Society now and then

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I was born in 1943 yet looking at pictures of my town's main shopping area as it was  Then I can hardly credit it when compared to the Now. Notice only one car is visible in the first picture, so in Fifty years great changes in the types and levels of transport.   I can remember having our milk delivered by horse and cart , and the mad dash to be the first kid to get the  horses droppings into their  buckets for their dads veggie patch. They were heady day's back then, hours spent when not in school, playing  Fox and Hounds, hide and seek, rat tat ginger, no matter what the weather. Warmer months were spent out in the nearby countryside, at the three ponds or  bluebell wood/primrose dell..........walking through the half mile field with its stream and other cultivated fields to get there, all the time keeping a wary eye out for the farmers, and we'd be gone all day  with pockets stuffed with odd bits of string, a penknife and an apple if you were lucky and mum was in a good mood, we would pool together what money  and sweety coupons we had for a large bottle of Pop, which we would purchase at Mr Kelloways shop en-route. Mum's didnt seem to worry about us then, knowing we'd return  when our  tummy's started to rumble.    What healthy young beasts we were !
Of course there was a certain level of 'bad behaviour' from us too, scrumping apples and being 'rowdy at the sat matinee for kids, always aware though that 'Copper Moore' knew where we lived and if caught would give us an option, either a clip around the ear or be taken back to face your parents, you always opted for the clip,  you knew it would be more than a clip from your parents for bringing the Cops to their door, Oh the shame of it !
Of course inner City Kids then and now, were not fortunate to have the open spaces me and my peers had.  But still seemed to be able to make their own fun and games , as we did. Crime linked with kids was something neither small town or cities had that much problem with then, or did they? and its just that media coverage has made it an 'issue' these days.


More families now with both parents working, more pressures in the work places, a three tier class system [ when I was a kid there were the rich and us] more pressure from advertising to have the 'latest' in everything.  High levels of unemployment and a good few parents who are not prepared to work for home and family, expecting the state to keep them, higher levels in under-age pregnancies, more children truanting from school, the lack of the ability by parents to just say simply NO to kids demands, the use of bad language by some young parents in front of their kids, and no respect for anything. And its obvious from the two pictures that children cannot play out as safely now when living in a town due to high levels of traffic.   A large number of children come from homes where there is alcohol /drug abuse, they have childhoods we can  only envisage in our worst nightmares. They live in a home where the respect has never had a place.   


 In my youth we grew up with respect , for our elders, for authority , for property and more importantly for ourselves.


Today we have lots of technology that allows kids to have access to computer games etc, mobile phones  televisions in their own rooms.. They don't have to interact with their peers outside of school if they don't want to. A fair few of them don't seem to be able to make their own  fun, bad behaviour often goes unpunished, swearing in public seems to be tolerated by all and sundry, some of them have no concern about damaging others property, Teachers, Police, seem to have their  hands tied  by legislation, re punishment.
Kids are constantly reminded of the Dangers of interaction with strangers,   People who genuinely like kids  are fearful of approaching them.
But most importantly there's a lack of Respect, and that something that's learnt at your parents knees, so in many cases the kids are not to blame, as respect for the individual seems to have taken a nose dive over the last couple of decades.
   


All in all I think my generation had the best of it, of course it wasn't all sunny days and fun we had our family up's and down's too,  and we faced the same dangers from 'strangers' the difference being we as street kids knew when to recognise someone who was a bit off the norm, in most cases. So are Kids too protected these days/ or is it that you cannot ever protect a child too much?
 We were first and foremost a Family, sadly that seems to have gone by the board these days, and I'm not saying that some single parent families don't raise their families as well as two parents, in very many cases it even works out better, but it does seem to me at least that the family as a whole don't seem to do things together, of course there are exceptions, but a lot don't even have an  evening meal sat at the table together, where things like fears of a stranger, bullying at school, where finding out what kind of a day each member of the family had could be talked about.


 Yes we had a few 'bad apples' who ended up in Borstal/Approved School/ prison, and speaking about the ones I knew locally most of them grew up in Dysfunctional families. 

• Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Will we never learn about child crime? (independent.co.uk)