On growing up in a different world

Just when you think the Good People have stretched absurdity to its absolute limits, the Gray Lady publishes an op-ed supporting the idea that kids need 'recess coaches' to structure what is just about the last unstructured moment in their lives. "Children today are growing up in a world vastly different from the one their parents knew," explains David Elkin, professor emeritus of child development at Tufts.

I was in elementary school for the most part during World War II, in a world vastly different from the one my Irish immigrant parents had known (no electricity, no car, no radio, no telephone, though to tell the truth the automobile and the telephone were sometime things in our family as well). And in turn that world of 1938-1946 was vastly different (no television, no sports teams, no money) from what my daughter would experience. As for my granddaughters, they're growing up on a sailboat in the South Atlantic. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford