Schneiders glasses

Gummitwist

Child with smartphone. There were times when kids knew other ways to occupy themselves.(Bild: Elena – stock.adobe.com)

"Krone" columnist Robert Schneider remembers his own childhood in view of his sons' fixation with cell phones. There were no smartphones back then - but the children still knew how to keep themselves busy.

"How did you survive your childhood without a cell phone and computer games?" my youngest son asked me recently when I once again tried in vain to curb his media consumption. - "Yes, how did I manage to stay alive and not drop dead of boredom?" I replied, annoyed.

But the question kept bothering me more and more. What did we children of the sixties actually do all day long? I can hardly remember being bored. But in the summer vacations, when it rained for days on end, I was endlessly bored and got silly ideas. "Luckily it's stopped raining! Get out into the fresh air!" my mother rejoiced when the sun finally shone again.

"What did you do?" the little one insisted. I thought about it. "We played cops and robbers, blind man's buff and tens." I had to explain the children's games to him in detail. He furrowed his brow and looked at me sympathetically. "It was that bad?" he said after a while. - "I don't have any bad memories of my childhood," I replied. "Was there a game that you really enjoyed?" - "There was. It was called Gummitwist. I played it with the neighbor girls. You put a rubber band around the ankles of two children. Their feet are about hip-width apart. The third child then makes certain jumps, always having to land on both bands of the elastic. The rubber moves upwards from round to round and the jumping becomes increasingly difficult. If the child makes a mistake, it's the next one's turn."

I was full of exuberance and didn't even notice that my son was watching TikTok on his phone.