This could be a piece about how children today don’t just play. Everything has to be organized. Warning, the next phase begins In my Day,  but it stops short of being preachy. In my day, kids gathered on street corners and met up and determined their own rules.

However, I lived out in the country. We had a next door neighbor, but they were older. Other than that, our friends lived miles away.  Instead there was me and my two brothers three years apart followed by a brother ten years younger and a sister 15 years younger. We had to make our own fun.

So I don’t know about kids lives being so scheduled.  As long as they are happy, it is fine. Yet I am going to look back on my childhood and be thankful for the creativity required. We made go carts and forts (wood and hay) and hung out in each. We wandered down in the woods and played on the abandoned equipment sinking into the ground.

Without enough players, we modified volleyball.  We used cheap balls you bought at K-mart and the only rule was that as long as the ball was moving, it was playable. You team could hit it a hundred times. A single player could hit it a hundred times. A ball rolling on the ground could be swept up and kept in play. The great part about that is that younger players didn’t ruin the game and you didn’t have to hit the ball before they tried to hit it and made it go straight to the ground.

So I am not preaching. However, I don’t think this game would even make a free video game to play on a smartphone.

Photo by Viktor Lundberg on Pexels.com