the moment I came home from school. I changed into street clothes, got on my bike, and rode around town with my buddies. I wouldn't return home till the street lights turned on. Good times!!!
I was like 1st grade (early 80s) and rode my bike all over town, would venture out far from home. At 10(mid 80s) in the Bay Area I would ride my bike miles from home. Parents had no idea where I was.
i mean, we had a handful of places we could be - the park, the crick, our cousin's, the library, etc - and if we were going anywhere else, we had to call home and ask permission. at least theoretically. basically, the rule was, if they looked for u the usual places and couldnt find u, you were in big trouble. this almost never happened tho. we were essentially feral.
When I was 5 and my sister was 6, my mother would lock us out of the condo in the summer around 9am and my Dad wouldn't be home until 8pm. Mom got home at 11pm. We'd stay in the condo, play in its field, or go to friends condos to play. Never had any scary or weird moments. When we moved and I was 7, we walked to school and home and we're told if someone knocks, to not answer and if someone calls, to say mom was in the bathroom. By the time I was 10, we could come and go as we pleased until it got dark.
I don’t know if it’s because the world is actually more dangerous or our parents were just less aware but we were really just left to take care of ourselves in the 80s. My mom often had to work late and it was go home, make a snack, do your homework, then go play outside
I think the world would actually be safer for roaming kids now, since everything can be recorded or tracked. We were just out there free range. Knowing damn well that guy across the street with the cookies was probably a perv…but still playing with no parents watching us.
the biggest safety net that parents had in the 80's that many parents and neighborhoods are lacking now is knowing most of the neighborhood - knowing that just because you don't directly have eyes on the kids out and about but that you can call Jenny's mom on the corner who can tell you she just talked with Shauna across the park who was just across the street with Jan and all the kids had just dropped their bikes for popcicles and hose guzzling for a bit, and maybe she will turn on the sprinklers for an hour
we do not have the community power that our parents had
That's a huge factor.. but the other thing about Xennials is that we were also right in the middle of the shifts in freedom and community oversight..
Especially in the 90s and early 2000s.. throw technology in the mix where the kids didn't have to call the HOUSE PHONE and say "Hi Mrs. Escobar, is Kalvin there?"..
Random side story.. I had a pretty deep voice for being 13, and called my girlfriend at the time.. her dad called my mom later that day to make sure I wasn't some 25 year old..
We had gr 13 when I graduated in Ontario and as soon as I turned 18 I would just go to the secretary and say I am reporting myself absent for the day. My friend's stepfather had a busted out old van and we would pile into and head out.
My parents never asked about homework or exams once during high school.
Lol I was just having this conversation with my daughter. She was talking about texting her friend Charlie to ask a question about math homework and we got on the subject of how back in the day she would have had to call Charlie on his HOUSE PHONE and you had no idea who was going to answer it. God forbid it was one of his younger siblings who would then run through the house yelling “Char-lie! There’s someone on the phone for you and it s a GIIII-IIIRRRLLLL!” Or worst of all, his dad, who would chuckle a little bit and then say “May I say who’s calling? Oh, ok Olivia, I’ll see if he’s upstairs….”
She was looking at me with widening eyes the whole time before coming to the conclusion that all of this sounded horrific.
Yep. I for sure got into trouble but in my case it was semi-calculated. I knew someone would find out. I knew my mom would know before I got home.
I don't know my neighbors well enough for that level of communication.
Forced to turn over the kid's phone number so she can call and say hi to the mom.
Find out the kids not named Wang but that's just what the kids are school call him and he leans into it. Turns out his real name is Charlie, which is an unfortunate name for a young Vietnamese refugee kid in the 80s, so that's why they call him Wang.
I think the biggest danger for kids has always been car accidents, and the world is definitely not safer for pedestrians on that front. People pay less attention, drive and accelerate faster, have bigger cars that are higher up (making it harder to see small people), and are less used to seeing kids and watching out for them.
The roads where I grew up were so empty. We kids owned the place.
I moved in to a new suburban neighberhood with lots of kids with bicicyles, skateboards and electric everything. They look like they are having a ball, but the streets are packed with parked and moving cars. I say a little wish for them every day.
The streets where I grew up are empty of cars and kids. Everyone is retired and refuses to move out. Looks lonely to be a kid there.
I live in the same neighborhood now as when I was growing up. It’s near a college. As a kid I had no trouble walking or biking anywhere at anytime.
As a college aged adult I was almost hit multiple times as I tried to cross the street to or from the college, by people running red lights or just failing to come to a complete stop before the crosswalk. This includes a bus.
Now as a middle aged adult there is so much traffic and so many people with no regards for anyone else I won’t let my child play outside alone. It’s too dangerous.
Add to that 10-15 yr olds on e-bikes. Where I live they are a freakin time bomb unregulated. I almost hit a kid at a four way stop who was on the sidewalk blocked by fencing going 20+ mph and not stopping. It’s nuts.
Drivers run red lights and stop signs every light cycle at the intersection near me.Its hard to believe the cops aren't enforcing it more.Not using turn signals is another one.
Same! Live in the same neighborhood that I grew up in and the amount of morons driving is ridiculous. Even with 2 flagged caution signs in front of my house I still don't let my kids go far. I definitely did not have this problem when I was a kid.
Never had a near-miss with a car as a pedestrian/cyclist until I set foot on my college campus. And it's in the same city where I went to middle and high school!
I think it really depends on where you're located too. I know the suburbs I grew up in have rapidly expanded over the last 20-30 years. Definitely not as safe for children roaming around in terms of vehicles.
I was hit by a cop car when riding my bike to school in 1995. Back in 1992 I was riding to school with a friend. Saw him get plowed by a 50 mph car right front of me.
Pretty sure it was just a high five. I wasn’t hurt bad, but my bike was wrecked. My mom didn’t want to hire a lawyer because she had a bad meth addiction at the time.
Yeah, I had three friends get hit by cars when we were younger. Two while riding bikes and the other while we were playing hide and go seek in the neighborhood.
Hard agree, and the cars weren't as safe so fatalities were way more common if you were in the car that crashed (especially for kids, who would often get thrown out a window because seat belts hadn't been widely adopted yet).
Yeah I got hit by a van when the guy blew the stop sign as I was crossing. He had a bunch of cages in the back of his van. To this day I can still tell when it's going to rain because I was pedaling when he hit my left leg as I was crossing the intersection. That was 35 years ago.
Child pedestrians killed by cars is almost non-existent today. The NY Times article I just looked at shows that it’s down 93% since 1979.
Of course I suspect a lot of statistics like that are just declines in kidnappings probably have a lot more to do with the fact that kids barely go outside anymore.
I had a friend get hit by a car in 2nd grade. He ran after a ball and as a car was coming he ran and hit his head on the curb. He died. My little brain didn’t know how to process death.
Nah, even cars are safer now; many new cars come with a forward-facing camera that will detect crossing pedestrians at low speeds. Guns are the biggest danger to kids now (guns are not more dangerous than they used to be; everything else has just gotten safer).
This is the real answer to all of it imo. So many more people and more cars makes running around the neighborhood way more dangerous then it ever was as back then!
The number one killer of kids in America right now is gun-related death. But child abduction is actually down from when we were kids. I'm not sure where car accidents fall on the list, but I'd also assume fairly high, and probably higher on the list in non-American places that have better gun laws.
Right, but kids never going out on their own will depress car deaths. This is one of the tricky things about "its safer than ever" - yes, and how much of that is because parents keep their kids on a leash?
Yep. I'm a runner (do local 5k's), and every running season from March to October, I nearly get hit while training by some moron who doesn't think he/she needs to stop at a stop sign. A couple years ago, a couple were driving in a convertible, and I had to jump out of the way to avoid getting hit as I was going across the crosswalk. The woman driving the car said, "Oh my God. I didn't see him." In response, her husband/boyfriend yelled, "Did you see the stop sign?!" I couldn't help but laugh.
I was just in Berlin for a month, kids there are pretty much leading adult lives. Just walking around getting snaks and shopping alone, hanging out. I think this helicoptering may just be an American phenomenon.
It's not. Almost any "American" social phenomenon will at least be somewhat present in the other Anglo nations, especially the UK.
Also, dense cities in general have this less. The area where kids spend the most time outside their own homes in the USA is New York City, where the stats have barely changed in the last 30 years.
Wouldn’t surprise me. We’re inundated with news that emphasizes dangers. The stories that get the most attention are the ones about violence, explosions, various crimes, and dangerous weather.
The world objectively is safer.. but fear is prominent. .fear mongering is everywhere now.. guilt tripping etc.. back in the day our parents only paid attention when some kid went missing on the news and then they'd all of a sudden make us come home earlier for a bit. Or there was news of a killer on the loose. So if it wasn't on the 6 o'clock news or the morning newspaper they didn't think about it. But now it's everywhere.. shaming parents for not being on top of everything for being neglectful just because they let their kids have freedom.. something changed in the 90s when my younger sister was born because she didn't get much freedom at all my dad and her mom had a tighter leash on her. I think there were some high profile cases of child molesters /rapists etc in that day.. plus her mom worked in a prison so she saw the worst of the worst.
People drive 35/45 mph in my residential area.
Growing up cars would go 5-10mph around houses and they were small. Now you get hit by an escalade you are dead, period.
I agree with this take. I got a house key in the 5th grade and started walking around. Got a bike in the 7th grade started covering more ground.
This isn't too different from the several kids I see riding around on eBikes. For the kids who still go outside, they discover far more stuff than I ever would - they are basically on motorcycles now. And all of this can be monitored by the parents
I fully agree with this!! I was a latchkey kid to a home that got burglarized when I was 10 and I was the first one home to that. Traumatized me for years…like that paranoia stayed with me well into college. And my mom at the time was just like “well, shit happens!”
I think the only thing that may be more prevalent now than early to mid-90s is hardcore drug use. Especially pills and heroin. That’s without looking at statistics though…just kinda based on what I see and hear. I feel like in the 90s it was really only rockstars doing heroin lol.
I would say that Crack was really bad in the 80s-90s but only in certain places. Rural areas got hit REALLY hard by the meth epidemic in the 00s though.
Totally. I could put a GOS tracker on my 9 year old now, if kids actually hung around outdoors anymore. Back in the 80s packs of kids just roamed around the parking lots, railway tracks, parks, store front, t's so funny to think back to that time and I was completely independent going around the neighborhood at 7 and 8 years old on our bikes and we just came home when it started getting dark. We knew to stay away from the grumpy old fuck and number 10 and the perv that used to offer us candy out of his van. It's so wild to think of especially as a mom now.
I don’t think that it used to be more dangerous back then, but i think the chances of a kid being a victim are greater.
I had a friend say he was going to raise his kid to do what he did (go ride his bike around, be out of the house, etc) but the problem is, that kid will be alone. We had friends that went to do the same thing, in groups or at least one other person. That was the culture when we grew up. If something were to happen to one kid out of all kids that are out around the neighborhood, the likelihood of it being one of us back then was a lot lower than it being a kid now. You can’t have your child convince their friends and you try to convince their parents to do the same.
And with zero chance of danger, the kid will just be out there peddling around alone for no reason and having no fun because all their friends are waiting for them to play video games online 😅
It's not just that. Depending on where you live, you run a real risk of getting the cops on you if you're not breathing down the back of your child's neck 24/7. Not that long ago I read a story of a mother who was arrested for letting her 10-year-old walk a mile down the road. Every so often you also read about some parent who go the cops called because their children were playing in the front yard unsupervised. It's not like that where I live, but I'm in a pretty rural area without a lot of Karens who can't mind their own business.
Yep, same here. When I was in 3rd grade, my best friend and I would come back to my house after school, let ourselves in, eat snacks, and start doing our homework (by which I mean watching all the Disney afternoon cartoons).
On weekends, we'd hop on our bikes and be out of the house literally all day. Did our parents know where we were? Probably.
The monsters were all alone back then. Now they have chat rooms to teach each other more monsterous things and bolster each other. It was much much safer then.
Laws have also changed, I didn’t know until my friend told me that he legally he can’t leave his daughter at home alone “for an unreasonable amount of time” until she’s 14. I don’t know what the law is for being unsupervised outside the home.
Overall the world is safer now than it ever has been before. Especially from accidental death or injury. Cars being safer (seatbelts, airbags, crumple zones, etc.), everything being less flammable, better public awareness.
I don't understand how it happens either. My kids schools are like fortresses. Parents can't come in. Metal detector at every entrance. Bookbags are searched and high schoolers can't have lockers.
Because those are performative/reactionary 'solutions', and people will find a way, when they're really determined to do something. The real way to stop it is prevention - a combination of mental health awareness/assistance and gun control to remove access.
The most effective prevention programs start early with "social and emotional learning" to teach how to regulate their emotions, help kids recognize when their friends need help, removing the stigma of getting that help, and instilling a sense of community and inclusion so the motivating resentment can't thrive. Unfortunately, SEL programs are now being labeled 'DEI' and funding has been reduced because of it, so it's going to get worse before it gets better.
There's only so much that can be done - and there is no way that is 100% foolproof. It's the logical fallacy that surely, as an individual, something could've been done which means it couldn't happen to you - but a lot of these events happen at schools with every kind of security already in place.
To your last point, I knew of kids that were killed 1) on train tracks, 2) climbing into a power station and being electrocuted, 3) climbing and falling off a water tower, and 4) falling through thin ice and drowning. This was in my first ~10 years of life, living in a relatively small city in the 80s. I’m just realizing now, reading this thread that this stuff doesn’t happen anymore (in my andecdotal bubble, anyway).
If you’re in the car it’s safer. If you’re outside the car it’s vastly less safe to be hit by a car now than at any time in the past. Most trucks and SUVs are too tall and make it impossible to see children passing in front of them.
You’re not wrong. Pedestrian deaths are actually increasing from the low point abut 15 years ago. Due to likely distracted pedestrians and drivers, and poor urban planning safety.
This. The amount of people willing to take others to courts over stupid things! Ex: Tommy fell off his bike in your driveway and broke his arm. I'm suing you because it happened on your property. Nevermind the fact that he was trying to pop wheelies to impress your daughter. What do you mean your countersuing for child endangerment and emotional damage? .... it's rediculous. Everyone wants an easy buck at someone else's expense...
Nah, that lady tried to settle for her expected medical expenses, which were around $20k. McDonald's offered $800. At that point, she decided to retain an attorney.
During the trial, McDonald's lied about the reasoning for the temperature of their coffee. It also came to light that McDonald's had already settled for around $500k from 700 other complaints about their coffee's temperature.
I'm not saying she was wrong to do so in the slightest. What it did though was show people hey if I get hurt and can blame it on someone else I'm gonna make money.
No, it's because boomers will call the cops if they see kids playing outside. The same boomers who post memes on Facebook about kids being glued to tablet screens.
its so strange being a cusp genx/millenial bc my mom is a boomer and so are all her friends.
she literally has a massive bell in the front yard (FL) that she would ring when she wanted us to come home lol. she never knew where we were at or what we were up to but she bitches about this constantly. they cant see the irony in their actions.
Boomer here. We live in a community next to a mid-size Midwest city where we raised our own kids back in the 80's and 90's. Tons of kids in the neighborhood. I love hearing them play, bouncing basketballs, seeing them ride their bikes together to school, hearing their shrieks from the school playground a few blocks away. We're not all grumpy. And sidebar, when I was a kid, there were those crabby people too, some old, some not so old. Not sure it's a generational thing.
Heck meanwhile I'm just happy to see the kids in my neighborhood playing outside. I even told one of them that. Yeah the kid was bouncing a soccer ball off our cars in my driveway, and I went out there to tell him that I did not want him to be in our driveway doing that (I was nice about it, I talked in a normal tone) but I also mentioned to him that I was happy to see him playing outside, just to be safer and respectful of other people's stuff (same kid was running across the street as cars were going down the street, maybe 15 feet in front of them).
Yep, it’s kind of a Catch 22. The world is safer because we are more aware of all the bad stuff. But because we are aware we are more paranoid, thus have a harder time letting our kids roam free.
The world is safer because we aren't making the whole planet breathe lead and abortion was legal for a while. What we're aware of is increasingly not real.
The world is generally safer than in the past, with long-term trends showing declines in violence, poverty, and conflict-related deaths. However, new and more complex threats have emerged, and recent years have seen an increase in conflict-related deaths in some regions, leading to a more mixed and uncertain picture.
The world is demonstrably safer in many key ways, particularly compared to the past, due to long-term declines in violence and improvements in living standards. However, a more nuanced view acknowledges that the nature of threats has changed and recent trends show concerning increases in conflict deaths in specific areas.
The world is much, much safer since then. Crime and murder rates are down significantly. But our access to news has been increased exponentially. Which is why it sometimes feels less safe.
My parents really had no idea where I was or what I was doing unless it was dinner time.
I know where my kids are and what they are doing all the time.
The world, or at least the US, is objectively less dangerous now. Crime stats show that even with the post-lockdowns pulse in violent crime that I'm certainly not denying hapoened, it's still less than the 80s and 90s.
Camden NJ, one of the US's most violent cities, actually had its first murder free summer in like 60 years.
We are well programmed to think everything is more dangerous now than when we were kids but it's statistically not the case. I also think the social structure has changed quite a bit. I rode the SEPTA bus alone as a child, but the bus driver looked out for the kids and so did the little old ladies. My stop was toward the end of the route so sometimes the driver would go to the end and turn around, and let me off at my stop so I wouldn't have to cross a major street. I don't know if you'll get that kind of service now.
Also we weren't supposed to play in the woods next to the house but we could roam up and down all the alleys we wanted to play with the neighborhood kids. We still played in the woods anyway haha. And we had to be back before the streetlights came on.
The world, or at least the US, is objectively less dangerous now.
It's pretty global, excluding places that have had major social upheavals. For developed countries (and less developed countries), overall rates of violent crime have dropped almost continuously since the mid-1990s. A large portion of it can be attributed to banning lead in gasoline and plumbing. You can actually see a correlation between the banning of lead in gasoline and plumbing and a drop in violent crime rates that starts about 10-15 years later.
Roe v Wade was 73, I've heard that attributed to a drop in crime. Leaded gas wasn't banned until 96. Leaded pipes stopped for new construction in 86. My mom lived in a house with lead pipes until 2010. A friend of mine bought a house that still had leaded pipes in 2020.
It’s the cars. In the UK for example, there are more than double the number of cars on the road compared to the 80s (36m vs 16.9m - an increase of 19.1m). That’s why kids can’t play outside. Boomers turned out the space we used for play over to the storage of cars.
Exactly. Our parents had to be reminded we existed. I got home from school at 2:45 my single parent barely ever made it home before 7:30. I got that bruise carrying a laundry basket and hit the door frame (no, I got it riding my bike — a perfectly serviceable pink bike for a 10-year-old girl — down a giant dirt mountain in a construction site). Four days a week I rode my bike to dance studio (where my mom or her current boyfriend would pick me up at 8:30 p.m. (no special lists of who can/can't pick up your kid from places), two days a week to piano lessons, from third-seventh grade (when we moved).
My mom's rule was basically "Don't call me at work unless you're dead."
I also feel like nowadays with the internet we hear all the terrible things that happen every minute of the day. Back then we only had the news and the paper and if it wasn’t big, it would only be national and we might miss it.
The crime rate now is way less than it was during the serial killer heyday of the seventies when I was like 5 and 6 running around with nothing but a be home by dark.
An actual reason was this all happening was during this time more and more women entered the workforce while at the same time society really wasn't ready to look after the kids with both parents working. There were no summer camps yet so it birthed a generation of key latch kids who yes... just roamed the neighborhood all summer coming home before the street lights came on.
