I can't hear another reference to "when we were kids they had a commercial to remind parents to look for us"
Posted by FrebTheRat@reddit | Xennials | View on Reddit | 62 comments
We ran around the neighborhood, but we weren't completely "feral". A lot of the kids in my area were always in earshot of the "bell" our parents would ring to tell us to come home. Those commercials were initially related to curfews and then became associated with child homelessness. They were not "did you forget you had children" commercials. Even in the 80s, not knowing where your elementary age kids were at 10 pm was neglect, not a "sign of the times". We did drink from hoses though.
Pale_You_6610@reddit
I wonder if my Mom ever saw those commercials from the bar stool?
PhilosopherDismal191@reddit
I was feral. We had some woods behind my house and I basically lived there for a while
EcstaticMiddle3@reddit
Absolutely had a huge farm bell that my mom would ring 2x. Better hear that bell, too.
Snuffyisreal@reddit
I had shitty neglectful parents. And I lived in white trash nirvana. Our parents didn't give a rats ass about us. Day night. Didn't matter unless they were affected
Dazzling-Biscotti-62@reddit
Look at this guy with parents who cared about where he was.
Homie, I walked two miles to a grocery store with no shoes on and my mom didn't even know I was gone.
Deletedmyotheracct@reddit
I'm younger for this sub (born 84) and I would say by like 93ish my parents would only have a vague idea about where I could be. I live in Philly and could get quite a bit aways with friends on our bikes or be somewhere in the woods. I had usual haunts near my house like the bowling alley, the comic/card shop, the playground, or friends' houses, but if I wasn't there good luck. My curfew was always 15 minutes after the street lights turn on or so- basically start making your way home once those lights go on.
Voluntary_Perry@reddit
We were usually at the park across the street. So my mom would just yell our names at the top of her lungs and we would come home.
djsynrgy@reddit
It comes down to lots of things. Parental work schedules and/or local support network and/or general public safety of one's locale, among others. But also, personal mental-ish is a big factor.
Conversely, I have a sister who's 4.5 years older. When we were kids, there was a little girl who was taken from our neighborhood; it was a huge deal with national coverage. I have no functional memory of it as it was happening, but it left a huge impression on my sister.
Fast forward: Her kid (now in college) effectively had zero social life outside of school/home, her entire childhood. Her mom was too afraid of worst case scenarios. Kid didn't even do extracurriculars; just school, home, rinse, repeat.
She literally can't ride a bike; never learned. Breaks my heart.
Predictably, her fist couple of years on campus have been rough, because she was so dramatically sheltered growing up, and is part of the cohort who graduated HS during the COVID lockdown era.
Conversely, my kid started riding on a balance bike at 2, and jumped to pedals at 4. She goes outside whenever she pleases, which is quite-often. Bad weather be-damned; she just loves interacting with nature. Finding critters; digging in dirt; playing in snow; traipsing through woods; etc. All over the house, are little piles of random rocks/twigs/leafs she's picked up along the way. We host sleepovers, too, because we want our child to have a childhood.
redditprofile99@reddit
I was actually out riding my bike and could be anywhere in the tri-town area. I lived in a rural area and would ride to arcades and card shops or a friend's cousin's house in a couple of towns next to mine. My parents literally didn't know where I was other than somewhere in one of those areas. I really wasn't allowed to stay in the house during the summer and would come home before dark.
shakeyshake1@reddit
I lived a rural area and it wasn’t uncommon to be up to 5 miles away on bikes or walking through the woods or a meadow or whatever.
Still though, they had a general idea of where I was and they would be very worried if I didn’t come home before dark.
flatulating_ninja@reddit
This is the rural I grew up in. There was a single convenience store about 5 miles down the two lane back road I lived on, I would ride my bike there for candy. Everything else was fields and forests. There were no arcades or card shops or even friends within biking distance, that was 15+ miles away in town, no tri-town for me.
shakeyshake1@reddit
Exactly the same here! Except the convenience store was down a 50 MPH road so I wasn’t allowed to ride my bike there.
