What would you--returned to your boyhood enthusiasms--want/be able to get in 2008?

I mean, it's not just comparing our past with our present; to test periods we need to imagine

--ourselves as we were, but brought up now.  Would life be better?  Worse?  The same?  (Part of this is also imagining growing up in different circumstances, how the society reacts with the family, now one school differs from another, etc..)

--ourselves as we are now, but moved to that past epoch: does life back then for a person of your age now compare favourably or unfavourably re: type of work, type of accomodation, state interference in your daily activities, health services etc.

For me:

--I think I would like it now, where I am, if I were growing up again.  School seems more interesting, less clumping together around one social model (there are other reasons, too); there are more things to do--so assuming I had the same interests and energy levels etc. I could get a wider range of experiences.

Of course, this new-young-me would be influenced in different ways; would I want an ipod, would I want the latest game console, which youth tribe would I belong to and how would that condition me?

--If I were placed as the adult I am now in the environment where I grew up, I think I'd be worse off.  A suburb, culture free, roads and roads--nature yes, but for an adult not so enjoyable (lots of parks and sports fields--

Heh, here's a conversation I heard between a 92 year old woman and a 35 year old woman.  I was pushing the 92 year old along the sea front.  We stopped to get an ice cream.  The 35 year old served us.  It was sunny (the first warm-enough-not-to-need-a-jacket day), there were no other customers, so we got chatting and, as they do, out came the various opinions.  The 92 year old and the 35 year old were sure things were worse now, more dangerous ("I remember skinheads, punks, mods, and heavy metallers," I said, "every weekend, fights and more fights."); then the 92 year old said,

"And those girls now getting drunk all the time!  It can't be good for them."

35 year old (sudden grin): "Oh well, I admit I did a bit of that when I was younger..."

To your lego example, there seem to be lots of science DIY kits around now, I don't know how flexible they are in their creativity (Migeru might know more about this), but....I suppose a question is: How influenced were you (or was I) by our relative peer groups, and what choices did we have--if we didn't want to be (or couldn't be) part of one group, how many others were there?  Also, how did child-adult interaction work back  then compared to now?

Ah, that's all badly expressed.  Two things I notice about the current crop of youth are:

1. Lack of understanding of volume control--and I put this down to cars raising ambient levels, and in an unpleasant way such that kids prefer their ipods.

2. The boys with their jeans hanging near their knees, underpants on display.  Surveys have been carried out: women don't find it attractive and yet--there it is.

For 2) -- A quick search through our old photo albums will no doubt demonstrate that attractiveness of male fashion, and female appreciation of said male fashion have ever been thus.  When I was, say, ten, it was Bermington Bags and Beatlecrusher shoes that were all the rage.  I'm sure I've spelled Bermington wrong--it's a word that came to my brain (along with the shoes) out of nowhere, stored in my brain all these years so I could mis-type it this afternoon--

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

I wish we'd had computers back in ye olden days.  And the Internet.  I felt very alone as a kid in my small town, with peers who had very very different interests than I.

So far as toys go, in my Capitalist utopia there was never an end to moronic products marketed to us.  Grandparents smothered us in these toys.  So my mother made up for it by never buying us toys and forcing us to use our time either reading (we were allowed to read anything we wanted to - and there weren't a lot of kids books lying around...) or doing something creative, be it crafts or art, or the annual neighborhood circuses and plays we produced in our back yard.  Actually, there was always some kind of silly impromptu performance going on.  We may have an acting gene we're not aware of...

Maybe it is different for girls.  I don't remember having many "problem solving" type toys.  I confess to having had a Cabbage Patch Doll (one of the "international" ones.  She was Dutch...).  And mountains of stuffed animals.  Didn't make me good at math.  But I do want to save the polar bears... ;)

"This is nothing compared to how Putin rigged Eurovision."

In terms of toys, one of the huge differences between toys-as-were and toys now is the sheer number of toys that have one function only.

And if children try to use them creatively, they're likely to get corrected and shown the "right" way to use it. Right at this moment, my son has found a teach-yourself-the-stars kit someone bought him for his birthday, and is happily inventing new constellations.  That's fine by me, but many of the parents I know would be interfering at this point.

Toys, basically, though superficially appealing, have become more and more boring.  RoboSapiens? A paperweight since Boxing Day.  Whereas things like wooden blocks lasted way beyond my children's toddler years.

But computers, digital cameras etc are just fantastic.  My son can take 600 photographs in a day cost-free, my daughter makes films-using Sims characters when she's short of human volunteers. Creative play may be a bit less obvious when it's electronic, but it's there.

"What is happening to our young
people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?"

Plato

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

200 years ago an 8 year old would see the shimmering leaves on the trees, the ripples on a lake or the morphing of clouds. Today the shimmering, rippling and morphing come from different sources. But the functionality remains the same - trying to find signal in all the noise.

You can't be me, I'm taken

I had a child, and had noted just the same things you have- model airplanes had morphed from incredible, gossamer constructs into wire-cut chunks of mostly-pre-assembled plastic, and I was amazed at the superficial level of the abilities of the kids Adrian knew, and their fly-speck attention spans.