You were 2.5 times more likely to die before the age of 19 in 1980 and four times more likely in 1970. Rate of serious injury while cycling alone was 6 times higher in the 1980s compared to the 2020s.
I tend to think it’s a little bit of both. I think that the media didn’t quite hype every single incident in the city, there was no social media for ad hoc independent journalist to post every single crime around the city, and I feel that overall, the journalistic fear mongering was at a lower level. But I firmly believe that our parents were also more ignorant.
The world seems more dangerous because we hear about every little bad thing that happens, but the odds are insanely low that your kid is gonna get kidnapped by a stranger or shot. But all it takes is 365 kids, one per day and it makes people think that it’s a massive problem.
Example - last time I checked a couple years ago there was something like 2000 people shot by police in a year, which seems high, but there’s almost a million cops in the US. so not even 1% of cops are shooting people. We are talking 0.002% but 2000 is enough to make people think it’s happening all the time.
It happens today still too. Folks grown up just assume it doesn't happen / want to reminisce about being a child, because they don't personally experience it.
Kids can and do roam. Sure they can have a phone on them, but there's no mandate to helicopter parent even today.
I know parents are tripping out now but I think it’s safer now. Kids can have tracking devices on them and plus we have cameras. In city it’s dangerous but I would image it’s better than it used to be.
The world is literally less dangerous. Violent crime peaked in 1992 and has trended steadily downward ever since (small uptick in 2020) then back down again in recent years. It's literally 1/3 of the level it was when we were kids.
I made my own dinner monday through friday starting around 12. But, I'm an excellent cook now so I took it as a plus. I was also made to do my own laundry and could walk to a store for supplies if needed. My mom was home 8pm every night and the rules were, that I be home too, the house be picked up and I have fed myself and done my homework. My mother never checked my homework once or did any reports/science projects for me either.
I honestly attribute who I am now to my hyper independent youth.
If we parented the way our parents did, we'd have CPS called on us. I've always felt that the nosy neighbor calling CPS over some dumb reason was a much greater threat to my child's safety than any boogeyman.
Kids basically aren't trusted to go unsupervised anymore until they are in their preteens. I think it's a combination of paranoia over safety and a distrust of their child's skills to make good decisions and fend for themselves. Hell, some places have laws that say that you can't leave a child home alone if they are under 14.
I think it is because today in some places if kids are outside alone parents get CPS and police called on them, and it does not matter if the parents allow them to go places alone.
Also many parents Gen Jones, Gen X, Xennial, and older Millennial will internalize their kids, teens, and adult children, and want them not to be average independent kuds, teens, or adults but completely dependent on their parents.
I have elder millennial lady friends I dated when we were teens, their kids never go outside alone not even to walk their dog or get the mail. A xennial friend has a son that is 6 and he told me "My son is way too young to start cleaning, learning cooking, etc." I did not tell him I started when I was 3. Gen X friends call their adult kids "my babies!" and it is not the moms or ladies that do this.
Probably the same level of danger. It's just that with the internet you learn about all of the bad cases when in the 70-90s you only heard about gigantic issues (like priests) or your local molester.
And people forget that most child abusers are people known to the child or family members, so being a helicopter doesn't really help there.
But I found this video interesting that they've found they have made playgrounds to safe now and it's creating anxiety in kids. But no thanks to thise crazy ass early playgrounds.
The world is much safer today than when I was growing up in the 80's, crime peaked in the 90's and has been going down since: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/#:~:text=The%20FBI%20data%20also%20shows,in%20some%20years%2C%20including%20recently.
I think part of it is also that parents are now more able to be worried.
Looking at my sibling's kids so do they all have phones and are generally supposed to texr parents know where they are and my siblings' contact them often. My sister's kids even have smart watches which lets my sister and her husband see their location via GPS.
On the other hand, when I was a kid so did my parents not really have any way to contact me (I got my first phone when I was 14yo) and of course no way to track me. I had a time I was supposed to be at home, but they knew that I might be one hour late. Hence, worrying at any point before one hour after my time was just pointless. What were they supposed to do anyway, call all my friends until they found me? Better to just wait with the worry.
They used to show tv commercials about not goin with strangers in the park or getting in cars and to set up passwords with your parents. Not necessarily safer but there's more technology out there today watching around the world
I had to call my mom when I got home from school so she knew I was still alive. But after that, I could be anywhere until my parents got home (around 7pm).
I know from my personal experience it was my mom working her ass off and not home, and when I was at my fathers he could not possibly care less than he did. My grandparents had a small acreage near a river. It was HEAVEN we I got to go there
I was born in early 2000s in former Soviet State. Played outside within a km away from 9am to 9pm. Looking back, I think that's a bit crazy that I was allowed to do that. Good times though.
Its called HIGH TRUST SOCIETY and its characteristic to HIGH IQ PEOPLE like WHITE PEOPLE and JAPANESE people
I know you reddit people are mostly leftists so you don't want to admit or cant even think about it, but the reason is simple why kids could roam freely in 70s to 90s
in the 70s ,80s, 90s there was not much MASS NON WHITE IMMIGRATION happening, so most of america and the west was huge majority white and this means more safe, civilized etc.
Yes crime still happen, like in all society but not like today
For example in Estonia, or Poland children still roam freely, play outside, go alone to school and from school to home ( while being little 7 years old 8 years old etc... )
My mom and my grandmother would literally kick us out the door and lock it behind us and refuse to let us back in until the sun started going down. As I lived out in the country, it was pretty much roaming around the property and out in the woods and climbing trees. She wouldn’t even let us come in to use the bathroom and pointed to an actual outhouse that we had down by the edge of the woods. Time for lunch? Yeah I would find my lunchbox from school sitting outside the patio door with my lunch in it and I’d be told to go someplace else and eat it.
1983 here. I rode my bike to different towns at 12 in the summer with my diet road friends played outside till dark walked hours and hours thru woods and built dama in the creek I was never home until I had to be at dark
Heck even in the mid 2000s I pretty much did this. Went biking wherever I wanted, I can even remember being in first grade and going to the corner store myself to buy stuff.
What's funny is I have a brother who is 10 years younger who was born in 2010 and some of the things I did my parents would never have let him do.
growing up in the 80s and 90s, my mom would lock us out of the house and we would take our bikes and rollerblades and roam all over town. I think my mom even let me rollerblade to school one day which was a couple miles down a busy street.
When I was a kid mom would disappear into her bedroom after breakfast, tell us to grab leftovers, never to be seen again till dinner every weekend. We were free to roam, play outside, whatever. The message was entertain yourselves, I am busy.
One time a group of us walked like miles to a quarry and we kinda walked down one step. Barely found our way back. No cell phones, we just left and came back. No panic, no drama.
Can confirm. We were often left to our own devices. My parents would do their thing, and allow us to roam anywhere.
Can’t say to why those things changed, but I’d imagine it’s many reasons.
Oh yeah, my friends and I biked around town for hours without any adult supervision. We'd go miles away from home without telling anyone our destination. The rule was come back before dinner!
We did! Younger end of GenX here. Every household in my neighborhood had a sort of radius beyond which we would have to ask for guidance or permission. Ours was about two miles (don’t go past the blue bakery without asking). Street light meant run home irl so the jokes about it came a decade or so later.
We left the house as soon as we got up got sugared up and might come home for lunch and we’re back out till dinner time, then back outside till the fire siren test at 9:00pm(curfew) . Yes we roamed free all summer!
I was literally told to take my bike and come back inside before the sun comes down. That was it. Am I gonna do the same with my kid? Fuckin hell no! Hahaha
I do think this is a valid point. That there is more responsibility and feeling that you yourself are responsible for everything regarding your child, and financing every last drop of goodness for them.
My children are just as free to roam as I was. They walked to school starting in 3rd grade and all have house keys. They run around the neighborhood with all the other kids, ride their bikes all over hell. The mindset in the image is very much an online only phenomenon. Nobody in the real world gives a fuck.
I grew up on a farm, at 10 I was given a motorbike and my first rifle (I was shooting before hand but this one was mine) and i was told that I had no excuse to be in the house anymore when its nice outside.
If I was not out single handedly reducing the rabbit population, I would ride my bike to a friends place and we would be outside from sun up till whenever dinner was.
The only reason I got a mobile phone when I turned 13 was because I kept going bush alone and mum just wanted a txt every now and then to make sure I was not dead.
There were limits to where kids were supposed to go (80s/early90s) but those limits were often not followed. I had one friend who always went skateboarding at loading docks in worst part of town, others who jumped off a bridge into a river. Both were specifically not supposed to go to those two places. I was more happy to ride my bike to a book store and read comics and books for free unless they kicked me out which they rarely did because I’d usually buy something.
In the 80’s I was out every single night until the screeching voice of my mother called me inside. We didn’t ever want to go home and were left to our own devices and imagination. Best times of my life - plus, staying at home after school meant chores.
Absolutely, around 10 I'd ride my bike miles from home and get a bag of snacks for like $3. Be gone all day, and not really say much to my parents. Or pack a backpack with a can of beans, knives, and maybe a bb gun and something to make a fire with, then go explore the woods all day and cook myself lunch somewhere I discovered (trespassing 100%). Good memories. Nintendo was fun and all, but after an hour, it was boring.
"The ditch" was our hangout spot too in Jr. High. Some kids had built a club house type deal down in some trees in the area where flood water gets channeled away from the city. We would hang out there making out and smoking pot. We were 12 & 13.
Ours was the Indian pit. I don't know how Indians were involved, but it certainly was a large pit, about 30 feet wide and probably 7 or 8 feet deep. We would keep it free of trash and use it as a bike ramp.
I was 6 my first time with the house key and being home alone. It was only for like 30mins while grandma took her bowling lesson but still, nobody could do that today.
Nah, being the second oldest sucks. Getting bossed around by an 8-year-old when you're 7 is almost as bad as having a manager that's 24-year-old when you're in your 40s.
My sister was 6 and I was 10 when we started spending summers home alone every day. We were part of a big neighborhood latchkey kid crew ranging from 4 to 11. We somehow all made it out alive.
Jesus. I just read this and thought “same here but surely not that young.”
So I looked up when the various seasons of Transformers first aired because I have memories of watching first run episodes home alone after school and realized that I was eight at the oldest when I became a latchkey kid.
My wife and I are the pariahs in our local school district because we do wacky things like let our kids ride their bikes around the block or shoot hoops out front without constant supervision.
It’s actually really hard on us. On the one hand we both firmly believe that children need some unsupervised time to develop and learn how to deal with minor problems but on the other hand we’re aware that we have a reputation of being wacky free range parents and a lot of kids in their schools aren’t allowed to come over because of it.
Things got heated over a 7 year old’s birthday party just this weekend. It was at an indoor golf place and my wife and I sat off to the side and watched our son play while all the other parents effectively played for their kids. My son golfs like an 7 year old which I consider pretty age appropriate since he’s, ya know, 7. Every time he got to an obstacle that give him a slight challenge the mom of the kid behind him tried to take his putter away and do it for him so I’d remind her he’s fine - which he was. After 3 or 4 times she yelled at me to parent my son and I yelled back that I was. He wasn’t doing anything wrong. He just needed a few tries to hit the ball through the windmill while being perfectly safe as his parents stood 20 feet away. I don’t need to run to my kids at the first sign of the slightest problems.
Yeah somehow the same generation that didn’t watch their kids in the 80s became the generation that called the cops in 00s if they saw unattended kids.
Guilt, denial, and probably some ignorance that they even were that parent.
100% it went from being normal to ostracized to see random kids unsupervised.
Yeah. There was a woman in rural Georgia that was arrested last November because she let her son ride his bike, by himself, to the store a mile from home. Not sure what the outcome was but the potential penalty was a $1000 fine and up to 1 year in jail. My parents would have been put away for life for all the places I went alone during my childhood.
There was a woman in rural Georgia that was arrested last November because she let her son ride his bike, by himself, to the store a mile from home.
To be fair, the case was dismissed, the officers were reprimanded, and the Georgia legislature passed a statute making it explicit that allowing your kids to go out on their own does not by itself count as child neglect.
I’m a child of the 80’s - my mom had me riding my bike all over town, from one pharmacy to another, to pick up her various Vicodin scripts. I was 15 and riding around with 150 or so tabs in my backpack!
Lol... to be fair, there are still lots of folks riding around on bicycles with backpacks full of drugs. However, I don't think they're picking them up for their mom.
Isn't that weird? Like now I can't go to the store at night without my parents giving me grief but they let me walk to school (over a mile away) at 6:30am at 16 lol.
That kinda reminds me of when I moved back in with my parents for 6 months, 3 years after I'd first moved out.
They tried to give me a curfew, despite the fact that a) I was 20, b) I'd been living on my own for 3 years already, and c) I didn't have a curfew when I lived with them after I was 15.
Also, the same generation that let their kids roam free in the '70s and '80s are also the same generation that spent the '80s and '90s convincing kids that child abductors and drug dealers were hiding behind every tree and bush to snatch unsuspecting kids, or turn them into junkies, or lure them into gangs. Years of PSAs and 'After School Specials' and DARE meetings and police officers giving special talks.
And then they wonder why '80s and '90s kids grew up to be more wary and overprotective of their own kids.
I’m still waiting on all my free samples that I was promised in D.A.R.E. The only crime family/drug dealers that actually used this method were the Sackler family/Perdue Pharma.
I was so bummed this past summer. My wife and I got a summer sitter for our six year old instead of going the camp camp camp every week.
We belong to a swim club where all the kids can run feral, swim team, tennis. So we just wanted the sitter to take her to the pool every day and maybe one other activity that week, go to the kids museum or whatever.
None of her friends did the same, the swim club was dead until 4:00. They were all doing the supervised 24/7 structured weekly camps all age segmented.
We lucked out that her summer sitter has a younger sister who is only a year older so they got to hang out and play a few days a week. Would have been a lonely summer for her.
Hopefully next year more parents will come around, we have started a trend for birthday parties where parents can just drop their kids off.
“Stranger danger” panic in the 1980s which wasn’t actually based on a very high number of child abductions by strangers, led to Gen X and millennials growing up with fear and a heightened awareness of danger because we had to look at missing children on milk cartons every day and watch terrifying news reports with inflated statistics, which ended up having been largely made up by the media to begin with. That means we’re raising our kids as though everyone around them wants to steal them, which was not statistically true in the 80s and it’s not statistically true today. But we’re giving them smooth brains anyway.
Our big thing was "hide and go seek, in the dark", but the whole neighborhood (at the time, roughly 4 blocks) was our place to hide! We had a blast! Kids hiding in shrubs, ditches, under cars, you name it.
Kid from 70 -80s yes we roamed. Kindergarten got out at noon. I walked a 1/2 mile to my sitters house by myself. When I was 3 I wondered away and a cop brought me home and yelled at my mom.
I was the last of 5 kids, people had more kids then too. Losing one or two was more acceptable lol.
First day of kindergarten in 1966 my mom walked me to school and told me, I’m going to show you once and once only how to get home. No lie. Our house was about 1/2 mile from the school.
Both parents working there ass off. We were free range kids. I grew up in the biggest city in my state so there were plenty of places to explore. Most of the time my parents never even knew i was gone.
Yes, it's true. Also used to play tackle football in the street. Get crunched into a car and you're simply out of bounds. Kept dimes in sock for calls home if it started to get dark and not quite home yet. This is back in the day of glass Gatorade bottles too. I didnt have a Mongoose or GT Performance with cool mags, but my bike got me everywhere.
This subject has been done to death however the part where she said its a reason to not have kids is a hot take so ill comment to that part. Watching your kids shouldn’t be even on the list of reasons not to have them. It should be the bouncer at the door .
If the idea of being around your kids all day 3 months out of the year is a blocker then yeah then kids might not be for you. No matter the circumstances.
It’s so strange to me that we need to defend actual occur aces to younger generations. A few months back someone posted a piece of shit stating that it was a falsehood and victim signaling that we were taken from our classrooms to watch the challenger launch.
History was even less documented before our time, and we believed the stories of elders, because humans, culturally speaking, have passed down stories, wisdom and history. Now even with much more detailed documentations of history reality is questioned. What a time to be alive
Yep. Wake up at 1045 in the summer just in time to pour a bowl of frosted flakes and turn on The Price is Right. Then booted out of the house with $5 for the corner store and come back before dark or maybe come back for lunch and then back out.
Hose water, biking all over the place, finding a random yellow jacket nest you were def not expecting, scraped up knees etc...
I tell my kids to go play outside Saturday morning, one of them keeps coming back saying “X can’t play outside because his parents aren’t home, he can only play on the computer.” “Y can’t play outside because his parents are sleeping, he can only play on Roblox (it’s 10:30am🙄)
1980 here, yes much more than I am comfortable with today when it comes to my kids. Mostly bike riding all over town at 12 without any form of contact for 6 hours a day in summer
Hell, I was born in 86, and I biked 3 whole km to school at 10 years old. I remember my mom biking with me the first time, and then she was like "you got got this? Good"
Mom was a teacher and both older siblings are in the X generation. (6 and 9 years older)
Come home when the street lights come on was still a thing (for me) in the summer.
I think I got my own key at 10. Bikes out until lights out. I'm so thankful I got to grow up like that.
I literally used to jump off the roof of the house and my Mom didn't care. I mean, one time when I was 9 I broke into a water treatment plant and got captured by security and my Mom didn't care.
The person asking got their name from Town & Country Surf Designs: Wood & Water Rage, an NES game from the '80s. They already know what it was like, this is engagement bait.
Xennials reading this: do YOU let your kids out unsupervised? If not, why not? Are you a softbrained idiot who buys into local news fearmongering? (yes)
I don't have kids, but I have a feeling that if I did, I wouldn't let them roam free as much as my parents did.
Both my parents worked and I often felt neglected and alone, I promised my little self that if I ever had kids, I would do the opposite and try my best to be a part of my child's life
I do more than many other parents but not as free as I was. When I was a kid the neighborhood was also full of kids. We all knew each other, had each other's back, someone could run and get an adult if necessary. Now? No I'm not take comfortable letting a kid wander around town alone.
anyone know when this changed? I know TV shows like America's most wanted are credited with putting a fear in parents, but I didn't see children disappear from the street until around the 2010s around the time video games had the Internet.
Nobody these days know what a latch key kid is. My friends and I were wild and feral as kids. I feel sad that todays kids are so connected digitally and find it hilarious that my own kids think they are slick. Like dude you are playing checkers and I was playing chess at your age.
At 8-9 years old I was allowed to bike pretty much anywhere in the city. We would build make shift ramps and put them on down hill slopes and attempt to bike or skateboard of them often attempting flips. No helmets or shin guards.
At 10 I ended up breaking my face quite literally in a cycling accident. Lost my front teeth. Nose completely snapped. Broke arm and wrist.
Was a wake up call. It’s cool to romanticize that era and I agree helicopter parenting these days is off the charts. There is always a compromise between unfettered negligence of your kids well being, and being overly protective.
This is my main concern, accidents and no one around who knows what to do. Especially with declining birth rates there's not even another kid to run off and get an adult like I did the time my brother fell in a ditch and needed stitches. Id feel a lot better letting kids free range if they were in a group.
It's because a lot of people now call the damn cops like they're customer support. Oh no! A TEENAGER is out unsupervised, 9-1-1.
So shit changed. Crime is way down in the US from when we were kids. Like way, way down even with a slight recent rise, and teens now all carry personal tracker communicators. It is so much safer to let kids wander free than it was when we were young.
But the news figured out that if people are scared and angry, they watch the news more and then a chunk of the population got really not cool with other people just existing out in public, especially youth.
To be fair the kids are simply exposed to more stupid stuff these days, and more likely try to do something dangerous to amuse themselves to copy what they saw online. It's not like we didn't try but our lack of creativity hampered our ability of off ourselves. Also there are a lot more single children, it was a lot easier to roam free when you have three brothers.
Its nothing new, the whole stranger danger craze was huge in the 80s and 90s but the biggest risk posed to children was, and still is, family members and close associates.
Do you mean crime by teens or by adults? Where I live we have adults into stealing cars, robbing homes, hard drugs, assault/rape, home invasions, etc. There are some teens into this but they are in the minority.
I’m horrified that I used to actually crawl through ditches and drain pipes. I’m so much more cowardly now, and afraid of anything that might be in a drain pipe.
I was a kid of the 80’s and 90’s, and my buddies and I had several blocks and a couple of mile radius we explored freely on our own on our bikes or on foot. As long as we told our parents where we were going and stuck together, that was good enough. We also checked in, and went to each other’s houses to play video games, or basketball etc. You also came back home at dusk, and if you wanted to play in the dark you did that in your backyard haha. But yes, fairly true.
It was most certainly the best days of my life. We will never see days like those again. Sure crime happened, but kids were more street smart and savvy. Friends and neighbors looked out for each other more I feel like. Social media, greed, and politics have destroyed the world as we once knew it.
In Australia we played in the bush and we found an underground cave that was FILLED with porn magazines, for 12 year old boys we thought we hit the jackpot ... we called it the porn cave. But we ended up feeling really guilty and ashamed for looking at it so we bought some matches with us and burned it all.
My cousins and I found woods porn when we were little. Their neighbors basement had stacks and stacks of playboys, so I assume that’s where they came from. The youngest of the cousins ratted his older brother and I out to their mom. Thanks, Mark.
Ha, that reminds me, when I was young, the next door neighbors house burned down. It was real sad and they didn't try to rebuild, they just moved on. Days after, a friend from across the street (who sadly had her house burned down years later) came over and we started going through the rubble of the house. It was a huge three story house but the charred remains didn't give that impression of how big it was.
What I didn't realize was that a lot of stuff never gets burned for various reasons. And in the case of this house, what didn't get burned were some porn mags. I remember when I saw it, my heart was just a flutter. I didn't want to bend over and grab it so I just used my shoe to turn pages without being noticeable. My friend was lingering all over the place and I would take just a few steps in a direction and come right back. My aunt, who lived in the house next to the burnt house, yelled at us saying don't step in there.
I was literally thinking for days of the different ways I could get that magazine without anyone noticing. And I swear, when I got the nerve, that was the day they came in and cleaned up the lost completely. So close, yet so far.
One of the best things I found out exploring the woods as a kid was a pentagram drawn on the ground with a stick, surrounded by candles and a porn magazine in the center of it. Someone tryin to summon a booty call, lol
In Australia that was at least true for me and my friends. We would take our BMX's and go anywhere, we'd also walk through rain forest and bush without supervision for hours after school. My guess is that either it was genuinely safer back then, or many parents were less knowledgeable and possibly naive or maybe the media and common beliefs has caused many to fear more for the safety of their children. I really don't know.
My whole childhood was me and a group of like 5 of us roaming around the town on bikes or walking with zero contact during…before they set the ground rules and be home before the sun goes down
I have a very fearful pre-teen as well. She is too scared to even walk across the street and ask to hang out with her neighbor friend. She asks me to text their mom first. I refuse but that means she just never does it. I'm doing the best I can over here.
Who tells you not to let her go to the park? Does she have a bike? My cousin has daughters in elementary and Jr high, they live in the woods on multiple acres and they stay indoors and make crafts, watch movies, etc.
we and the bro used to walk to the supermarket and eat the free fruit and bread "testers" till we got told to leave then went to the fish and chip shop (new zealand) and play some street fighter 2 or mortal kombat for 20c then we would go to the school to play some bball or head to a mates house one had a c64 other had an IBM something.
I was hitchhiking to go five miles to buy candy in like first grade if remember correctly. But we did disappear all day and go anywhere we wanted as long as we came home.
I let my 16 year old and 11 year old walk down to the end of the neighborhood, all local streets not crosswalks, to go to the donut shop. They came back and said they were asked if they were lost and need the police 2 times.
Everyone is a an idiot now and thinks 2 kids cant walk down the block to get donuts or pizza without a official escort or an SUV ride.
Yes u croakie! This was normal! Maybe if all u republicans didn’t request 10 year old sex slaves with ur leader in chief dementia don! Things might be the same but with technology supervision!
Nothing has ever blown my mind quite like watching parents walk their MIDDLE SCHOOLERS to school that's LITERALLY ON THE SAME BLOCK as their apartment complex.
My Aunt-in-law drove her granddaughter to high school everyday. It’s less than a half mile away and they live in a small town. I always thought the girl was a lot younger than she actually was just because of how coddled she was.
I Drive my son to school or the bus stop every day because I enjoy spending that time with him. He's extremely active and usually out all day after school until 10pm so that little blip in the morning is the most I talk to him some days. He's almost 18 now and graduates high school early tomorrow so our little morning chats will now be done 😕
I walked home from HS because it was just under a mile from my house and it was fine. But I did have grown men shouting all kinds of sexual harassment at 15 year old me out their car windows. Now a days that wouldn't fly but it was the 90s.
I have to pick up my 3rd and 4th graders or else they will start making phone calls. I live a block and a half away from the school and they know the way here and can make it fine on their own. It’s a school policy apparently
Our house is across the street from the school, my first grader has been walking by himself since Kindergarten. Granted there's a crossing guard, but I like him having the independence
In my previous neighborhood, parents drove their high school aged kids to the school bus stop and the kids waited in the cars until the bus came. I was always like WTF is this even about. I could see doing it in bad weather or really cold days but not every single day. And it was not a place on a busy road with no sidewalks either. Just a regular suburb.
I started kindergarten in 1983... just a couple of months before my 5th birthday. The bus stop was about 2 blocks from my house, with a fairly busy road with no crosswalk that I had to cross. I was walked to the bus stop for the first week or so... then after that, I was on my own. Occasionally, my aunt would babysit for some other kids in the neighborhood in the afternoons, so I'd be told in the morning to walk to their house instead of coming back home.
I see kids in high school that the school bus picks up and drops off at their home. Kids do walk to a nearby Jr high school, but in elementary and high school they do not walk to a bus stop.
Yeah my next door neighbor watches her 9 year old daughter at the bus stop from her driveway. The bus stop is 75 feet away from their house and there's 10 other kids that go to the same bus stop. I leave for work every day around the time that bus comes so that's how I noticed. I mean, it's better than her not caring about her kid for sure, but it's a little much for a kid who's 9 years old.
Another way to look at it is that these latchkey kids are now parents and they WANT to be involved in their kids lives. They enjoy spending time with their children.
Hell yea as kids we roamed all day. Ride our bikes to the park, play football in the street later, go home to eat, then go right outside at night to play kick the can (hide and seek)
out of the house by 8 ride my bike an hour to my mates place, get him, we ride to the next mate so on and so forth until out 8 year old pose is formed then its be home by dark. we roamed, we drank from taps when thirsty. someone mom fed us if we were hungry, all we needed was a our bike and our freedom.
My parents would kick me out of the house. If my friends weren't around I would be at the school yard for hours by my self. Once I got to Middle school I was allowed to cross the main street and it got way more fun.
Yes, starting at age six I was allowed full reign of the street we lived on. Me and about 20 other kids and at age 10 I was allowed to go wherever and be back for dinner.
Hell ya man, i remember being 11 and jumping off this roadside bridge into the river below with my buddies, a cop pulled up and told us to go home, then just left. Shit was awesome. Just riding your bikes wherever you could get before dinner in the summer.
I graduated in 2003, so growing up late 90s, during the summer is wake up at 10am or later, go to the neighborhood pool by myself, bike ride, play with friends outside, go inside to play video games, only go home to make a sandwich and drink hose water ever. Until dark wouldn't even be inside my house, TV/games until 2am, sleep in do it again
We literally explored every storm drain pipe that ran under the streets in my neighborhood when I was like 10-12. And the woods were our playground, battleground, porn stash.
Ahh.. free range after getting out of school, do your homework, then go ride bikes and hang with friends. Climbing trees, finding new places to just do whatever, canals we would fish out of, call the radio station to play a song. Adults only checked or yelled for dinner or "you have to go to this event! Get dressed!!"
For kids now, having things recorded is the up side. Back then, if an adult told your parents you did something wrong... grounded. Hell, other adults would ground me lol. Good ol' days.
Pretty much, yeah. There was a roaming group of us on bikes who would run around the neighborhood and mess around in the surrounding woods and creek and stuff. When I got my first job at 12 helping the neighborhood landscaper i lost about 3 days a week from doing that. But the three bucks an hour was worth it.
No joke BTW, that was literally how it went down back in the 90's for me.
The neighborhood I grew up in in the early 80's was built on top of a big hill. We had an area of natural space we called the gully because it was just bare grassland and shrub brush that was shaped like a big bowl. I think it was essentially an area in a subdivision development required for drainage. Anyway, in the winters we always got a lot of snow so, naturally, the gully became the perfect sledding hill for all the neighborhood kids. One day, on a particularly icy morning, a boy that lived down the street from me took a head first dive off of his sled about halfway down the hill and cracked his head wide open. Blood everywhere, so much blood! Fast forward a few hours and 14 stitches later and this kid is back on the hill, with a baseball helmet on, sled in tow. He finished out the day sledding with us as this was just like any other day. We thought absolutely nothing of it.
I scratch my head at people younger than me talking about being latchkey kids, because I was born in 1991, was an only child of older parents, and they were told to teach me “stranger danger.”
I didn’t go anywhere without my mom and I think the first time I was left at home was 8? I misspoke at school and told a member of the PTA that I walked to school alone at, like, 10, and they lost their shit at my mom for “being irresponsible” and she in turn, lost her shit at me for making her out to be a derelict mom.
Maybe this is the result of my parents moving to the city, but I dunno; my friends who stayed in the ‘burbs (also only kids of older parents) definitely had helicopter moms, too.
That's barely a reason why. The main reasons we didn't have kids are as follows:
1) Broke. We didn't have money. We were stuck working shitty jobs for shitty pay, which meant we didn't have money to go out and socialize to find a partner, let alone have the money for diapers, formula, daycare, and everything else associated with a child.
2) Why be a parent when our own parents were so uninterested? I most likely didn't have that "biological clock" because my parents didn't care about my hobbies and interests. I've been raising myself, even as the youngest child of 8. How would I know the joys of parenthood when my parents only cared about the TV and phone while calling all my hobbies a "Nintendo" and leaving me able to count the number of times they played with me on a single hand. Two camping trips a summer, almost no vacations, and being forced to go hunting and fishing with my father who was trying to "make a man" out of me (and failed miserably because of biology; trans). The rest of the time, my parents spent living in their own bubbles.
3) Stopping the cycle of abuse. For many of us, too, it's also about ending the cycle of abuse. Rewind 10 years and there was no way I would have been mentally able to take care of a child without beating on them. My anger was out of control, and I was fighting to unlearn to react to anger with rage and violence. That's because when I was little, I was beaten, and I knew I would beat my own kids, too. Yeah, I wouldn't have been like my mother who beat me all because a book fell out of my hand and it startled her, but I would have probably lost it over something stupid, like waking me up in the middle of the night. It's a much different story now that I've had therapy and worked through all that, but I didn't want to pass that traumatic history of abuse and my short temper onto a child.
I had two weeks home from school sick with measles + pneumonia when I was 6. My parents couldn't get that time off work, so I just stayed home by myself. The first week I was in bed, the second I played outside in my pyjamas in winter. Best week of my life at the time and for a while after though! I would never risk that with my kid now.
I would have been a latchkey kid except we just left our back door unlocked and I didn't even need a key.
I wonder how much is just the way parents/victims of crime are blamed so much these days.
Ditches, culverts, patches of woods, construction sites and abandoned houses. It was madness.
Either the street lights coming on or being called was what brought you home. Then you had a glass of milk some animal crackers and you were off to bed. It was a really magical experience that I’m sad my kid won’t have. They’ve got their own shit what will be magical too though, so that’s okay.
I grew up in a rural area. My mother had a large bell mounted to the side of the house that she would ring when it was time to come home for dinner. Sometimes I didn't hear it and she would just leave my dinner on the counter. I was NEVER in the house. I rode over a mile on the road alone down steep hills when I was seven to go see friends. We then moved to an even more rural area and I did 10 mile rides to go see friends when I was nine. On summer days, we used to walk a couple of miles to go to a convenience store and get a Slush Puppy. I used to play around fast-flowing creeks and electrical fences on the neighbors property. I grew up at the bar of a mountain range and when I was 12ish, my friends and I used to go hiking all day on steep trails with large drop-offs miles from anywhere. I would bring a Coke for the entire day. I don't think it even occurred to my parents to wonder where I was, I would just sort of wander in a dusk. This may have been the best childhood anyone has ever had...
Uhhh yeah. Basically folks went to work. We woke up whenever we wanted to. Got on our bikes and fucked off until it was quitting time for the parents. Maybe we went home for dinner. Maybe we just ate at a friends. Then depending on the parents we were either inside by dark (which is about 10pm where I live during summer) or as long as the parent knew exactly where we were going we could go out after dark.
There were three groups of parents for us growing up. Boomer shit, but no cell phones, so whatever we did, we'd end up at one of those houses. We'd use the phone to say what house we were at. A little archaic, but I can't recall any issues.
Ryan's house though.. his dad hooked it up when it came to making lunch. He worked from home and spoiled us rotten with meals he made for us.
When I was 14 in 1990, I went from philly to montreal on a bus(s), just to see the Montreal Forum. I left on Friday and came back Monday, not a single person asked where I was, just "are you ready for school tomorrow? t
I was born in 68. By the time I was in elementary school, I would routinely go over to my best friend’s house and then wander around a large neighborhood park called Hansen Park with him. This was without any adult supervision. By the time I was in High School I as riding my bike under freeways to a high school that was 3.5 miles away.
Kids are also too expensive, even with assistance. In my father’s childhood, they pumped them out as cheap farm labor. Everything is flipped now, in less than 100 years.
As a kid/teen... Not sure I'd be a functional member of society if I had to be under the eyes of an adult at all times. I'd likely have no self-sufficiency and would just manipulate others to do everything for me and never actually be able to do anything myself.
Now I manipulate others to do my stuff but am a happy person doing myself and being alone in the process.
Having people around me constantly makes me lazy because I will delegate everything to the nearest, remotely capable person.
Yes, pretty much. I cannot imagine allowing my five and seven-year-olds the kind of freedom. I enjoyed in the 80s. I don’t know if parents were just more ignorant, or they were just wasn’t that much crime and craziness as today, but I remember at seven or eight years old I used to ride my bike several blocks away to a party store on a main boulevard in the city of Detroit. There is no way in freaking how I would allow my kids to do that today.
I kind of grew up in two countries. I also grew up in Romania in the 80s and 90s. Eastern European communist countries were just different. The crappy and impressive government aside, it was generally speaking extremely safe. I would take the tram to go to school several kilometers away and walk 1 km to the tram stopped and 1 km back when I was in the fourth grade by myself. At 11 years old, I would pretty much roamed the city as I pleased. Getting on public transportation, bicycle, walking. Nobody ever bothered me or any of my friends, and we never felt unsafe.
In the summers, I’d come to the US to visit my father and grandparents. However, before third grade, I did spend a few years in the US and went through kindergarten through second grade. I remember at five years old living in the middle of the city of Detroit, for any Detroiters I’m referring to the Chene and Warren area, and us kids would ride our bicycles around the block or two or three blocks up no problem. And even then it was a pretty rough neighborhood.
The world in the USA is much safer. But we are bad at statistics and social media presents us with the modern equivalent of Halloween razor blades in apples almost hourly.
The world (at least Canada and the US) became less dangerous. The effects of leaded gas, the trauma of the Vietnam war, almost complete lack of available mh and addiction resources made the 70s and 80s a nightmare in terms of violent crime. Things are better now, even though they seem worse due to constant media exposure
I wandered off for entire weekends by myself when I was in high school in the mid-80s. Id let my one parent know I was going to hang out w friends in London for the weekend and they'd nod. I'd be off. I had a lot of leeway when my mom was alive, too, but that was mostly just wandering around, climbing trees, riding my bike wherever.
Something I don’t see mentioned much. Is myself (1982) and many others in that range raised our younger siblings. So the last thing we wanted as young adults and so on, was to raise more kids.
Brought my kids up the 80s/90s in a rural state on 14 acres surrounded by woods. They would be out in the woods and fields playing or riding bikes or building forts from sticks and it was all good. They would come home when they got hungry or needed something. Now personally, I grew up in the 60s in Baltimore and my brothers and I were outside playing with friends on the sidewalk or back alley after school or all day in the summer with no supervision from any adult. No one thought that was odd. The world has changed.
I was a homebody... super sensitive to sunlight for both my eyes and skin... but in the 80s, I had the house to myself most hours of the day for most days of the week. Mr. Rogers raised me.
When i was a kid we would play football or hockey on the street in front of my parent's house from morning until late at night. There were maybe 5 cars the whole day. Last time i visited my parents there were 26 cars driving by in 30 minutes.
I grew up in the late 80s and 90s. We were absolutely allowed to roam free. I remember rolling myself up and down the block in my little Flintstones car at 4 years old
Between 5-8 years old I was in a woods building first, tree houses, swinging on vines and roaming around a 2 mile area. This was daily from
After school till dinner.
I had a friend who ended up marrying a woman with kids. He was watching them one day and let them go outside to play in the yard. Someone called the cops because the kids were unattended.
Remember Halloween back then? First I want to say that I spent my little kid years in a small Midwestern town where Halloween was a very big deal. It felt like almost every house gave away candy and decorated their homes.
That being said I think the first time I went trick or treating was when I was 8. I went with my siblings and the oldest was 10. Basically it was normal to see groups that didn't have a chaperone. One my siblings and I got older we split from each other to go with our friends instead.
In the 6 years I lived there and trick or treated, none of us ever went with a chaperone. Whether we went together or in our own separate groups.
100%. I grew up in a town of 300, and my first 10 years were 69 to 79 and in addition to being a latchkey kid from 5 years old, I was also feral all summer long. My memories of childhood are mostly of being outside from sun up until well after dark. I have very few memories of being inside a house until I was married with a kid of my own. He was raised like I was, and he spent most of his time outside. He's 34 now and still alive.
In my opinion as a child that grew up in the 80’s and a mother of 3 varying children now. Availability of reach through cellphones, news and the internet play a high factor in why my kids aren’t raised like I was in the same town. Back in the 80’s mother just read her book and we were supposed to go home when the street lights came on.
I was raised by “the village” of older folks in the neighborhood who would keep an eye on things and call our parents if we pulled any stupid shit or got hurt. We used to go visiting them for candy and chit chat, and they had no issues occasionally letting us use their restrooms or making lunch for us.
“The village” is now our parents, and they’d sooner call the police on parents in our generation than communicate with us or give any shits about our kids. They’d probably pull a gun if someone rang their doorbell.
Yes, my parents absolutely REFUSED to give us rides ANYWHERE. They were SUPER PROUD of this, and still pat themselves on the back for forcing us to be more independent by telling us that we could go wherever we wanted as long as we were responsible for how we got there and got home.
I mean nobody was home with me... Well, babysitters. Which is also kind of insane. Some high schooler spent her summer watching me and my brother? How much did she even get paid? Because I'm telling you right now she didn't get paid enough to watch The Little Mermaid every day all summer long.
So many scabs, scars, and scares. No contact home unless at a friend’s house. In an inflatable boat in the canal. Who knows what’s under the water. Go anywhere on a bike. Jump down a huge dirt hill at a construction site and the bottom is below the water table. No way to get out if you fall. Chinese stars from the flea market. A wooden ninja sword. Quarter sticks of dynamite! What a fun childhood! How did I not die a dozen times?!
There were a lot of "runaways" back then too. Missing kids that were written off as having left home with no trace. Times were dangerous for kids back then.
I'm a pretty protective mom, and I've had the cops called on me multiple times because my kid was playing near - not in - the road. I live in a small town, not a super busy road, and right next to a 4-way stop. This cop half my age was so condescending about my kindergartener playing in our yard unsupervised for like 20 minutes.
It is IMPOSSIBLE to do anything right as a parent now.
My kid complains at overnight camp if he has to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night he has to wake up a counselor AND another kid because of “the rule of 3s.” He loves camp but he finds it really embarrassing to wake someone up because he needs to pee at 3 am, which fair. He almost didn’t want to go this summer.
My mother would kick us out of the house during the summer and tell us to come home when the fire house rang the siren at 530 pm. My friends and I would ride our bikes all over town, play wiggle ball or tennis, swim in someone’s pool, and it was fucking glorious. Those were the best days of my life.
Yeah we were told to go play outside as long as the weather was nice, be home in time for dinner, then go back out and play until the street lights came on. Only rule was call if you're at a friend's house and plan on going somewhere with their parents and them. I too really value and appreciate that time of my life.
Oh yeah. My parents both worked during the week and throughout the summer when we were out of school, they’d leave me and my little sister home alone all day. Every weekday for 3 months 😂
I was a “latch key kid” once I hit first grade. It was awesome. Spent a lot of time wandering the woods (we didn’t have computers and TV had good stuff on before you went to school and before bed).
The thing is even if I stayed home all day over the summer and my mom was around, she would chain-smoke and watch soap operas/talk shows in the living room while I entertained myself in a separate room.
If I am home all day with my 10-year-old we’re doing stuff: playing video games, building Legos, reading together, going to the flea markets and thrift stores, playing sports, etc. my wife does bigger things with him like go to the zoo and take him to the waterpark. He’s pretty much always with us and always has something fun to do (he also hangs out with friends on a regular basis, but they’re not roaming around the neighborhood like we did when we were kids).
I was babysat at a neighbor’s house who had kids my age. We were out and about in the yard, knew where the boundaries were, as young as 2,3, and 4. I’m guessing at that age, the mom might have been outside with us. But it wasn’t a lot older that we were NOT supervised- riding tricycles in the barn, playing on the swing set. One time - we were young enough to stand UNDER the edges of a hammock, 2 of us on either end, swinging the children the middle, on the hammock. I know we were unsupervised because we once went up too far, and I (who was in the hammock that time) fell out and got the wind knocked out of me. We did not tell mom. We couldn’t have been older than 4,5, and 6 to fit under the hammock.
Gen Xer here, can confirm we roamed miles from home daily as kids. Need to call home, find a payphone or go to a friend's house to place a call.
Contrast that with some cases today of parents getting in trouble by allowing their kids to go less than a block to play in a park playground. The socially acceptable range kids can roam is becoming more constrained every year.
Was just telling a story the other day about how my best friend and I would spend hours wandering through the woods with a machete we found. We were like 10-11 years old? Was totally normal back then
“Crawled around in ditches”🤣🤣 I wonder why ditches were such a fond memory of my childhood too? Catching snapping turtles in the muddy ditches, jumping bikes over muddy ditches, swimming in ditches when it rained a lot.
Beginning at age 10 in the early 90s I spent the entire summer vacation at home with my older brother (2 years older) while both parents worked full time. It was a small town, so we just wandered for hours and hours, probably miles away from home.
Yeah they let us pretty much do whatever, hell they practically kicked us out of the house after breakfast.
As far as safety. I tend to believe that the lack of social media meant our parents basically knew everyone in the neighborhood, so even though we were out of their sight, there were always eyes on us. At least in my experience if me and my friends were doing something stupid pretty much anyone in the neighborhood was free to put a stop to it, and that got you in more trouble when you got home so you learned quick to respect your elders and other people’s property
I had to be gone for more than 6 continuous hours with no check in before my mom started to worry. If I came back for lunch, from 9 am to 5pm I was a ghost..
There was a stretch of about 5-7 years when my parents had no fuckin clue where the hell I was. I was just expected to call and check in from time to time so my mom knew I was still alive.
I think exposure to all the videos of young people doing stupid things and imitating stupid things has created more fear. In the 80s and 90s I played all over, riding bikes in the forest, building jumps, forts, caves, tree forts and in the street runoff tunnels. They didn't know what we were up to and it was never a problem.
46 year old here. Out of the house at roughly 8 to 9 in the morning and be back by sundown or when the street lamps go on. Walked home about 4 miles in high school bus was optional. All school campuses were completely open K thru 12. Middle school had prefabs thay didn't have AC and space heaters in the winter.... all the bad language you can't say today was born in those days. Shit was rough, but also; kind of awesome.
Yep, i remember going on a Saturday bike ride between my city and the next (about 30 miles round trip) with a friend when we were about 14. Only rule was dont get arrested and be home when the lights come on.
As for the difference, the world is too "fuck you got mine" to let kids out on there own often. See when were allowed to roam the parents almost all coordinated. If you acted up, you can guarantee one of the other parents will daisy chain a message back to your mom or dad. Guaranteeing an ass whooping when you got home. Then there was the fact that kids rarely were alone (usually hanging out with friends), knew to not fuck with strangers and knew/obeyed the rules of the road on bicycles (partially because the police would enforce the rules of the road).
Was just thinking about this the other day...at 12 yo I used to ride my bike clear across town for tennis lessons in the summer....along major roadways the whole way. It took about 45 minutes door to door....it boggles the mind thinking back on it.
When I was a kid during summer break I'd go out on my own all across town. Head to the community center and play basketball, head to the elementary school and play on the playground, go to the bowling alley and people watch while scrounging for loose change to blow at the attached arcade. The year The Lion King came out, I saw it in theater 13 times(!!) by myself. God, I miss people carrying cash; people just left it everywhere. Every day a scavenger hunt!
Sometimes the neighborhood kids would come together and we'd bike all over town looking for an ~~abandoned house to snoop around in or egg~~.
I lived in a pretty safe and walkable neighborhood, though, with no shortage of third spaces. I still live there, actually, but there aren't as many of those spaces anymore, or as many kids. There were families everywhere in the early '90s, but now the whole place is 30-something tech workers walking their dogs at 11PM.
I definitely had some Stand By Me type adventures early on. My own grade school child wasn’t allowed out of the yard. Some of my adventures from South Carolina include exploring the banks of the Broad River (7) and eating random berries in the woods (5) both while my parents were at work. In Arizona myself and friends used to go out into the desert to see large planes take off, race jack rabbits, or try to catch scorpions (9).
I don’t know if I was lucky or kids die harder than we think but I wasn’t taking any chances with mine
I was roaming around at 8 with no supervision. Parents were not home - my mom taught me how to use the microwave to heat up a TV dinner, banquet Salisbury steak when I was like 5. Walked myself to school, which meant I was late every morning. Was almost left back one year. I honestly don’t remember when I showered, did homework, went to bed or studied. It was soo much freedom. I went to the park at like 10pm. Kind of miss those days.
I will say I’m honestly surprised I made it out of childhood. I was almost abducted and flashed many times by old men. Folks were pretty brazen back then with no cameras around.
I would play in the woods and swamps all day. I would ride my bike to any friend's house. The only real rule I had was I had to be home before the street lights on my street came on or I had to call home to let my parents' know I was eating dinner at a friend's house
I was born in '84. When I was thirteen or fourteen, my brothers were twelve and ten. My Mom got us a pass to the local outdoor pool and every day from 11:00AM until 4:30PM we would ride our bikes down to the pool and swim all summer long. Sometimes we would ride up to the school where there was a bike trail on the back grounds, or to the corner store across town. No cell phones to call us. No need to check in until dinner.
We are considered quite hands-off parents because we have our kids (one each in primary, middle, and high school) walk or bike themselves to and from school every day, and we let (and encourage!) them to roam around our idyllic little Canadian town by themselves ... and our kids don't have mobile phones to check in with us. Lots of other folks we know are not comfortable with that.
But even so, my wife won't let them go out without saying exactly where they're going and when they'll be back, and she worries if they're one minute late. It's a whole new social landscape of fear for children.
I saw this post earlier and it got me wondering: Why don't modern parents let their kids hang out alone at home? It was the best time for me. I felt comfortable and safe when no one was around. I looked forward to my family leaving for the evening just so I could feel that.
I don't have kids but I'd like to think I'd give them similar trust. Assuming they'd earned it.
As young as age 6, I remember myself and all the other kids on the street having free run of our neighbourhood; at that age, the only rule was not to go out of sight of any of your friends’ houses without letting at least one parent know, otherwise go nuts.
The kids down the street from where I live now seem to have a similar arrangement with their parents, so it isn’t an entirely lost form of parenting.
When we got older it was pretty normal to be gone for the entire day on the weekend and I was rarely asked what I got up to or where I went - it was always some combination of arcade, video store, Mcdonalds and comic store, often supplemented with a misadventure into the woods or a random field to smoke or set off firecrackers.
My parents were remarkably lenient when I was in high school because I got straight A’s.
In exchange, they let me go to punk shows most nights of the week. On Wednesdays a bunch of us would go dancing at this sketch-ass BDSM bar that played 1980s Synth Pop (they got busted eventually for serving alcohol to minors). We’d stay up to 2am, hit the Denny’s then be back at school 6 hours later.
The only rules my parents had were, Where are you going and Who are you going with? I also had to be at school the next day.
I would ride my bike home from primary school and have to wait several hours before my parents would get home, but I “wasn’t old enough” to be given a key, so I was expected to just kick around in the yard or something until someone came home and let me into the house. I got into big trouble a few time when I was a bit older and figured out how to pop open one of the back windows and climb inside (my own home).
In the summers we left when we got up amd ate something, came back at dinner to check in, eat, amd back out the door til 9 or so unless we were staying the night with a friend or camping. This is in small Harlan County Kentucky. We literally played sports with whatever was in season and then biked around to hell and back.
Best days of my life amd its sad to think kids these days are missing out.
I was just telling my husband how my cousins and I were out in the neighborhood with no supervision at like 3 and 4 years old. I remember getting in trouble at 3 because my 2 year old cousin threw wood at a neighbor's car and I got a spanking because I was older and didn't stop him. I may or may not ask be bitter about that.
I now have a 4 year old and I wouldn't let him go out unsupervised to wander for the afternoon, and we live in a pretty safe area with lots of other little kids.
We weren't allowed in the house on a nice day during the weekends or summer. The only rules we had were "don't set anything on fire and be back by the time the street lights come on." Rarely did we follow rule #1.
I can't get my kid to go play outside. I tell her to all the time and she just looks at me like I have some mental health problem, which I do, but still
When I was a kid, my parents would drop me off at the library for a few hours while they did whatever around town. When my son was about seven, someone threatened to call CPS because I was browsing in the nonfiction section while he sat reading in the children’s section. I could literally see him from where I was standing, but social norms have really changed that much.
Yes. I roamed the neighborhood on my bike from after school till dinner time, and then from after dinner to when it got dark. Riding around with friends on bikes miles away from home, having a mini adventure every day.
Even when we were all home, we were expected to entertain ourselves. I was a voracious reader so I was usually in my room with a book. I really don't remember my parents playing with us or directly supervising us most of the time. We lived in a place where finished basements were common so if you weren't in your room, you were in the basement. I still have nightmares of my mom hollering my name whenever she wanted something and didn't want to walk up or down the stairs.
For summer, my mom would work an hour away and I would hang out with my friend climbing trees, riding bikes around unknown parts of the neighborhood, swimming in the lake, and eating fudgesicles all without adult supervision
Yes the numbers are declining but I think 0% of them are because they have to "watch" their kids more than they did in the 1900's. Do people not have kids because they don't want that responsibility for sure, but not due the need to watch them more.
My parents had no idea where I was from 7am when they left for work, until 5 or 6pm when they got home. After school and during the summer I was often miles away from home, braving busy city streets on my bike to get to friends' houses. They had no idea. Honestly, they didn't care to know. So long at reports of my misconduct didn't come back to them, the assumption was that my activities were not worth fretting about.
If I wasn’t playing a Nintendo game I was outside playing street hockey or roaming the neighborhood with the other neighbor kids. I was home for meals or video games and sleep that was it.
We had a coffee shop in this old Victorian home in my small town back in the early/mid-90s, before Starbucks ruined everything, and on Friday and Saturday nights every kid 13-20 or so was there at some point, if even just to figure out their plans for the night.
I was left home alone every day in 1st and 2nd grade from 315pm to 5pm until my mom would get home from work (my dad wouldn’t get home until much later). This was totally fine. I would get home, grab a slice of cheese, hop on my bike and ride to my fiends house and play in the back yard. It just was how it was.
I lived in Colorado in the mountains. My dog and I would regularly play hide and seek for hours. It was a mining town so there were tons of mines with fools gold in them and would bring a bucket to collect some then sell it to shops to sell it to tourists. I had to of been 8-10. After school I'd walk home and my parents didn't get home until 6 pm. Would make a stop at the candy store buy some .03 jolly ranchers and other candies for .50. Then watch nickelodeon. Some friends and I built a tree fort and hung out in it. We found pieces of wood at night at construction sites and nails and created walkways to each fort in the trees. It collapsed after the first rain/ wind and we were so pissed. Was a fun week though.
I just said in another comment that I attended a showing of Antropophagus at a video store with a group of girls from school, so yeah, we were definitely out there unchecked.
To be fair, my parents made a point of moving to a suburb frequently called one of the safest in America, but also we did get to largely roam free, within reason. Popping down the street or riding my bike through the neighborhood. Sure, I still have a chip in a front tooth because I was swinging on a swing set and seeing how high I could go and then flip backwards out of the swing and on my last of several tries I landed my face deadass into my knee and a little parental intervention could have prevented that. But also sometimes we would just jump off the highest piece of playground equipment we could find when our parents were around, so can't really put any real blame on my mom there.
According to my parents, my eldest relatives, and others their age, kids were straight up NOT ALLOWED in the house until either dinnertime, or the streetlights turned on. Then you better get your ass home as quickly as possible lol.
There has been a bit of research about how parenting changed beginning in the 80's becoming overprotective. Jonathan Haidt, an NYU sociologist has done a lot of work on parenting, social media and the effect on kids born after '95.
CahlikCrush@reddit
the moment I came home from school. I changed into street clothes, got on my bike, and rode around town with my buddies. I wouldn't return home till the street lights turned on. Good times!!!
wtfover@reddit
"Come home when the streetlights come on", we all heard it.
my-username-checks@reddit
I was like 1st grade (early 80s) and rode my bike all over town, would venture out far from home. At 10(mid 80s) in the Bay Area I would ride my bike miles from home. Parents had no idea where I was.
AceOfStace27@reddit
i mean, we had a handful of places we could be - the park, the crick, our cousin's, the library, etc - and if we were going anywhere else, we had to call home and ask permission. at least theoretically. basically, the rule was, if they looked for u the usual places and couldnt find u, you were in big trouble. this almost never happened tho. we were essentially feral.
lateral_moves@reddit
When I was 5 and my sister was 6, my mother would lock us out of the condo in the summer around 9am and my Dad wouldn't be home until 8pm. Mom got home at 11pm. We'd stay in the condo, play in its field, or go to friends condos to play. Never had any scary or weird moments. When we moved and I was 7, we walked to school and home and we're told if someone knocks, to not answer and if someone calls, to say mom was in the bathroom. By the time I was 10, we could come and go as we pleased until it got dark.
Eephusblue@reddit
I don’t know if it’s because the world is actually more dangerous or our parents were just less aware but we were really just left to take care of ourselves in the 80s. My mom often had to work late and it was go home, make a snack, do your homework, then go play outside
MisRandomness@reddit
I think the world would actually be safer for roaming kids now, since everything can be recorded or tracked. We were just out there free range. Knowing damn well that guy across the street with the cookies was probably a perv…but still playing with no parents watching us.
DasKittySmoosh@reddit
the biggest safety net that parents had in the 80's that many parents and neighborhoods are lacking now is knowing most of the neighborhood - knowing that just because you don't directly have eyes on the kids out and about but that you can call Jenny's mom on the corner who can tell you she just talked with Shauna across the park who was just across the street with Jan and all the kids had just dropped their bikes for popcicles and hose guzzling for a bit, and maybe she will turn on the sprinklers for an hour
we do not have the community power that our parents had
kalvinescobar@reddit
That's a huge factor.. but the other thing about Xennials is that we were also right in the middle of the shifts in freedom and community oversight..
Especially in the 90s and early 2000s.. throw technology in the mix where the kids didn't have to call the HOUSE PHONE and say "Hi Mrs. Escobar, is Kalvin there?"..
Random side story.. I had a pretty deep voice for being 13, and called my girlfriend at the time.. her dad called my mom later that day to make sure I wasn't some 25 year old..
edwigenightcups@reddit
I graduated in ‘99 and I’m not sure how because I often just…didn’t go to school for the last few years
Top_Bumblebee5510@reddit
We had gr 13 when I graduated in Ontario and as soon as I turned 18 I would just go to the secretary and say I am reporting myself absent for the day. My friend's stepfather had a busted out old van and we would pile into and head out. My parents never asked about homework or exams once during high school.
CourtAlert8679@reddit
Lol I was just having this conversation with my daughter. She was talking about texting her friend Charlie to ask a question about math homework and we got on the subject of how back in the day she would have had to call Charlie on his HOUSE PHONE and you had no idea who was going to answer it. God forbid it was one of his younger siblings who would then run through the house yelling “Char-lie! There’s someone on the phone for you and it s a GIIII-IIIRRRLLLL!” Or worst of all, his dad, who would chuckle a little bit and then say “May I say who’s calling? Oh, ok Olivia, I’ll see if he’s upstairs….”
She was looking at me with widening eyes the whole time before coming to the conclusion that all of this sounded horrific.
throwawayallthewhat@reddit
Yep. I for sure got into trouble but in my case it was semi-calculated. I knew someone would find out. I knew my mom would know before I got home. I don't know my neighbors well enough for that level of communication.
epheisey@reddit
Seems to me like the reason parents knew most of the neighborhood because of their kids, not the other way around.
jaymzx0@reddit
Yep.
"Who were you riding bikes with?"
"Wang, from school"
"What's his mom's name?"
Forced to turn over the kid's phone number so she can call and say hi to the mom.
Find out the kids not named Wang but that's just what the kids are school call him and he leans into it. Turns out his real name is Charlie, which is an unfortunate name for a young Vietnamese refugee kid in the 80s, so that's why they call him Wang.
True story. I forgot how racist the 80s were.
Indubitalist@reddit
I know my neighbors. I really think this is a situational rather than generational thing.
thewayshesaidLA@reddit
Agreed. We know a lot of people in our subdivision and have good relationships with our immediate neighbors.
RazorRamonio@reddit
I smiled and nodded at my neighbor the other day. It was our first interaction in probably 10-15 years.
Dangerous-Elk-6362@reddit
I think the biggest danger for kids has always been car accidents, and the world is definitely not safer for pedestrians on that front. People pay less attention, drive and accelerate faster, have bigger cars that are higher up (making it harder to see small people), and are less used to seeing kids and watching out for them.
bigdickedbat@reddit
I’ve been hit twice by a car while riding my bike as a child. Way more drinking and driving back then!
chamrockblarneystone@reddit
The roads where I grew up were so empty. We kids owned the place.
I moved in to a new suburban neighberhood with lots of kids with bicicyles, skateboards and electric everything. They look like they are having a ball, but the streets are packed with parked and moving cars. I say a little wish for them every day.
The streets where I grew up are empty of cars and kids. Everyone is retired and refuses to move out. Looks lonely to be a kid there.
SouthCoastGardener@reddit
I live in the same neighborhood now as when I was growing up. It’s near a college. As a kid I had no trouble walking or biking anywhere at anytime.
As a college aged adult I was almost hit multiple times as I tried to cross the street to or from the college, by people running red lights or just failing to come to a complete stop before the crosswalk. This includes a bus.
Now as a middle aged adult there is so much traffic and so many people with no regards for anyone else I won’t let my child play outside alone. It’s too dangerous.
lilacsmakemesneeze@reddit
Add to that 10-15 yr olds on e-bikes. Where I live they are a freakin time bomb unregulated. I almost hit a kid at a four way stop who was on the sidewalk blocked by fencing going 20+ mph and not stopping. It’s nuts.
Freebolotamus@reddit
Drivers run red lights and stop signs every light cycle at the intersection near me.Its hard to believe the cops aren't enforcing it more.Not using turn signals is another one.
TapAway755@reddit
It's probably been about 10 years since I've seen a cop driving and not looking down at their phone.
Tiffylani@reddit
Same! Live in the same neighborhood that I grew up in and the amount of morons driving is ridiculous. Even with 2 flagged caution signs in front of my house I still don't let my kids go far. I definitely did not have this problem when I was a kid.
grandma-activities@reddit
Never had a near-miss with a car as a pedestrian/cyclist until I set foot on my college campus. And it's in the same city where I went to middle and high school!
beta_1457@reddit
I think it really depends on where you're located too. I know the suburbs I grew up in have rapidly expanded over the last 20-30 years. Definitely not as safe for children roaming around in terms of vehicles.
RepresentativeRun71@reddit
I was hit by a cop car when riding my bike to school in 1995. Back in 1992 I was riding to school with a friend. Saw him get plowed by a 50 mph car right front of me.
Van-Goghst@reddit
Did the cop get paid leave or just a high five?
RepresentativeRun71@reddit
Pretty sure it was just a high five. I wasn’t hurt bad, but my bike was wrecked. My mom didn’t want to hire a lawyer because she had a bad meth addiction at the time.
Van-Goghst@reddit
That’s awful, I’m sorry to hear that
grandma-activities@reddit
Did your friend... survive?
ancientastronaut2@reddit
Now it's texting and driving instead.
Inc-Roid@reddit
Yeah, I had three friends get hit by cars when we were younger. Two while riding bikes and the other while we were playing hide and go seek in the neighborhood.
mizushimo@reddit
Hard agree, and the cars weren't as safe so fatalities were way more common if you were in the car that crashed (especially for kids, who would often get thrown out a window because seat belts hadn't been widely adopted yet).
The_Abjectator@reddit
More drinking and driving then but the amount of texting/social media while driving is crazy high now.
TeutonJon78@reddit
Probably actually more risk now since that's 24/7 instead of mostly late at night.
FirehawkLS1@reddit
Yeah I got hit by a van when the guy blew the stop sign as I was crossing. He had a bunch of cages in the back of his van. To this day I can still tell when it's going to rain because I was pedaling when he hit my left leg as I was crossing the intersection. That was 35 years ago.
-Boston-Terrier-@reddit
Child pedestrians killed by cars is almost non-existent today. The NY Times article I just looked at shows that it’s down 93% since 1979.
Of course I suspect a lot of statistics like that are just declines in kidnappings probably have a lot more to do with the fact that kids barely go outside anymore.
Dangerous-Elk-6362@reddit
That and better medical treatment possibly. But interesting and good to know.
Snoo93550@reddit
This is for adult pedestrians too.
ThrustTrust@reddit
Good insight. I agree Less small neighborhoods and quiet streets probably play a big role in this change.
Consistent-Camp5359@reddit
I had a friend get hit by a car in 2nd grade. He ran after a ball and as a car was coming he ran and hit his head on the curb. He died. My little brain didn’t know how to process death.
frontendben@reddit
That’s literally the main reason for r/fuckcars.
Pizzasaurus-Rex@reddit
Its how most of my classmates have died.
shhwest@reddit
Nah, the biggest danger now is guns.
jeff77k@reddit
Nah, even cars are safer now; many new cars come with a forward-facing camera that will detect crossing pedestrians at low speeds. Guns are the biggest danger to kids now (guns are not more dangerous than they used to be; everything else has just gotten safer).
GenghisConnieChung@reddit
Not to mention there’s a lot more traffic/vehicles on the road now than there was back then.
brayonthescene@reddit
This is the real answer to all of it imo. So many more people and more cars makes running around the neighborhood way more dangerous then it ever was as back then!
motion_thiccness@reddit
The number one killer of kids in America right now is gun-related death. But child abduction is actually down from when we were kids. I'm not sure where car accidents fall on the list, but I'd also assume fairly high, and probably higher on the list in non-American places that have better gun laws.
Derelicticu@reddit
Unless you live in the United States, then it's been firearms for a while now.
Dangerous-Elk-6362@reddit
Surprising and horrific, although that seems to include suicides, so it's partly not comparable to the background risk of letting your kid run around.
sbotzek@reddit
Right, but kids never going out on their own will depress car deaths. This is one of the tricky things about "its safer than ever" - yes, and how much of that is because parents keep their kids on a leash?
MisRandomness@reddit
Yes this is very true.
DBE113301@reddit
Yep. I'm a runner (do local 5k's), and every running season from March to October, I nearly get hit while training by some moron who doesn't think he/she needs to stop at a stop sign. A couple years ago, a couple were driving in a convertible, and I had to jump out of the way to avoid getting hit as I was going across the crosswalk. The woman driving the car said, "Oh my God. I didn't see him." In response, her husband/boyfriend yelled, "Did you see the stop sign?!" I couldn't help but laugh.
Tiny-Reading5982@reddit
Car accidents or people they know
Megaspore6200@reddit
I was just in Berlin for a month, kids there are pretty much leading adult lives. Just walking around getting snaks and shopping alone, hanging out. I think this helicoptering may just be an American phenomenon.
dontbajerk@reddit
It's not. Almost any "American" social phenomenon will at least be somewhat present in the other Anglo nations, especially the UK.
Also, dense cities in general have this less. The area where kids spend the most time outside their own homes in the USA is New York City, where the stats have barely changed in the last 30 years.
Indubitalist@reddit
Wouldn’t surprise me. We’re inundated with news that emphasizes dangers. The stories that get the most attention are the ones about violence, explosions, various crimes, and dangerous weather.
SuedeVeil@reddit
The world objectively is safer.. but fear is prominent. .fear mongering is everywhere now.. guilt tripping etc.. back in the day our parents only paid attention when some kid went missing on the news and then they'd all of a sudden make us come home earlier for a bit. Or there was news of a killer on the loose. So if it wasn't on the 6 o'clock news or the morning newspaper they didn't think about it. But now it's everywhere.. shaming parents for not being on top of everything for being neglectful just because they let their kids have freedom.. something changed in the 90s when my younger sister was born because she didn't get much freedom at all my dad and her mom had a tighter leash on her. I think there were some high profile cases of child molesters /rapists etc in that day.. plus her mom worked in a prison so she saw the worst of the worst.
pzanardi@reddit
People drive 35/45 mph in my residential area. Growing up cars would go 5-10mph around houses and they were small. Now you get hit by an escalade you are dead, period.
hamsterfolly@reddit
But think of the liability, your kids out there breaking other people’s stuff on camera
No_Command_8477@reddit
I agree with this take. I got a house key in the 5th grade and started walking around. Got a bike in the 7th grade started covering more ground.
This isn't too different from the several kids I see riding around on eBikes. For the kids who still go outside, they discover far more stuff than I ever would - they are basically on motorcycles now. And all of this can be monitored by the parents
Blackbird136@reddit
I fully agree with this!! I was a latchkey kid to a home that got burglarized when I was 10 and I was the first one home to that. Traumatized me for years…like that paranoia stayed with me well into college. And my mom at the time was just like “well, shit happens!”
I think the only thing that may be more prevalent now than early to mid-90s is hardcore drug use. Especially pills and heroin. That’s without looking at statistics though…just kinda based on what I see and hear. I feel like in the 90s it was really only rockstars doing heroin lol.
mizushimo@reddit
I would say that Crack was really bad in the 80s-90s but only in certain places. Rural areas got hit REALLY hard by the meth epidemic in the 00s though.
BloodyRightToe@reddit
This is correct. Life has never been safer. Helicopter parents exist because they can, not because they are needed.
1800_Mustache_Rides@reddit
Totally. I could put a GOS tracker on my 9 year old now, if kids actually hung around outdoors anymore. Back in the 80s packs of kids just roamed around the parking lots, railway tracks, parks, store front, t's so funny to think back to that time and I was completely independent going around the neighborhood at 7 and 8 years old on our bikes and we just came home when it started getting dark. We knew to stay away from the grumpy old fuck and number 10 and the perv that used to offer us candy out of his van. It's so wild to think of especially as a mom now.
culturebarren@reddit
It's also safer in general. Violent crime has steadily decreased over the last 30 years or so
ToonTroll@reddit
I don’t think that it used to be more dangerous back then, but i think the chances of a kid being a victim are greater.
I had a friend say he was going to raise his kid to do what he did (go ride his bike around, be out of the house, etc) but the problem is, that kid will be alone. We had friends that went to do the same thing, in groups or at least one other person. That was the culture when we grew up. If something were to happen to one kid out of all kids that are out around the neighborhood, the likelihood of it being one of us back then was a lot lower than it being a kid now. You can’t have your child convince their friends and you try to convince their parents to do the same.
And with zero chance of danger, the kid will just be out there peddling around alone for no reason and having no fun because all their friends are waiting for them to play video games online 😅
lcsulla87gmail@reddit
The world is in fact much safer
nwbrown@reddit
The world is objectively less dangerous.
Parents today are just pussies.
Spamberguesa@reddit
It's not just that. Depending on where you live, you run a real risk of getting the cops on you if you're not breathing down the back of your child's neck 24/7. Not that long ago I read a story of a mother who was arrested for letting her 10-year-old walk a mile down the road. Every so often you also read about some parent who go the cops called because their children were playing in the front yard unsupervised. It's not like that where I live, but I'm in a pretty rural area without a lot of Karens who can't mind their own business.
DirtyBirdDawg@reddit
Yep, same here. When I was in 3rd grade, my best friend and I would come back to my house after school, let ourselves in, eat snacks, and start doing our homework (by which I mean watching all the Disney afternoon cartoons).
On weekends, we'd hop on our bikes and be out of the house literally all day. Did our parents know where we were? Probably.
unmystakable@reddit
The monsters were all alone back then. Now they have chat rooms to teach each other more monsterous things and bolster each other. It was much much safer then.
Sausage_Queen_of_Chi@reddit
Laws have also changed, I didn’t know until my friend told me that he legally he can’t leave his daughter at home alone “for an unreasonable amount of time” until she’s 14. I don’t know what the law is for being unsupervised outside the home.
pertrichor315@reddit
Overall the world is safer now than it ever has been before. Especially from accidental death or injury. Cars being safer (seatbelts, airbags, crumple zones, etc.), everything being less flammable, better public awareness.
CensoryDeprivation@reddit
The world is safer; schools not so much.
dontbajerk@reddit
Schools are safer overall too actually.
Tiny-Reading5982@reddit
I don't understand how it happens either. My kids schools are like fortresses. Parents can't come in. Metal detector at every entrance. Bookbags are searched and high schoolers can't have lockers.
genivae@reddit
Because those are performative/reactionary 'solutions', and people will find a way, when they're really determined to do something. The real way to stop it is prevention - a combination of mental health awareness/assistance and gun control to remove access.
The most effective prevention programs start early with "social and emotional learning" to teach how to regulate their emotions, help kids recognize when their friends need help, removing the stigma of getting that help, and instilling a sense of community and inclusion so the motivating resentment can't thrive. Unfortunately, SEL programs are now being labeled 'DEI' and funding has been reduced because of it, so it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Tiny-Reading5982@reddit
Yes there needs to be a way to control guns in general but I'm thinking a lot of these schools are lacking in safety too.
genivae@reddit
There's only so much that can be done - and there is no way that is 100% foolproof. It's the logical fallacy that surely, as an individual, something could've been done which means it couldn't happen to you - but a lot of these events happen at schools with every kind of security already in place.
HeyCarpy@reddit
To your last point, I knew of kids that were killed 1) on train tracks, 2) climbing into a power station and being electrocuted, 3) climbing and falling off a water tower, and 4) falling through thin ice and drowning. This was in my first ~10 years of life, living in a relatively small city in the 80s. I’m just realizing now, reading this thread that this stuff doesn’t happen anymore (in my andecdotal bubble, anyway).
shohei_heights@reddit
If you’re in the car it’s safer. If you’re outside the car it’s vastly less safe to be hit by a car now than at any time in the past. Most trucks and SUVs are too tall and make it impossible to see children passing in front of them.
SanchoPandas@reddit
yup. pedestrian and bike deaths have been climbing rapidly since 2009.
pertrichor315@reddit
You’re not wrong. Pedestrian deaths are actually increasing from the low point abut 15 years ago. Due to likely distracted pedestrians and drivers, and poor urban planning safety.
But a lot of those deaths are adults.
Appropriate-Neck-585@reddit
Yep. It SEEMS more dangerous because the crimes that do happen are either captured on smartphones and or blasted out over social media.
shed1@reddit
The world is much, much safer now. The world is also much more litigious now, so.
Kalathefox@reddit
This. The amount of people willing to take others to courts over stupid things! Ex: Tommy fell off his bike in your driveway and broke his arm. I'm suing you because it happened on your property. Nevermind the fact that he was trying to pop wheelies to impress your daughter. What do you mean your countersuing for child endangerment and emotional damage? .... it's rediculous. Everyone wants an easy buck at someone else's expense...
And tbh? I blame McDonald's coffee lady for that
shed1@reddit
Nah, that lady tried to settle for her expected medical expenses, which were around $20k. McDonald's offered $800. At that point, she decided to retain an attorney.
During the trial, McDonald's lied about the reasoning for the temperature of their coffee. It also came to light that McDonald's had already settled for around $500k from 700 other complaints about their coffee's temperature.
Kalathefox@reddit
I'm not saying she was wrong to do so in the slightest. What it did though was show people hey if I get hurt and can blame it on someone else I'm gonna make money.
brandt-money@reddit
No, it's because boomers will call the cops if they see kids playing outside. The same boomers who post memes on Facebook about kids being glued to tablet screens.
thehotmegan@reddit
its so strange being a cusp genx/millenial bc my mom is a boomer and so are all her friends.
she literally has a massive bell in the front yard (FL) that she would ring when she wanted us to come home lol. she never knew where we were at or what we were up to but she bitches about this constantly. they cant see the irony in their actions.
barnegat54@reddit
Boomer here. We live in a community next to a mid-size Midwest city where we raised our own kids back in the 80's and 90's. Tons of kids in the neighborhood. I love hearing them play, bouncing basketballs, seeing them ride their bikes together to school, hearing their shrieks from the school playground a few blocks away. We're not all grumpy. And sidebar, when I was a kid, there were those crabby people too, some old, some not so old. Not sure it's a generational thing.
divide_by_hero@reddit
...while they themselves are also glued to their phones and TVs 24/7
FirehawkLS1@reddit
Heck meanwhile I'm just happy to see the kids in my neighborhood playing outside. I even told one of them that. Yeah the kid was bouncing a soccer ball off our cars in my driveway, and I went out there to tell him that I did not want him to be in our driveway doing that (I was nice about it, I talked in a normal tone) but I also mentioned to him that I was happy to see him playing outside, just to be safer and respectful of other people's stuff (same kid was running across the street as cars were going down the street, maybe 15 feet in front of them).
Significant-Rush-129@reddit
Yep, it’s kind of a Catch 22. The world is safer because we are more aware of all the bad stuff. But because we are aware we are more paranoid, thus have a harder time letting our kids roam free.
graveybrains@reddit
The world is safer because we aren't making the whole planet breathe lead and abortion was legal for a while. What we're aware of is increasingly not real.
Reggaeton_Historian@reddit
I'd spend entire Saturday out on the street from like 9 AM to 4:00 PM sometimes.
These days, parents force their kids to sit at a brewery for 3-4 hours and shove an iPad in front of them.
Mountain-Fox-2123@reddit
The world is generally safer than in the past, with long-term trends showing declines in violence, poverty, and conflict-related deaths. However, new and more complex threats have emerged, and recent years have seen an increase in conflict-related deaths in some regions, leading to a more mixed and uncertain picture.
The world is demonstrably safer in many key ways, particularly compared to the past, due to long-term declines in violence and improvements in living standards. However, a more nuanced view acknowledges that the nature of threats has changed and recent trends show concerning increases in conflict deaths in specific areas.
SevenDos@reddit
The world is much, much safer since then. Crime and murder rates are down significantly. But our access to news has been increased exponentially. Which is why it sometimes feels less safe. My parents really had no idea where I was or what I was doing unless it was dinner time. I know where my kids are and what they are doing all the time.
Fabulous-South-9551@reddit
I wish I had a sibling so bad when I was a kid. I was home alone all the time. Now I’m an introvert who prefers to stay home than go out.
Evocatorum@reddit
We are the latchkey Generation.
throwawayhbgtop81@reddit
The world, or at least the US, is objectively less dangerous now. Crime stats show that even with the post-lockdowns pulse in violent crime that I'm certainly not denying hapoened, it's still less than the 80s and 90s.
Camden NJ, one of the US's most violent cities, actually had its first murder free summer in like 60 years.
We are well programmed to think everything is more dangerous now than when we were kids but it's statistically not the case. I also think the social structure has changed quite a bit. I rode the SEPTA bus alone as a child, but the bus driver looked out for the kids and so did the little old ladies. My stop was toward the end of the route so sometimes the driver would go to the end and turn around, and let me off at my stop so I wouldn't have to cross a major street. I don't know if you'll get that kind of service now.
Also we weren't supposed to play in the woods next to the house but we could roam up and down all the alleys we wanted to play with the neighborhood kids. We still played in the woods anyway haha. And we had to be back before the streetlights came on.
red286@reddit
It's pretty global, excluding places that have had major social upheavals. For developed countries (and less developed countries), overall rates of violent crime have dropped almost continuously since the mid-1990s. A large portion of it can be attributed to banning lead in gasoline and plumbing. You can actually see a correlation between the banning of lead in gasoline and plumbing and a drop in violent crime rates that starts about 10-15 years later.
Pattison320@reddit
Roe v Wade was 73, I've heard that attributed to a drop in crime. Leaded gas wasn't banned until 96. Leaded pipes stopped for new construction in 86. My mom lived in a house with lead pipes until 2010. A friend of mine bought a house that still had leaded pipes in 2020.
ObviousSalamandar@reddit
The world is much safer now.
frontendben@reddit
It’s the cars. In the UK for example, there are more than double the number of cars on the road compared to the 80s (36m vs 16.9m - an increase of 19.1m). That’s why kids can’t play outside. Boomers turned out the space we used for play over to the storage of cars.
stealthyliz@reddit
24 hour news with missing persons stories as filler.
RazorRamonio@reddit
The world was 100% not safer back then. Anybody saying otherwise is straight tripping. It only seems more dangerous now because of the internet.
