Menifee Mom: Teaching Children The Way Things Were

By Karen Thomas

"Hang up the phone."

It seems pretty obvious, but I'll bet it doesn't make sense to a lot of kids. A friend of mine was telling me how one of her kids finally asked her why she says that. She had to explain how we used to have phones that hung on the wall and when you ended the conversation, you had to "hang up" the receiver.

I never imagined that someday I would look back on my childhood and feel like they were the "Olden Days." I mean, really, I'm not very old, and yet things have changed so much! It is amazing how often I catch myself saying, "We didn't have that when I was a kid."

Take, for example, the Internet. It is such a staple of our lives now that it's hard to imagine life without it. When our kids have to do research for a report, they don't pull out an encyclopedia, they go online. Instead of teaching them the ins and outs of finding information in a book, we have to teach them to find reputable websites. We communicate via e-mail, do our shopping, pay bills, look up movie times, plan vacations, check the weather or the stock market, watch movies and television, catch up with friends across the globe, read the news, and even check our kids' grades online.

There are simple things too, like automatic door locks in your car. My child was amazed when I told her that we used to have to go around and lock and unlock each door one at a time.

"One person's door would get unlocked with a key and they'd get in and reach over and unlock someone else's door," I explained. "When we got out of the car, we were ALWAYS reminded to lock our own door."

When I was setting the time on a clock recently, I found myself telling my kids how there used to be a phone number you could call to find out the exact time so you could set your clocks accurately. Now, we all have cell phones or cable TV to set our clocks by.

And that leads to another one: phones. Pagers came out when I was in high school. (Tell your kids about those ... they will think it's the strangest thing. ) Before that, the big invention was a cordless phone. Remember having a REALLY long phone cord so you could walk all over the house while talking on the phone? When we got our first cordless phone with the long silver antenna you had to pull out, we thought life was pretty great.

What about microwaves? Remember a time when we had to reheat leftovers on the stove or in the oven? I told my daughter about that and she said, "That kind of ruins the point of leftovers, doesn't it?"

Or typewriters? Oh, how glad I am for word processing! I've lost count how many times I've used the delete key on just this one column.

The list goes on and on, and for those of you who have been around longer that I have, you can list even more. It kind of makes you wonder what's next, doesn't it? The next time you're in the car with your kids or sitting at the dinner table, bring up the topic. Talk about the things that hadn't been invented yet when you were a kid and ask them what they think is next. It's sure to be a great conversation.

Karen Thomas is a stay at home mom of four daughters, has been on the PTA board at her kids' school for four years, and is a volunteer at her church, in addition to her activities as a volunteer soccer referee, a piano teacher, and a runner. Her column will appear here every other week. Comments are welcome.