Jane Healy is a Phd. in child development, and has that most important of talents--the ability to make a complex subject acessible, without patronizing th reader, or making a cartoon out of the central point.
For those who know more than I do, I beg pardon in advance for my errors.
"Myelinization" is the growth of a protein sheath around a neural fiber. It acts partly as electrical insulation. Babies' brains are mostly un-myelinized, and the process begins very early in life, at the core of the brain, and spreads outward.
Think of an infant brain as a mass of as-yet undifferentiated wiring, with no insulation--a very high signal-to-noise level indeed.
The majority of the process is complete by 14, with the cerebral cortex the last to get it- the wrinkly outer layer the last to get the rubber, and start humming instead of zapping and sparking.
The cerebral Cortex does most of the math, the problem solving--the higher level stuff that makes the difference between a drooler and a concert pianist.
All other things being equal (genetics, nutrition, oxygen supply, etc. etc.)

Brain development equals input.

A child watching a child ride a bicycle on television gets input, at say, level one.

A child riding a bicycle gets input at level between 60 and 100. (Different sources).

But, you might say, "I only allow the best- Sesame Street, PBS, Billie James Hargis's Freedom Crusade--you know, the good stuff."

Sorry duckie, it's all input, and as far as development is concerned, ---it's all crap. Near Zero.

Result? Television time is a near-total loss to brain development, no matter what the content.
In a culture like the US, where TV time is 6-1/2 hours a day, the developmental defecit is enormous.

As you can imagine, media being the largest pile of money outside of wall street, the axe-jobs began the day the book hit the stores. In my lifetime, only the global warming story has been attacked so vitriolically and so consistently as the notion that TV rots your brain--or, in this case, greatly reduces the complexity of the cerebral cortex.
Heresy black.
A glider pilot friend of mine was the coroner of Miami-dade county, "I've seen more dead bodies than you've seen live ones, bud", and he was also a very bright guy. Cherwinski, when I told him about the book, laughed. I asked the obvious question, and he said, "Nothing's funny. But if I had said that they'd burn me at the stake."
He also said that
"At autopsy, you can spot a real tube kid almost at a glance. The cortex just aint as wrinkly."

In later work, Healy found and spoke of some therapy that can reduce the worst effects of the tube, but I had the impression that she was offering hope to parents who recognized their huge mistake--too late-- and whose plight touched her heart.

I give this book to everyone I know with kids, -everyone whom I think offers the slightest chance of reading it with an open mind.

Useful talking follows experience, the more experience the better. Talking that precedes experience is known as bullshit.

That's ok, I've already found myself saying stuff about music these days being crap compared to what we listenned to as kids.  Which is saying a lot, given I grew up in the 80's...

But I really don't feel grumpy about "the kids" and their toys.  Their parents however, I mostly loathe.  (Er, 'cept for Jerome, Mig, Colman, etc.  ET parents are fabulous parents.)

"This is nothing compared to how Putin rigged Eurovision."

Is this the mental level of the kids today?...

Why are you blindly mapping corporate trends onto social trends? Why aren't you comparing educational achievement of children from two different eras instead?

you are the media you consume.

Now that is done, I can get to the heart of the matter: every generation of humans is better than the last, as they know more, they do more, and they revel in the abundance their ancestors have created for them (and good for the bugger too!).

I look at some young people who are 14, 15, 16, not a great deal younger than me, and am amazed at their precocity. Not only do they have a great deal of knowledge about important things, but they are outspoken on those issues, and confident in what they have to say. They know that with a resource like the internet, anything they don't know, or haven't yet formed an opinion on, can be easily sussed out by tomorrow. I know it's not the deep and well-rounded kind of knowledge an older person might have, but their ability to take in and use is already present, and with a few years in university and a few in life, they'll be well on their way.

When I went to live in Manchester, I knew nothing, literally nothing. But I met young queer kids there who had not only come out at fourteen or younger, but were able to analyse why their peers and society as a whole were not welcoming to queer culture. When you've heard a 16-year-old use words like 'heteronormativity', and know what they mean, you are impressed.

Maybe these kids were switched on because of their particular situation, but anything that gets them to think works. I met a gang 15-year-old communists (one looked like John Donne, which I thought was pretty cool), who protested against the war, and engaged you in all kinds of conversations. A 17-year-old was the greatest film critic you had ever met, and a 16-year-old deaf kid from Moss Side who could tear you to pieces about deaf culture and the rights of children.

Sure, not all young people are like this, some are dull and stunted in their personality and mind, but they are all products of this 'Kinder culture' you mention. No doubt they all grew up watching massive amounts of television, playing videos games for hours on end, being stopped from doing anything a little too 'risky', having toys that proscribed creativity rather than encourage it, never being overly fond of reading just for the sake of it. Hell, that's how I grew up, for sure, yet I refuse to accept that my mental level is less than yours because I happened to get a dustbin monster in my Kinder Egg (which I did, actually, in case you wonder).

I also want to say that I'm angry that the argument that 'kids today' are some sort of degenerate species is repeated here.

Member of the Anti-Fabulousness League since 1987.