then, there's the occasional shut-in that comes out with guns ablazing because he never learned how to deal with his peers or his problems.

I remember my days on the playgrounds in elementary. They had these old swings that we'd all race out to claim during lunchtime. We'd swing as high as we could and see who could leap the furthest. I remember one year the "duty teachers" as they were called really clamped down on that behavior. I remember lots of weird things happening. Suddenly they outlawed Tag because it was a "contact sport" or some bollocks.

I also remember that we would organize wars for lunch hours and would spend our recesses collecting acorns that would be our ammunition. We'd take our ziplock bags for our food, stuff them with acorns and bury them near the chosen battlefield because they'd take them away if we took them into the school. Lunch hour would see us lining up in opposing skirmisher lines and whipping them at each other. It was marvelous fun, and he who collected the green acorns was considered the most dangerous.

Nobody ever lost an eye or broke a leg on the swings. Sadly they replaced those swings with crappy generic baby proofed ones. I remember, nobody clamoured for them again after that. They'd defeated our interest in the name of safety. This was the late 90s so I guess western Canada was taking its time catching up to the supposed playground scare.

One thing I also vividly remember is being constantly bullied and the system being useless at resolving it. Early on I used violence to tell them to bugger off, but apparently thats unacceptable. Instead what happened was they would sit me and my bully down and try to sort it out like we were both equally culpable. My supervision by adults proved to me that they couldn't be trusted and all they did was inflict further torment on me by making mine or my parents' reports of it into more fodder for the bully. "Can't we all get along?" "No, he hates me, stop telling me we should be friends." "You have to resolve this." "Why do I have to do anything? I'm the victim." Their inability to resolve the bullying while simultaneously hampering my own independent desire to defend myself caused me to be a pariah for most of school. That was fun. :yeah: