Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for August 03, 2014

Modern life has increased the number of allergies or at least the people with them.

Spit in his transfat when he’s not looking. Include a spare loose tooth if you’re feeling generous.

I feel sorry for the kid with the helmet and leash; just because his parents are too lazy to teach him important things, like how to stay safe, is no reason to treat him like a retarded dog.

Wow! Stephan had his backwards blue cap even then!

Now parents are getting charged with felony neglect for letting their 7 year old walk a block to the park by themselves.

I can relate to most of these as a kid except flying on a plane by myself. I didn’t take my first plane trip until my early 20s.

This rings very TRUE. How sad! Is Cartoon-Boy going all philosophical on us?

It gets worse, just imagine how thes overprotected kids are going to raise their own kids etc, etc.

Darwin is okay, and I certainly believe in the power of Evolution, but not for me or my children.Learning, adapting and surviving is just too much of a risk.This may doom my offspring to failure and oblivion, but I should be gone by then, so, no biggie.

Pastis will probably teach him to smoke next.

the kid, definitely the kid. i weep for the whole generation

To day’s strip reminds me of the “Tubes” song “What Do You Want From Life”

The reason kids have so many allergies and get sick so often these days is because parents are so paranoid about germs! The introduction of anti-bacterial EVERYTHING has led to a society that fears LIFE. Let the child eat food that has hit the floor, get dirt in his mouth, eat a piece of dog food and get scratched up on the playground….it’s the germs that our body fights that make us healthy in the end

Watch/read ‘Stand By Me.’

If it was done today every adult in town would be in jail. 12 year olds sleeping out at night!!!!

When I was a child I would walk miles away from home, my parent didn’t care, maybe they wanted me to get lost?

This generation of hyper-pretected kids will probably rebel, and send their own kids down to play in the creek. .Or at least we can hope.

BTW, no-one here has blamed the real culprit here: TV news. I kid you not! Just as many bad things happened to kids in the 50’s and 60’s as now, but now, whenever something bad happens to a kid in Oregon, it’s all over the news in South Carolina for days. In those days, only local “bad thing happens to a kid” stories were aired..Then, TV and newspapers found out they could make money by beating people over the head with “bad thing happens to a kid” stories from anywhere, and it became wall-to-wall. .It used to be that, living in a city, you would see about 1 “bad thing happens to a kid” story a year. Now, we get 1 pretty much every “week”. (The math works out, since there are 50 states and we used to get news about only 1.).Seeing all this news, parents naturally have a strong tendency to be over-protective now, since the world is so much more dangerous now. Even though it isn’t.

@Juice-Bruce A baby’s arm holding an apple.As for this strip, where’s the bubble wrap? As a youngster, I ate dirt, drank water through a rubber hose, ate bologna or egg salad sandwiches that had been subjected to 90 degree heat, had butter on the morning toast and the butter was not refrigerated, yet I’m still alive. Oh, and fallen off the monkey bars at our schools playground. Parents are raising an entire generation of scaredy-cats.

Rode bicycle without a helmet, played sandlot baseball without a mob of screaming parents taking out their aggression and/or frustration, explored under-construction buildings, owned pocket-knives, stole the occasional cigarette from our parents, etc.

when you were a kid, you walked to school 6 miles. in the snow, 6 ft of snow. but, now….stranger danger, test scores, and childhood obesity….makes those days seem like the dark ages.

When I was a kid there was far more child death from stupid things.

Made fox-hole forts and tree houses, swung from trees on a rope, rode in a trough in an abandoned chicken coop, explored the city’s flood control system. I could go on…

YMMM!—trans fats!

I’m 62, grew up in the deep south. Played in muddy ditches, camped in snake infested woods, swam in “bar pits” (where dirt had been obtained for building the highway), rode bikes on US 1, chased after the mosquito fogging truck, and in general have no idea why we’re still alive. But we had fun.

I have to add this one, just to illustrate how some things have changed so incredibly much;When I was about 9 or 10, in Florida, my Dad worked for the phone company and drove a typical utility truck. I remember it was a mid-50s black ford. Well, it was stolen one night, and that was such big news that one of the news crews came out from Jacksonville to do the story. I can still see my Mom on the news that night, walking through the front yard with the reporter.What happens today if a car is stolen? Moral? We have become amazingly accepting of crime.Thus endeth the lesson.

For the record, there are many homeschooling parents and kids who are not religious in any way (us) and whose kid now has her Master’s from Hofstra. Please don’t paint us with such broad strokes.

