What decade in your opinion

[purbeast]

I would guess most people are going to say when they were in their teens or earlier 20's.

 

I loved the 90's because that is when I was 8-18 and video games and arcades.  Then going through highschool and all that was awesome.

 

Then in the 2000's I was in college partying it up so hard and then got a real job and could actually buy stuff I wanted and I started to finally travel and got married.

 

Now in the 2010's I have continued to travel and travel a lot more than before, purchased our first house and have a badass man cave with every console, a 120" screen, and I now have my own arcade down there with real arcade games, and I also had my first child.

 

It's hard for me to pinpoint the "best" decade. 

[Destino]

36 minutes ago, youngestson said:

The 70s I was a little kid roaming free in perhaps the last decade children were allowed to roam free. Great time.

I was a child in the 80s and roamed miles from home atop my bike, my most prized possession, with a little group of unsupervised children.  I’m sad for kids today.  They’ll never experience that freedom and adventure that’s been part of human upbringing since time immemorial.  They’re forced to exist in an entirely supervised and scheduled world... and are suffering very high rates of anxiety, obesity, and depression. 

[TheDoyler23]

Off to a rough start, but I'm going to say this one. I get to see my kids grow up. 

[PeterMP]

14 hours ago, Destino said:

I was a child in the 80s and roamed miles from home atop my bike, my most prized possession, with a little group of unsupervised children.  I’m sad for kids today.  They’ll never experience that freedom and adventure that’s been part of human upbringing since time immemorial.  They’re forced to exist in an entirely supervised and scheduled world... and are suffering very high rates of anxiety, obesity, and depression. 

 

For most of human history, kids were put to work when they were very young and did not have years of freedom.  That era in between when child labor laws started to be put into place and farming became heavily automated and based on equipment that couldn't easily and safely be operated by kids and their labor was no longer necessary to the 2000s or so when you see increased supervision of children (I guess maybe in the 1990s) and the number of child activities increased and so did scheduling is actually the anomaly when viewed in the larger historical perspective.

 

If you go back into even the 1950s, except for in more wealthy families, kids didn't actually have a lot of free time for unsupervised and unscheduled activities, and certainly if you go back into the 1920s in general they even have less.  And back into the 1800s, the situation is even worse (nothing like being locked in a room for hours a day and being forced to work in unsafe and unsanitary conditions during your childhood).

 

I'm also then not at all sure that there is a link between supervision and scheduling and anxiety, obesity, and depression as sort of implied in your post.

[Destino]

1 hour ago, PeterMP said:

I'm also then not at all sure that there is a link between supervision and scheduling and anxiety, obesity, and depression as sort of implied in your post.

From what I’ve read playtime, especially free play time, has been on steady decline since at least the 1950s.  This has been linked to rising anxiety and stress.  https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/142/3/e20182058
 

As for obesity I’m not sure I’ve read anything directly linking the two in children, but there’s plenty linking the two between humans in general.  The more time spent active the less likely you are to be obese.  Structured play will almost never result in the same amount of active time as free unsupervised play outside.  It’s hard to get really fat when you’re moving, climbing, biking, running, or even just walking for most of the day.  A handful of scheduled events will never come close to matching the hours activity of playing until the street lights come on.  

[PeterMP]

30 minutes ago, Destino said:

From what I’ve read playtime, especially free play time, has been on steady decline since at least the 1950s.  This has been linked to rising anxiety and stress.  https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/142/3/e20182058
 

As for obesity I’m not sure I’ve read anything directly linking the two in children, but there’s plenty linking the two between humans in general.  The more time spent active the less likely you are to be obese.  Structured play will almost never result in the same amount of active time as free unsupervised play outside.  It’s hard to get really fat when you’re moving, climbing, biking, running, or even just walking for most of the day.  A handful of scheduled events will never come close to matching the hours activity of playing until the street lights come on.  

I'm not sure when it was maximized and that would certainly be based on the population you looked at.  That researchers that most likely came from more wealthy back grounds found people that had time to be involved in studies who also were likely upper class families concluded that play time was heaviest in the 1950s wouldn't surprise me.

 

But that's not what kids are doing in their unsupervised and unscheduled time today.  Even if I send my kids outside, they want to take electronic devices

 

Even in your link:

 

"Play with traditional toys was associated with an increased quality and quantity of language compared with play with electronic toys,¹⁰⁰ particularly if the video toys did not encourage interaction."

 

That requires structured/scheduled time to get my kids to do.  Even for something like board games or card games, that requires me saying at this time (scheduled and supervised) we're going to play this game.

