I think kids are pretty intelligent and will make apropriate desicions most of the time ( well everyone makes mistakes sometimes...) so long as they have enough information.

In Britain, especially, you have a pop culture which uses sex to sell anything and everything, mostly with no objections from parents. At the same time you have large groups of parents insisting that their children willnot learn about sex or repoduction as this will aid the loss of their innocense. Then they wonder why Britain has one of the highest under age pregnancy rates in the world!

If I was a kid, I'd be confused!

Other than that I don't think things have really changed from when I was a kid to now. Kids are now interested in stuff that wasn't even invented when I was a kid ( i.e. home computers etc. ) this of course means that they're going to spend less time outdoors, even if their parents periodically throw them outside.

For kids that live in cities like London, traffic is a problem. When I was a kid, we mostly played at the bottom of our street ( especially during term time ) every day. At the weekend you'd go up the park ( I lived round the corner from Hampstead Heath, a rather large park ) play round the ponds, on the swings in the woods etc.

But now there is nowhere to play in the street. There are cars parked solidly up and down both sides of the street ( it's not a very wide street, three small cars across ) and the frequency of cars driving down the street would make it impossible to play anything. The street I live in now has room enough, but the speed at which people drive down the road would make it suicidal for anyone to attempt running around daft . This means that the only places left to play are generally a reasonable distance away. It becomes inconvinient to go play, except for at weekends. Which kids still do, but it becomes much more of a supervised outing than the romp it was when I was young. Sigh! I think I was able to be much more independant when I was young than a lot kids are these days, I think that's sad.

TTFN M'Lady P.