Sometimes 'I'm bored' can lead to the STUPIDEST games. My aunt was driving home a few years back and ended up hitting this 16ish kid in the middle of the road. The whole works showed up(Cops, Ambulance, etc) she was in tears as she hadn't seen him until he was, like, 15 ft-ish off her bumper. She tried to stop but there was no way to stop completely.
End result was he had (I think) a broken leg and various scrapes and bruises. While she was trying to figure out what happened, (knowing her, probably half hystarical) how he got there without her seeing when one of the cops told her they had had repeated reports of a group of teens playing chicken with the cars that came down that street, specifically at that corner. They just hadn't been able to catch any of them.
Sometimes you just have to wonder; what the H*** are they THINKING?! And where do their parents THINK they are????
When does one's own common sense kick in??? Past a point it's not a matter of parenting (to mean, if you didn't get it into their heads when they were little, it's a bit late now). It's a matter of intelligance, resistance to peer pressure, and respect for yourself as well as others. And unfortunantly for kids now, our culture is promoting a level of selfishness and an inflated senses of self worth that are appauling. Yes, it's good for kids to be self confident and to know themselves. It's something else to set the bar so low that no one can fail at anything and really learn for fear of harming their self image. In a sense, we've made ANY failure shameful and create the atmosphere that even the smallest mistake is larger than life. Failure is only truly failure if you don't learn from it!
**Stepping off of my rambly soap box now.
