Sunday, March 16, 2014

Childhood Ain't What It Used To Be

This was our one day of winter in 2014.
When I read the topic for this week's Listicles--Things That Aren't the Same--on NorthwestMommy.com, I immediately thought of childhood. Lots of good things are the same between my childhood & my children's: being read lots of books, having a garden in the back yard & learning where food comes from, having two parents & an extended family they see fairly often, wearing cloth diapers.

However, even though they're both so little, but there are already so many things I've noticed that are different. Some are big & some are small. Some are only difference between me & them, but some are most likely different for you & your children too.

Here are the first ten that came to mind:

  1. Cycling as transportation. I biked a lot as a kid, but it was a recreational pastime, not really transportation. My parents rarely biked at all--I'm not sure my dad even had one as an adult.
  2. YouTube is our TV. We got rid of our TV when Linnaeus was a year old, right around the time when things switched from analog to digital. Rather than buy a new TV or a digital box for our hand-me-down TV we just ditched it. I don't miss it, because if I want to watch something, I can get pretty much any TV series online. I started subscribing to a lot of different YouTube channels a few years back, so that's what I watch more than TV series anyway.
  3. Information on demand. Related to #2, my kids will grow up being able to get the answer to any trivia question within a minute or two. When I want to explain something, I can pull up a video online that shows it within moments. eBooks can be bought, downloaded for free or borrowed from the library in minutes. When I was a kid, real books were the only books. Encyclopedias & librarians were the only way to get the answer to some of the odd questions that come up during childhood.
  4. Urban life. I grew up in the suburban areas of various small towns around BC until my teens, when we moved to a quiet suburb of North Vancouver. My kids will grow up in the city, with its at-times-heavy traffic, ethnic diversity, cafes, restaurants, recreation & community centres, & cultural amenities & events right at our doorstep.
  5. Baby Led Weaning. My mom did what most people still do when introducing babies to solid food: mush. We're giving our kids actual solid food like steamed broccoli or carrots, roasted yams, pears, banana, etc. It is not only easier (no blending food, no shopping for expensive little jars of puree, no spoon feeding while my dinner gets cold) but it's more fun to watch a six-month-old explore food. If you're about to start giving solids to your child, I highly recommend you look into Baby Led Weaning.
  6. Breastfeeding. Like most North American mothers of the 1970s, our moms were more likely to breastfeed than their parents, but a lot less likely than my generation. No shame, no blame--I turned out fine on formula after my mom was unsuccessful at getting breastfeeding to work. But my two kids are breastfed, Linnaeus until he was nearly two & a half, & we'll see when Bronte decides to wean.
  7. Living car-free. I spent a good chunk of my little life in cars, driving from one part of town to another, or one side of the province to another. My kids ride in carshare vehicles around once a month. Linnaeus doesn't really understand the concept of car ownership--he used to just think that we could take any car that was parked in front of our house because we'd often use different vehicles in the car coop. Now he knows to look for the Modo logo on the door.
  8. Snow-free winters. I don't know if I can blame global warming for this, as I lived the first 11 years of my life in a different climate zone that actually had what most Canadians would consider a winter. Hallowe'en costumes had to be big enough to accomodate snowsuits under them. I grew up making snowmen, snow forts cross country skiing in my back yard & crazy carpeting home from school. Here in Vancouver, there's so little of the stuff around that we don't bother with snow suits or snow boots, we just layer a lot under the rain gear. I have a child who was afraid to walk on snow the two or three days that he saw it during his second winter.
  9. Environtmental friendliness. Is that even a term? Greenpeace had only been around for a few years when I was born & being green just wasn't much of a thing when I was little. My three-year-old son knows more about recycling, composting & organic food than I did in high school.
  10. Pretend phones. The first time my son pretended to answer the phone with an object, it was a small, rectangular cracker. Because that's the shape & (relative) size of phones nowadays. When I was a kid, the closest object to a phone would have been a banana.

Now I turn it over to you: what are the major difference between your childhood & that of your kids? Do you share some of the differences in my list, or are those things the same for you? Let me know if the comments below!


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18 comments:

  1. So true, all of it! I miss snow.

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    1. Yeah, you must have grown up with a goodly amount of it. :)

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  2. great list babe, I just couldn't think this week. I hear you, so many things have changed since I was a kid and I am sure when Dino has his own kids I'll be even more shocked and stumped.

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    1. Oh, don't even get me thinking about grandchildren... Eek!

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  3. I loved the bicycling as transportation. I truly wish more North American communities were designed for this. I biked everywhere as a kid, and miss it so much now.

    http://hammockinthehoneysuckle.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-more-things-change.html

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    1. It's not impossible--cycling infrastructure is extremely cheap to add in, compared to things like left turn bays or extra lanes of highway. Doesn't do much to help the way cities are laid out with long commutes between work/school & home though. That's going to take a bit more time to change... :)

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  4. I thought about doing a list of things that aren't the same for me kids, too. Mine would have been very similar to yours. One big thing that is different is the number of stay at home moms. Everyone in our neighborhood had moms who stayed home, so every day after school and all summer long, there were kids everywhere to play with.
    I have never heard of carsharing! Is it a company that owns the car, and you simply have a membership type thing to rent it? Interesting.

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    1. Yeah, stay at home moms (for their kids' entire childhood, anyway) are a rarity now, I think...

      We're members of Modo (www.modo.coop) which is a not-for-profit cooperative carsharing organization. In Vancouver there's also ZipCar & or Car2Go which are for-profit companies. The concept is basically the same: you become a member, book cars when you need them (by the hour or by the day) & get billed monthly. The cars are located all over the city, so you don't necessarily have to travel to a central office to get one, like you would with a traditional car rental company. :)

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  5. I am smiling at the image of talking to a banana!

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    1. Yeah, but it's the fruit that looks most like an old-school phone, right? :)

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  6. Such a great list! I want to live your life, by the way. I live in suburbia. True, blue suburbia. But our lives revolve around the nearby big city, so we spend many an hour in our cars driving the kids to school and ourselves to work. I admire my brother who lives in Chicago and lives car-free. I wish I could walk out my door to a café or market.

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    1. Well, I'm flattered, but you should probably see some of the comprimises we've made to live in a relatively urban setting here in Vancouver before we swap lives, LOL. We'd have a much nicer house if we moved out to the suburbs where it's cheaper. A house that didn't have a leaky roof & a kitchen from 1960...

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  7. Great list! We were watching an old 80's movie with the kids a few weeks ago, and someone was using an old rotary phone. They were like, "What in the world is THAT?!?" So funny!

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    1. Haha! What I can't figure out is how my son knew what an old fashioned phone was or how to use it right away. He'd never seen a real one, to my knowledge, but he understood what it was as soon as he got the Fisher Price toy one...

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  8. Enjoyed your list! I can tell I've been out of the baby realm for a time...not familiar with "baby led weaning" in the manner you describe. I would've interpreted it to mean taking your child's lead in weaning from breastfeeding. I pretty much did the mush thing too!

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    1. Yeah, the name 'Baby Led Weaning' is a bit misleading, but technically weaning starts when you introduce solid foods, so I guess it makes sense. Some people call it 'Baby Led Solids' which explains what it is a bit better. I think it's only become popular in the last 5 years or so. I didn't know about it until after my son was born in 2010.

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  9. oh so many things are different between my own childhood & my kids- I grew up in a small town in the forest- they are growing up in the city- in Gastown! Cant get much different than that!

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    1. That's definitely a big difference in environment, wow. Gastown's a pretty cool neighbourhood to have right in your 'back yard'. :)

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