I thought about my own children and the world they were in now—how they rarely went outside; rarely rode their bikes. What happened? I wondered. What happened to my generation? How had we been the kids with so much freedom, who then grew up to deny this freedom to our own children? This adventure. This sense of discovery and danger and risk and recovery.
David Kushner,
Alligator Candy: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), ch. 32.
And yet, when I looked at the Sunday Tampa Tribune [from] the morning Jon disappeared, I was struck by what I saw.
An article headlined "What Are Our Children Missing?" opened with a quote from a local art teacher and mother of two. "Children today have been shortchanged," she told the reporter. "When I was young, we could wander in the woods, we could breathe and run free."
She and other parents didn't think that life in the early seventies wasn't as adventurous as it seemed.Kids were getting overscheduled, they believed, confined by a regimen of after-school activities that was curtailing their independence and exploration.
Id., ch. 34.
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