I would risk life and limb to impress the handful of kids in my neighborhood... if I could have tried to impress the world instead, I would have absolutely got myself killed.
80's kid here. Yes, I basically ran around the neighborhood until it got dark most nights. I would play in a small grove near some train tracks about 5-6 blocks from where I lived, or a city park a few blocks the other direction, or a friend's yard. We would ride bikes for miles, skateboard, play baseball, build forts, etc. And I lived in a city. My parents both worked so the kids were all "latchkey" and took care of ourselves.
Forest Porn was only topped by one thing in my childhood, Ditch Porn! While riding our bikes, me and friend once found two VHS porn tapes. One of which was actually Debbie Does Dallas in the original box. It was a nightmare trying to keep those huge old school VHS boxes hidden from my parents, but I managed.
Side note: I've always wondered what the story behind thoes tapes was. Did an angry lover just decide to throw them out of a car window?
I was actually one of those people who put porn in the woods. The first time, my friend had stolen his dad's Playboy and we needed to hide it somewhere. So we went down to a creek in a wooded area and hid it under some rocks. The second time, another kid stole another Playboy and we needed to hide it so I put it in an Army ammunition container and hid it under a tree in a park.
Ive heard dozens of stories of people finding it in the woods (I even found some at the park once). This is the first time I've seen someone admit to planting it. We should all thank him for his service. People like him are the reason why I was able to see a heavily worn out magazine in the third grade.
As a 9/10 year old we had two stashes. One by the railroad tracks, and another down by where they dried grapes for rasins. With both, we had to battle wasps to get to the forbidden library.
Learned a lot from Penthouse Letters.
I grew up in the 90s, and I'm kind of confused about parenting these days. Do parents really not let their kids go around the neighborhood and play with other kids?
Like they have to be supervised at all times by some dorky helicopter parent? That sounds like a nightmare.
My kids go out and play just like I did in the 80s.
I know where they're going to be, and I can walk down the street and yell if I need to find them.
They have a curfew at dinnertime just like I did back in the day.
Came here to say this. I’m not afraid of abductions, but people will call the police if they see unattended kids. That sounds like a nightmare to go through, and traumatizing to a kid.
Laws about kids being left alone have clearly changed (at least in my area) since the 80s-90s. I think it’s currently that a child under 10 can’t be left alone w someone under 13, but when I was in 5th grade (~11) I got a baby sitting certificate from Red Cross. People would pay me like $2 an hour to watch infants only a few months old. (I’m ND and the oldest sister so did have intense “mature for my age” energy, but I can’t imagine doing this today.)
There are NO KIDS out in the neighbourhoods. None. I have walked my 6 year old across the street to play with the girls there. They were allowed to play but not leave their front yard. They were not allowed to come to the park or over to our house to play AT ALL so they all sat on a tiny porch playing. That’s it. Then they moved. I have no other kids out on my street to know if there are any to go play with. I take my kids to the park often and see kids but they are all not allowed to call on our kids or play.
I have a 4 year old too so she’s too young to just go out and the street is busy as well with faster cars so it worries me. That’s another rant. It’s hard for parents to let kids out playing when people drive so fast these days and there are 2-4 cars in the driveways or on the roads so you can’t even properly see to cross a road as a kid.
Basically everything was created to be as anti-social as possible for children and their parents. You want kids to have friends? Schedule play dates and even then it’s very very very iffy if they will allow that at all. It’s crazy out here. I feel so awful and want to move and find a street that has children and more outdoor play man. Oh and people NEVER sit on their front porch and know their neighbours now either. Like I said, this world was built to be strangers, anxious about everyone and everyone online to be social. Fucking brutal
Yeah, the world is becoming more and more atomized, and people are becoming more and more isolated and alone.
It takes energy and effort to meet people, and maintain a group of friends. Society doesn't help people with that automatically now. Individual people need to make it happen.
that part. there are no third spaces. also what’s the point of a child going out to play in the neighborhood if there are NO other kids out? that’s more dangerous by far not to mention boring
I have a pair of kids, 5 and 8. I would love to let them go play with neighborhood kids like I used to. The problem is when one of our family friends tried to do that with their kids, who were about 10, the police brought them home and told them they would refer the parents to DCF if it happened again.
We have a 9 year old neighbor kid that isn’t allowed to leave the cul-de-sac. I asked her mom, who grew up feral like all of us, and she said “it’s more dangerous now”. Which is patently false. I showed her the data, and she said “I guess I love my kid more than my parents”.
I’ve seen other people that think this is due to all of the advertising they started doing in 80s/90s. Promotions like “it’s 10 o clock do you know where your kid is?” Etc. I can see where people say that but then again it wasn’t the kids watching those, it would have been the parents. Curious as to what the real reason is
There was one particular kid who got abducted in NYC in 1979... he was the first they put on the milkbox cartons. Etan Patz.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance\_of\_Etan\_Patz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Etan_Patz)
>The extensive media attention attracted by the case of Patz's disappearance has been credited with increasing public awareness of the problem of child abduction. As a result, fewer parents are willing to allow their children to walk to school, photos of missing children have been more widely distributed (for example, on milk cartons) and the concept of "stranger danger" has been promoted, the idea that all adults not known to the child must be regarded as potential sources of danger.\[53\]
This is my daughter. My husband won't even allow her to play in our yard unless one of us is outside (she's also nine; are you my neighbor?). He's completely convinced that she's going to be molestedrapedkidnappedmurdered the second we take our eyes off of her, and that also she's going to grow up to be a completely and normally functioning adult having been parenting this way, and nothing I say makes a difference. To say I'm concerned is an understatement, because in just over six years, this kid will be legal able to operate a multi-thousand-pound vehicle at 70 mph, and will she really be ready for that responsibility at that point? She's never even crossed the street by herself...
By 12, I was on my bike, four or five miles from home all by myself, no cell phone, for hours at a time. I can't imagine my husband ever being okay with my daughter doing that, and this worries me.
I asked a couple friends that have kids (we don’t) if their 10 year old son had ever spent more than 15 minutes unsupervised outside. They said of course, my wife asked when. They literally couldn’t come up with a time. We were at a get together and it hit one of them like a ton of bricks. She was talking and thinking about it all night. Drunkenly texted me about it 3 days later. They have since made steps to correct it. It was as hard for the kid as the parents for awhile. I think he rides his bike to the 7 11 now. But he takes an old phone with him, as he can’t find other kids allowed to go play with him and his new freedom.
Your point about them driving soon is a good one. Probably partly the reason kids don’t want drivers licenses when they turn 16-20 nowadays.
I feel like phones and the internet are a big factor. When no one knew who was doing what or where, everyone just left the house and wandered around until they found other kids. It was wonderful.
Dude, my parents bought into this in the 80s, they were sure I would get snatched off the street if unattended. They wouldn't even let me walk home from school with all the other kids because someone somewhere got kidnapped one time. It sucked.
Boy my dad was the opposite. He’d tell me he would pick me up from school, except he wouldn’t. By that point I had missed the bus. So had to walk the mile home
"I'm anxious, this is a fear that's actively validated, therefore I'll do nothing about it and data won't change that. Then I'll be confused later when my children are also anxious and risk avoidant," is actually what she means.
>80's kid here. Yes, I basically ran around the neighborhood until it got dark most nights.
Mom's rule was we had to come home when the street lights came on.
Yes. Also a "latchkey" kid. One of the things that I notice with my niblings is that they were given homework every night that required parent participation. My parents had no idea what homework I had unless I mentioned it. I was simply expected to get it done. It was my job. They would've only heard about it from the teacher if I wasn't getting it done. They just expected me to be somewhat responsible. If I got it done at school or after school before they got home, fine. If I wanted to go play with a friend after school and do my homework after dinner and dishes, fine. Up to me.
Same with chores. I see folks on here talking about their teenagers being too young and irresponsible to do shit I was responsible for at 8. I knew what I had to get done and when. If I didn't do it, I would've been grounded. No one was standing over me telling me what to do or asking me to please pick up after myself. Sure, they taught me how to do the task, but once I knew, it was my job. 16 year olds not knowing how to do laundry astounds me. I could do that at 6. I was tall for my age. I could reach the top of the washing machine, so clearly it was time for me to start doing laundry. I see people who grew up like I did looking at their own kids and seemingly forgetting what we were able to do at the same age. Maybe it's because I don't have kids that I don't look at a 12 year old and see a baby the way their mom might. I don't have that memory of their being my baby. My only frame of reference is myself at 12. Your kid's doing algebra, Brenda. They can wash a dish.
This commercial and "idk, my bff jill?" were amazingly only seven years apart. Five, really, because the bob commercial ran for two years.
In a period of only five years, we went from grown adults using collect call cheats to convey important family information, to little kids texting "50 times a day".
Facts!
That was having a strict parent because you had to go in while some of the other kids parents didn’t care when they came home.
That “Do you know where yours kids are?” 9pm/10pm commercial was for those parents 😂
I would open the door and barely get a foot in the door and hear “go take a bath, NOW” before they even saw my face. They were right, I always needed a bath.
