You kids today do NOT know how nice you have it...

...compared to back in my day. Let me tell you!
Dear daughter comes to me to tell me of her boredom, and I just cannot care. She took out her DIDJ (electronic handheld learning game) and played it a while. She didn't even consider that she hadn't used it in months and the rechargeable batteries in it STILL WORKED. Thank you Sony Eneloops - wish I had you when I was young. And for that matter, thank you Leap Learning systems, with your addition and spelling drills in a fun, Fairy environment. All I had was this really dumb baseball handheld that blew up like Jiffy pop in the hot car window where I accidentally left it one afternoon, no thanks to the car manufacturers who didn't invent darkened glass in back seats until after I was old enough to know better. That game sucked anyway, but it also really sucked that my mom didn't warn me to put it down in the footwell, either. No my kind of growing up was the school of hard knocks and "too bads". Oh sure, we had our schoolhouse rock, thank goodness, or I never could have memorized the Preamble to the Constitution.
But beyond the fact of Disney East AND West channel, NICK east and west, and a whole fuckin' channel for cartoons, lies the lack of appreciation for having as many toys as she has, the quality of the toys she has, the quality of toys I have that I let her play with, and it makes me want to have a temper tantrum and kick my heels on the ground. Why couldn't I have had a scooter, a boogie board, an iPod? Oh yeah, they pretty much weren't invented yet. If our childhood was so much more fun than our parents, with their limited toys and space, and our children's childhood is so much more fun than ours, what will our grandchildren's childhood be like? Portable on-demand cheap tv shows anywhere and everywhere? Videogame style learning in school? Wireless messaging for play dates? And then what? I cannot even imagine. I know I should appreciate my old bike, the hours of Gilligan's Island, my neighbor's Atari, and all the books, records, and tapes. But will she appreciate what she had when faced with the new toys in the future?