I wish I could say that the profanity and pot use among children today was "different" from my childhood, but unfortunately I saw it then too. My mother could be oblivious. There was one instance where my then 14-year-old brother and a friend of his trapped a garden snake and blew pot smoke at it until it got a contact high, then let it go and watched it try to slither away in several different directions at once. My mother didn't believe it happened. "Oh, they're only little boys. Where would they get pot?" Yeah, that's the dream world she lives in, where teenagers are still "little children," and therefore when they talk about doing something, it's all talk. I have tried in vain to tell her that yes, there are people in the world who will furnish 14-year-olds with pot, and it happened then too, but in her eyes I'm still a little kid myself (I'm 48) so what do I know? I guess it's easier for her to tell herself I'm a naive, gullible child for believing their "big talk" than to admit it's true and those things happen.

I do feel it's awfully jarring to hear hard core profanity out of a voice that hasn't even changed yet, but I can't say that's different, because I was hearing it in the 1970's too. And saying it. That's what I lived. I'm far less likely to swear now, as a middle-aged woman, than I was as a ten-year-old child among other ten-year-old children (but no adults.) Is it that the children will now swear openly in the presence of adults, that's different? Yeah, "free speech." Even adults nowadays seem to think cussing with every breath is what free speech is all about, as opposed to what it actually is, which is the right to disapprove of the job the President is doing, or tell the cops you don't think they handled that situation well, without fear of going to jail.

I wonder if that adult supervision I touched on is looked at differently nowadays. Maybe the reason kids used to go out and play in the yard but now they're on electronic devices all the time is, nowadays if you let kids go play out the yard, somebody's going to yell that they're unsupervised, and that's neglect. Parents almost can't do anything nowadays without someone hollering that it's somehow abusive--and again with the resentment, because my parents could cuss me out, slap me, leave marks, and all that, and it was OK then. And yes, I did tell.