Kids These Days

Let’s face it: kids these days have it easy.

School used to be harder, we didn’t have big screen televisions and video games, we hunted our own food, cultivated our own crops, wore fig leaves for clothes. Parents sometimes love to compete back and forth in a hyperbolic holier-than-thou tailspin, seemingly unable to recover a clear view of today while stalled in romantic musings of yesterday. The thing is, we’ve all been “kids these days.” Talking like we weren’t is just vanity.

There have always been lazy kids, kids unable to make their own fun, self-centered bully kids who never grow out of their insecurities. It’s still the same, if expressed in what, to an older generation (namely us), is an unfamiliar medium.

If you’re in your 30s, you might remember how your parents couldn’t understand your fixation with Nirvana or your sense of loss over Cobain. (Substitute any 90s phase if that one seems inappropriate.) Your kids don’t understand it either. The fact that you’re the only generation who can should give you pause.

Today is one of those days when I can’t believe that I’m living this life.

It was the Weet-Bix kids’ TRY-athlon at Narrow Neck Beach. Roughly 8,000 kids, age 7 to 15, try a short swim, run, and bike ride. “Try” is obviously the key word; it’s not about winning, it’s about getting kids to give it a go, and to feel part of something important. The important thing is to encourage a healthy, active lifestyle. It’s all very Kiwi, but don’t let that fool you; this is a lesson in perspective, not geography.

The population of our little part of the peninsula (south of Takapuna) is somewhere around 12,000. There were 8,000 kids. Let that sink in for a minute, not only for the images of dreadful traffic snarls that should immediately pop to mind (and it was a congested nightmare for a few hours) but for the fact that, including parents, we more than doubled the local population by holding an athletic event for kids.

Kids these days, right?