Quote:
Originally Posted by ceciltguitar
Several early boomers have commented about spending the whole day outside as a child during the summer. One of the big big differences between early boomers late boomers - “Jones’s” - is that the early boomers childhood, up until they were teenagers or even after they were teenagers, was spent in the era before most people had air conditioning and televisions. After everybody had air-conditioning and televisions, kids stop going outside as much.
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I don't think I agree with this last part. As a '59er, we always had TV - I do remember the big day when we got a COLOR TV - we'd had B&W until I was 7 or 8. But we always had a TV at home, from as early as I can remember, probably since I was born. And we had air conditioning, later swamp cooling when we moved to Arizona, but we always had some form of cooling.
And I LIVED outside. So did my friends. We were out all the time. As a little kid in the mid-Atlantic and then as a bigger kid and teenager in the desert Southwest. I don't remember spending very much time inside until girls and beer and weed became part of the picture in high school. But I was STILL outside quite a lot. I know at some point, kids started spending more and more time inside and less outside, but I think that might have had more to do with when video games really took off - that was a few years after my time and I just never got into them at all. And with cable TV and hundreds of TV stations. And then once we had 24 hour news stations, they needed to find stuff to talk about so they REALLY played up every child abduction anywhere and parents started getting nervous about letting their kids out of sight. But my guess is all of this was probably more of a Gen X and beyond phenomenon.
-Ray