Beginning our series “Remembering Radio” on the HMHS Podcast Network is this April, 1953 episode of The Aldrich Family – The Bicycle.

Our parents and grandparents remember family radio time, where instead of sitting in front of a television set, families gathered around the big console radio in the sitting room listening to great adventure, comedy, mystery, and science fiction shows as their imaginations painted a world for them.

We present these old time radio shows in the hopes that your family will spend a few minutes together enjoying the wonderful world of Audio Theater; the theater of the mind. Afterward you can use the opportunity for great family discussions. Ask each member how they pictured the cast to look like; the family’s home; the dance; the bicycle. It is fun to compare the different way we see things with our mind’s eye! Then discuss the story. What good things happened? What things were not so good? What would have been a better way to behave? Use this as a spring-board into a larger discussion on responsibility and ethics, and let us know about your family’s discussions in the comments section below.

An underlying theme to this episode is responsibility. To further the discussion and early teaching of responsibility, we found a great book that can aide parents in training children to choose responsibility aptly titled: Choosing Responsibility.

For your teenagers there is a wonderful book written for teens by teens called Do Hard Things: A Teenage Rebellion Against Low Expectations which is written with the goal of “combating the idea of adolescence as a vacation from responsibility”.

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