What are we doing?

The other day I was at the mall having lunch with Reema, and I was watching these little girls leaving the restaurant with their mom. They looked around 8 or so. Each of them had a toothpick in their hand, and they were pretending to smoke cigarettes. They held them in their hands, oh so elegantly, waving them around and gesturing as they talked to each other. They were even doing a bit of a walk to go with it, sashaying slightly, blowing imaginary smoke rings in the air. I pointed them out to Reema. I agreed with her that it was scary. But it also got me thinking. When we were kids, they sold candy cigarettes. We didn't have to use our imaginations and pretend that mere sticks were cigarettes..oh no! They manufactured little white sticks of sugar and put them in a box of 20, just like Mommy had. (they also made Charleston Chew, in case you preferred to tuck a wad in your lip) My brother and I "smoked" these. This, of course, was about 20 years before my grandpa died of lung cancer.

Anyway, this got me thinking about our kids. There's something in their toybox, I'm sure, that will have us all horrified in 20 years or so. But what is it? I don't mean the plastic from China, or the BPA in their bottles. We already know about that stuff. I mean just something that seems innocuous now, but then will make us all wonder what the hell we were thinking. I can hear myself now, telling Rowan and Saoirse, "Well, everybody did that back then." But about what?