Kids Need to be Kids

I know I should be working on "Justice Tempered?" instead of venting over something I just read. However, I just can’t pass this up.

A school principal offered his suggestion to the youth of today when they complain "what can we do, where can we go?" Our school principal’s suggested they "Go home, mow the lawn, wash the windows, learn to cook, build a raft, get a job, visit the sick, study your lessons and after you’ve finished, read a book."

While there is nothing wrong with these suggestions, one thing is left out: Kids need to be kids." How many time have you read something about countries using child labor and responding that kids need to be kids?

The problem today is: Where can a kid be a kid? When I grew up we had place to play. All we needed was an open field and enough kids for a game of baseball or football. Then there was the woods where we played cowboys and indians. Robin Hood or a number of games where we used our imaginations. Today kids have none of these places where their imagination is needed to entertain them.

Without imagination, reading a book is hard. Without imagination, predicating what may happen is next is to impossible. As adults we complain, self included, about imagination not being present in the young. We complain how TV has killed imagination because it supplies all the answers. In my youth TV was an infant. We had radio programs such as "The Shadow" which required imagination. For kids today, radio is nothing more than music.

I have a great-grandson that shows he has an imagination to go along with the abundance of energy he possess. Yet, there are many times when he is using that imagination, we adults criticize him, expecting him to be a four year old adult. This is not what we should be doing to our children, expecting them to be young adults.

There are many of you that will say that times have changed. Things are just not like they were when I grew up. While that is true there is one thing that hasn’t changed: Kids are still the same as they were in 1940s when I was a kid. They still need the same opportunity to sharpen and hone their minds by using their imaginations.

The principal goes on to say the world, nor their parents owe them anything. That is far, far from the truth. We owe these kids the opportunity to be kids. We owe, as a community, not just as individuals, these kids something more than TV, video games and only sixty minutes a day "Play Time." We owe them the opportunity to sharpen and hone their minds with imagination.