RabbitNumber8@reddit
It’s definitely safer now by a wide margin! The rise of cable news is a big part of this. Every bad thing is broadcast nationwide.
dancindead@reddit
It's ten pm. Do you know where your childrwn are? https://youtube.com/shorts/KVz0qSBwlU0?si=htm0J9gbDXHLyyj7
heartbrokebonebroke@reddit
Exactly. Our parents had to be reminded we existed. I got home from school at 2:45 my single parent barely ever made it home before 7:30. I got that bruise carrying a laundry basket and hit the door frame (no, I got it riding my bike — a perfectly serviceable pink bike for a 10-year-old girl — down a giant dirt mountain in a construction site). Four days a week I rode my bike to dance studio (where my mom or her current boyfriend would pick me up at 8:30 p.m. (no special lists of who can/can't pick up your kid from places), two days a week to piano lessons, from third-seventh grade (when we moved).
My mom's rule was basically "Don't call me at work unless you're dead."
EquivalentPain5261@reddit
I also feel like nowadays with the internet we hear all the terrible things that happen every minute of the day. Back then we only had the news and the paper and if it wasn’t big, it would only be national and we might miss it.
raven00x@reddit
alternatively, go home, have a snack, play outside, tell your mom you did your homework at school, play outside more.
klutzosaurus-sex@reddit
The crime rate now is way less than it was during the serial killer heyday of the seventies when I was like 5 and 6 running around with nothing but a be home by dark.
Warm-Stand-1983@reddit
An actual reason was this all happening was during this time more and more women entered the workforce while at the same time society really wasn't ready to look after the kids with both parents working. There were no summer camps yet so it birthed a generation of key latch kids who yes... just roamed the neighborhood all summer coming home before the street lights came on.
PopcornDrift@reddit
The world was much more dangerous in the 80s than it is now. At least in the US it is. Violent crime has been mostly declining for the last 40 years
Evening_Chime@reddit
The world was plenty dangerous back then, but before the internet everyone just lived in optimism and thought everything was good.
The internet was like someone lifting a stone or a log in the forest and looking at what was going on underneath.
I'm still not sure that was good for us as a species
Odd_Suggestion6168@reddit
You were 2.5 times more likely to die before the age of 19 in 1980 and four times more likely in 1970. Rate of serious injury while cycling alone was 6 times higher in the 1980s compared to the 2020s.
thesupineporcupine@reddit
I tend to think it’s a little bit of both. I think that the media didn’t quite hype every single incident in the city, there was no social media for ad hoc independent journalist to post every single crime around the city, and I feel that overall, the journalistic fear mongering was at a lower level. But I firmly believe that our parents were also more ignorant.
zerocoolforschool@reddit
The world seems more dangerous because we hear about every little bad thing that happens, but the odds are insanely low that your kid is gonna get kidnapped by a stranger or shot. But all it takes is 365 kids, one per day and it makes people think that it’s a massive problem.
Example - last time I checked a couple years ago there was something like 2000 people shot by police in a year, which seems high, but there’s almost a million cops in the US. so not even 1% of cops are shooting people. We are talking 0.002% but 2000 is enough to make people think it’s happening all the time.
Ok_Researcher_9796@reddit
The world was far more dangerous statistically in the 80s than it is now.
DoctorWaluigiTime@reddit
It happens today still too. Folks grown up just assume it doesn't happen / want to reminisce about being a child, because they don't personally experience it.
Kids can and do roam. Sure they can have a phone on them, but there's no mandate to helicopter parent even today.
PackageNorth8984@reddit
We had it easier than our parents though. At least we only had to walk uphill in the snow one way.
protossaccount@reddit
I know parents are tripping out now but I think it’s safer now. Kids can have tracking devices on them and plus we have cameras. In city it’s dangerous but I would image it’s better than it used to be.
Entire-Order3464@reddit
The world is literally less dangerous. Violent crime peaked in 1992 and has trended steadily downward ever since (small uptick in 2020) then back down again in recent years. It's literally 1/3 of the level it was when we were kids.
Rwhite5440@reddit
The life of latchkey kids
tastysharts@reddit
I made my own dinner monday through friday starting around 12. But, I'm an excellent cook now so I took it as a plus. I was also made to do my own laundry and could walk to a store for supplies if needed. My mom was home 8pm every night and the rules were, that I be home too, the house be picked up and I have fed myself and done my homework. My mother never checked my homework once or did any reports/science projects for me either.
I honestly attribute who I am now to my hyper independent youth.
NerdSupreme75@reddit
If we parented the way our parents did, we'd have CPS called on us. I've always felt that the nosy neighbor calling CPS over some dumb reason was a much greater threat to my child's safety than any boogeyman.
mizushimo@reddit
Kids basically aren't trusted to go unsupervised anymore until they are in their preteens. I think it's a combination of paranoia over safety and a distrust of their child's skills to make good decisions and fend for themselves. Hell, some places have laws that say that you can't leave a child home alone if they are under 14.
slyiscoming@reddit
Not more dangerous just less regulated. Now days parents are expected to keep a closer eye on their kids.
Slugwheat@reddit
I almost got kidnapped twice. Didn’t tho. Learned lessons. When we were all kids, we were dumb, but not as dumb as we think we were back then.
YoohooCthulhu@reddit
The world is not more dangerous. It really is crazy
myballsiche@reddit
I found out later that my folks knew were I was. Just because u don't see them doesn't mean they are not there.
Plus, other folks knew what was going on. We weren't as slick as we thought.
PersianCatLover419@reddit
I think it is because today in some places if kids are outside alone parents get CPS and police called on them, and it does not matter if the parents allow them to go places alone.
Also many parents Gen Jones, Gen X, Xennial, and older Millennial will internalize their kids, teens, and adult children, and want them not to be average independent kuds, teens, or adults but completely dependent on their parents.
I have elder millennial lady friends I dated when we were teens, their kids never go outside alone not even to walk their dog or get the mail. A xennial friend has a son that is 6 and he told me "My son is way too young to start cleaning, learning cooking, etc." I did not tell him I started when I was 3. Gen X friends call their adult kids "my babies!" and it is not the moms or ladies that do this.
invisible_panda@reddit
I don't think the world is more dangerous. The 24/7 news cycle makes us think that
TeutonJon78@reddit
Probably the same level of danger. It's just that with the internet you learn about all of the bad cases when in the 70-90s you only heard about gigantic issues (like priests) or your local molester.
And people forget that most child abusers are people known to the child or family members, so being a helicopter doesn't really help there.
But I found this video interesting that they've found they have made playgrounds to safe now and it's creating anxiety in kids. But no thanks to thise crazy ass early playgrounds.
https://youtu.be/jNrSMLUi3ps?si=YuZlA5NIZkJxraUd
lollipop-guildmaster@reddit
The world is significantly safer -- by double digits. It's just now you can look online to see how many sex offenders live in your neighborhood.
OliviaWG@reddit
The world is much safer today than when I was growing up in the 80's, crime peaked in the 90's and has been going down since: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/#:~:text=The%20FBI%20data%20also%20shows,in%20some%20years%2C%20including%20recently.
Grasshop@reddit
You don’t even have to go back to the 80’s. I was a kid in the 90’s and early 00’s and I feel like it was like that too.
Jeuungmlo@reddit
I think part of it is also that parents are now more able to be worried.
Looking at my sibling's kids so do they all have phones and are generally supposed to texr parents know where they are and my siblings' contact them often. My sister's kids even have smart watches which lets my sister and her husband see their location via GPS.
On the other hand, when I was a kid so did my parents not really have any way to contact me (I got my first phone when I was 14yo) and of course no way to track me. I had a time I was supposed to be at home, but they knew that I might be one hour late. Hence, worrying at any point before one hour after my time was just pointless. What were they supposed to do anyway, call all my friends until they found me? Better to just wait with the worry.
PeppermintEvilButler@reddit
They used to show tv commercials about not goin with strangers in the park or getting in cars and to set up passwords with your parents. Not necessarily safer but there's more technology out there today watching around the world
FreeElleGee@reddit
I had to call my mom when I got home from school so she knew I was still alive. But after that, I could be anywhere until my parents got home (around 7pm).
flytingnotfighting@reddit
I know from my personal experience it was my mom working her ass off and not home, and when I was at my fathers he could not possibly care less than he did. My grandparents had a small acreage near a river. It was HEAVEN we I got to go there
Electric_Train@reddit
I was born in early 2000s in former Soviet State. Played outside within a km away from 9am to 9pm. Looking back, I think that's a bit crazy that I was allowed to do that. Good times though.
Sephirothdf@reddit
Its called HIGH TRUST SOCIETY and its characteristic to HIGH IQ PEOPLE like WHITE PEOPLE and JAPANESE people
I know you reddit people are mostly leftists so you don't want to admit or cant even think about it, but the reason is simple why kids could roam freely in 70s to 90s
in the 70s ,80s, 90s there was not much MASS NON WHITE IMMIGRATION happening, so most of america and the west was huge majority white and this means more safe, civilized etc.
Yes crime still happen, like in all society but not like today
For example in Estonia, or Poland children still roam freely, play outside, go alone to school and from school to home ( while being little 7 years old 8 years old etc... )
buremogilny@reddit
As soon as the street lights turned on that’s when we came home
QuoVadimusDana@reddit
Must be that time of week for the reminder of this post
tolerable-fine@reddit
And look how well we turned out.
Leather-Sky8583@reddit
My mom and my grandmother would literally kick us out the door and lock it behind us and refuse to let us back in until the sun started going down. As I lived out in the country, it was pretty much roaming around the property and out in the woods and climbing trees. She wouldn’t even let us come in to use the bathroom and pointed to an actual outhouse that we had down by the edge of the woods. Time for lunch? Yeah I would find my lunchbox from school sitting outside the patio door with my lunch in it and I’d be told to go someplace else and eat it.
I’m not sure kids today could handle that.
Yourdaddy83@reddit
And we didn't tie them to telephone poles either
BlackwaterDouglas@reddit
rickdill@reddit
1983 here. I rode my bike to different towns at 12 in the summer with my diet road friends played outside till dark walked hours and hours thru woods and built dama in the creek I was never home until I had to be at dark
Interesting-End-5863@reddit
Heck even in the mid 2000s I pretty much did this. Went biking wherever I wanted, I can even remember being in first grade and going to the corner store myself to buy stuff.
What's funny is I have a brother who is 10 years younger who was born in 2010 and some of the things I did my parents would never have let him do.
userninja889@reddit
growing up in the 80s and 90s, my mom would lock us out of the house and we would take our bikes and rollerblades and roam all over town. I think my mom even let me rollerblade to school one day which was a couple miles down a busy street.
PlantedinCA@reddit
When I was a kid mom would disappear into her bedroom after breakfast, tell us to grab leftovers, never to be seen again till dinner every weekend. We were free to roam, play outside, whatever. The message was entertain yourselves, I am busy.
PokerbushPA@reddit
I'm convinced my parents forgot they had a kid at least a dozen times.
I have hard evidence for two, and the rest is mid, but sus...as the kids say these days. I think.
SciFiCrafts@reddit
One time a group of us walked like miles to a quarry and we kinda walked down one step. Barely found our way back. No cell phones, we just left and came back. No panic, no drama.
BovaFett74@reddit
Can confirm. We were often left to our own devices. My parents would do their thing, and allow us to roam anywhere. Can’t say to why those things changed, but I’d imagine it’s many reasons.
Zerostar39@reddit
I mean, do kids even explore the sewers anymore these days?
Intelligent_Grrl@reddit
Absolutely! I was also babysitting other people's kids starting at 12 years old.
Grouchy_Situation_33@reddit
I’m still roaming………
OppositeRun6503@reddit
Yes it really happened, we were free range kids back in the 80s.
FtmtfBBW@reddit
Oh yeah, my friends and I biked around town for hours without any adult supervision. We'd go miles away from home without telling anyone our destination. The rule was come back before dinner!
IntelligentTurnover2@reddit
We did! Younger end of GenX here. Every household in my neighborhood had a sort of radius beyond which we would have to ask for guidance or permission. Ours was about two miles (don’t go past the blue bakery without asking). Street light meant run home irl so the jokes about it came a decade or so later.
Food-Blister-1056@reddit
We left the house as soon as we got up got sugared up and might come home for lunch and we’re back out till dinner time, then back outside till the fire siren test at 9:00pm(curfew) . Yes we roamed free all summer!
slowfocus2020@reddit
I was literally told to take my bike and come back inside before the sun comes down. That was it. Am I gonna do the same with my kid? Fuckin hell no! Hahaha
83carini@reddit
I miss ditches
FancyThought7696@reddit
I do think this is a valid point. That there is more responsibility and feeling that you yourself are responsible for everything regarding your child, and financing every last drop of goodness for them.
PotentialBadger7146@reddit
Some of us roamed....others had limits....
RedditModsSuckTaints@reddit
My children are just as free to roam as I was. They walked to school starting in 3rd grade and all have house keys. They run around the neighborhood with all the other kids, ride their bikes all over hell. The mindset in the image is very much an online only phenomenon. Nobody in the real world gives a fuck.
Lau_wings@reddit
I grew up on a farm, at 10 I was given a motorbike and my first rifle (I was shooting before hand but this one was mine) and i was told that I had no excuse to be in the house anymore when its nice outside.
If I was not out single handedly reducing the rabbit population, I would ride my bike to a friends place and we would be outside from sun up till whenever dinner was.
The only reason I got a mobile phone when I turned 13 was because I kept going bush alone and mum just wanted a txt every now and then to make sure I was not dead.
oriaven@reddit
I mean, I still do...
Snoo93550@reddit
There were limits to where kids were supposed to go (80s/early90s) but those limits were often not followed. I had one friend who always went skateboarding at loading docks in worst part of town, others who jumped off a bridge into a river. Both were specifically not supposed to go to those two places. I was more happy to ride my bike to a book store and read comics and books for free unless they kicked me out which they rarely did because I’d usually buy something.
Suedeskin@reddit
In the 80’s I was out every single night until the screeching voice of my mother called me inside. We didn’t ever want to go home and were left to our own devices and imagination. Best times of my life - plus, staying at home after school meant chores.
Miles_High_Monster@reddit
Absolutely, around 10 I'd ride my bike miles from home and get a bag of snacks for like $3. Be gone all day, and not really say much to my parents. Or pack a backpack with a can of beans, knives, and maybe a bb gun and something to make a fire with, then go explore the woods all day and cook myself lunch somewhere I discovered (trespassing 100%). Good memories. Nintendo was fun and all, but after an hour, it was boring.
BullCityCoordinators@reddit
Remember your parents calling out from the front porch that it was time to come home?
girlonbike@reddit
My mom had a special whistle she would do to call us home we were like dogs.
JimShimoda@reddit
My dad did that shit. Yes, we heard you Dad. We're ignoring you.
GenericDave65@reddit
The place we hung out was literally called “the ditch”
JimShimoda@reddit
"The Lot". It was two adjacent vacant lots by the school. There was a ditch between the school and the lot. We called that "The Bog".
girlonbike@reddit
"The ditch" was our hangout spot too in Jr. High. Some kids had built a club house type deal down in some trees in the area where flood water gets channeled away from the city. We would hang out there making out and smoking pot. We were 12 & 13.
I_AM_DEATH-INCARNATE@reddit
Ours was the Indian pit. I don't know how Indians were involved, but it certainly was a large pit, about 30 feet wide and probably 7 or 8 feet deep. We would keep it free of trash and use it as a bike ramp.
CorgiUprising@reddit
Yes
Deff added to better adjustment too IMHO
dc1999@reddit
I had a key to the front door when I was eight and expected to use it every day after school.
MisRandomness@reddit
I was 6 my first time with the house key and being home alone. It was only for like 30mins while grandma took her bowling lesson but still, nobody could do that today.
grizzlywondertooth@reddit
A 30-minute "bowling lesson"?
I hate to tell you... The 7-10 split was on your grandma
MisRandomness@reddit
Bahahaha. Well it wasn’t a 30 min lesson just that it ran over by 30 after I got home from school. It was Wisconsin so yeah..bowling was a big deal.
Frosty_Cloud_2888@reddit
6 year old latch key kid club!
loglady17@reddit
I started babysitting at 8, looking after my sisters who were 7 and 5 lol
spookydonkey513@reddit
being the oldest sucks
goofytigre@reddit
Nah, being the second oldest sucks. Getting bossed around by an 8-year-old when you're 7 is almost as bad as having a manager that's 24-year-old when you're in your 40s.
heresmytwopence@reddit
My sister was 6 and I was 10 when we started spending summers home alone every day. We were part of a big neighborhood latchkey kid crew ranging from 4 to 11. We somehow all made it out alive.
GrumpyOldHistoricist@reddit
Jesus. I just read this and thought “same here but surely not that young.”
So I looked up when the various seasons of Transformers first aired because I have memories of watching first run episodes home alone after school and realized that I was eight at the oldest when I became a latchkey kid.
Roobix9@reddit
Yup, same.
annaoceanus@reddit
Same here
bargle0@reddit
DAE running the woods and finding homeless encampments?
randojust@reddit
Mandatory for lots of us, parents say get out in the morning and you saw them again at dinner. It was great
-Boston-Terrier-@reddit
My wife and I are the pariahs in our local school district because we do wacky things like let our kids ride their bikes around the block or shoot hoops out front without constant supervision.
It’s actually really hard on us. On the one hand we both firmly believe that children need some unsupervised time to develop and learn how to deal with minor problems but on the other hand we’re aware that we have a reputation of being wacky free range parents and a lot of kids in their schools aren’t allowed to come over because of it.
Things got heated over a 7 year old’s birthday party just this weekend. It was at an indoor golf place and my wife and I sat off to the side and watched our son play while all the other parents effectively played for their kids. My son golfs like an 7 year old which I consider pretty age appropriate since he’s, ya know, 7. Every time he got to an obstacle that give him a slight challenge the mom of the kid behind him tried to take his putter away and do it for him so I’d remind her he’s fine - which he was. After 3 or 4 times she yelled at me to parent my son and I yelled back that I was. He wasn’t doing anything wrong. He just needed a few tries to hit the ball through the windmill while being perfectly safe as his parents stood 20 feet away. I don’t need to run to my kids at the first sign of the slightest problems.
Goblinboogers@reddit
They also wonder why kids are increasingly incapable of doing anything on their own or making decisions
polygonalopportunist@reddit
Yeah somehow the same generation that didn’t watch their kids in the 80s became the generation that called the cops in 00s if they saw unattended kids.
Guilt, denial, and probably some ignorance that they even were that parent.
100% it went from being normal to ostracized to see random kids unsupervised.
RonWill79@reddit
Yeah. There was a woman in rural Georgia that was arrested last November because she let her son ride his bike, by himself, to the store a mile from home. Not sure what the outcome was but the potential penalty was a $1000 fine and up to 1 year in jail. My parents would have been put away for life for all the places I went alone during my childhood.
ILikeBumblebees@reddit
To be fair, the case was dismissed, the officers were reprimanded, and the Georgia legislature passed a statute making it explicit that allowing your kids to go out on their own does not by itself count as child neglect.
Any_Perception6527@reddit
I’m a child of the 80’s - my mom had me riding my bike all over town, from one pharmacy to another, to pick up her various Vicodin scripts. I was 15 and riding around with 150 or so tabs in my backpack!
EschewObfuscation21@reddit
Or buying cigarettes for my mom with a note from her.
Cool_Dark_Place@reddit
Lol... to be fair, there are still lots of folks riding around on bicycles with backpacks full of drugs. However, I don't think they're picking them up for their mom.
Tiny-Reading5982@reddit
Isn't that weird? Like now I can't go to the store at night without my parents giving me grief but they let me walk to school (over a mile away) at 6:30am at 16 lol.
returnFutureVoid@reddit
16? I was walking over a mile away to school in 2nd grade. The busiest section had now sidewalk.
