Word: childhoods
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...amused, often appalled, always highly ironic toward the weirdness in which he lived. He had to get away from it sometimes--to Baja, to Alaska, up in the Piper Saratoga--because his celebrity had never not been there. He couldn't tell you where the media images of his childhood ended and his own memories began, and learning to live with its effects hadn't been easy. People were always approaching him, always wanting something from him, but he stood in the fray and treated them graciously. "He assumed the best about people and never became cynical about their motives...
...special quality about young John Kennedy then may have been simply that he was so normal, so much like our own kids, allowed a childhood because of the insistence of his mother Jackie Kennedy and in spite of the formidable environs of the presidential mansion...
...this sounds familiar, it probably should. Throughout the cold war, complacent Americans watched with disdain as promising youngsters behind the Iron Curtain were plucked from home and hearth and sent to spend their childhood in athletic camps where they would be ruthlessly forged into international competitors, exemplars of the totalitarian ideal...
Critics cite such unpleasantness to account for the 73% of kids who quit their childhood sports by age 13, according to studies. "They drop out because it ceases to be fun, and the pressures put on them by coaches and parents don't make it worthwhile," says Fred Engh of West Palm Beach, Fla. He's a professional coach, father of seven and author of the book Why Johnny Hates Sports...
...kids' sports. But the trend has been abetted by other, less predictable changes in American life: the ascendancy of the automobile, the shrinking of open spaces, the ubiquity of the two-earner family and the pervasive fear of crime. Baby-boomer parents may look back wistfully at their own childhood, when playing sports was a matter of heading to the corner sandlot or the neighborhood park after school for a pick-up game. But the sandlot's been filled in by a four-bedroom Cape Cod with a two-story atrium. To pay for the Cape...