Lots of fantasy and generalizations, or maybe the author lived a more sheltered life than I did as a child. My father once noted that with the advancement of medicine, survival of the fittest no longer was the rule. As he so quaintly put it (usually after seeing an example of a not so bright individual) "the culls are breeding."

There is an element of society that has had entirely too much influence recently, obsessing about protecting our young to an absurd degree ("Microaggressions?" PLEASE!). The real world can still be brutal, and we do our children no favors by excessive attempts to shield them from reality.

My offspring are still amazed at my attitude that life is a gamble, and that fear obstructs reward more often than it avoids danger. I blew a million dollars on a space tourism venture, failed, and moved on. The lesson I hope they take from my attitude is that a life spent in avoiding risk is a life only half lived. There's more to existence than just survival.

I am not going to contradict every line. The main point, for me, here, is that the "good old days" were not. We had a child molester in my neighborhood. Much later, working in software development, a woman told me about one in hers - in Alabama in the 1950s. When she told the story, she expressed her surprise and dismay, as if Alabama in the 1950s was a perfectly moral place. In criminology, we say that crime knows no neighborhood. In other words, crime is not limited to some place, but is every place.

"We got sick we recovered. We were stronger than kids are now." Actually, the strong survived, not much else. Babies died before age 6. Generally, the longer you live, the better your chances of living longer. When we say that life expectancy was 35, we are averaging infant mortality into it. Children died of childhood diseases before the acceptance of vaccination.

"We didn’t ask for much protection and we weren’t given much, and we survived" Because no one speaks for the dead.

"There was no talk about the needs of the group. When we went to school, we weren’t told about ways we could help others." Yes, there was, in many ways, in home, church and school. In my elementary school (1955-1960), we sang songs about giving for the community chest (later "Red Feather") drives.

"When we played games..." It was pretty interesting in the 6th grade when the gym teacher explained that baseball was a girls' game. (See Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.)

There was far less whispering and gossip. There were fewer cliques Baloney. In 1959, you had to be just as cool as James Dean or someone would knock your books out of your hand on the way to class.

There was no compulsion to “share.” Oh, yes, indeed, there was (see above). Otherwise, Ayn Rand would not have challenged 2500 years of ethical philosophy.

"School wasn’t some kind of social laboratory..._" You just did not realize it. School was always about that.

"We still don’t take every word a doctor says as coming from God." Granted that, now that I am an adult. Nonetheless, I would not be alive had I not had heart surgery in 1956 -- but, then, I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, where medical science was (and is) a significant industry.

When I was a pre-teen kid, there was one rule: Supper's at six. We played, ran, fought, made-up, and generally got dirty, bruised, and scratched up. There were friends, bullies and wierdos. There was a kid who fed a neighbors pet bird to a cat. We played in the street. Be careful on Halloween or your new car might get covered shredded paper, glued there with home-made paste. Still, with all that, the neighborhood produced Doctors, scientists, politicians, police, musicians, plumbers, and bicycle repairmen. No parents bothered to take their kids out of the cellophane. They came already working and were taught right and wrong by experience (You should have known better, were you raised in a barn?).

