Maybe if GM forced the used car market to give them kickbacks, they wouldn't be in bankruptcy. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up being part of their restructuring plan.

I have 5 kids - 11,8,6 & 10 month old twins. I can say that there are pressures on me as a parent that my parents did not have to contend with. With Michael Jackson's balcony stunt, and Britney Spears tripping in public while carrying her kid, and the media circus that followed both, I think that parents are unwilling to let their kids take physical risks today that wouldn't have mattered 30 years ago. When I was a kid, my kness were regularly covered with scabs, I've had my share of slings, stitches, bruises and the ocassional black eye. Last week my 8 year old gets stomped on the face in football practice by someone's cleat, and ends up with a black eye. A subsequent trip to the doctor for school vaccinations found my wife and I with a doctor's disapproving look as she interrogated my son about the cause of the black eye. When I was a kid, if you fell and hurt yourself doing something physical, you got a "better be more careful next time" lecture aimed at the kid. Nowadays it seems that allowing your child into an arena that has the possibility of physical injury is as bad as causing the injury yourself.

Not to mention that you never know how local authorities are going to handle instances of perceived misbehavior. In my day, if you got busted by an authority figure, you got yelled at, and maybe a call to the parents. Today it seems that you can get in a lot more trouble for just climbing a tree.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/new s/news.html?">in_article_id=397240&in_page_id=1766 &in_page_id=1766&expand=true

My kids also have a plethora of consumer devices, game cube, ps2, game boys, mp3 players, etc. They also have bats, balls, gloves, bicycles, etc., as well as memberships to local museums, botanic garden, zoo, library cards, etc. They spend more time with the consumer devices then I did as a kid, but I'm spending more time with consumer devices then I did as a kid as well. Life is changing, times are changing. If you removed all of the consumer devices we have now, I doubt my kids would be spending any more time outside then they do now. Society has changed as a whole, it's not just one element that has caused it to be.