Yeah – “walk it off” – that’s what my parents told me after my moped accident. 28 years later, I had cervical spinal cord surgery to correct the damage done in that accident. I was barely able to walk at all by that time.

Lots of people who were told to walk it off later found out they had significant ankle, knee and back injuries that would have healed better if they had been treated sooner.

Yes my brother and I went to the park and ate all the popcorn on the ground. Sat in the car winter and somer while the adults got a few groceries. Played outside until we had to get in or else.

We used to jump out of trees and off things over 10 feet off the ground and played outside until the Sun went down. Now my kids’ school won’t let them use bats or hockey sticks at recess.

Sure, Stephan — mock all you want. But would you rather have to deal with a nephew who had died on your watch because he was accidentally exposed to something he shouldn’t have been (some allergies are more than just minor inconveniences — they’re deadly!) or was severely injured later on in life due to something he was told to just “walk off” (see DOSQueen’s comments above)? Just because nothing bad ever happened to you, that doesn’t mean that it can never happen to anybody — it just means that you were lucky!

@ legaleagle48 needs to take an anti anxiety pill and chill out. Quit being such an ass-hat attorney. When I was a kid, I did the same exact things that the strip shows.. and now my son, age 8, is doing the same… I refuse to be part of the “keep your kid 18” from you at all times" crowd… you supervise, you know where he/she is, but you don’t smother your kid … how on earth will he ever learn to take care of himself and actually have fun? yeesh.. some people.

It wasn’t all that long ago…

When I was 10 years old I would hop on my bike at sun up and would be gone all day. I would most often not return until sun down. At the age of 10 I would often end up as much as 10 miles from home while riding my bike. At the age of 15 I even started camping out on warm summer nights all by my self (unless you count the loaded 12 gauge pump shotgun I slept with). I feel really sad for kids now days that do not have the freedom to even step out the front door without an adult in tow. With all the craps kids have to put up with today I often wonder what kind of adult they will turn out to be and how will they treat the next generation of kids. The next generation of kids will be treated like harden criminals and prisoners from the day they are born until the day they die. I can see the beginning of that happening now.

This story is so cute.

Mini Stephan Pastis.

xxx

I’d go with the tuff love, Steph. Rat will gladly back that up. A little too gladly, perhaps, but Ma Nature can be a b*tch, so you’ve got to be prepared….

And when I was a kid, everyone smoked everywhere — on buses, in stores, in movies. Losing other people’s cancer is a fair trade.

the playgrounds had metal slides missing rungs and cement grounds sometimes covered in broken glass. we were out all day running wild. FREEDOM

How did we get here?

Occasionally people did get injured doing some of the things in the strip.

Tort attorneys convinced people to sue. Insurance industry attorneys also chose to sue rather than pay for the medical costs.

Insurance companies lobbied for regulations that pursue the mirage of the complete elimination of risk.

Media supported the mirage of complete elimination of risk while hyping the occasional injuries, but never provided the context based upon the low probability of the injury.

The old way is the better way.

It is amazing how any of us survived growing up when we did – rode my bike for years and never had a helmet, played in dirt and rode in the back of a truck without a seat belt.

I walked to and from school by myself at 7.

Don’t forget to be home by the time the street lights come on!

The only thing I regret is getting several sun burns as a kid. Now, over 50 years later, I have to look at every spot that pops up my skin with suspicion. .There is now concern about rising skin cancer rates.

This is the opposite for teenagers these days…

I recently watched a house hunting show and the mother didn’t want a pool because she was worried her kids would drown. She said, “This house is nearly perfect, but it has a pool…” This comic is not an exaggeration.

the mess that Pastis has become!

Definitely feel sorry for the kid. One can’t live one’s life in a bubble. Taking stupid risks is, well, stupid, but living normal activities without bubble wrap is what makes life worth living.

Tim Hawkins, a Christian Comedian, says his parents not only let him and his siblings play in the pesticide dust that the truck sprayed, but told them it was coming and sent them out to it.

I fit a few of these, one up to a point. Back then there was a lot more you could get away with than today. One of the things I love today is the folks who scream about kids not getting enough exercise and then turn around and scream that kids will hurt themselves if they do exercise.

You should see Terry’s parents in “the 26 storey treehouse” if you think THIS is bad.

“letting their 7 year old..” Renting, selling, trading.. it’s all wrong.