I made friends with kids on my road. Otherwise I would have had no one to hang out with everyday during summer. My best neighborhood friend was two years younger than me. You couldn’t be really picky.
flatulating_ninja@reddit
This was a 55 mph curvy wooded road with no shoulder. I shouldn't have been allowed to. I had a couple cousins through the woods and for a couple years a friend who lived in the house about a half mile down the road. Other than that, unless it was sports or school I was at home or in the woods around the house.
redditprofile99@reddit
Yeah I spent a lot of time in the woods too. My friends and I built tree forts and connected them all with paths. Fun times.
shakeyshake1@reddit
I miss hanging out in the woods. I never built a tree fort, but there were hunting blinds up in the trees and hunting shacks in meadows so we would hang out there a lot.
VaselineHabits@reddit
Yep, my parents kicked us out about when the sun came up and didn't much care where we were or went... but we damn sure better be home before it got dark outside.
I wonder if they ever wondered where we were and what we were doing. But maybe they didn't because they sure acted surprised when their 2 eldest kids got knocked up. Surprised Pikachu face
Apprehensive_Hat8986@reddit
"How could you get pregnant after we did nothing to prepare or educate you about life?!?!"
Reasonable-Wave8093@reddit
Yes, but in the city! They had no idea lol
epidemicsaints@reddit
It's also a very sheltered perspective.
The neighborhoods I have lived in for 20 years, it's an every day block party with kids 3-17 screaming and wailing until 10pm with adults taking turns sitting on the porch to supervise.
Fixing bikes, sword fights, screaming and running.
whatsmyname81@reddit
Yeah same, people are always like, "kids these days don't play outside!" And I'm over here like, behold the pile of random crap my son has dragged home from the woods because at 13 years old, all he does is run around the neighborhood with his friends. This kid would remind you more of Bart Simpson than any of the things people say about kids these days, and so would all his friends.
I'm sure that other stuff exists, but just like there was when we were kids, there is a range of experiences.
FrebTheRat@reddit (OP)
I grew up latch key in row houses three blocks from the neighborhood school. Single mom but there were always people around. My kids have the same freedom because we live in a dense neighborhood with a neighborhood school. All their friends are in a 8 block radius.
MyNameIsSat@reddit
Honestly that applied to me. It applied to my husband. It applied to our cousins, it applied to our childhood friends. It applied to a good majority of people ive read comment on here. I think OP you might be in the minority in that it did not apply to you. We were all latch key kids who left the house during the day with instructions to be back by dark. Creeks (yeah, totally not safe but I mean we were kids) and hoses were what kept us hydrated, and we were starving when we got home. "Where'd you go all day?" Was answered with around, so no they mostly never knew the location and wouldnt have had a clue where to start looking if we didnt turn up.
The whole "where are your kids" thing wasnt about us or that, thats just a spin, but we absolutely were running wild, without supervision.
fumbs@reddit
I wasn't even a latch key kid. I had one of the few stay at home moms. But I would just say bye Mom I'll be home later. The only question was would I be home for dinner.
FrebTheRat@reddit (OP)
Not saying we weren't out and about on our own a lot. I was latch key with a single mom, but if she needed a commercial at 10 to tell her to look for us then someone would have called CPS.
RainbowUnicorn0228@reddit
I was typically home by the time the street lights came on or sooner if I was in charge of making dinner, which was most of the time. However, I had a few friends who would be gone for days and their parents seemed to never care or notice. My mother would ask them to call home and let their parents know they were safe and where they were, and my friend’s would look at her like she had three heads and state some variation of “my parents don’t care” or “my mother isn’t even home”. One time after my mom push the issue my BFF called home and put it on speaker. She was like “Hi ma, it’s X. I’m at rainbow unicorn’s house.” And then her mother said something like “and?? Whatcha calling here for @$&. Wasting my @#$ time. You can stay there for all I care.” And then they hung up. My friend just looked at my mom and shrugged and said “told ya.” My mom never made another comment again to any of my friends about calling home after that.
actualelainebenes@reddit
One of the networks in my area still shows that ad every night at 10pm like clockwork
Possible-Tangelo9344@reddit
I lived miles from any friends, so was never really out with them, but I would go in the woods to the creek for hours with no way to be reached or checked on.