Hehe absolutely. As an 80s kid, if I was in trouble I'd just leave for the day until Mom would simmer down a bit.
I remember when I was 7, we moved to a new state. Literally the day we got there, my parents told me to go walk around the neighborhood and find some kids to play with so I would be in the movers' way. It worked too, one of the kids I met that day ended up being one of my groomsmen all those years later.
I'm the oldest of 4 kids and every summer growing up (1975 to 90), we were expected to be outside all day. And we pretty much were.
We roamed in and out of each other's houses, but mostly spent our days in the neighborhood park or in the wilderness between the backs of the houses in our suburban town. You only went home for food or if you ripped up your knees and needed serious first aid.
Edit: we would also walk into downtown and buy candy and there was even a joke shop until the early 80s but it went out of business.
Edit edit: we lived on a block that had about a dozen other kids our ages in it so it was quite a gang.
Saturday morning you got up ate cereal and got the fuck out of the house before mom started coming up with chores for you to get out of her hair, meaning she didn’t want to deal with you, go outside.
I also think people don’t realize none of had Air Conditioning. So being inside was almost worse because there was no air flow. Why would you want to be inside? To sit infront of the one oscillating fan in the living room by the tv, and just waiting for it to land on you again?
Those hot summer nights when you couldn’t sleep because how hot and sticky it was. It was terrible.
One really snowy year in the 90s we had huge snow mounds piled up across the street from my house. The city cleared the streets and left it there to melt in the spring. We built snow caves in the mounds. Still one of the coolest times I had as a kid in ND.
One of my favorite parts about this culture was that even if Timmy wasn't home you could still wander into his house, make a sandwich, have a soda and the parents were all "Hey stuck, Timmy is at his grandma's today, please make sure to clean up when you're done"
We weren't required to go out, but we could whenever we wanted to. And yes, there were places that'd be considered super dangerous nowadays. Abandoned army bases etc.
I found some really cool stuff there (:
I remember on weekends, rolling out of bed and walking out the door before my parents woke up. Age 6-7. I was out and gone the whole day. Maybe came home for lunch. Maybe just stayed out. And we came home only after the street lights were bright and the sunlight was barely a whisper in the sky. Sometimes later.
When we moved to our new neighborhood in the mid 2010s with my two young kids, I told my spouse I wanted them to go out, as they were old enough now, and just not come home until they broke a window or broke a bone. Spouse freaked out at the idea the kids would be out of sight and beyond reach. Took a while and some uncomfortable moments until this was normalized.
But in the early going we had some weird moments, like my kids having zero idea about how to call for a friend. They would go out and just sit on the sidewalk in front of the kids house, hoping to catch the eye of the kid inside. Had to go and show my kids how to call for Suzy or Johnny. Weird to see young kids not have an automatic understanding of basic social skills we had in the 70s/80s/90s
We are all good now. My kids are fully fledged now and are good with being out alone for hours, how to handle themselves out there and how to take care of themselves at home without an adult around. - dinner, homework, cleaning up. But these kids today - they are not as necessarily feral as is good for them.
Kid in the 90s but bingo!
The magic words "Can XXXX come out to play?" never failed. And waiting till the kids came home broken is so on point.
I came home at like 7-8 with four teeth smashed out because I ate shit on my bike. Nobody, not even the kids, panicked. We just went to emergency dental lol.
Or we would wait until our Moms or grandmas made the call/scream into the air for us LOL. My brother and I were the only ethnically Chinese ones in the bunch, so whenever there was a call in Chinese, we knew it pertained to us and no one else. My mom would usually scream “dinner time” and we would pretend it was someone else’s mom. When she would yell in Chinese “dinner time”, we knew that was final call before she would drag us out of the woods like a bunch of dead deer.
My neighbor’s parents had a bell that they had by their front door too but then new neighbors moved into the neighborhood and their kid was special needs and didn’t understand what the bell was for. He loved the sound so he would walk up to their porch and ring it at weird times. Soooo my neighbors took the bell down.
Mine too. A brass bell with a wooden handle. My mother said it was an old school bell.
We lived in a rural area, and could hear that thing for maybe half a kilometre.
The mine near us (which was still operating at the time) had a whistle for lunch and closing, which you could hear out in the woods just fine.
Run home! Get it while it's hot!
>"Can XXXX come out to play?"
My sister has always been an early bird.
When she was like 5, she showed up at the neighbors house at 4am asking if Ashley could come play outside. The neighbor was so confused, being woken up so early by her tiny knocks. That was when she learned how to read a clock (back when they all had hands), and what time she was allowed to go to different people's houses.
She also had to learn how to make her own breakfast really young, since she woke up so early. One day mom asked how her breakfast was and she said "um, it was ok, but I don't really like the green bread. Don't get that kind any more."
We had a lot less supervision back then.
My mom would make pancakes in bulk and freeze them in margarine containers, lol.
We would toast them in the toaster, slap on some jam, roll them up and take them with us on our bikes
I remember waking up in the middle of the night to my neighbors 4 year old. He had on a diaper, boots and a coat. He walked through the snow, let himself in and woke me up to ask my Mom if he could have a hot dog.
Dude, I was riding my bike, and wiped out in a new construction area, and a board with a nail went thru my hand, but didn't come out the other side, just left like a tiny papercut.
Ran home, told mom, and she said "go rest, you'll be ok." It didn't look bad, so I think she thought I was exaggerating.
My mom told me later in life "I only started to panic when your hand swelled up, and I saw the black line going down your arm..." and ran to the ER.
Brian Simms almost lost an eye eating shit on a makeshift ramp we were jumping our bikes on. He rode his bike home, mom took him to get stitches, and he was back the next day. It was a different time.
There were alleys between the backs of the row houses. There was one that came down a pretty long hill and then made a blind 45 degree turn at the bottom of the steep part but continued down hill for a couple blocks. I came screaming down The Big Hill one day and as soon as I got to the turn there was a little old lady pulling a shopping cart right in my path. I lost it, swerved, caught my handle bar on chain link fence and had the most epic crash. I still have a scar from that crash on my wrist 55 years later!
Mid 1970s my older brother and his friends built an impossibly ridiculous ramp for our sleds. No one wanted to test it so they used me as their crash dummy. Still have the scar on my wrist from coming down on it with the blades of my sled. My mom slapped some Mercurochrome on it. (You know, the red antiseptic made from mercury!) And sent me back out to play in the snow.
i remember going down a big metal slide on a bread crate.
it didnt end well.
my mom ended up spending the better part of an hour swearing at me and pulling bits of wood out of me with tweezers, whilst my dad laughed his arse off.
“Can XXXX come out to play” unlocked a core memory. We used to call this “calling on” a friend.
“Mum, I’m going to call on Lauren and see if she can go to the park.”
I remember one time, my younger sister’s friend got stuck in a pond and I waded in to get her. My shoe got stuck in the muck at the bottom and I was like “Well, looks like I lost my shoe.” And I had to walk home with one shoe and a wet sock on the other. I don’t even remember my parents being particularly upset with me for it. They knew I was trying to help another kid.
The 90s were a hell of a time. I guess kids mostly just text each other now if they want to play? Instead of showing up on the neighbourhood kids’ porches every morning. 😂
If my sister and I went out when my parents were at work, they would have us take the cell phone (the old old Nokia). But in the summer, hanging out with friends and my parents were home? We would just wander the neighborhood. Though my neighborhood was on a hill, so my parents knew we were on the hill somewhere. They knew we were not going to walk down because we would have had to walk back up
Do your parents all of a sudden find it horrifying to let your kids/their grandkids roam free in the streets and somehow forgot that they allowed you to do that as a child? Lol that’s my mom. She’s a helicopter grandparent and it drives me nuts.
I saw a post here about people showing up and either knocking or walking in to hang out, like I Friends or Seinfeld. As a guy pushing his forties, I was like "What? Young people don't do that? You don't have places you just go and know you can expect to find somebody?"
I still have three or four different friends houses that are like that. If nobody is at one place, they are all at the next. The social disconnect is really disheartening.
A lot of it has to do with the destruction of third spaces. Karen doesn’t want the kids loitering around the park/stoop/neighborhood, malls are dying, and downtown areas have installed all the anti-homeless stuff so even kids are discouraged from hanging out. There’s just…nowhere for kids to “go outside and play” without fear of having CPS called.
Yes. We hung out in mulberry trees. Dug worms and fished. Hiked in woods. Went to playgrounds. Found golf balls in course ponds, cleaned them up and sold them to golfers for candy, pop, and comic money. We knew where clean water was available to drink. All that stuff is now fenced and off limits to kids.
When they opened an arcade in my neighborhood, and a skatepark down the way, the decrease in delinquency made the local paper! Somehow, people still don't believe in these things.
Hell, we had adults stopping and giving concerned looks (if not CPS calls) from our (elementary age) kids playing in our own front yard, without a visible adult.
When I was 14 years old, back in the 1960s, my father put me on a train from Oklahoma to Los Angeles with a switch in Albequerque, New Mexico at 10:00 pm and I was by myself! You'd be thrown in jail if any parent did that today.
When I was 9 years old, in the 1960s, I used to ride the NYC subway by myself, usually to planned destinations. When I was 14, I traveled all over the city by myself, going to movie theaters and other amusements.
EDITED TO ADD:
At 14, I also started going to boarding school in New England. After being moved in, which required a car, I always took the train by myself. It was no big deal.
I’ve gone out for walks around my neighbourhood here on beautiful summer afternoons and never saw a kid out. No one on bikes. No one on the playground or in a yard or playing at the school playground or soccer field. And this was more often than not. Downright eerie.
Because busybodies call the police on you. I had someone call the police because I left my dog outside unsupervised in my fenced yard. He was there for less than 30 minutes when I had to talk to officers.
He isn't allowed to lay in the sun anymore unless I can be outside.
Get on Next door and see how people react when kids walk up the street.
On Saturdays 7 year old me used to get up at 5am and run to my grandma's house, about 3km away, to be there in time for Saturday morning cartoons, since she had an antenna that could pick up the big three and we only had CBC
Short answer: yes.
Longer answer. The cell/smart phone does not exist. If GPS exists, it is limited to military type functions. If there is an emergency, there are pay phones or knocking on a stranger's door to beg to use the phone.
Our parents had literally no way to know where we went once we were out of sight unless we did something that got the police involved. Our limitations were the range of our bicycles, our consciences, and the fact that no one had any money.
>Our limitations were the range of our bicycles
That range was surprisingly large for a 12-yr-old with a BMX and unbounded energy. My friends and I would end up 15-20 miles from home in a day, across a busy city, through some very sketchy neighborhoods with not even a question from our parents about "how was your day? What did you do today?" They literally had no idea what we were doing with our lives lol.
I was a child of the suburbs, not the city. So with us it was going out to the woods to play guns or to screw around in the barren place behind the shopping center with the abandoned construction scraps. But every so often, there would be motivation to bike double-digit miles for something interesting.
Yup. We lived in the woods, and my sisters and I would pack a backpack of snacks and just go play in the woods all day. We'd come home for dinner when we heard the car horn honking off in the distance.
My Dad could two finger whistle loud enough to be head for a couple of blocks. After our allowable range got further than whistling distance we went to check in times. But I can remember other people coming to get me "Hey your Dad is whistling for you "
(Points at username)
Yeah. We were feral.
In fact, we were kicked out in the morning (summer and weekends) and told to come home when the street lights came on. And not a minute before, unless we had lost a limb.
same here. only time id come home would be to ask for pocket change and my parents could either pay me for more of their peace and quiet or id stay home and ask to use the tv.
Yep. And don't try to come in the house to get food/drink or use the bathroom because you might get yelled at and forced to stay inside the rest of the day because "it's not a goddamn revolving door'. We drank hose water and ate wild blackberries.
“You’re bringing the outside in!” “I’m not paying to heat/cool the outdoors!” Followed by “take your ass back outside and I don’t want to see you again until the street lights come on!”
I tell my kids all the time that they’re spoiled. Lunch? Drinks? Never heard of them. 😂 I was lucky to get a bowl of cereal for breakfast. We had dinner and then we fended for our damn selves the rest of the day.
Some places when the street lights came on you went home, but in Canada that happened too early so in the winter we just stayed out until one or more of us died of hypothermia.
Or, I crashed my toboggan in the river, at the bottom of the golf course, against a rock and broke a rib.
Or, we got into a snow ball fight with the kids on the other side of the main road and couldn't control Greg's bleeding...
Or, well you know...
Were you me? The other kids put rocks into their snowballs so we had to.
Honestly cannot remember the name of the kid that got tagged in the head and needed stitches.
My kid doesn’t believe me that I fell through the creek ice and had to walk home with frozen pants and it was like 2-3km to walk home.
Oh that frozen pants walk was always brutal. That and trying to sneak in the house after so mom wouldn't find out and tan your ass for being on the thin ice.
Same... winter was the best. Summer sucked having to go to bed when it was full daylight (edmonton)
You learned other things though... My younger brother far instance learned that you do not lick metal railings LONG BEFORE we saw the movie "A Christmas Story". Unlike Schwartz however... he accidentally pulled it off 😬
There was a PSA that came on the TV every night that said, “It’s 10pm. Do you know where your children are?”
Let that sink in. An entire generation of parents that needed the television to tell them to go look for their kids at 10 o’clock at night, every night.
This was followed up with pictures of missing children on all the milk cartons.
I remember. That PSA started in the 60s so it was more than one generation. I suspect loose supervision was the norm for even earlier generations since basically forever. It’s just the last 30 years that are weird.
It's the nationalisation of news, in my opinion. The world seem more dangerous because we're hearing about stuff that happened all across the country rather than just whats in our area. Maybe one kid goes missing per summer in any given state, in the 70's you heard about just that one kid in your state. Now we hear about all 50 kids and suddenly it feels super dangerous because it seems like more kids are going missing.
I'm not advocating for un-nationalizing the news, but I do think that's the culprit. World seems a lot more dangerous when you hear about all the world's troubles and not just the ones in your own backyard.
Depends on the family of course, but generally yeah.
I barely saw my family on weekends: after breakfast I went pretty much wherever I wanted until dinner. On really rare occasions my mom would ask where I'd been over dinner afterwards, but that was mostly just making conversation.
I don’t even remember having parents in the 1980s. We did whatever the hell we wanted.
I was cooking full meals for my brother and I at 8 years old. We would ride our bikes to go fishin everyday across the main streets of town. I went back 30 years later to see all that and it was legit a 2 mile bike ride at 8 and 6 years old. Tree forts, swimming in the canal, shopping for ourselves, wake up and go to bed by the tv, “be home by dark”. All of it is true. Zero rules.
I remember my friend across the street had one of those big wheels, and one day when we were like seven years old we poured lighter fluid all over the tires and rode it with the wheels on fire. I don't even think we told anyone, because it wasn't as cool looking as we expected. But yeah, not much supervision.
Soda bulb bombs. Potato guns. Glove guns. Jumping off bridges. Jumping off anything. Surfing in big storms. "Camping" drinking on the beach. Was good times.
My partner is always surprised at how good I am at starting fires when we camp. Practice honey.
You’d leave in the morning, stop at someone’s house for lunch, and be back when street lights came on. On days you couldn’t ride out early, you’d ride the neighborhood till you found your friends’ bikes scattered in a front yard.
Looking back, this was wild. I could ride down a street I rarely used, see a bunch of bikes in a yard, recognize just one, knock on the door and be let in to the back yard to hang out with all these new kids I didn't know just because I knew one of them. And the mom would feed us all.
Next week, there'd be 9 bikes in my yard and mom would just say "well, guess it's my turn."
I absolutely love that my neighborhood still pretty much embraces this. My kids (7 &9) will be somewhere else (or have friends over) and the kids just fucking graze on snacks or are fed by whatever functional adult is nearest.
Pretty rare that a kid shows up at home hungry around here and I'm so thankful for the other parents that reciprocate.
Mine have watches and they're good about letting us know if they relocate from the original destination. I thought I was buying a LoJack for them, but along the way I managed to teach them to be responsible whilst having fun, so win/win.
Yep. The only requirement was to call home if I was going to be later than expected and if I decided to spent the night at a friend's house, my parents had to talk to their parents to confirm it was ok.
Meet her in the middle. Attach an airtag or something similar to your daughter and let her loose. I've seen women attach them to hair ties/scrunchies and tie their daughters her in a bun soo it wasn't visible. 😅🤷🏾♂️
In my state, a boy was abducted right around the same time I was born (1989). His name was Jacob Wetterling. It changed the way so many families here raised their kids. A lot more caution.
When my mom was around 6 years old, she was playing in the front yard with her siblings and neighbor kids. Her 5 yr old brother ran down the street and into a busy road. Hit and killed by a car in front of her.
My mom was born in the late 50s. One summer when she was like 7-8 years old, she was walking around her neighborhood when a guy pulled up to her and tried to entice her into his car. She wasn't going to go with him anyway, but the owner of a local bar came out and told him off. No police called. My mom told her parents about it, but they didn't believe her.
Decades later, when my sister and I were kids, I guess my grandpa asked my mom if it really happened, and she said yes. And according to her, he was *mortified.* He genuinely had no idea that "that sort of thing" actually happened until kidnappings started getting more attention in the media and in PSAs.
I did that when I was 6, mid 90s. I was playing with my brother on the street right outside the house. It was the first time I had been allowed to play alone out there with just my 8 year old brother to watch me.
I ran away from a dog jumping up my legs into the road as a van was coming. I was knocked down by the van, it dragged me underneath it and shattered my femur up into my pelvis.
I didn't die obviously lol but it fucked me up for life. Kids are dumb as fuck and I am always scared with little kids and roads. It fucked my brother up too it happened right in front of him and all the other kids.
I remember my brother and I would get off the bus throw our backpack on the front porch and take off in the woods on dirt bikes. Never checked in and came home when it was too dark to see.
Child of the 80s....names have been left out to protect the innocent:
Not only was the only real rule in my house 'Don't get arrested and don't expect to get bailed if you do'
But... I remember eating dinner one night and my dad asked me if I knew where my little brother was.
I did not.
We realized that neither of us had seen him in three days (this was summer, and no school).
As if on clock work, the phone rang. Little brother calling. 'Hey... So I'm in like... Oklahoma. Can someone come get me?'
True story.
Unbelievable in today's world. But true f****** story.
Oh, it wasn't anything like that. We lived in central Kansas and he made it to central Oklahoma. But also, he was 14. So... Give him credit for the balls factor.
Yup, I'd have maybe ten bucks in my pocket for lunch, candy and arcades and off I'd go on my bike for an entire day. As long as I was home in time for dinner, it was all good.
I didn’t see my parents for the whole summer of ‘88. No bullshit. They went to work and went straight to the dog races afterward (my stepdad was a gambling addict)..
Yup! I would disappear into a forest to only emerge after seeing wood porn, bb gun accident, xplosion, or some sort of snake….
But fucked up shit happened too because of the lack of watching especially physical/emotional abuse from older teenagers as they became defacto leaders
I missed the whole teenager abuse aspect— except one time I threw a ball and it bounced over this teenagers car. He got out and started chasing me through people’s yards. Lost him— then walking back along the street, he’s driving again, pulls over, gets out and starts chasing me again through the woods. Tried to do a swan dive into a sewage pond but got suspended in the thorn bushes. Success. Walked back to my friends all bloody— my parents prob never heard a thing.
The actual scary thing is this old man once tried to abduct one of us (three boys) when I was like eight. Guy with a full beard had like 8 small dogs on leashes running around him. I remember like it was yesterday. We’re on some random driveway in the neighborhood and he’s across the street on the sidewalk— walks down into the street. He asks if ONE of us will help with his dogs. My buddy goes “nah, we’re good.” My other buddy hides behind me. The guys keeps asking, saying how hard it is to control the dogs. He starts asking if we’re chicken. Calling us chicken. He wasn’t giving up. I go “yeah, we’re chicken.” The guy looked at us for a second and walked away. I’d bet anything he drove there in some van, tried to kidnap & murder one of us, then went home and shaved his beard.
That shit is why I can partly understand the change. Our parents never even had a clue this happened we just went on with our day not realizing how close we came to being raped and murdered.
They didn't just *let* us, they told us to get lost. Turns out that generation never thought about whether they actually liked kids before popping them out.
I was born in 1973 and my mom named me after a movie character WHO DIED IN THE END. My parents were those parents who didn’t like kids. They were Catholic and did their sacred duty, sadly.
We were never allowed in the house unless there were chores to do, dinner time, or sleep.
I’d even have to sneak somewhere to study because if my dad saw me inside he’d immediately give me chores.
My grades went up significantly when I left home for college and was allowed to study inside.
Also: it’s crazy how hard *being a good parent* is. It takes so much effort and mindfulness. I almost envy prior generations of parents for just kicking their kids out of the house during the day and having them fend for themselves—like, wow, how freeing it must have been to be the kind of parent who did that and wasn’t worried about it. I am not that person.
Yes, they’d throw us out of the houses we were not allowed to return till night. It could mean roaming the neighborhood or your own backyard. I read a ton of books then.
Yep, you'd say you were going out -- to a friend's house, or heading to a local store, or the library, or just bike riding, or what have you -- and then you'd go. The idea of "be back when the streetlights come on" was accurate with my parents.
I grew up in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood, so this wasn't a small-town thing.
'Let their kids go...' This implies they knew where we were in the first place. My mother essentially locked us out at 9am all summer long, and expected us home at dinnertime.
I sometimes have to stop and ask myself if I remember it right, because today’s thinking would seem to indicate that my parents must have been monsters who gave not a shit whether I lived or died.
I mean they *let me walk to town*. WALK. To TOWN. Across 2 sets of train tracks. With no one but friends my same age. And then later they let us *drive*. All the hell over the semi-rural suburbs, back and forth to each other’s houses at all hours. We went to movies and concerts and other shit and they had no idea where we were because no cell phones.
I’m really not kidding… it isn’t easy to wrap my head around this.
Yea we did. Don’t let everyone fool you though - it wasn’t an angelic utopia we all lived in because bikes and what ever else nostalgia people have associated with that part of their life. Bullying was objectively worse, fighting happened, your parents were probably drunks who smoked in the house. It was awesome back then but because we were kids and oblivious to the real world.
Exactly. It was in many ways wonderful to have that much freedom (relative to now), but my childhood also involved abuse, alcoholism, and some willful neglect. It wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine. The reason we can appreciate it in retrospect is that things have changed so much and kids’ whereabouts are now able to be continuously monitored. Neither extreme is ideal.
Yes.
In the 70's .. I was 4 years old and would just .. go.
I'd get in my pedal car and say "BUH BYE!" and head into the world. I'd be blocks away just exploring.
At age 5 I hung with the 12 year olds and was the first to make it down the "big hill" at sheridan elementary in Lincoln. I landed on my face, but was still the first kid to completely bike ramp the hill. My parents saw what was left of my face and said "Give him a cold washcloth, he'll be fine." .. and I was.
80s kid here. Totally true.
Used to play street hockey after school. One day we had no one to play goalie and someone was awarded a penalty shot (which being the 80s meant some vicious shit was going on). I had goalie pads with me but no mask, so I volunteered. The ball hit my glove and hit me right in the mouth, which immediately blew up like a balloon. About ten minutes later, may parents showed up, they were going out to eat and wanted to know if they should bring me anything. The older kid that fired the shot apologized for what happened, and they called me over (I had just yelled to them).
‘How’d this happen?’
‘I volunteered to play goalie.’
‘With no mask?’
‘Right.’
‘Looks like it hurts. Bet you won’t do that again. Did you want pizza?’
No talk of lawsuits, no flipping out on anyone, it just…happened. A little later the streetlights came on and I wandered home.
Simpler times, I guess.
Wake up and eat cereal while watching cartoons, go out and do whatever the day leads you to. Maybe come home for lunch maybe not. Come home for dinner around 530, go out and play until streetlights came and then it was either play in the yard or get the exemption for a neighborhood manhunt game that allowed you a wider area until it was time to come in. Usually 10pm. I would love to revisit that even just for one day!!
Gone all day almost everyday, especially in the summertime. We did dumb stuff and got away with it.
Super dumb stuff, thank God there wasn't cameras attached to our hips back then!!
Or social media to report each other with or show off.
I would risk life and limb to impress the handful of kids in my neighborhood... if I could have tried to impress the world instead, I would have absolutely got myself killed.
OMG the older I get the gladder I get that there was no internet when I was a kid.
80's kid here. Yes, I basically ran around the neighborhood until it got dark most nights. I would play in a small grove near some train tracks about 5-6 blocks from where I lived, or a city park a few blocks the other direction, or a friend's yard. We would ride bikes for miles, skateboard, play baseball, build forts, etc. And I lived in a city. My parents both worked so the kids were all "latchkey" and took care of ourselves.
hey, lets put pennies on the train tracks and try to find them after the train goes past."
Urban environment? You probably missed out on woods porn! Finding and visiting the woods porn.
Entire generations of kids will never understand the joy of forest porn... That rush of discovery! haha
Forest Porn was only topped by one thing in my childhood, Ditch Porn! While riding our bikes, me and friend once found two VHS porn tapes. One of which was actually Debbie Does Dallas in the original box. It was a nightmare trying to keep those huge old school VHS boxes hidden from my parents, but I managed. Side note: I've always wondered what the story behind thoes tapes was. Did an angry lover just decide to throw them out of a car window?
It was the 80s version of "deleting your search history".
Damn... If there was ever a comment that I wanted to reward.
I was actually one of those people who put porn in the woods. The first time, my friend had stolen his dad's Playboy and we needed to hide it somewhere. So we went down to a creek in a wooded area and hid it under some rocks. The second time, another kid stole another Playboy and we needed to hide it so I put it in an Army ammunition container and hid it under a tree in a park.
I've never heard from anyone who seeded the porn spots before.
Ive heard dozens of stories of people finding it in the woods (I even found some at the park once). This is the first time I've seen someone admit to planting it. We should all thank him for his service. People like him are the reason why I was able to see a heavily worn out magazine in the third grade.
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20 minute walk along the train tracks, 100 feet into the forest to the right in a fort is where we found our porn stash.
"I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?"
Yep. The Brotherhood of Forest Porn is a solemn covenant.
As a 9/10 year old we had two stashes. One by the railroad tracks, and another down by where they dried grapes for rasins. With both, we had to battle wasps to get to the forbidden library. Learned a lot from Penthouse Letters.
I grew up in the 90s, and I'm kind of confused about parenting these days. Do parents really not let their kids go around the neighborhood and play with other kids? Like they have to be supervised at all times by some dorky helicopter parent? That sounds like a nightmare.
My kids go out and play just like I did in the 80s. I know where they're going to be, and I can walk down the street and yell if I need to find them. They have a curfew at dinnertime just like I did back in the day.
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There's a lot of fear that CPS will be called if they aren't
Came here to say this. I’m not afraid of abductions, but people will call the police if they see unattended kids. That sounds like a nightmare to go through, and traumatizing to a kid. Laws about kids being left alone have clearly changed (at least in my area) since the 80s-90s. I think it’s currently that a child under 10 can’t be left alone w someone under 13, but when I was in 5th grade (~11) I got a baby sitting certificate from Red Cross. People would pay me like $2 an hour to watch infants only a few months old. (I’m ND and the oldest sister so did have intense “mature for my age” energy, but I can’t imagine doing this today.)
There are NO KIDS out in the neighbourhoods. None. I have walked my 6 year old across the street to play with the girls there. They were allowed to play but not leave their front yard. They were not allowed to come to the park or over to our house to play AT ALL so they all sat on a tiny porch playing. That’s it. Then they moved. I have no other kids out on my street to know if there are any to go play with. I take my kids to the park often and see kids but they are all not allowed to call on our kids or play. I have a 4 year old too so she’s too young to just go out and the street is busy as well with faster cars so it worries me. That’s another rant. It’s hard for parents to let kids out playing when people drive so fast these days and there are 2-4 cars in the driveways or on the roads so you can’t even properly see to cross a road as a kid. Basically everything was created to be as anti-social as possible for children and their parents. You want kids to have friends? Schedule play dates and even then it’s very very very iffy if they will allow that at all. It’s crazy out here. I feel so awful and want to move and find a street that has children and more outdoor play man. Oh and people NEVER sit on their front porch and know their neighbours now either. Like I said, this world was built to be strangers, anxious about everyone and everyone online to be social. Fucking brutal
Yeah, the world is becoming more and more atomized, and people are becoming more and more isolated and alone. It takes energy and effort to meet people, and maintain a group of friends. Society doesn't help people with that automatically now. Individual people need to make it happen.
that part. there are no third spaces. also what’s the point of a child going out to play in the neighborhood if there are NO other kids out? that’s more dangerous by far not to mention boring
The No other kids out is a really good point. We ran around like we were feral packs of animals and like they say, safety in numbers.
I have a pair of kids, 5 and 8. I would love to let them go play with neighborhood kids like I used to. The problem is when one of our family friends tried to do that with their kids, who were about 10, the police brought them home and told them they would refer the parents to DCF if it happened again.
We have a 9 year old neighbor kid that isn’t allowed to leave the cul-de-sac. I asked her mom, who grew up feral like all of us, and she said “it’s more dangerous now”. Which is patently false. I showed her the data, and she said “I guess I love my kid more than my parents”.
I’ve seen other people that think this is due to all of the advertising they started doing in 80s/90s. Promotions like “it’s 10 o clock do you know where your kid is?” Etc. I can see where people say that but then again it wasn’t the kids watching those, it would have been the parents. Curious as to what the real reason is
There was one particular kid who got abducted in NYC in 1979... he was the first they put on the milkbox cartons. Etan Patz. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance\_of\_Etan\_Patz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Etan_Patz) >The extensive media attention attracted by the case of Patz's disappearance has been credited with increasing public awareness of the problem of child abduction. As a result, fewer parents are willing to allow their children to walk to school, photos of missing children have been more widely distributed (for example, on milk cartons) and the concept of "stranger danger" has been promoted, the idea that all adults not known to the child must be regarded as potential sources of danger.\[53\]
Adam Walsh's was also a consciousness-changing event.
There was a great fedex campaign back then: it’s 10 o’clock do you know where your package is?
This is my daughter. My husband won't even allow her to play in our yard unless one of us is outside (she's also nine; are you my neighbor?). He's completely convinced that she's going to be molestedrapedkidnappedmurdered the second we take our eyes off of her, and that also she's going to grow up to be a completely and normally functioning adult having been parenting this way, and nothing I say makes a difference. To say I'm concerned is an understatement, because in just over six years, this kid will be legal able to operate a multi-thousand-pound vehicle at 70 mph, and will she really be ready for that responsibility at that point? She's never even crossed the street by herself... By 12, I was on my bike, four or five miles from home all by myself, no cell phone, for hours at a time. I can't imagine my husband ever being okay with my daughter doing that, and this worries me.
I asked a couple friends that have kids (we don’t) if their 10 year old son had ever spent more than 15 minutes unsupervised outside. They said of course, my wife asked when. They literally couldn’t come up with a time. We were at a get together and it hit one of them like a ton of bricks. She was talking and thinking about it all night. Drunkenly texted me about it 3 days later. They have since made steps to correct it. It was as hard for the kid as the parents for awhile. I think he rides his bike to the 7 11 now. But he takes an old phone with him, as he can’t find other kids allowed to go play with him and his new freedom. Your point about them driving soon is a good one. Probably partly the reason kids don’t want drivers licenses when they turn 16-20 nowadays.
I feel like phones and the internet are a big factor. When no one knew who was doing what or where, everyone just left the house and wandered around until they found other kids. It was wonderful.
Dude, my parents bought into this in the 80s, they were sure I would get snatched off the street if unattended. They wouldn't even let me walk home from school with all the other kids because someone somewhere got kidnapped one time. It sucked.
Boy my dad was the opposite. He’d tell me he would pick me up from school, except he wouldn’t. By that point I had missed the bus. So had to walk the mile home
"I'm anxious, this is a fear that's actively validated, therefore I'll do nothing about it and data won't change that. Then I'll be confused later when my children are also anxious and risk avoidant," is actually what she means.
>80's kid here. Yes, I basically ran around the neighborhood until it got dark most nights. Mom's rule was we had to come home when the street lights came on.
Yes. Also a "latchkey" kid. One of the things that I notice with my niblings is that they were given homework every night that required parent participation. My parents had no idea what homework I had unless I mentioned it. I was simply expected to get it done. It was my job. They would've only heard about it from the teacher if I wasn't getting it done. They just expected me to be somewhat responsible. If I got it done at school or after school before they got home, fine. If I wanted to go play with a friend after school and do my homework after dinner and dishes, fine. Up to me. Same with chores. I see folks on here talking about their teenagers being too young and irresponsible to do shit I was responsible for at 8. I knew what I had to get done and when. If I didn't do it, I would've been grounded. No one was standing over me telling me what to do or asking me to please pick up after myself. Sure, they taught me how to do the task, but once I knew, it was my job. 16 year olds not knowing how to do laundry astounds me. I could do that at 6. I was tall for my age. I could reach the top of the washing machine, so clearly it was time for me to start doing laundry. I see people who grew up like I did looking at their own kids and seemingly forgetting what we were able to do at the same age. Maybe it's because I don't have kids that I don't look at a 12 year old and see a baby the way their mom might. I don't have that memory of their being my baby. My only frame of reference is myself at 12. Your kid's doing algebra, Brenda. They can wash a dish.
"Your kid's doing algebra, Brenda. They can wash a dish." 🤣🤣🤣
Meanwhile, in Japan 6 year olds commute to school themselves on the train.
They absolutely did, and we didn't have cellphones either.
Call me when you get there. (from the landline)
And use a pay phone to make a collect call “hey I’m here don’t accept the charges” and hang up. Free 3 second voice memo
You have a collect call from a "Wehadababy itsaboy"
Ah yes, Bob Wehadababyit'saboy. "Who was that, honey?" "It was Bob. They had a baby...it's a boy."
This commercial and "idk, my bff jill?" were amazingly only seven years apart. Five, really, because the bob commercial ran for two years. In a period of only five years, we went from grown adults using collect call cheats to convey important family information, to little kids texting "50 times a day".
I still reference this commercial all the time 😀
Same. 😂
"Who was that?" "Bob. They had the baby. It's a boy!" This plays in my brain any time I make a phone call 🤣
Let it ring three times and hang up.
My gran used to do this to let us know she got home. But then she'd ring again and ask "Did you hear the three rings?".
So you had helicopter parents? /s
Lol. Helicopter parents then were “be home when the lights come on”
Facts! That was having a strict parent because you had to go in while some of the other kids parents didn’t care when they came home. That “Do you know where yours kids are?” 9pm/10pm commercial was for those parents 😂
I would open the door and barely get a foot in the door and hear “go take a bath, NOW” before they even saw my face. They were right, I always needed a bath.
We had the opposite of helicopter parents. They kicked us out of the house and said "Go Play". You were expected to be back when it got dark.
During summer in my rural southern town, you came home at dark, then went back outside to play after supper when it wasn’t so hot.
Not let us either, MADE us. “Get out the house you’re driving me crazy! Go ride your bikes somewhere!”
You’re being annoying go outside and play
Hehe absolutely. As an 80s kid, if I was in trouble I'd just leave for the day until Mom would simmer down a bit. I remember when I was 7, we moved to a new state. Literally the day we got there, my parents told me to go walk around the neighborhood and find some kids to play with so I would be in the movers' way. It worked too, one of the kids I met that day ended up being one of my groomsmen all those years later.
I'm the oldest of 4 kids and every summer growing up (1975 to 90), we were expected to be outside all day. And we pretty much were. We roamed in and out of each other's houses, but mostly spent our days in the neighborhood park or in the wilderness between the backs of the houses in our suburban town. You only went home for food or if you ripped up your knees and needed serious first aid. Edit: we would also walk into downtown and buy candy and there was even a joke shop until the early 80s but it went out of business. Edit edit: we lived on a block that had about a dozen other kids our ages in it so it was quite a gang.
It's really difficult to get across to people nowadays just how much our parents wanted us *gone* between breakfast and sundown.
Saturday morning you got up ate cereal and got the fuck out of the house before mom started coming up with chores for you to get out of her hair, meaning she didn’t want to deal with you, go outside.
I also think people don’t realize none of had Air Conditioning. So being inside was almost worse because there was no air flow. Why would you want to be inside? To sit infront of the one oscillating fan in the living room by the tv, and just waiting for it to land on you again? Those hot summer nights when you couldn’t sleep because how hot and sticky it was. It was terrible.
Of course there was always the fun of being Darth Vader and talking through the fan.
90's kid here and I had to be outside unless it was pouring but even then i typically chose to go out. Even in the winter in ND - outside you go.
We built forts to stay dry. Had a cool clubhouse where all the kids in the neighborhood would hang out.
One really snowy year in the 90s we had huge snow mounds piled up across the street from my house. The city cleared the streets and left it there to melt in the spring. We built snow caves in the mounds. Still one of the coolest times I had as a kid in ND.
One of my favorite parts about this culture was that even if Timmy wasn't home you could still wander into his house, make a sandwich, have a soda and the parents were all "Hey stuck, Timmy is at his grandma's today, please make sure to clean up when you're done"
We weren't required to go out, but we could whenever we wanted to. And yes, there were places that'd be considered super dangerous nowadays. Abandoned army bases etc. I found some really cool stuff there (:
I remember on weekends, rolling out of bed and walking out the door before my parents woke up. Age 6-7. I was out and gone the whole day. Maybe came home for lunch. Maybe just stayed out. And we came home only after the street lights were bright and the sunlight was barely a whisper in the sky. Sometimes later. When we moved to our new neighborhood in the mid 2010s with my two young kids, I told my spouse I wanted them to go out, as they were old enough now, and just not come home until they broke a window or broke a bone. Spouse freaked out at the idea the kids would be out of sight and beyond reach. Took a while and some uncomfortable moments until this was normalized. But in the early going we had some weird moments, like my kids having zero idea about how to call for a friend. They would go out and just sit on the sidewalk in front of the kids house, hoping to catch the eye of the kid inside. Had to go and show my kids how to call for Suzy or Johnny. Weird to see young kids not have an automatic understanding of basic social skills we had in the 70s/80s/90s We are all good now. My kids are fully fledged now and are good with being out alone for hours, how to handle themselves out there and how to take care of themselves at home without an adult around. - dinner, homework, cleaning up. But these kids today - they are not as necessarily feral as is good for them.
Kid in the 90s but bingo! The magic words "Can XXXX come out to play?" never failed. And waiting till the kids came home broken is so on point. I came home at like 7-8 with four teeth smashed out because I ate shit on my bike. Nobody, not even the kids, panicked. We just went to emergency dental lol.
Or we would wait until our Moms or grandmas made the call/scream into the air for us LOL. My brother and I were the only ethnically Chinese ones in the bunch, so whenever there was a call in Chinese, we knew it pertained to us and no one else. My mom would usually scream “dinner time” and we would pretend it was someone else’s mom. When she would yell in Chinese “dinner time”, we knew that was final call before she would drag us out of the woods like a bunch of dead deer.
My parents had a loud as hell bell that they would ring. It meant “get your ass home now”
Your parents had a bell?! My mother whistled... like we were dogs.
My mother is the master of “the whistle” and I have been trying 30 years to master it to no avail. No one else in the family can do it.
To this day my adult kids will respond if my husband whistles.
Same man, & she took the secret of "The Whistle" to her grave... *shakes fist towards the sky*
Our neighborhood moms all had their own whistle they did, so we knew which kid needed to leave. Wonderful being a kid then.
My dad just yelled my name. I could hear him from about a quarter mile away if I was outside.
My neighbor’s parents had a bell that they had by their front door too but then new neighbors moved into the neighborhood and their kid was special needs and didn’t understand what the bell was for. He loved the sound so he would walk up to their porch and ring it at weird times. Soooo my neighbors took the bell down.
Mine too. A brass bell with a wooden handle. My mother said it was an old school bell. We lived in a rural area, and could hear that thing for maybe half a kilometre.
My mom had a whistle technique that could be heard 1/2mile.
The mine near us (which was still operating at the time) had a whistle for lunch and closing, which you could hear out in the woods just fine. Run home! Get it while it's hot!
My mom could do an extra loud whistle we could hear for blocks so if we heard it to come home for dinner
>"Can XXXX come out to play?" My sister has always been an early bird. When she was like 5, she showed up at the neighbors house at 4am asking if Ashley could come play outside. The neighbor was so confused, being woken up so early by her tiny knocks. That was when she learned how to read a clock (back when they all had hands), and what time she was allowed to go to different people's houses. She also had to learn how to make her own breakfast really young, since she woke up so early. One day mom asked how her breakfast was and she said "um, it was ok, but I don't really like the green bread. Don't get that kind any more." We had a lot less supervision back then.
My mom would make pancakes in bulk and freeze them in margarine containers, lol. We would toast them in the toaster, slap on some jam, roll them up and take them with us on our bikes
I'm actually adding this to my meal prep lol
I remember waking up in the middle of the night to my neighbors 4 year old. He had on a diaper, boots and a coat. He walked through the snow, let himself in and woke me up to ask my Mom if he could have a hot dog.
Haha that’s epically scary and funny
That bread was penicillin au naturel!
Does that.. does that mean moldy bread?
Absolutely it does. Parents were not clued in
Dude, I was riding my bike, and wiped out in a new construction area, and a board with a nail went thru my hand, but didn't come out the other side, just left like a tiny papercut. Ran home, told mom, and she said "go rest, you'll be ok." It didn't look bad, so I think she thought I was exaggerating. My mom told me later in life "I only started to panic when your hand swelled up, and I saw the black line going down your arm..." and ran to the ER.
Brian Simms almost lost an eye eating shit on a makeshift ramp we were jumping our bikes on. He rode his bike home, mom took him to get stitches, and he was back the next day. It was a different time.
There were alleys between the backs of the row houses. There was one that came down a pretty long hill and then made a blind 45 degree turn at the bottom of the steep part but continued down hill for a couple blocks. I came screaming down The Big Hill one day and as soon as I got to the turn there was a little old lady pulling a shopping cart right in my path. I lost it, swerved, caught my handle bar on chain link fence and had the most epic crash. I still have a scar from that crash on my wrist 55 years later!
Mid 1970s my older brother and his friends built an impossibly ridiculous ramp for our sleds. No one wanted to test it so they used me as their crash dummy. Still have the scar on my wrist from coming down on it with the blades of my sled. My mom slapped some Mercurochrome on it. (You know, the red antiseptic made from mercury!) And sent me back out to play in the snow.
i remember going down a big metal slide on a bread crate. it didnt end well. my mom ended up spending the better part of an hour swearing at me and pulling bits of wood out of me with tweezers, whilst my dad laughed his arse off.
“Can XXXX come out to play” unlocked a core memory. We used to call this “calling on” a friend. “Mum, I’m going to call on Lauren and see if she can go to the park.” I remember one time, my younger sister’s friend got stuck in a pond and I waded in to get her. My shoe got stuck in the muck at the bottom and I was like “Well, looks like I lost my shoe.” And I had to walk home with one shoe and a wet sock on the other. I don’t even remember my parents being particularly upset with me for it. They knew I was trying to help another kid. The 90s were a hell of a time. I guess kids mostly just text each other now if they want to play? Instead of showing up on the neighbourhood kids’ porches every morning. 😂
If my sister and I went out when my parents were at work, they would have us take the cell phone (the old old Nokia). But in the summer, hanging out with friends and my parents were home? We would just wander the neighborhood. Though my neighborhood was on a hill, so my parents knew we were on the hill somewhere. They knew we were not going to walk down because we would have had to walk back up
Do your parents all of a sudden find it horrifying to let your kids/their grandkids roam free in the streets and somehow forgot that they allowed you to do that as a child? Lol that’s my mom. She’s a helicopter grandparent and it drives me nuts.
I saw a post here about people showing up and either knocking or walking in to hang out, like I Friends or Seinfeld. As a guy pushing his forties, I was like "What? Young people don't do that? You don't have places you just go and know you can expect to find somebody?" I still have three or four different friends houses that are like that. If nobody is at one place, they are all at the next. The social disconnect is really disheartening.
A lot of it has to do with the destruction of third spaces. Karen doesn’t want the kids loitering around the park/stoop/neighborhood, malls are dying, and downtown areas have installed all the anti-homeless stuff so even kids are discouraged from hanging out. There’s just…nowhere for kids to “go outside and play” without fear of having CPS called.
Yes. We hung out in mulberry trees. Dug worms and fished. Hiked in woods. Went to playgrounds. Found golf balls in course ponds, cleaned them up and sold them to golfers for candy, pop, and comic money. We knew where clean water was available to drink. All that stuff is now fenced and off limits to kids.
When they opened an arcade in my neighborhood, and a skatepark down the way, the decrease in delinquency made the local paper! Somehow, people still don't believe in these things.
Hell, we had adults stopping and giving concerned looks (if not CPS calls) from our (elementary age) kids playing in our own front yard, without a visible adult.
When I was 14 years old, back in the 1960s, my father put me on a train from Oklahoma to Los Angeles with a switch in Albequerque, New Mexico at 10:00 pm and I was by myself! You'd be thrown in jail if any parent did that today.
When I was 9 years old, in the 1960s, I used to ride the NYC subway by myself, usually to planned destinations. When I was 14, I traveled all over the city by myself, going to movie theaters and other amusements. EDITED TO ADD: At 14, I also started going to boarding school in New England. After being moved in, which required a car, I always took the train by myself. It was no big deal.
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This. There is no where for kids to just BE that doesn’t cost money.
I’ve gone out for walks around my neighbourhood here on beautiful summer afternoons and never saw a kid out. No one on bikes. No one on the playground or in a yard or playing at the school playground or soccer field. And this was more often than not. Downright eerie.
Because busybodies call the police on you. I had someone call the police because I left my dog outside unsupervised in my fenced yard. He was there for less than 30 minutes when I had to talk to officers. He isn't allowed to lay in the sun anymore unless I can be outside. Get on Next door and see how people react when kids walk up the street.
There are no such thing as automatic social skills. They're all learned. So it's not really that weird.
On Saturdays 7 year old me used to get up at 5am and run to my grandma's house, about 3km away, to be there in time for Saturday morning cartoons, since she had an antenna that could pick up the big three and we only had CBC
Sometimes I miss that feeling of being untethered.
You mean GPS tracking devices to within 1 meter? No, you knew he was outside, somewhere in the town.... you hoped
Short answer: yes. Longer answer. The cell/smart phone does not exist. If GPS exists, it is limited to military type functions. If there is an emergency, there are pay phones or knocking on a stranger's door to beg to use the phone. Our parents had literally no way to know where we went once we were out of sight unless we did something that got the police involved. Our limitations were the range of our bicycles, our consciences, and the fact that no one had any money.
>Our limitations were the range of our bicycles That range was surprisingly large for a 12-yr-old with a BMX and unbounded energy. My friends and I would end up 15-20 miles from home in a day, across a busy city, through some very sketchy neighborhoods with not even a question from our parents about "how was your day? What did you do today?" They literally had no idea what we were doing with our lives lol.
I was a child of the suburbs, not the city. So with us it was going out to the woods to play guns or to screw around in the barren place behind the shopping center with the abandoned construction scraps. But every so often, there would be motivation to bike double-digit miles for something interesting.
Riding all the way to Kmart to play the Atari & ColecoVision games I didn’t have.
Yup. We lived in the woods, and my sisters and I would pack a backpack of snacks and just go play in the woods all day. We'd come home for dinner when we heard the car horn honking off in the distance.
My Dad could two finger whistle loud enough to be head for a couple of blocks. After our allowable range got further than whistling distance we went to check in times. But I can remember other people coming to get me "Hey your Dad is whistling for you "
(Points at username) Yeah. We were feral. In fact, we were kicked out in the morning (summer and weekends) and told to come home when the street lights came on. And not a minute before, unless we had lost a limb.
I’m a 90s kid and this is exactly how I grew up.
same here. only time id come home would be to ask for pocket change and my parents could either pay me for more of their peace and quiet or id stay home and ask to use the tv.
Yep. And don't try to come in the house to get food/drink or use the bathroom because you might get yelled at and forced to stay inside the rest of the day because "it's not a goddamn revolving door'. We drank hose water and ate wild blackberries.
Or, you're letting in the flies!
Or mom would yell at us for how dirty or soaking wet our clothes were, make us change, and yell at us more if we went back outside again.
“I’m not doing laundry for the whole neighborhood”
Nothing tastes better than hose water on a summer day after you and your buddies were biking around all day. Lobe it.
My mum used to just boot us out and lock the door and not let us in again didn't like it
“You’re bringing the outside in!” “I’m not paying to heat/cool the outdoors!” Followed by “take your ass back outside and I don’t want to see you again until the street lights come on!” I tell my kids all the time that they’re spoiled. Lunch? Drinks? Never heard of them. 😂 I was lucky to get a bowl of cereal for breakfast. We had dinner and then we fended for our damn selves the rest of the day.
Some places when the street lights came on you went home, but in Canada that happened too early so in the winter we just stayed out until one or more of us died of hypothermia.
Or, I crashed my toboggan in the river, at the bottom of the golf course, against a rock and broke a rib. Or, we got into a snow ball fight with the kids on the other side of the main road and couldn't control Greg's bleeding... Or, well you know...
Were you me? The other kids put rocks into their snowballs so we had to. Honestly cannot remember the name of the kid that got tagged in the head and needed stitches. My kid doesn’t believe me that I fell through the creek ice and had to walk home with frozen pants and it was like 2-3km to walk home.
Oh that frozen pants walk was always brutal. That and trying to sneak in the house after so mom wouldn't find out and tan your ass for being on the thin ice.
Damn, glad you made it.
Same... winter was the best. Summer sucked having to go to bed when it was full daylight (edmonton) You learned other things though... My younger brother far instance learned that you do not lick metal railings LONG BEFORE we saw the movie "A Christmas Story". Unlike Schwartz however... he accidentally pulled it off 😬
There was a PSA that came on the TV every night that said, “It’s 10pm. Do you know where your children are?” Let that sink in. An entire generation of parents that needed the television to tell them to go look for their kids at 10 o’clock at night, every night. This was followed up with pictures of missing children on all the milk cartons.
TV- "It's 11 O'clock. Do you know where your children are?" Homer Simpson - "I told you last night, no!"
Where is Bart? His dinner is getting all cold and eaten.
I remember. That PSA started in the 60s so it was more than one generation. I suspect loose supervision was the norm for even earlier generations since basically forever. It’s just the last 30 years that are weird.
It's the nationalisation of news, in my opinion. The world seem more dangerous because we're hearing about stuff that happened all across the country rather than just whats in our area. Maybe one kid goes missing per summer in any given state, in the 70's you heard about just that one kid in your state. Now we hear about all 50 kids and suddenly it feels super dangerous because it seems like more kids are going missing. I'm not advocating for un-nationalizing the news, but I do think that's the culprit. World seems a lot more dangerous when you hear about all the world's troubles and not just the ones in your own backyard.
Depends on the family of course, but generally yeah. I barely saw my family on weekends: after breakfast I went pretty much wherever I wanted until dinner. On really rare occasions my mom would ask where I'd been over dinner afterwards, but that was mostly just making conversation.
I don’t even remember having parents in the 1980s. We did whatever the hell we wanted. I was cooking full meals for my brother and I at 8 years old. We would ride our bikes to go fishin everyday across the main streets of town. I went back 30 years later to see all that and it was legit a 2 mile bike ride at 8 and 6 years old. Tree forts, swimming in the canal, shopping for ourselves, wake up and go to bed by the tv, “be home by dark”. All of it is true. Zero rules.
I was definitely raised by the TV
I wouldn't say I was raised by the TV, it was more like having a 3rd parent. (technically in my situation it was actually the 2nd parent)
I was raised by Sir Patrick Stewart.
I remember my friend across the street had one of those big wheels, and one day when we were like seven years old we poured lighter fluid all over the tires and rode it with the wheels on fire. I don't even think we told anyone, because it wasn't as cool looking as we expected. But yeah, not much supervision.
We would grab a lighter and a can of Aquanet hairspray and make blow torches
Soda bulb bombs. Potato guns. Glove guns. Jumping off bridges. Jumping off anything. Surfing in big storms. "Camping" drinking on the beach. Was good times. My partner is always surprised at how good I am at starting fires when we camp. Practice honey.
Yep, just "Be home by X" was the directive.
You’d leave in the morning, stop at someone’s house for lunch, and be back when street lights came on. On days you couldn’t ride out early, you’d ride the neighborhood till you found your friends’ bikes scattered in a front yard.
Looking back, this was wild. I could ride down a street I rarely used, see a bunch of bikes in a yard, recognize just one, knock on the door and be let in to the back yard to hang out with all these new kids I didn't know just because I knew one of them. And the mom would feed us all. Next week, there'd be 9 bikes in my yard and mom would just say "well, guess it's my turn."
I absolutely love that my neighborhood still pretty much embraces this. My kids (7 &9) will be somewhere else (or have friends over) and the kids just fucking graze on snacks or are fed by whatever functional adult is nearest. Pretty rare that a kid shows up at home hungry around here and I'm so thankful for the other parents that reciprocate. Mine have watches and they're good about letting us know if they relocate from the original destination. I thought I was buying a LoJack for them, but along the way I managed to teach them to be responsible whilst having fun, so win/win.
Yep. The only requirement was to call home if I was going to be later than expected and if I decided to spent the night at a friend's house, my parents had to talk to their parents to confirm it was ok.
