Modern Parenting

may hinder brain development.

On Saturday, we took a guided tour of the Denali Park HQ area. The ranger pointed out a rock where the children of the early park officians used to play, a century ago. “We’d never let them do that today,” she said. “Kids today aren’t as tough.”

I spoke up, and told her, “Kids today are just like kids in any other day. It’s the parents that are different.” Several of the (older) people in the group nodded.

13 thoughts on “Modern Parenting”

  1. Some children, then and now, are not as tough; but lawyers and special interest are more effective. If the child is physically hurt, some lawyer might figure out how to make money off a tort lawsuit. If the child is emotionally hurt, some special interest will explain how its unfair that some kids are capable of playing on the rock and others are not, so nobody should play on the rock.

    But more than likely, some environmentalist said that rock should be preserved like the rest of the park, and children playing on it will damage it because nature is more fragile than children.

    1. And that last, or something similar, is a legitimate concern in some areas. I have seen numerous documentaries about hillsides in various popular UK tourist areas being devastated simply by the erosion caused by far too many feet walking along popular paths. I would imagine that many popular tourist areas in the USA have similar problems.

  2. The wife called BS on the ranger at Denali when we got the same line there a couple of weeks ago.

    I also noticed the constant global warming propaganda from the ranger/tour guide lectures. I commented to one of the rangers later and was told that was mandated by DC a couple of years ago and they had no choice.

    1. When I was on the Portage glacier cruise a month ago, the narrator of the trip was a National Park Ranger. I was amazed that she actually mentioned that the glacier had progressed up and down the valley many times and that it just happened to be deep into the valley at this time. She managed not to make any mention of global warming, although I must admit that my attention was more on taking in the scenery rather than listening to the government line.

      Still, I expected it to come, particularly since it was unusually warmer that week, but I never heard global warming. She did say climate change, but in the generic sense that climate does change which affects glacier formation. I was happy not to hear how my desire to visit the glacier contributed to it being smaller.

      1. When I visited Glacier Bay National Park 10 years ago, I learned some interesting facts about its history, as presented on the park’s website:

        Sailing through Glacier Bay today, you travel along shorelines and among islands that were completely covered by ice just over 200 years ago. When Captain George Vancouver charted adjacent waters of Icy Strait in 1794, he and his crew described what we now call Glacier Bay as just a small five-mile indent in a gigantic glacier that stretched off to the horizon. That massive glacier was more than 4,000 feet thick in places, up to 20 miles wide, and extended more than 100 miles to the St. Elias mountain range. By 1879, however, naturalist John Muir discovered that the ice had retreated more than 30 miles forming an actual bay. By 1916, the Grand Pacific Glacier – the main glacier credited with carving the bay – had melted back 60 miles to the head of what is now Tarr Inlet.

        Imagine that. During the Little Ice Age, the glacier almost completely filled the inlet. By 1879, it had retreated over 30 miles and by 1916, it had retreated another 30 miles. That was after the Little Ice Age ended and well before the invention of SUVs, jet airplanes and most other CO2 spewing things that we’re told are causing the climate to change. If humans didn’t cause that glacier to retreat, what did?

  3. My own encounter with this sort of nonsense was on a cruise ship a decade or so ago, where there were gunracks still attached along the aft railings. I remember cruising with my parents in the 1970s when skeet shooting over the taffrail was on the daily list of activities.

    When I asked about it more recently, the cruise director said “they were concerned about lead poisoning in the ocean.”

    Kids are smart enough to look at a handful of lead BBs, and CUBIC MILES of ocean, and call B.S. Apparently, grownups are not.

  4. The problem is the lead shot settles and is eaten by Bankers, I mean bottom-feeders and reenters the food chain fast.

  5. I was up at Big Basin in Santa Cruz Mt’s a few weeks ago and noticed that the big tree-ring display showing 2000 years of history had been made PC. The center of the tree no longer noted the “Birth of Christ”. Off center a bit was the “Birth of Mohamed” and then the “Fall of the Byzantine Empire”.

    We’ve been Islamified.

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