Too Much for our kid's to deal with.

This year I will be fifty-seven years old. From the age of three months until I left home properly at twenty-one, I say properly because I left several times for far fetched riches and soon went back, for all of those formative years I along with my brother and school friends lived on one of the roughest and poorest council estates in Swansea. It was the 1970's and we loved it.

Early on it was a two bedroom, second floor flat on Byron Crescent and later a two bedroom house on Creidiol Road, both on the Mayhill farm estate. In hadn't been used as an actual farm for over onw hundred years but the cattle still roamed freely.(Ha,ha)

My point being, as young kids six or seven years old for example we could leave the house first thing in the morning and as long as we were home before it was dark it was our day to enjoy, unless there was school of ccourse. We had no mobile phones, we had three TV channels and one of them every other program was in Welsh, a language very few of us spoke here in Wales back then. There was no internet, no Tik or Tok except for our clocks, not evening a capital X unless it was a teachers mark on our homework.

We would play, averything, anything and anywhere risk or no risk. From football on the green where there was no playing left-right it was uphill or downhill with stingy nettles on one side and the road on the other. we would climb tree's, climb onto rocks and sheds. There was even a large rock escarpment just below where we lived that became our Star Ship Enterprise from Star Trek. The way it had formed millions of years ago meant we had an engine room, a lift and even a Captains chair. Dangerous? Who cared how dangerous it was, we were Mayhill Boy's!

We knew there were 'Bad Men' out there, we knew not to talk to strangers, to get in a strangers car and so on. We knew at very young ages how to live, how to play and how to go home safely. I'm not saying for a second that bad things never happened back then, of course they did, but, there was very little in the way of news broadcasts so we never saw it, heard it. The parents would certainly never talk about such things in front of us. We knew there were 'Gay' men, we knew there were people who worshipped the devil, we knew not really understanding but we knew what was wrong in the world around us. Let me just say being a gay person back in the early 1970's was very frowned upon and that's how we were encouraged to think.

If we now travel through time to todays culture is it worse or better?

Children, in my opinion, don't have a hope in hell of growing up without a phobia, a fear or even a very biased opinion on just about everything.

Even though companies such as CERN and NASA had the internet of sorts for many years it wasn't until 1993 that the public could use it to any real extent. It was all about the ability to reach out to the world and learn, research and hopfeully if your telephone line was powered with a good signal, you might even get to see pictures. It was such an exciting time for all of us.

Today children can access pornography, the Dark Web and all sorts of mind bending images and films. I can remember my step son at about the age of nine or ten watching men playing football in Bolivia witha human head as the ball. All he had typed in was South American head footballers as he was obsessed with Messi who for him was the 'Head' footballer, the best! I fully understand that the adult sites have age restrictions popping up but difficult is it for a child to click 'Yes' when asked if they are over eighteen? I know that companies such as Amazon are doing everything possible they can do to prove someone's age, especially with the growing knife problem we have these days. Amazon to give them their fair due's are working on new ways to prove who you are along with your accurate agegroup in order to authorise such sales, but hasn't this come too late. Not just companies like Amazon but everywhere?

It's not only ordering online but also content. There may be content which to an adult is totally unoffensive or neautral, which to a child could be very harmful. For example, a friend of mine has a son who at the age of ten(10) years old decided that he was gay. Now I am not saying thats impossible but he could tell you everything about being gay, transgender, non-binary, literally everything. If he was older, mid to late teens you could accept that okay he knows how he feels lets support and go with it. At ten years old we wanted to play football, climb tree's and play fighting games as much as possible. So my point is this, being gay or whichever living style you want is natural and nothing to be ashamed of but let our kid's grow up, let them find out who they are naturally without having their minds warped by things they see on TV, things they can download on the internet and so called 'Influencers' You -Toking about different things that THEY don't agree with.

Let our kids grow up, let our kids watch cartoons, childrens comedy and just bloody laugh!!!!

When they are old enough they can make sense of how they are feeling themselves, even better with a loving support group around them. Please, please stop this rubbish online for our kids to see. Stop making drama glamourising being different, there is nothing wrong with being different but in the world we live in today it,s very sad and I'm ashamed to say, it's dangerous.

Yes our children today need to know so much more about the workings of this time bomb we call life than we ever did. lets not make our kid's today obsessed with what we are allowing on our broadcast mediums, whichever one, it doesn't matter.

Who is going to help me ? "Let our kid's be kid's before there is too much for them to deal with!"