A pastrami on rye, a pickle and thou beside me . . .

Randi Kreiss

You know how people say, “Kids will be kids”? I’m here to say that kids won’t be kids, at least not like the kids we were and we knew growing up. The children moving from childhood through adolescence today will be different — in part because of what they read, what they watch on TV and what they see in the movies.

Every generation believes that the modern one is sliding fast down a slippery slope, but I believe I have the evidence. Since it’s summer, let’s just consider what passes for summer movies these days compared with kids’ and teenage movies of the past.

When I was a kid growing up in Cedarhurst, we would take the public bus to Far Rockaway, buy a deli sandwich and a pickle and pass the afternoon in the dark comfort of the Pix Theater. Sometimes we went to the Strand or the Columbia RKO. Most of them were gone by the ’70s. Imagine sending your 10-year-old on a bus with just another kid for company?

We were quite unworldly, and I’m not claiming that was necessarily a good thing. Well, maybe I am. The world felt safer. None of us was on the lookout for perverts on the bus or in the movie house; and yet, almost every woman my age has a story to tell of being approached or touched. We knew it was creepy, and we moved away from the creep in question. Most of us never even told our mothers. Nothing bad really happened. OK, so we were lucky, too.

People haven’t changed so much over the decades. There were always dangerous strangers out there. Rape and violent crime always existed, but most of us got through childhood quite safely, with the added blessing of a certain naiveté regarding evil in the world. Our parents sheltered us from TMI (too much information).

What has changed for the worst is the access we give our children to all kinds of inappropriate information and entertainment.