Lunchbox police up their game
The lunchbox police, where schools take it upon themselves to educate parents on what they deem appropriately healthy food to bring to school, is a hot button topic at the moment, but the problem of what to put in kids lunches these days is nicely skewered in this comment, following an opinion piece, from Glenda, who says: "What's wrong with Marmite sandwiches, a water and an apple?" Brigid replies: "Sandwiches contain CARBS! Marmite is heavily processed, yeast extract and contains SUGAR! It's a DEATHWICH! And apples are too acidic for their teeth. Really, I don't know how we survived the 70s!"
Merry-go-round risky but fun
"Back in the 1960s my husband built our three children aged 5, 7 and 9 a playground in the backyard, the star attraction being a merry-go-round built of pipe with four attached seats," writes Yvonne Flynn of Orewa. "One child would stand in the middle to push the others furiously around — the faster the better. Naturally there was no shortage of other neighbourhood children joining in but they were warned that they did so at their own risk.
"To start with I would hang out the upstairs window yelling at them to be careful, but I concluded that I was actually putting fear into them and so, from then on, I just tried to relax and let them get on with their fun realising that they were actually taking responsibility for their own actions. Of course in those days we were stay-at-home mothers, TV had only just arrived on the scene and we tried to be firm reliable parents who were there if needed. It is a different story today where there are so many more parameters and regulations and dare I say it 'molly-coddling'."