_Shafty@reddit
Lol, was it uphill both ways and through the snow?
Tiny-Reading5982@reddit
Okay? I took a bus in elementary and middle school.
red286@reddit
That kinda reminds me of when I moved back in with my parents for 6 months, 3 years after I'd first moved out.
They tried to give me a curfew, despite the fact that a) I was 20, b) I'd been living on my own for 3 years already, and c) I didn't have a curfew when I lived with them after I was 15.
LemoLuke@reddit
Also, the same generation that let their kids roam free in the '70s and '80s are also the same generation that spent the '80s and '90s convincing kids that child abductors and drug dealers were hiding behind every tree and bush to snatch unsuspecting kids, or turn them into junkies, or lure them into gangs. Years of PSAs and 'After School Specials' and DARE meetings and police officers giving special talks.
And then they wonder why '80s and '90s kids grew up to be more wary and overprotective of their own kids.
VeniceDrumGuy@reddit
I’m still waiting on all my free samples that I was promised in D.A.R.E. The only crime family/drug dealers that actually used this method were the Sackler family/Perdue Pharma.
FreeElleGee@reddit
They’re also the first to complain that kids aren’t spending enough time outside “just being kids”.
PintoTheBurninator@reddit
I grew up in the 70s/80s and have a brother 2 years older than me.
We lived on a farm with 700 acres of woodland and would be gone literally every waking hour of every day that we weren't in school.
We would did tunnels, build forts, swim in creeks and ponds, raid trash dumps, hunt with our bb guns, catch snakes, have rock fights, etc.
I imagine there are plenty of rural communities where this still the norm.
ThrustTrust@reddit
It was a different time.
DW6565@reddit
I was so bummed this past summer. My wife and I got a summer sitter for our six year old instead of going the camp camp camp every week.
We belong to a swim club where all the kids can run feral, swim team, tennis. So we just wanted the sitter to take her to the pool every day and maybe one other activity that week, go to the kids museum or whatever.
None of her friends did the same, the swim club was dead until 4:00. They were all doing the supervised 24/7 structured weekly camps all age segmented.
We lucked out that her summer sitter has a younger sister who is only a year older so they got to hang out and play a few days a week. Would have been a lonely summer for her.
Hopefully next year more parents will come around, we have started a trend for birthday parties where parents can just drop their kids off.
Neflite_Art@reddit
needed to be back when it got dark :D
BoringExperience5345@reddit
“Stranger danger” panic in the 1980s which wasn’t actually based on a very high number of child abductions by strangers, led to Gen X and millennials growing up with fear and a heightened awareness of danger because we had to look at missing children on milk cartons every day and watch terrifying news reports with inflated statistics, which ended up having been largely made up by the media to begin with. That means we’re raising our kids as though everyone around them wants to steal them, which was not statistically true in the 80s and it’s not statistically true today. But we’re giving them smooth brains anyway.
BigDaddyHadley@reddit
Latch key kids stand up!!!
BigDaddyHadley@reddit
Our big thing was "hide and go seek, in the dark", but the whole neighborhood (at the time, roughly 4 blocks) was our place to hide! We had a blast! Kids hiding in shrubs, ditches, under cars, you name it.
Creative-Motor8246@reddit
Kid from 70 -80s yes we roamed. Kindergarten got out at noon. I walked a 1/2 mile to my sitters house by myself. When I was 3 I wondered away and a cop brought me home and yelled at my mom.
I was the last of 5 kids, people had more kids then too. Losing one or two was more acceptable lol.
Statistically it’s safer now
adon4@reddit
Be home when the street lights turned on.
Dickrubin14094@reddit
Nope, this is definitely a movie and TV only thing. Never had the chance to roam thanks to Adam Walsh. Same with all my friends in the 80s.
MellowDCC@reddit
Why do I see this post every day?
Global-Alfalfa699@reddit
First day of kindergarten in 1966 my mom walked me to school and told me, I’m going to show you once and once only how to get home. No lie. Our house was about 1/2 mile from the school.
zen6541@reddit
True fact...
JimmyKlean@reddit
https://youtu.be/jHdVgLnmZTo?si=R0MsPLi9H_evdP5R
Edrobbins155@reddit
Both parents working there ass off. We were free range kids. I grew up in the biggest city in my state so there were plenty of places to explore. Most of the time my parents never even knew i was gone.
Intrepid_Elk_4351@reddit
Yes, it's true. Also used to play tackle football in the street. Get crunched into a car and you're simply out of bounds. Kept dimes in sock for calls home if it started to get dark and not quite home yet. This is back in the day of glass Gatorade bottles too. I didnt have a Mongoose or GT Performance with cool mags, but my bike got me everywhere.
Puzzleheaded_Smoke77@reddit
This subject has been done to death however the part where she said its a reason to not have kids is a hot take so ill comment to that part. Watching your kids shouldn’t be even on the list of reasons not to have them. It should be the bouncer at the door .
If the idea of being around your kids all day 3 months out of the year is a blocker then yeah then kids might not be for you. No matter the circumstances.
LasagnahogXRP@reddit
It’s so strange to me that we need to defend actual occur aces to younger generations. A few months back someone posted a piece of shit stating that it was a falsehood and victim signaling that we were taken from our classrooms to watch the challenger launch.
History was even less documented before our time, and we believed the stories of elders, because humans, culturally speaking, have passed down stories, wisdom and history. Now even with much more detailed documentations of history reality is questioned. What a time to be alive
Scott_R_1701@reddit
Yep. Wake up at 1045 in the summer just in time to pour a bowl of frosted flakes and turn on The Price is Right. Then booted out of the house with $5 for the corner store and come back before dark or maybe come back for lunch and then back out.
Hose water, biking all over the place, finding a random yellow jacket nest you were def not expecting, scraped up knees etc...
gvsteve@reddit
I tell my kids to go play outside Saturday morning, one of them keeps coming back saying “X can’t play outside because his parents aren’t home, he can only play on the computer.” “Y can’t play outside because his parents are sleeping, he can only play on Roblox (it’s 10:30am🙄)
emperor_dinglenads@reddit
It's 10 PM, where tf are your kids, lady?
Illustrious-Pea-5691@reddit
1980 here, yes much more than I am comfortable with today when it comes to my kids. Mostly bike riding all over town at 12 without any form of contact for 6 hours a day in summer
Cute-Acanthisitta-46@reddit
I grew up in the 80s. As long as we were in our chair at 6pm for dinner, it was all good.
clipplenamps@reddit
Hell, I was born in 86, and I biked 3 whole km to school at 10 years old. I remember my mom biking with me the first time, and then she was like "you got got this? Good"
Mom was a teacher and both older siblings are in the X generation. (6 and 9 years older)
Come home when the street lights come on was still a thing (for me) in the summer.
I think I got my own key at 10. Bikes out until lights out. I'm so thankful I got to grow up like that.
14thLizardQueen@reddit
Also what the hell were we going to do inside? Chores?
Pod_people@reddit
I literally used to jump off the roof of the house and my Mom didn't care. I mean, one time when I was 9 I broke into a water treatment plant and got captured by security and my Mom didn't care.
elkniodaphs@reddit
The person asking got their name from Town & Country Surf Designs: Wood & Water Rage, an NES game from the '80s. They already know what it was like, this is engagement bait.
Mountain-Fox-2123@reddit
They still do that in most of the world.
PetMonsterGuy@reddit
Xennials reading this: do YOU let your kids out unsupervised? If not, why not? Are you a softbrained idiot who buys into local news fearmongering? (yes)
Roobix9@reddit
I let my daughter walk with her friends (or sometimes alone) to the nearby elementary school or the grocery store. She's 15.
My son is 12 and he's scootered to the grocery store and back, but I won't lie--it made me a little uncomfortable.
And this is coming from a free-range, latch-key kid.
PetMonsterGuy@reddit
So what happened?
Roobix9@reddit
Nothing. Everyone is fine. 🤷🏻♀️
LovelyHead82@reddit
I don't have kids, but I have a feeling that if I did, I wouldn't let them roam free as much as my parents did.
Both my parents worked and I often felt neglected and alone, I promised my little self that if I ever had kids, I would do the opposite and try my best to be a part of my child's life
PetMonsterGuy@reddit
That’s different from needing to drive your kid the two blocks from your house to the school, or just not letting them leave the house at all
LovelyHead82@reddit
Totally agree that’s way too overprotective
Polybrene@reddit
I do more than many other parents but not as free as I was. When I was a kid the neighborhood was also full of kids. We all knew each other, had each other's back, someone could run and get an adult if necessary. Now? No I'm not take comfortable letting a kid wander around town alone.
Consistent-Camp5359@reddit
I learned a lot under that overpass.
luxtabula@reddit
anyone know when this changed? I know TV shows like America's most wanted are credited with putting a fear in parents, but I didn't see children disappear from the street until around the 2010s around the time video games had the Internet.
Timely-Document7011@reddit
Nobody these days know what a latch key kid is. My friends and I were wild and feral as kids. I feel sad that todays kids are so connected digitally and find it hilarious that my own kids think they are slick. Like dude you are playing checkers and I was playing chess at your age.
Mammoth_Mixture4735@reddit
I was 5 years old running around Houston on my bike getting beat up by bullies and getting chased by dogs and jumping in dumpsters finding Playboys
Signal-Philosophy271@reddit
I remember a neighbor climbing through one and came out the other side
marshmallowest@reddit
As long as we were home for dinner. We were usually with a group of friends so I guess they figured we'd be hard to kidnap like that
mraza9@reddit
At 8-9 years old I was allowed to bike pretty much anywhere in the city. We would build make shift ramps and put them on down hill slopes and attempt to bike or skateboard of them often attempting flips. No helmets or shin guards.
At 10 I ended up breaking my face quite literally in a cycling accident. Lost my front teeth. Nose completely snapped. Broke arm and wrist.
Was a wake up call. It’s cool to romanticize that era and I agree helicopter parenting these days is off the charts. There is always a compromise between unfettered negligence of your kids well being, and being overly protective.
Kinda where I am today with my younger ones.
Polybrene@reddit
This is my main concern, accidents and no one around who knows what to do. Especially with declining birth rates there's not even another kid to run off and get an adult like I did the time my brother fell in a ditch and needed stitches. Id feel a lot better letting kids free range if they were in a group.
OffPoopin@reddit
Yeah, theres definitely a give and take. Was it cool? Yes. Is it the same now? Not even close.
We didnt just get this way. There are reasons and none of them are because we got dumber
boreddissident@reddit
It's because a lot of people now call the damn cops like they're customer support. Oh no! A TEENAGER is out unsupervised, 9-1-1.
So shit changed. Crime is way down in the US from when we were kids. Like way, way down even with a slight recent rise, and teens now all carry personal tracker communicators. It is so much safer to let kids wander free than it was when we were young.
But the news figured out that if people are scared and angry, they watch the news more and then a chunk of the population got really not cool with other people just existing out in public, especially youth.
kremlingrasso@reddit
To be fair the kids are simply exposed to more stupid stuff these days, and more likely try to do something dangerous to amuse themselves to copy what they saw online. It's not like we didn't try but our lack of creativity hampered our ability of off ourselves. Also there are a lot more single children, it was a lot easier to roam free when you have three brothers.
elegantlywasted1983@reddit
Well put!
ScuzzBuckster@reddit
Its nothing new, the whole stranger danger craze was huge in the 80s and 90s but the biggest risk posed to children was, and still is, family members and close associates.
PersianCatLover419@reddit
Do you mean crime by teens or by adults? Where I live we have adults into stealing cars, robbing homes, hard drugs, assault/rape, home invasions, etc. There are some teens into this but they are in the minority.
Joelouis57@reddit
PersianCatLover419@reddit
🤣
ParadoxInsideK@reddit
I’m horrified that I used to actually crawl through ditches and drain pipes. I’m so much more cowardly now, and afraid of anything that might be in a drain pipe.
Derelicticu@reddit
They used to air commercials urging parents to be less negligent.
"Do you know where your kids are."
OffPoopin@reddit
Oooof. I always just thought they were talking about the other kids. For whatever reason, it never applied to me. Seriously.
That commercial was for me
I can still hear your post
Rich-Picture-7420@reddit
Confirmed Latch Key Kid right here
Difficult-Serve-6168@reddit
Ohh Big Facts!!
aliencardboard@reddit
I was a kid of the 80’s and 90’s, and my buddies and I had several blocks and a couple of mile radius we explored freely on our own on our bikes or on foot. As long as we told our parents where we were going and stuck together, that was good enough. We also checked in, and went to each other’s houses to play video games, or basketball etc. You also came back home at dusk, and if you wanted to play in the dark you did that in your backyard haha. But yes, fairly true.
It was most certainly the best days of my life. We will never see days like those again. Sure crime happened, but kids were more street smart and savvy. Friends and neighbors looked out for each other more I feel like. Social media, greed, and politics have destroyed the world as we once knew it.
Knight_thrasher@reddit
I played in the wooded area. Building forts, finding porn mags
foshi22le@reddit
In Australia we played in the bush and we found an underground cave that was FILLED with porn magazines, for 12 year old boys we thought we hit the jackpot ... we called it the porn cave. But we ended up feeling really guilty and ashamed for looking at it so we bought some matches with us and burned it all.
ghostbackwards@reddit
lol, why was there always porn in the woods?
_game_over_man_@reddit
My cousins and I found woods porn when we were little. Their neighbors basement had stacks and stacks of playboys, so I assume that’s where they came from. The youngest of the cousins ratted his older brother and I out to their mom. Thanks, Mark.
shinbreaker@reddit
Ha, that reminds me, when I was young, the next door neighbors house burned down. It was real sad and they didn't try to rebuild, they just moved on. Days after, a friend from across the street (who sadly had her house burned down years later) came over and we started going through the rubble of the house. It was a huge three story house but the charred remains didn't give that impression of how big it was.
What I didn't realize was that a lot of stuff never gets burned for various reasons. And in the case of this house, what didn't get burned were some porn mags. I remember when I saw it, my heart was just a flutter. I didn't want to bend over and grab it so I just used my shoe to turn pages without being noticeable. My friend was lingering all over the place and I would take just a few steps in a direction and come right back. My aunt, who lived in the house next to the burnt house, yelled at us saying don't step in there.
I was literally thinking for days of the different ways I could get that magazine without anyone noticing. And I swear, when I got the nerve, that was the day they came in and cleaned up the lost completely. So close, yet so far.
CelticSith@reddit
One of the best things I found out exploring the woods as a kid was a pentagram drawn on the ground with a stick, surrounded by candles and a porn magazine in the center of it. Someone tryin to summon a booty call, lol
foshi22le@reddit
In Australia that was at least true for me and my friends. We would take our BMX's and go anywhere, we'd also walk through rain forest and bush without supervision for hours after school. My guess is that either it was genuinely safer back then, or many parents were less knowledgeable and possibly naive or maybe the media and common beliefs has caused many to fear more for the safety of their children. I really don't know.
JUIC3ofORANG3@reddit
My whole childhood was me and a group of like 5 of us roaming around the town on bikes or walking with zero contact during…before they set the ground rules and be home before the sun goes down
jackatman@reddit
I still let my kids roam free. There's a ton of parks around and they have bikes.
sil24@reddit
i wish i could let my 10 year old run around... she's too scared to and everyone i know shames me for saying i want her to go run around the parks
girlonbike@reddit
I have a very fearful pre-teen as well. She is too scared to even walk across the street and ask to hang out with her neighbor friend. She asks me to text their mom first. I refuse but that means she just never does it. I'm doing the best I can over here.
PersianCatLover419@reddit
Who tells you not to let her go to the park? Does she have a bike? My cousin has daughters in elementary and Jr high, they live in the woods on multiple acres and they stay indoors and make crafts, watch movies, etc.
Least-Task276@reddit
"We are gonna go play on the train tracks!"
"Ok, be careful!"
We literally did this.
girlonbike@reddit
Same, I remember finding so many needles on those tracks too.
Gophers_FTW@reddit
Well, yeah. Several dollars worth of pennies and nickels flattened. Cheap entertainment.
Idratherhikeout@reddit
Same
Gloomy-Moose-4367@reddit
we and the bro used to walk to the supermarket and eat the free fruit and bread "testers" till we got told to leave then went to the fish and chip shop (new zealand) and play some street fighter 2 or mortal kombat for 20c then we would go to the school to play some bball or head to a mates house one had a c64 other had an IBM something.
Sestos@reddit
I was hitchhiking to go five miles to buy candy in like first grade if remember correctly. But we did disappear all day and go anywhere we wanted as long as we came home.
schizrade@reddit
I let my 16 year old and 11 year old walk down to the end of the neighborhood, all local streets not crosswalks, to go to the donut shop. They came back and said they were asked if they were lost and need the police 2 times.
Everyone is a an idiot now and thinks 2 kids cant walk down the block to get donuts or pizza without a official escort or an SUV ride.
genivae@reddit
That's infuriating, especially at that age! The 16 year old could very well have a job making the donuts and pizza!
SnipingDiver@reddit
Not only allow to free roam, but we were kick out of the house for various reasons.
WireNoob@reddit
Yes u croakie! This was normal! Maybe if all u republicans didn’t request 10 year old sex slaves with ur leader in chief dementia don! Things might be the same but with technology supervision!
bitchimgandalf@reddit
Was it even a good day if your mom didn't have you strip in the yard and get sprayed down with the hose before you were allowed back in the house?
MightyClimber@reddit
Shit, when I was 5 we lived in a tiny rural village and I would get sent to the store to buy my dad cigarettes.
theguineapigssong@reddit
Nothing has ever blown my mind quite like watching parents walk their MIDDLE SCHOOLERS to school that's LITERALLY ON THE SAME BLOCK as their apartment complex.
TheRadHamster@reddit
My Aunt-in-law drove her granddaughter to high school everyday. It’s less than a half mile away and they live in a small town. I always thought the girl was a lot younger than she actually was just because of how coddled she was.
WeWander_@reddit
I Drive my son to school or the bus stop every day because I enjoy spending that time with him. He's extremely active and usually out all day after school until 10pm so that little blip in the morning is the most I talk to him some days. He's almost 18 now and graduates high school early tomorrow so our little morning chats will now be done 😕
jazzbot247@reddit
I walked home from HS because it was just under a mile from my house and it was fine. But I did have grown men shouting all kinds of sexual harassment at 15 year old me out their car windows. Now a days that wouldn't fly but it was the 90s.
Neither-Mycologist77@reddit
Our elementary school will not allow anyone to walk to school, even if escorted both ways by a parent. Bus or car drop-off line only.
I don't know what the middle school policy is yet because my kid's not there yet. I believe the high school kids can still ride bikes or whatever.
Jayman44Spc@reddit
I have to pick up my 3rd and 4th graders or else they will start making phone calls. I live a block and a half away from the school and they know the way here and can make it fine on their own. It’s a school policy apparently
DuckTalesOohOoh@reddit
It's not a policy if you tell the school they can walk and no one is picking them up.
ancilla1998@reddit
Do you have kids?
DuckTalesOohOoh@reddit
Yes.
Magic_Man_Boobs@reddit
In some states it is in fact the law that kids under a certain age cannot be released from the school's care unless there is some else to resume it.
DuckTalesOohOoh@reddit
What states are doing this? And what's the age?
PersianCatLover419@reddit
That is crazy. So if your kids want to walk home, they will call you, CPS, etc.?
ancilla1998@reddit
Depends on the school system, but yes.
cdimino@reddit
I like spending time with the little guy…
smokeymccrackpiped@reddit
Our house is across the street from the school, my first grader has been walking by himself since Kindergarten. Granted there's a crossing guard, but I like him having the independence
PuppyJakeKhakiCollar@reddit
In my previous neighborhood, parents drove their high school aged kids to the school bus stop and the kids waited in the cars until the bus came. I was always like WTF is this even about. I could see doing it in bad weather or really cold days but not every single day. And it was not a place on a busy road with no sidewalks either. Just a regular suburb.
mizushimo@reddit
Parents used to want their kids to have some independence, and now both kids and parents seem to want the opposite.