AllTh3Naps@reddit
If we were leaving the area of our small town we had to let our parents know. But basically, we could be about 15 minutes away on the bike, and my parents didn't care where we were. And compared to my friends, we had the strict parents.
There were definitely instances where it started getting dark, so one of us was assigned phone duty to call around to friends' houses to locate our missing siblings.
This was the norm in my country town.
sweeneyty@reddit
me n my community was feral af. check your 'i had a family' privilege
FrebTheRat@reddit (OP)
Latch key kid with a single mom. We definitely got around unsupervised, but no one was wondering where we were after dark.
sweeneyty@reddit
if it wasnt true for alot of us...the ad campaign would have never existed. no reason to deny other peoples reality......none of the peoples lives on tv at the time made any sense to us either..nor the nostalgia that exists now. we all have to realize there are alot of other factors that determine your experience in a given time period...
i.e. alot of the people here dont seem to have the ptsd of a drug war veteran. in my socioeconomic class/region, this is the hallmark of the generation, for others it was just an item on the 10 oclock news. both are real.
One-Earth9294@reddit
I'd still drink from the hose lol. Just not 'the second the water comes out' give it a second to clear all the bugs n' shit out.
Nah I wasn't a feral kid my dad had us on a strict curfew and bedtime. Much to my consternation.
hobbes_shot_second@reddit
Jokes on them. My parents were too drunk or high by 10pm to comprehend the message.
saltybruise@reddit
Ha, right? I used to sneak out to go party in Tijuana but then it was like, why sneak, no one's looking for you.
Crallise@reddit
That's so fucking sad.
saltybruise@reddit
Ah, I mean at the time it was nice. My parents were just not really equipped to parent. I weirdly and luckily ended up married to a great dude and have great friends.
Wonderful-Elephant11@reddit
I think it’s funny that it’s used as evidence of a more righteous and moral time. Kids went missing all the time. The rate of abductions of children in the 70’s-80’s was way higher than it is now. There just weren’t any amber alerts.
FrebTheRat@reddit (OP)
This is my problem with it. Misrepresenting this commercial like it meant "kids were more independent then" is just wrong. That's not what it was about. Vast majority of the parents in my community, even the pretty shitty ones, knew where their kids were by dark, and would be losing their shit if they weren't home by 10.
sbotzek@reddit
I think people can exaggerate a bit, but the rule for every friend I had was "home or a phone call by the time the street lights turn on". None of us were literally kicked out of our houses - our boredom just wasn't our parents' problem, it was ours, so we had to find a way to solve it.
Most of the time we were within a half mile of our houses, but definitely not within bell distance. I grew up in a suburb.
FrebTheRat@reddit (OP)
I was in the urbs. 6 blocks was probably 60+ row houses and the neighborhood school where all the greenspace and sports fields was three blocks away. We were always pretty close by.
RJRoyalRules@reddit
I think the American childhood/teenage experience of the 1980s-90s was too broad for anyone to say it was one way or another, it's so dependent on context, class, region etc. When I do get annoyed is when people I grew up with and knew acted like we were always running wild like a group of friends in some 1980s horror movie. No we weren't! We were playing in an apartment complex courtyard with everyone's parents watching us!
FrebTheRat@reddit (OP)
I definitely think there is a major urban/rural divide. I was in a dense urban adjacent area with row houses and a neighborhood school. It was pretty hard to be anywhere that wasn't watched by someone who knew us or my mom.
Capital_Barber_9219@reddit
We were completely feral
Cross_22@reddit
My middle school kid finally started playing D&D. Now all the parents are texting to each other about who is in charge of pick-ups and drop-offs and at what time. I am just shaking my head here remembering when I grabbed my bike, bag of dice, a bottle of Mountain Dew, and told my mom I'd be back sometime early evening.
FrebTheRat@reddit (OP)
Same here. I just let my kid sort it out. Main problem is there is a major road between some of the kids and they're not allowed to cross it. Their parents are literally driving them across the street. It's ridiculous.
JustVisitingHell@reddit
My Dad had a whistle that we could hear all up and down the block or across the street. I don't mean a metal or plastic item that he blew air into, he would put two fingers to his lips and let loose a sound that would have made everyone in earshot pick up their head and look towards the source.
That's how I knew it was time to come home. Wasn't "feral" but was outside playing majority of the day into the evenings. The "when the street lights come on" type of curfew.
Msheehan419@reddit
I thought it meant like, I told my mom I was staying at Michelle’s and Michelle told her mom she was staying at my house but we were really over at Wes McDanials house smoking weed with John and Pierre. (Yes my best guy friend in high school was named Pierre)
sed2017@reddit
When I was out riding my bike I rode all over town… my parents had no idea where I was at any given time until I came home or called home…
DoggoCentipede@reddit
In a different sub a similar topic came up due to this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/11/27/georgia-mom-arrested-after-her-10-year-old-went-on-a-walk-alone/76619161007/
sbotzek@reddit
My parents didn't force me out of the house, but they also didn't provide me entertainment like modern parents do. If I was bored it was my problem to fix, not theirs.
The main rule was to be home by the time the street lights came on.
Other than that my parents didn't really know where I was. Most days I was within 2-4 streets over. Sometimes at the local high school or elementary school. Sometimes at the local 7-11 playing video games. Rarely, but sometimes, in the local hills that were about 4 miles away.
Definitely not within bell distance.
I don't consider it neglect or being feral.
heresmytwopence@reddit
https://i.redd.it/sdlq8bbija6e1.gif
OreoSoupIsBest@reddit
I was kicked out of the house as soon as I had breakfast and my friends, and I traveled many miles away all the time. The rule was I had to be home for dinner and when the streetlights came on. It was wonderful and glorious.
andrewclarkson@reddit
A lot of us went to a lot of effort to avoid our parents knowing where we were lol.
La_Croix_Life@reddit
My parents used to lock my sister and I out of the house. At one point, a neighbor lady ended up finding out we had no where to go so she let us hang out at her house in the winter and watch TV. I'm so grateful for that lady. Not sure what ever happened to her, she's probably dead now but she was a good person.
Skywren7@reddit
Wasn't that commercial made because of the Atlanta Child Murders?
Proud_Cauliflower400@reddit
Growing up on a farm in the country was weird. Not weird at the time, but weird now that us 80's kids are getting close to old age, at least us 1980 to 1985 year range kids. . My parents never had to look for me, by dinner time, I was usually hungry. I knew when dinner time was by where the sun was during the summer or what time it was getting dark in the fall or how long it'd been dark during the winter. I suppose I was lucky to even have a regular dinner time at all.
EggieRowe@reddit
You got called home with a bell? There's no bell short of one in a church tower that could have called in the kids in my neighborhood and we were living in middle-class suburbia. Street lights for us and some parents definitely let their kids be feral.
Many-Calligrapher914@reddit
Those ads were started in response to a spate of child murders that happened across Atlanta in 1979. The Podcast “Atlanta Monster” did an excellent job covering the events. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/atlanta-monster/id1324249769
Traditional_Entry183@reddit
I didn't live in a neighborhood or around many other people, and was basically always with my parents unless they drove me to and from a friend's house, so this absolutely never applied to us until I was almost done with high school.
CatchMeIfYouCan09@reddit
We were easily 3 counties over on any given day....
MassOrnament@reddit
There were definitely limits. I moved a lot but we were often told not to go past a certain point in the neighborhood or off our property (when we had acreage). My parents made us stick to the yard when it was dark or we couldn't be found quickly and easily. When we were out camping, we had to be within range of my dad's ability to whistle very loudly, and come running if we heard it. My parents mostly knew exactly where I was.
Ok_Reporter4737@reddit
I had neglectful parents and that commercial totally applied to them 🥲