This is why I stopped playing Neopets (hahaha I’m old) years ago. I hated that they introduced clothing and paying for things. It used to be an amazing game and place to be creative then it became just about money and corporate. So sad.
But I agree. Kids need to be kids again. I grew up mid 80-90’s and my fondest memories are of playing outside, swimming, fishing riding bikes, going to friends houses to play. I will always remember playing “babysitters club” with my best friend and her older sister (who was always the Mom) and we still to this day all still laugh about this. Or the time we decided it was amazing fun to take our sleeping bags and ride down the stairs in them and we ended up putting a hole in the basement wall.
Kids need to be able to do things and learn by doing and not by being placed into bubble wrap and protected from everything. I look at some of my friends who constantly clean and disinfect their kids and don’t let them play at the park because it’s dirty and I think “how the heck did I live this long?” I literally grew up playing in mud, dirty, lakes, rivers/streams, fishing catching frogs... I don’t get it but I guess that officially makes me old.
I didn't have that experience because my parents were super overprotective, so maybe I can offer some insight? ^_^
I wasn't allowed to friends' houses unless my parents vetted them first, so I frequently had friends at
my house. I was never a particularly social kid though, so my closest friend was my little sibling. We're still super close despite a 3-year age difference. At that age we had all the same interests: care bears, horses (not mlp though), plushies, pokemon, etc. We were only allowed to play unsupervised inside the house or out in the back yard, but our parents also took us on frequent walks with our dogs. We played a
lot of pretend. In good weather we would be out back doing live-roleplay, pretending to be pokemon or wolves or horses. In bad weather (england, so frequent) we would be in one of the big bedrooms playing out scenes with our toys. There was advanced political drama, war, and more tame things like school or house. We had a bunch of secondhand 80s carebears VHSes and we particularly liked to play the kinds of story you see there (and in g1mlp). We would have villains who were trying to destroy peoples or places and we had to fight them with Good Magic. We often got in trouble for being dirty, even just from playing out back.
I agree that my childhood wasn't the healthiest; I've grown into a pretty messed-up adult. But this parenting style has spread so that it now covers nearly every kid, and that needs to stop before the adult population is made up of dozens of me's, or worse.
