Johnny-on-the-Spot … by John Foster …

I read an interesting article in Psychology Today that said children of the 60’s and 70’s developed patience and frustration tolerance due to fewer choices and less immediate gratification, leading to greater emotional endurance.

It got me to thinking.

Growing up in northern Ohio, Mom and Dad did not arrange “play dates” for us.

We all just sorta “hung out”.

But if you were “nerdy” John Foster, you didn’t hangout with your “buds” until the chores were done.

I was probably one of the first in my neighborhood to have “wash maids knee”.

Doctors call is “patellar bursitis” and it’s common among house maids, the clergy and gardeners or anyone who spends a lot of time on their knees.

Friday morning my chore was to scrub the kitchen floor on my hands and knees.

It involved a bucket full of hot water with a generous portion of Spic ‘n Span mixed in along with a scrub brush and a big sponge.

My pals would be waiting in the garage while I slopped water on the linoleum, scrubbed it with the brush and sopped up the dirty water with that sponge

I can still see that distinctive pattern of the flooring when I close my eyes.

On Friday mornings, I played ball with “dishpan hands”.

And, it was “sandlot ball”.

It was a lot that had been cleared for a house but the plans fell through.

We grabbed our rakes, sickles and scythes to clear a playing field and tossed the bigger rocks and stones away.

No uniforms.

No dugouts.

Not even bases.

Usually pieces of scrap lumber we “:borrowed” from a nearby house construction site.

No backstops either so bad pitches and foul balls went where they wanted to go.

Cleats?

Hardly.

Probably the same shoes we wore when mowing the lawn.

No umpires or coaches or parents.

No scoreboards, no lights, no benches.

On close plays, we’d haggle amongst ourselves until be reached a decision on “safe: or “out”.

We rarely had enough kids to field two, complete teams so “centerfield” was relegated to the swiftest afoot with a strong throwing arm.

There were no postgame snacks unless your allowance could cover for a Mountain Dew or Pepsi at Johnny’s Food Basket.

If you got thirsty, you ran to the Gardner’s backyard spigot and ran it long enough to get cooler and lose most of the hot plastic hose taste.

We played till we got tired or we lost our lighting (sundown).

Sometimes we’d decide to play “Army” and our bats became our rifles.

We even had “dirt clod fights”.

Parents today would never allow that.

Playing and playground equipment is designed to eliminate any possible injury but it takes away the opportunity for any personal risk assessment.

You could fry the backs of your legs on the old sliding boards and if you lost your grip on the “merry-go-round”, you could wind up in a dusty heap in the next county.

There was a “seasonal risk” for the “monkey bars”.

If you fell off in the spring, it was dirty brown water and mud awaiting you but a summer slip landed you on deeply-rutted sun-dried clay, Mother Nature’s version of concrete.

We were given the opportunity to practice risk assessment on our own.

Still, we played with those metal-tipped “yard darts” that our parents bought for us.

They also put us in cars with no child seats or safety belts.

Therein lies a few of today’s problems.

When everything is comfortable, nothing prepares you for discomfort.

When every problem is solved for you, you never develop your own problem-solving skills.

Kids need controlled doses of discomfort, independence and problem-solving opportunities.

We thought we were just playing sandlot baseball when, in reality, it was instructional play combined with self-directed problem solving. as we developed emotional resilience.

And we used to wait.

Not minutes or hours but days, weeks or even months.

We developed patience and frustration tolerance due to fewer choices and less immediate gratification.

We learned greater emotional endurance.

Hey!

I love going on-line, buying something and have it show up on my doorstep sometimes later the same day.

But I also enjoy those days when I have nowhere to go and all day to get there.

P.S.

There’s a sad spot in my heart with the passing of Neal Sedaka. Long overdue for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he’ll probably get in in a year or two. I think he should have been there LONG before he passed. Neal, I’ll never forget because breaking up is hard to do.