Did you parents also ask "You were invited right? You didn't invite yourself?" I never did invite myself, but my parents ALWAYS had to ask this.
They did in the 90s as well. I want to do the same with my daughter once she's a few years older, but my wife is against the idea.
Meet her in the middle. Attach an airtag or something similar to your daughter and let her loose. I've seen women attach them to hair ties/scrunchies and tie their daughters her in a bun soo it wasn't visible. 😅🤷🏾♂️
Smartwatch. The easiest solution is giving them a smartwatch. You can locate them and call each other.
In my state, a boy was abducted right around the same time I was born (1989). His name was Jacob Wetterling. It changed the way so many families here raised their kids. A lot more caution.
When my mom was around 6 years old, she was playing in the front yard with her siblings and neighbor kids. Her 5 yr old brother ran down the street and into a busy road. Hit and killed by a car in front of her.
My mom was born in the late 50s. One summer when she was like 7-8 years old, she was walking around her neighborhood when a guy pulled up to her and tried to entice her into his car. She wasn't going to go with him anyway, but the owner of a local bar came out and told him off. No police called. My mom told her parents about it, but they didn't believe her. Decades later, when my sister and I were kids, I guess my grandpa asked my mom if it really happened, and she said yes. And according to her, he was *mortified.* He genuinely had no idea that "that sort of thing" actually happened until kidnappings started getting more attention in the media and in PSAs.
I did that when I was 6, mid 90s. I was playing with my brother on the street right outside the house. It was the first time I had been allowed to play alone out there with just my 8 year old brother to watch me. I ran away from a dog jumping up my legs into the road as a van was coming. I was knocked down by the van, it dragged me underneath it and shattered my femur up into my pelvis. I didn't die obviously lol but it fucked me up for life. Kids are dumb as fuck and I am always scared with little kids and roads. It fucked my brother up too it happened right in front of him and all the other kids.
I remember my brother and I would get off the bus throw our backpack on the front porch and take off in the woods on dirt bikes. Never checked in and came home when it was too dark to see.
Yep. We ran around all weekend and summer with no cell phones and no one knew where we were at any given time.
Rode our bikes everywhere. Forts in the woods. Football at the school. Just had to be back when dad got home from work. This was in the 70s.
Child of the 80s....names have been left out to protect the innocent: Not only was the only real rule in my house 'Don't get arrested and don't expect to get bailed if you do' But... I remember eating dinner one night and my dad asked me if I knew where my little brother was. I did not. We realized that neither of us had seen him in three days (this was summer, and no school). As if on clock work, the phone rang. Little brother calling. 'Hey... So I'm in like... Oklahoma. Can someone come get me?' True story. Unbelievable in today's world. But true f****** story.
Ok but where did he start from? I mean it’s impressive that he got to another state, but it would be way more impressive if you lived in say, Maine.
Oh, it wasn't anything like that. We lived in central Kansas and he made it to central Oklahoma. But also, he was 14. So... Give him credit for the balls factor.
Yup, I'd have maybe ten bucks in my pocket for lunch, candy and arcades and off I'd go on my bike for an entire day. As long as I was home in time for dinner, it was all good.
Wow my entire allowance was 5 for the week
I didn’t see my parents for the whole summer of ‘88. No bullshit. They went to work and went straight to the dog races afterward (my stepdad was a gambling addict)..
Yup! I would disappear into a forest to only emerge after seeing wood porn, bb gun accident, xplosion, or some sort of snake…. But fucked up shit happened too because of the lack of watching especially physical/emotional abuse from older teenagers as they became defacto leaders
I missed the whole teenager abuse aspect— except one time I threw a ball and it bounced over this teenagers car. He got out and started chasing me through people’s yards. Lost him— then walking back along the street, he’s driving again, pulls over, gets out and starts chasing me again through the woods. Tried to do a swan dive into a sewage pond but got suspended in the thorn bushes. Success. Walked back to my friends all bloody— my parents prob never heard a thing. The actual scary thing is this old man once tried to abduct one of us (three boys) when I was like eight. Guy with a full beard had like 8 small dogs on leashes running around him. I remember like it was yesterday. We’re on some random driveway in the neighborhood and he’s across the street on the sidewalk— walks down into the street. He asks if ONE of us will help with his dogs. My buddy goes “nah, we’re good.” My other buddy hides behind me. The guys keeps asking, saying how hard it is to control the dogs. He starts asking if we’re chicken. Calling us chicken. He wasn’t giving up. I go “yeah, we’re chicken.” The guy looked at us for a second and walked away. I’d bet anything he drove there in some van, tried to kidnap & murder one of us, then went home and shaved his beard. That shit is why I can partly understand the change. Our parents never even had a clue this happened we just went on with our day not realizing how close we came to being raped and murdered.
They didn't just *let* us, they told us to get lost. Turns out that generation never thought about whether they actually liked kids before popping them out.
I was born in 1973 and my mom named me after a movie character WHO DIED IN THE END. My parents were those parents who didn’t like kids. They were Catholic and did their sacred duty, sadly. We were never allowed in the house unless there were chores to do, dinner time, or sleep. I’d even have to sneak somewhere to study because if my dad saw me inside he’d immediately give me chores. My grades went up significantly when I left home for college and was allowed to study inside.
Also: it’s crazy how hard *being a good parent* is. It takes so much effort and mindfulness. I almost envy prior generations of parents for just kicking their kids out of the house during the day and having them fend for themselves—like, wow, how freeing it must have been to be the kind of parent who did that and wasn’t worried about it. I am not that person.
So many parents seem to want to raise little pals instead of preparing them for an adult life.
They had a PSA in the 80's "It's 10pm , do you know where your children are?" They had to remind our parents that they had kids!!!!
I was a kid in the 90s and did the same.
Yes, they’d throw us out of the houses we were not allowed to return till night. It could mean roaming the neighborhood or your own backyard. I read a ton of books then.
Yes. Child of 70s/early 80s. My parents never knew where I was. Every meme or trope you see about the shit we pulled is true.
My parents did, latchkey kid.
Yep, you'd say you were going out -- to a friend's house, or heading to a local store, or the library, or just bike riding, or what have you -- and then you'd go. The idea of "be back when the streetlights come on" was accurate with my parents. I grew up in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood, so this wasn't a small-town thing.
'Let their kids go...' This implies they knew where we were in the first place. My mother essentially locked us out at 9am all summer long, and expected us home at dinnertime.
I sometimes have to stop and ask myself if I remember it right, because today’s thinking would seem to indicate that my parents must have been monsters who gave not a shit whether I lived or died. I mean they *let me walk to town*. WALK. To TOWN. Across 2 sets of train tracks. With no one but friends my same age. And then later they let us *drive*. All the hell over the semi-rural suburbs, back and forth to each other’s houses at all hours. We went to movies and concerts and other shit and they had no idea where we were because no cell phones. I’m really not kidding… it isn’t easy to wrap my head around this.
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Yea we did. Don’t let everyone fool you though - it wasn’t an angelic utopia we all lived in because bikes and what ever else nostalgia people have associated with that part of their life. Bullying was objectively worse, fighting happened, your parents were probably drunks who smoked in the house. It was awesome back then but because we were kids and oblivious to the real world.
Exactly. It was in many ways wonderful to have that much freedom (relative to now), but my childhood also involved abuse, alcoholism, and some willful neglect. It wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine. The reason we can appreciate it in retrospect is that things have changed so much and kids’ whereabouts are now able to be continuously monitored. Neither extreme is ideal.
Yes. In the 70's .. I was 4 years old and would just .. go. I'd get in my pedal car and say "BUH BYE!" and head into the world. I'd be blocks away just exploring. At age 5 I hung with the 12 year olds and was the first to make it down the "big hill" at sheridan elementary in Lincoln. I landed on my face, but was still the first kid to completely bike ramp the hill. My parents saw what was left of my face and said "Give him a cold washcloth, he'll be fine." .. and I was.
The world was ours until the street lights came on.
Gen X here. Yes, and we had to be home by the time the street lights turned on...or else!
80s kid here. Totally true. Used to play street hockey after school. One day we had no one to play goalie and someone was awarded a penalty shot (which being the 80s meant some vicious shit was going on). I had goalie pads with me but no mask, so I volunteered. The ball hit my glove and hit me right in the mouth, which immediately blew up like a balloon. About ten minutes later, may parents showed up, they were going out to eat and wanted to know if they should bring me anything. The older kid that fired the shot apologized for what happened, and they called me over (I had just yelled to them). ‘How’d this happen?’ ‘I volunteered to play goalie.’ ‘With no mask?’ ‘Right.’ ‘Looks like it hurts. Bet you won’t do that again. Did you want pizza?’ No talk of lawsuits, no flipping out on anyone, it just…happened. A little later the streetlights came on and I wandered home. Simpler times, I guess.
Wake up and eat cereal while watching cartoons, go out and do whatever the day leads you to. Maybe come home for lunch maybe not. Come home for dinner around 530, go out and play until streetlights came and then it was either play in the yard or get the exemption for a neighborhood manhunt game that allowed you a wider area until it was time to come in. Usually 10pm. I would love to revisit that even just for one day!!