Perhaps oversimplified, but I agree with the article.
We had hope, real hopes and dreams, not something the government promised us. We had time to play and learn to grow up. We were not little adults, but we did NOT feel perpetually entitled to be treated as helpless kids either. We learned to respect adults and to emulate those we felt worthy. How many babies die now, from abortion, is that somehow better than sickness of years past! No one said using the progression of science to stay healthy was bad, but overusing it to suit drug companies might be.
ADHD is the trend of the century, and our daughter was almost caught in that Rx trap, when the school wanted her on Ritalin. Her doctor came to the rescue when he found numerous allergies were the cause of the restless inattention, not ADHD. One has to proceed with caution with the drug establishment. Child molestation did exist, but it still does, likely worse. Somehow, teaching the kids to be afraid of all things grownup seems not to have stopped it. We were free, free to make decisions based on reason. We also were free to live with the consequences of our actions. Today, schools teach kids they are entitled and have freedoms, with no strings. When they find out years later that is not true, they then have no self esteem. They were not told that self respect comes with trying and accepting responsibility. I had a bike and a horse, no helmet, no "be careful", risk was part of life. I only almost died from pneumonia which was almost sealed with penicillin allergy! So much for modern meds.We were taught in church to help the poor, but the poor then were actually not on welfare. We were taught to offer help while not stealing their dignity. The one school propaganda of those days was to love the UN, and we grew up to reason how bad an idea that was. Now, the kids are discouraged from even thinking for themselves, without checking it with equally uneducated peers! Teachers were educated in subjects not the theory of education. The IQ in this country has dropped, making it even harder for them to reason. I still agree, we had the best movies (40s-60s) without all the tech advances. We had music with real musicians from Glen Miller, to Ella Fitzgerald, to Elvis and the Beatles. Now we have street thugs making millions and pushing gangsta rap on white suburban youth, Call that an improvement? We read J.F. Cooper and Alcott at 9 and Orwell and Pasternak in high school. We read Rand in college. How many kids today have the attention span and the understanding to make it through those books? Yet that is one way we learned about the world of thought. I enjoy my computer very much, but the distilled communication of texting is not relating. Back in the day, kids learned to converse in person. We were never blind to the illegal acts of politicians seeking power, but now they are in your face entitled to that power. In college we studied the science of weather, not the politics of so-called climate change. We knew the climate changed, always had, even before industry. I just am seeing too many young disillusioned adults failing to leave home, turning to alcohol or drugs, to mask the discouragement and fear they feel when what they have been taught to expect does not fit reality to which .politicians have led them to think they are entitled. At 16, my dad informed me as a female, I would have to be better than a man applying for a job - okay, I could do that. I am 68, and glad I had the parents and teachers who made me see life could be hard, but we always have choices.

Let me connect some dots for you.

"But once upon a time, when we were young, we were free. We didn’t take any shots, and when we got sick we recovered. We were stronger than kids are now. ........There were no childhood “conditions” like ADHD or Bipolar, and we certainly didn’t take any brain drugs. The idea of a kid going to a psychiatrist would have been absurd."

Anybody want to meet me in person and buy me a beer, I'll fill you in on this.

All very open to discussion and much of it questionable. Let me suggest that when we were kids we did not sigh sadly for the good old days.

Just one point for now: "Kids never acted like little adults. They didn’t dress like adults. They didn’t want to be fake adults."

In point of fact, "youth culture" is a recent invention of the Baby Boomer generation. Historically, there was little differentiation between children and adults, though every society does have some rites of passage, including those for the transition to adulthood. (Bar Mitzvah is a common example.) If you read the "Horatio Alger" stories from the late 19th century, you find children of 12 holding jobs, living on their own.

It is not so much that children act like adults, but that adults are still children. And it can be a good thing. NEOTENY is the retention into adulthood of immature characteristics and it is a survival trait. In The Ascent of Man Jacob Bronowski has a chapter on "The Long Childhood." Of course, not everything about grown-ups acting like kids is good.

While some criticize the article, it does have a lot of truth. The nanny state has grown and people are fitting in, behaving like children who crave the parental nature of modern government.

Read my comment there...
Although you've seen my position here, before.

There never was a golden age. That is the Eden Myth, retold even in Hesiod's "Days" and echoed in Plato's Dialogs. It is the narrative of the True Believer: Once there was a golden age, but the Evil One(s) stole it from us, but if we all work together, we can build a new world, not for ourselves, but for our children."

You know? I don't use this word but I feel it's appropriate after reading that...amen!

And I'll say it another way...to you And the author...Thank you.

We grew up in "Happy Days".

Despite some of the comments below, I pretty much agree with the article. It may be good old days thinking and totally irrelevant in todays screwed up world, but that world was much better.