I’ve been watching a lot of pickers, collectors and pawn store shows on the History Channel the past few years. As a dad, granddad, collector and self-professed “big kid,” I’ve taken away many things from those shows, but two main themes have stuck with me.

First, I sure had it good growing up compared to what I feel my kids and grandson miss out on and how lucky I was to be a baby-boomer. And second, I did not have the hardships of my parents and grandparents.

Now, don’t get me wrong, my parents and grandparents are part of the “greatest generation” and I fully respect and honor them. I just feel I was fortunate enough to be born and raised in a time, and in a country, when and where kids could be kids. While I respect the need to be part of the teen workforce and how good it feels to earn a wage as a teen, I think my parents, and most certainly my grandparents, had it much harder…raised during difficult times in our nation.

Conversely, today’s kids, including my own, not only missed out on the freedom to roam the neighborhood, play unsupervised until dark or later in the summer, and buy ice cream treats from a stranger in a van, but they missed out on simple toys and games that required something foreign to them called “imagination.” They also missed out on observing some of life’s simpler things like a remote-less television with only three to five channels.

In this editorial I don’t dare try to explain the exponential technological growth we’ve experienced in this “world-wide” world in which we live, and how the kids handle it like my generation handled Tiddlywinks or Dominos. Nor do I try to share the limitations and life of those raised before my generation was even born. But I will say this based on memory and all the “old-time” toys, items and collectibles I see on the aforementioned television shows: I am happy to have been raised in a nice middle-class neighborhood by nice middle-class parents with nice toys and games that required imagination and possibly, dare I say – kids, cover your ears or don’t read this next word – ASSEMBLY.

I think having all that in my life has made me more mechanical (I’m going to guess most teens have no idea how to take a door off its hinges, for example), more thoughtful about history and more inclined to honor and respect the past.

Again, please don’t get me wrong, I’m not passing judgement, nor saying today’s 20- and 30-something parents are doing a bad job raising the next generation.

However, I am saying having a different point of reference is a good thing. Being in my 60th year of life, a collector and big kid, I’ve instilled some of this perspective in my kids, ages 17, 21 and 28, and – assuming they were listening – I hope they appreciate that life wasn’t always based on an electronic devise you hold in your hand but something you build, collect and, if you’re lucky, know its history.

In closing, all this makes me wonder…will my kids and grandson see any of their devices on the History Channel some day?