It's all the fault of that guy, what was his name? Was it Dr Spock?
That guy completely ruined the recreation time of adults all over the world about forty years ago and for the foreseeable future by convincing people that children and their opinions should actually be seriously listened to.
That was essentially the end of the world as I used to know it.
I grew up in a world that you spoke if you were spoken to and if you violated that basic tenet too often and too aggressively with your parents and their generation it would be treated as if you hadn't said a thing or at least that noone actually heard you (and this gets into that lovely ability articulated by Oscar Wilde's adage, "The exact and precise time to know when to say NOTHING!" By that, of course, I mean your parents and their generation to children).
If your parents were rich they got a nanny for the children so they didn't have to pay attention to them and they could go out and play golf all day or whatever or even leave the children alone with the nanny for days or weeks at a time and just go have nothing but fun, fun, fun----eg golf, parties, you name it.
And if your parents weren't rich and couldn't afford a nanny to keep their children out of their hair and their recreations, they applied the philosophy of that glorious English eccentric around the time of the Second World War who said and most seriously----"Just let the little nippers run wild."
The latter actually was the best method of all to develop in children a good imagination, self-reliance, the everlastingly important ability to be patient or at least not to be totally into instant self-gratification!
That kind of thing BEFORE Spock foisted this plague on human-kind created a world of what Brokaw called "The Greatest Generation" and he was probably right.
And then along comes this guy Dr. Spock who released on the world a philosophy and culture worse than the Holacaust---eg he made the world feel that the opinions of children actually matter.
MY GOD, SPOCK, did you not realize that if you let the little nippers run wild on their own they are a whole lot more resilient than most give them credit for and they will grow up to be far more resilient adults than the crop of yammering, little instant-gratification, no-neck monsters the world has spawned in the last half century known as the "Me Generation"?
(If someone actually tells me to shut up or else add a smiley face to this post I'm going to throw up all over this thread).
Bob Huntley, don't you dare try to look me in the eye and tell me I'm not right about this!