 

And that trend had started into the 1980s.

 

There's a difference between saying kids need to play and get physical activity and saying kids need unscheduled and unsupervised times.  Today, those tings are actually often conflicting.  (They actually need both, but the issue is to what extent).  Especially in today's world if kids are given unscheduled and unsupervised time, they tend to use that time to sit in front of an electronic device.  Which have their own issues as your link points out.

 

(This gets into a larger issue of marketing to kids.  And with that, I'll let this go to not to derail this thread.)

[Kosher Ham]

2 hours ago, TheDoyler23 said:

Off to a rough start, but I'm going to say this one. I get to see my kids grow up. 

 

Not to be morbid, we all would love that to be a certainty. Tomorrow is not a promise. 

[TheDoyler23]

4 minutes ago, Kosher Ham said:

 

Not to be morbid, we all would love that to be a certainty. Tomorrow is not a promise. 

 

I hear ya. 

[Renegade7]

I don't have enough decades for frame of reference.

 

When I walked in this thread I was kinda hoping the question was which decade had biggest impact on my opinion of the world.  That would be the 2000s without question, it was ten years straight of the reality that I got lucky in the 90s in regards to world events directly impacting my everyday life, as if what I was already going through wasn't touch enough as the 90s wore on.

 

Growing up between the Cold War and War on Terror feels like a little thing I didn't realize was a big thing older I got, but that doesn't make it my favorite decade.

 

I predict the 2020s will be a litany of "okay, we get it" moments in human history, which is what's supposed to happen when you keep playing with fire and getting away with it until you finally get really burned. I'm not sure what else it will take, so hoping this is the final straw and we dont rush back into what got us here in the first place.

 

Otherwise, I won't have a favorite decade and they all gonna suck until I run out.

[Kosher Ham]

I don't think several of you understand what this is about, or perhaps I should have read it more carefully. 

 

Sorry but.. It should be specific. From my perspective. 

[Renegade7]

3 minutes ago, Kosher Ham said:

I don't think most of you understand what this is about, or perhaps I should have read it more carefully. 

 

Sorry but.. 

 

I'll admit I dont, so just posting out loud again.

[TD_washingtonredskins]

2 hours ago, PeterMP said:

I'm not sure when it was maximized and that would certainly be based on the population you looked at.  That researchers that most likely came from more wealthy back grounds found people that had time to be involved in studies who also were likely upper class families concluded that play time was heaviest in the 1950s wouldn't surprise me.

 

But that's not what kids are doing in their unsupervised and unscheduled time today.  Even if I send my kids outside, they want to take electronic devices

 

Even in your link:

 

"Play with traditional toys was associated with an increased quality and quantity of language compared with play with electronic toys,¹⁰⁰ particularly if the video toys did not encourage interaction."

 

That requires structured/scheduled time to get my kids to do.  Even for something like board games or card games, that requires me saying at this time (scheduled and supervised) we're going to play this game.

 

And that trend had started into the 1980s.

 

There's a difference between saying kids need to play and get physical activity and saying kids need unscheduled and unsupervised times.  Today, those tings are actually often conflicting.  (They actually need both, but the issue is to what extent).  Especially in today's world if kids are given unscheduled and unsupervised time, they tend to use that time to sit in front of an electronic device.  Which have their own issues as your link points out.

 

(This gets into a larger issue of marketing to kids.  And with that, I'll let this go to not to derail this thread.)

 

Good points. And to be honest, even in the 80s it wasn't like every day included long hikes, skipping rocks, catching tadpoles, and drinking out of hoses from dawn till dusk. There were days like that for sure, but I think we look back and fill in some gaps to romanticize our youth. 

 

I spent plenty of summer days in a friend's house looking for his dad's Playboys, watching VHS movies, drinking Coke, and trading baseball cards. That was basically my generation's "rotting your brain" and there was plenty of that to go along with trips to the pool, kickball, etc. 

1 hour ago, Renegade7 said:

Growing up between the Cold War and War on Terror feels like a little thing I didn't realize was a big thing older I got

 

This is something I've thought about many times and very well-articulated. Just wanted to point that out. 

[Mournblade]

90s hands down. After the oppressive Reagan 80s, the 90s were such a relief. Great music, great movies (Tarantino), I was in my 20s and in my prime...great memories. 

[TheGreatBuzz]

I’m only in my late 30’s so it’s not like I have a lot of meaningful decades to pick from.  I’m going to go with the 2000’s because that is when I joined the Navy and was single so all I did was travel the world and party.  I should write a book one day.