Do you think your children are having a more or less fun childhood?

[Ozgirl75]

I was just pondering this today after reading a book. My kids are so loved, they go to a great school where they do a lot of fun extra curricular (music, sport, debating, choir, art class), they have nice friends, we go on holiday, we do outings at weekends, go out for lunch now and then, go to the beach, spend time outside etc. They seem to have a very happy time of things and are generally lovely kids.

I grew up in the 1980s and had a great childhood too. Only child of loving parents, also a few clubs (Guides, ballet) and spent 90% of my free time playing out with my neighbours, in that unsupervised 80s way. We lived in deep Sussex countryside, very safe, went off on bikes, played in streams and it was just FUN.

My kids OTOH never really play out (they’re 11 and 13). I would let them - we also live in a safe, family area, but basically no one else plays out. They are also quite busy with homework and clubs but I just wonder if they’re going to look back on their childhood and think “was it fun?” I mean, it’s safe, it’s lovely but there isn’t a lot of unsupervised excitement. Maybe it doesn’t matter because they have no frame of reference! I guess I just have this stack of fun memories of childhood and I wonder what my kids will have.

Good question. I don't think my children's lives are comparable to mine.

I grew up very poor. No holidays or days out. My parents were also quite depressed and miserable a lot of the time so I was left to occupy myself. But I did play out for hours on end with friends. Went swimming with friends, read hundreds and hundreds of books, loved the local library, walked for miles. Going to the big supermarket with my mum or to the high street or town was an exciting trip out for us. When I did watch tv it was proper tv with storylines and characters.

My children have a lot more, we go on holiday every year, we have days out, they do swimming, football, scouts. We go on bike rides together, I bake with them, take them to parks, trampolining, swimming. They occasionally go to a friends house or the older one will meet up with a friend but it's nothing like when I was a child. They aren't really interested in reading and screens are the default if they're not being occupied.

I think there's a lot more on parents these days to get kids out and moving whereas in my childhood you sorted yourself out. There was nothing else to do though was there?

Mine do play out. They also are having a lovely time doing extracurricular’s they enjoy and nice days out. But they default to screens to relax now. It was a slow creep as the eldest got more into them. I worry that they don’t really have another way to relax - and that they don’t spend any time bored at all - that just can’t be good for you.

I live on a very safe pedestrianised street and so many kids in the street don’t play out! My DD does and a handful of others but there are at least 8-10 other kids of a similar age who never play out. I don’t understand it.

I would say more fun for ours. My husband was a boarder from eight who had tightly controlled and limited free time at school, he was also awfully bullied by staff, so free play just wasn’t a thing available to him. I grew up in poverty, there wasn’t the time or money for days out, trips to the seaside and toys really, and then as an older child I went into care, so the situation that led up to that also prevented normal childhood play that a child of my age would usually be experiencing.

Our children have toys, days out, go on holidays, our son can take himself to the park after school and at the weekends, he can go to the woods and make dens etc, something our daughter will be able to enjoy when she is old enough.

My childhood was so lovely. Born mid 60's so spent all the 70's pretty much outside from dawn until dusk. Horses (random ones, didn't have my own but was obsessed!), bikes, camps, rounders. Literally outside continuously, big gangs of us on our bikes, only stopping to go in for tea then back out again. Bit of telly but it really was only on for a couple of hours at a time. I had a whole stud farm made from plastic so spent time changing the horses, planning their stables around etc plus all the time jumping over sticks in the garden pretending they were jumps.

I feel lucky enough that my kids were born at the beginning of the 2000's so they lived a very similar life really, not quite the same in that I did always know where they were, but no screens until the got game boys at around 8/9 years old? To think I thought they were bad enough! I cannot bear seeing little kids on phones now, Kirsty Allsop is dead right, it's just too sad.

Teens here.

About the same amount of fun, different but they laugh a lot.