Stuff I had that my 3 year old doesn't

the_flying_pig

Yeah, I dunno on balance.

Technology is obviously far better, just as it will be much better than it is now in another 30 years' time. So's food [but highly dubious that it'll be better again 30 years from now].

Housing's a lot worse, as are the issues caused by parents working longer hours & so on.

Overall it's difficult to compare.

My wife insists on buying so much tat [some of it moderately expensive] for my two year old that it's far more than he can ever play - if he has, say, 15 hours of potential toy-playing time per week he'd really be down to about 20 minutes per toy. I worry that being saturated with all this junk could affect attention span & creativity. We're currently having an extension done to the back of the house, the other day in the back garden I heard my son say that he was 'riding a train', I just assumed that he'd be talking about some plastic [or more likely expensive Brio/wood] tat but was really delighted & almost a tad emotional when i turned round to see that he was sitting on the end of a steel girder, pretending it was a train. I'm sure that's the sort of thing that I'd have done all the time when I was his age but that he almost never does at all.

StevieJ

Yes, the Ice cream van ringing it's tones at bedtime is not a good idea though.

Unless you tell them it is the child catcher from 'Chitty Chitty Bang' looking for naughty children who are not asleep yet :eek: cruel I know.

angrypirate

I was never taken out of school for holidays as a child and when i have children in the near future, i would never dream of it. I believe in France you can be prosecuted for it.

PasturesNew

angrypirate wrote: »

I was never taken out of school for holidays as a child and when i have children in the near future, i would never dream of it. I believe in France you can be prosecuted for it.

You can be prosecuted for it here.

StevieJ

Graham_Devon wrote: »

I fear the point is being missed here ISTL.

So lets just take Haven holidays as an example, in Wales., in October (term time) for 4 nights = £239.

Same place, same caravn, in Wales, in September (school holidays) for 4 nights = £719

This is why we used to go in term time (I guess!). If we didn't go in term time, we'd never have gone.

Surely you only have to take one day out, is it not the holidays that reflect the exact school holiday period that are the most expensive? probably more so with overseas holidays .

PasturesNew

What I never had in the 60s:

Graham_Devon wrote: »

What I had that my 3 year old doesn't (or won't have)

- A stay at home mum

- A large enough house from the start that was owned by parents even though only one wage was coming in.
- A greenhouse I could grow tomatoes in (I hated them though).
- Lego that was cheap enough to buy with pocket money.
- Computer games that came on cassette that were also cheap enough to buy with pocket money.

- A playgroup that was simply that. Wasn't overseen by offsted and didn't include parents evenings...you just turned up if you needed to go in. Used to love that place.
- A playgroup in the supermarket (which supermarket offers this now?!)

- The ice cream van doing it's rounds and the excitement when you heard it (they only seem to park up now?)

I also had quite a lot of stuff. Maybe not the same stuff as now. But I had stuff. A TV, a commodore, an Atari. My chopper bike was frankly awesome. As was the ability to ride it somewhere...more so when I got my dynamo rear light which you had to cycle at 45mph just to get it glowing.

We had holidays, but NEVER term time. Old, rickety, damp caravans in farmers fields were often the norm.

My sister was told that the ice cream van's jingle meant he'd run out.

On housing: my parents bought, aged about 40, with two wages coming in.

ruggedtoast

StevieJ wrote: »

Surely you only have to take one day out, is it not the holidays that reflect the exact school holiday period that are the most expensive? probably more so with overseas holidays .

Taking one day out either side won't help you. July and August are the most expensive times to go away, as is half term.

Graham_Devon

StevieJ wrote: »

Surely you only have to take one day out, is it not the holidays that reflect the exact school holiday period that are the most expensive? probably more so with overseas holidays .

Yer - theres plenty of options - I'm sure we used to go on a thursday and come back Sunday. We used to go Scotland to log cabins quite a lot. I remember the woods surrounding it (as we played in them a lot), sitting on the lake fishing (I was later told there were no fish and it was more a pond than a lake!), and I remember vividly having my first taste of beer in the pub.

It's those things I remember. I never did those things otherwise...only on holiday - and everything seemed so magical back then.

I guess I would like to pass those memories onto mine.

GhIFA

StevieJ wrote: »

Unless you tell them it is the child catcher from 'Chitty Chitty Bang' looking for naughty children who are not asleep yet :eek: cruel I know.

Bl**dy hell, forget about the kids, that would be enough to give me nightmares!

Own_My_Own

Carl31 wrote: »

thats part of the decision of having children though imo

if you cant go a few years without a holiday, then are children for you?

Imo, taking kids out of school for holidays is as bad as benefit fraud, school is paid for by the taxpayer, you shouldnt be able to 'waste' it for holidays

A few years ?

My 2 have 4 years between them. That's 16 years of no holidays. No holidays for the kids as well as the parents.

I am lucky that we have a caravan and go away cheaply in the school holidays, but I do know of families that have found paying the £250 fine for taking their child out of school still makes it cheaper than going at the correct time.