Kids these days have it easy...don’t they?

With Christmas approaching, my Christmas tree is up and dropping needles everywhere, all my shopping is done, my Christmas cards are written and sent, my house is looking festive, stockings are up, I have carols on in the car, sing carols to the kids at bed time and generally have gone carols-crazy, and all the presents are wrapped. So inevitably my thoughts turn to Christmasses past, and how different it was for us back then. My kids can consider themselves to be fortunate – they have a stable home (stable as in constant, rather than stable in the context of where Jesus was born, obviously…because that might not be considered to be “fortunate”, as such, in this era of triple-glazed, centrally-heated domestic luxury), a loving family, a comfortable income, and parents who go OTT at Christmas time even though they have spoken sternly to each other about this year NOT buying the children quite such a pile of presents. And then they each go off and buy the children a huge pile of presents.

Now then, my 8 year old self might have thought that my 8 year old son has it easy. But does he actually? As life moves on, society evolves, and all that happens is that children gain a whole new set of anxieties which I as a child never had to concern myself about.

·         Internet grooming. In our youth, the people one associated with one could either physically see, or actually hear through the medium of the telephone. We didn’t have these worries about weird 50 year old men posing as 8 year old boys in order strike up a friendship, and consequently we didn’t have to suffer the hypothetical ignominy of our mothers reading us the riot act every time we dared to set a virtual foot on the internet, rigorously vetting our friends list and loading net nanny on to our laptops so that every time we innocently googled the word “cock” we got a virtual slap on the wrist.

·         Sometimes less is more. Kids have so much these days that they find it hard to place a value on their stuff. If it’s broken, by and large they get a new one. We are no longer a “make-do-and-mend” society. When we were kids, if you needed it for school, you sometimes got it (or in my case you got your big sister’s one with the relevant, highly visible, often very embarrassing alterations made). If you didn’t actually need it, you waited until Christmas. Life was so simple.

·         At Christmas, we got one present from our parents, a stocking filled with small toys and a Satsuma. Sometimes we got something from a non-defective godparent or grandparent. Nowadays, children must experience a certain level of rising panic (although clearly they would never be able to identify it as such) when faced with the sheer volume of presents piled up under the tree. Or maybe they don’t care, and they just rip all the wrapping off without a second thought, and it’s just me who experiences rising panic at the number of thank you letters I’m going to have to persuade them to write.

·         Technology. We had pen and paper, and one of those phones with a dial which, if you dropped it, broke your toe rather than itself. They have (separate) remote controls for the TV, the stereo, the set top box, the DVD player and sometimes even the garage door. They have to understand how to work mobiles, androids, laptops, PCs, tablets, iPhones and iPods. If the TV didn’t work when I was a child, you held the aerial up and walked slowly around the room, leaping up and down and cursing occasionally like some sort of ballet dancer with Tourette’s, until the snowstorm on the screen receded and you could see the picture again. If the TV doesn’t work nowadays, they need to work out if it’s the TV, the aerial, the set top box or the broadband connection, switch everything off and back on again, and then get a man in to fix it.

Perhaps modern technology and modern living has actually made our kids’ lives more complicated. Mind you, on the plus side at least in the age of Google we don’t have door-to-door Encyclopaedia Britannica salesmen pestering us any more.