Cool_Dark_Place@reddit
I started kindergarten in 1983... just a couple of months before my 5th birthday. The bus stop was about 2 blocks from my house, with a fairly busy road with no crosswalk that I had to cross. I was walked to the bus stop for the first week or so... then after that, I was on my own. Occasionally, my aunt would babysit for some other kids in the neighborhood in the afternoons, so I'd be told in the morning to walk to their house instead of coming back home.
PersianCatLover419@reddit
I see kids in high school that the school bus picks up and drops off at their home. Kids do walk to a nearby Jr high school, but in elementary and high school they do not walk to a bus stop.
FirehawkLS1@reddit
Yeah my next door neighbor watches her 9 year old daughter at the bus stop from her driveway. The bus stop is 75 feet away from their house and there's 10 other kids that go to the same bus stop. I leave for work every day around the time that bus comes so that's how I noticed. I mean, it's better than her not caring about her kid for sure, but it's a little much for a kid who's 9 years old.
Fit_Addition7137@reddit
Another way to look at it is that these latchkey kids are now parents and they WANT to be involved in their kids lives. They enjoy spending time with their children.
djseifer@reddit
And yet, if they don't, some nosy neighbor or maybe even the school will call CPS on them.
Polybrene@reddit
That's my biggest fear as a parent.
Rubberbandballgirl@reddit
My friend’s stepmom used to drive my friend’s sisters to school when the school in question was 5 minutes away on foot.
lc626@reddit
Hell yea as kids we roamed all day. Ride our bikes to the park, play football in the street later, go home to eat, then go right outside at night to play kick the can (hide and seek)
Talithathinks@reddit
This is so true even though the crawled around in ditches made me giggle!
j-lulu@reddit
Crawled in ditches, rolled down hills, went to the movies, the bowling alley, played pool, swam, biked, ran, all the things.
nipslippinjizzsippin@reddit
out of the house by 8 ride my bike an hour to my mates place, get him, we ride to the next mate so on and so forth until out 8 year old pose is formed then its be home by dark. we roamed, we drank from taps when thirsty. someone mom fed us if we were hungry, all we needed was a our bike and our freedom.
No-Stage-4611@reddit
No one really asks this question, right? Why would anyone care what parents let their kids do back then?
19dadchair73@reddit
Parents would kick you out so they could watch their favorite soap operas
rrha@reddit
In the summers when I was a kid, my friends and I would take off on a Friday with a tent and some food. Then we’d be back on Sunday.
No calls. No letting anyone know how we were. Or where we were. They wouldn’t even ask.
evolutionxtinct@reddit
Yuuuuup loved it!
wanderfae@reddit
Facts
Sweet-Sale-7303@reddit
My parents would kick me out of the house. If my friends weren't around I would be at the school yard for hours by my self. Once I got to Middle school I was allowed to cross the main street and it got way more fun.
drawredraw@reddit
Yes, starting at age six I was allowed full reign of the street we lived on. Me and about 20 other kids and at age 10 I was allowed to go wherever and be back for dinner.
PropertyJaded308@reddit
Hell ya man, i remember being 11 and jumping off this roadside bridge into the river below with my buddies, a cop pulled up and told us to go home, then just left. Shit was awesome. Just riding your bikes wherever you could get before dinner in the summer.
retsamegas@reddit
I graduated in 2003, so growing up late 90s, during the summer is wake up at 10am or later, go to the neighborhood pool by myself, bike ride, play with friends outside, go inside to play video games, only go home to make a sandwich and drink hose water ever. Until dark wouldn't even be inside my house, TV/games until 2am, sleep in do it again
hamsterfolly@reddit
Can confirm, I was a child in the 80s and 90s
symbologythere@reddit
We literally explored every storm drain pipe that ran under the streets in my neighborhood when I was like 10-12. And the woods were our playground, battleground, porn stash.
RockShowSparky@reddit
they don’t do that anymore?
ginger-inside-007@reddit
Ahh.. free range after getting out of school, do your homework, then go ride bikes and hang with friends. Climbing trees, finding new places to just do whatever, canals we would fish out of, call the radio station to play a song. Adults only checked or yelled for dinner or "you have to go to this event! Get dressed!!"
For kids now, having things recorded is the up side. Back then, if an adult told your parents you did something wrong... grounded. Hell, other adults would ground me lol. Good ol' days.
revel911@reddit
I honestly don’t think I saw my parents during summers except for sunday morning church.
Plane_Jacket_7251@reddit
Pretty much, yeah. There was a roaming group of us on bikes who would run around the neighborhood and mess around in the surrounding woods and creek and stuff. When I got my first job at 12 helping the neighborhood landscaper i lost about 3 days a week from doing that. But the three bucks an hour was worth it. No joke BTW, that was literally how it went down back in the 90's for me.
Zealousideal-Pen-233@reddit
The neighborhood I grew up in in the early 80's was built on top of a big hill. We had an area of natural space we called the gully because it was just bare grassland and shrub brush that was shaped like a big bowl. I think it was essentially an area in a subdivision development required for drainage. Anyway, in the winters we always got a lot of snow so, naturally, the gully became the perfect sledding hill for all the neighborhood kids. One day, on a particularly icy morning, a boy that lived down the street from me took a head first dive off of his sled about halfway down the hill and cracked his head wide open. Blood everywhere, so much blood! Fast forward a few hours and 14 stitches later and this kid is back on the hill, with a baseball helmet on, sled in tow. He finished out the day sledding with us as this was just like any other day. We thought absolutely nothing of it.
pierdola91@reddit
I scratch my head at people younger than me talking about being latchkey kids, because I was born in 1991, was an only child of older parents, and they were told to teach me “stranger danger.”
I didn’t go anywhere without my mom and I think the first time I was left at home was 8? I misspoke at school and told a member of the PTA that I walked to school alone at, like, 10, and they lost their shit at my mom for “being irresponsible” and she in turn, lost her shit at me for making her out to be a derelict mom.
Maybe this is the result of my parents moving to the city, but I dunno; my friends who stayed in the ‘burbs (also only kids of older parents) definitely had helicopter moms, too.
FatSteveWasted9@reddit
School choice in my town means that no one goes to their neighborhood school any more. Traffic is fucking horrendous at school time now
timberwolf0122@reddit
Young GenX here.. yep I was out somewhere and more likely over a mile from any kind of phone
E-2theRescue@reddit
That's barely a reason why. The main reasons we didn't have kids are as follows:
1) Broke. We didn't have money. We were stuck working shitty jobs for shitty pay, which meant we didn't have money to go out and socialize to find a partner, let alone have the money for diapers, formula, daycare, and everything else associated with a child.
2) Why be a parent when our own parents were so uninterested? I most likely didn't have that "biological clock" because my parents didn't care about my hobbies and interests. I've been raising myself, even as the youngest child of 8. How would I know the joys of parenthood when my parents only cared about the TV and phone while calling all my hobbies a "Nintendo" and leaving me able to count the number of times they played with me on a single hand. Two camping trips a summer, almost no vacations, and being forced to go hunting and fishing with my father who was trying to "make a man" out of me (and failed miserably because of biology; trans). The rest of the time, my parents spent living in their own bubbles.
3) Stopping the cycle of abuse. For many of us, too, it's also about ending the cycle of abuse. Rewind 10 years and there was no way I would have been mentally able to take care of a child without beating on them. My anger was out of control, and I was fighting to unlearn to react to anger with rage and violence. That's because when I was little, I was beaten, and I knew I would beat my own kids, too. Yeah, I wouldn't have been like my mother who beat me all because a book fell out of my hand and it startled her, but I would have probably lost it over something stupid, like waking me up in the middle of the night. It's a much different story now that I've had therapy and worked through all that, but I didn't want to pass that traumatic history of abuse and my short temper onto a child.
dandelion_galah@reddit
I had two weeks home from school sick with measles + pneumonia when I was 6. My parents couldn't get that time off work, so I just stayed home by myself. The first week I was in bed, the second I played outside in my pyjamas in winter. Best week of my life at the time and for a while after though! I would never risk that with my kid now.
I would have been a latchkey kid except we just left our back door unlocked and I didn't even need a key.
I wonder how much is just the way parents/victims of crime are blamed so much these days.
General-Reserve9349@reddit
Before that kids had jobs
amcneel@reddit
Yup. When we moved to Istanbul, I was allowed to roam the back streets at 9-10 years old. There were def more than one pack of dogs I had to run from
BalanceScared1201@reddit
Home time was when the street lights came on that’s why summer ruled unlike today’s kids we never wanted to be at home .
-Disagreeable-@reddit
Ditches, culverts, patches of woods, construction sites and abandoned houses. It was madness. Either the street lights coming on or being called was what brought you home. Then you had a glass of milk some animal crackers and you were off to bed. It was a really magical experience that I’m sad my kid won’t have. They’ve got their own shit what will be magical too though, so that’s okay.
NicPaperScissors@reddit
I truly spent so so much time in ditches. And - this was in the rainy PNW! We would try to crawl through culverts. Little feral gremlins!
Youregoingtodiealone@reddit
Riding my bike down to the creek is an entire catalog of childhood memories from elementary to high school, amongst other bike-accessible locales
hiro111@reddit
I grew up in a rural area. My mother had a large bell mounted to the side of the house that she would ring when it was time to come home for dinner. Sometimes I didn't hear it and she would just leave my dinner on the counter. I was NEVER in the house. I rode over a mile on the road alone down steep hills when I was seven to go see friends. We then moved to an even more rural area and I did 10 mile rides to go see friends when I was nine. On summer days, we used to walk a couple of miles to go to a convenience store and get a Slush Puppy. I used to play around fast-flowing creeks and electrical fences on the neighbors property. I grew up at the bar of a mountain range and when I was 12ish, my friends and I used to go hiking all day on steep trails with large drop-offs miles from anywhere. I would bring a Coke for the entire day. I don't think it even occurred to my parents to wonder where I was, I would just sort of wander in a dusk. This may have been the best childhood anyone has ever had...
RealityOk9823@reddit
I dug through the ditches, burned through the witches, and slammed in the back of my Dragula.
Wait, that was later. Nah, I stayed at home, played video games and watched GLOW at night.
greaterwhiterwookiee@reddit
Uhhh yeah. Basically folks went to work. We woke up whenever we wanted to. Got on our bikes and fucked off until it was quitting time for the parents. Maybe we went home for dinner. Maybe we just ate at a friends. Then depending on the parents we were either inside by dark (which is about 10pm where I live during summer) or as long as the parent knew exactly where we were going we could go out after dark.
And this was at like 9-12 years old.
Pitiful_Winner2669@reddit
There were three groups of parents for us growing up. Boomer shit, but no cell phones, so whatever we did, we'd end up at one of those houses. We'd use the phone to say what house we were at. A little archaic, but I can't recall any issues.
Ryan's house though.. his dad hooked it up when it came to making lunch. He worked from home and spoiled us rotten with meals he made for us.
11229988B@reddit
Same here. Except my parents usually weren't around. I was scared of getting in trouble so I'd still get home by dark. And it was year round for me.
Ayemann@reddit
*commercial comes on at 8pm*
"Do YOU know where your kids are?"
QKofDaggers@reddit
They had to make a commercial to remind our parents to check on us at 10pm.
TotoRabane@reddit
I wish this was my experience. My parents were very strict and didn't let me do anything! Growing up in NYC probably didn't help.
leafer32@reddit
Yup, pre internet and smart devices, we really were raw-dogging it out there
CrimbleGnome420@reddit
When I was 14 in 1990, I went from philly to montreal on a bus(s), just to see the Montreal Forum. I left on Friday and came back Monday, not a single person asked where I was, just "are you ready for school tomorrow? t
Evening_Chime@reddit
When I think about how many ways I could have gotten hurt where nobody would ever have found me, it does get a little scary
Old_Barnacle7777@reddit
I was born in 68. By the time I was in elementary school, I would routinely go over to my best friend’s house and then wander around a large neighborhood park called Hansen Park with him. This was without any adult supervision. By the time I was in High School I as riding my bike under freeways to a high school that was 3.5 miles away.
mcvmccarty@reddit
Kids are also too expensive, even with assistance. In my father’s childhood, they pumped them out as cheap farm labor. Everything is flipped now, in less than 100 years.
Bigchunky_Boy@reddit
Yes 70’s and 80’s were wild across the burbs . No phones except landlines and a time you were to return ( sometimes). 90’s Idk .
CaliKindalife@reddit
Yes. We were young, wild, and free. We drank from hoses and were not allowed inside till it was dinner time.
Fahlulah@reddit
As a kid/teen... Not sure I'd be a functional member of society if I had to be under the eyes of an adult at all times. I'd likely have no self-sufficiency and would just manipulate others to do everything for me and never actually be able to do anything myself.
Now I manipulate others to do my stuff but am a happy person doing myself and being alone in the process.
Having people around me constantly makes me lazy because I will delegate everything to the nearest, remotely capable person.
stevemandudeguy@reddit
"It's 10 o'clock, do you know where your children are?"
^ this was a literal ad campaign ^
thesupineporcupine@reddit
Yes, pretty much. I cannot imagine allowing my five and seven-year-olds the kind of freedom. I enjoyed in the 80s. I don’t know if parents were just more ignorant, or they were just wasn’t that much crime and craziness as today, but I remember at seven or eight years old I used to ride my bike several blocks away to a party store on a main boulevard in the city of Detroit. There is no way in freaking how I would allow my kids to do that today.
I kind of grew up in two countries. I also grew up in Romania in the 80s and 90s. Eastern European communist countries were just different. The crappy and impressive government aside, it was generally speaking extremely safe. I would take the tram to go to school several kilometers away and walk 1 km to the tram stopped and 1 km back when I was in the fourth grade by myself. At 11 years old, I would pretty much roamed the city as I pleased. Getting on public transportation, bicycle, walking. Nobody ever bothered me or any of my friends, and we never felt unsafe.
In the summers, I’d come to the US to visit my father and grandparents. However, before third grade, I did spend a few years in the US and went through kindergarten through second grade. I remember at five years old living in the middle of the city of Detroit, for any Detroiters I’m referring to the Chene and Warren area, and us kids would ride our bicycles around the block or two or three blocks up no problem. And even then it was a pretty rough neighborhood.
jade_Brks@reddit
Did the world became more dangerous or did we became more aware ?
Idratherhikeout@reddit
The world in the USA is much safer. But we are bad at statistics and social media presents us with the modern equivalent of Halloween razor blades in apples almost hourly.
Incredibly unlikely events scare us
whenveganscheat@reddit
The world (at least Canada and the US) became less dangerous. The effects of leaded gas, the trauma of the Vietnam war, almost complete lack of available mh and addiction resources made the 70s and 80s a nightmare in terms of violent crime. Things are better now, even though they seem worse due to constant media exposure
CeelaChathArrna@reddit
It still breaks my teens regularly the things that were normal for us. They think our parents were nuts to allow us that much freedom.
SaskiaDavies@reddit
I wandered off for entire weekends by myself when I was in high school in the mid-80s. Id let my one parent know I was going to hang out w friends in London for the weekend and they'd nod. I'd be off. I had a lot of leeway when my mom was alive, too, but that was mostly just wandering around, climbing trees, riding my bike wherever.
NovelPepper8443@reddit
Me at 51 wondering what my mom did all Summer when we were out of the house from 1979-1989.
AnesthesiaSteve@reddit
Something I don’t see mentioned much. Is myself (1982) and many others in that range raised our younger siblings. So the last thing we wanted as young adults and so on, was to raise more kids.
Impossible_Turn_7627@reddit
Child free, and this is a big part of it.
RedJerzey@reddit
Me and my friends used to hang in the storm sewers like a club house. Ride our bikes for miles around town.
In 4th & 5th grade I would just go to my friend's house after school and ride dirtbikes. Never called home. Just showed up at dinner time.
1st grade I would come home, unlock the door, make a snack and do homework/ watch TV until 5:30 when my parents got home.
Healthy-Membership86@reddit
Brought my kids up the 80s/90s in a rural state on 14 acres surrounded by woods. They would be out in the woods and fields playing or riding bikes or building forts from sticks and it was all good. They would come home when they got hungry or needed something. Now personally, I grew up in the 60s in Baltimore and my brothers and I were outside playing with friends on the sidewalk or back alley after school or all day in the summer with no supervision from any adult. No one thought that was odd. The world has changed.
MonkeyBred@reddit
I was a homebody... super sensitive to sunlight for both my eyes and skin... but in the 80s, I had the house to myself most hours of the day for most days of the week. Mr. Rogers raised me.
4DimensionalButts@reddit
When i was a kid we would play football or hockey on the street in front of my parent's house from morning until late at night. There were maybe 5 cars the whole day. Last time i visited my parents there were 26 cars driving by in 30 minutes.
Qfn4g02016@reddit
I would disappear for weeks in the summer
Fufeysfdmd@reddit
I grew up in the late 80s and 90s. We were absolutely allowed to roam free. I remember rolling myself up and down the block in my little Flintstones car at 4 years old
OGHighway@reddit
We would be gone all day building a bike track and jumps in the middle of the desert.
Its a Home Depot now.
naswege@reddit
Between 5-8 years old I was in a woods building first, tree houses, swinging on vines and roaming around a 2 mile area. This was daily from After school till dinner.
Wild_Chef6597@reddit
I had a friend who ended up marrying a woman with kids. He was watching them one day and let them go outside to play in the yard. Someone called the cops because the kids were unattended.
Rice_Eater483@reddit
Remember Halloween back then? First I want to say that I spent my little kid years in a small Midwestern town where Halloween was a very big deal. It felt like almost every house gave away candy and decorated their homes.
That being said I think the first time I went trick or treating was when I was 8. I went with my siblings and the oldest was 10. Basically it was normal to see groups that didn't have a chaperone. One my siblings and I got older we split from each other to go with our friends instead.
In the 6 years I lived there and trick or treated, none of us ever went with a chaperone. Whether we went together or in our own separate groups.
hotcapicola@reddit
Halloween is ruined for kids these day. Walk around a parking lot in broad day light for 30 minutes and then go home.
shandelatore@reddit
100%. I grew up in a town of 300, and my first 10 years were 69 to 79 and in addition to being a latchkey kid from 5 years old, I was also feral all summer long. My memories of childhood are mostly of being outside from sun up until well after dark. I have very few memories of being inside a house until I was married with a kid of my own. He was raised like I was, and he spent most of his time outside. He's 34 now and still alive.
benbenpens@reddit
I knew kids who went off to climb hills, roam for miles and ride dirt bikes in California at the age of 8. No parental supervision. And we survived.
RickardsRed77@reddit
We got an answering machine so I could leave a message and my mom could know, generally, where I was when she got home. Bikes all day!
ForeignBarracuda8599@reddit
I was gone from 7 am until the street lights came on except to eat otherwise I got to help clean the house lol.
Mariecal2@reddit
We'd bring cups from home and buy a gallon of purple stuff and little Debbie snack cakes with our lunch money (supposed to be in summer school)
We had all the sprinkler schedules for the schools and we'd head over, destroy the lawn then roam around town. Goodtimes.
tara12miller@reddit
In my opinion as a child that grew up in the 80’s and a mother of 3 varying children now. Availability of reach through cellphones, news and the internet play a high factor in why my kids aren’t raised like I was in the same town. Back in the 80’s mother just read her book and we were supposed to go home when the street lights came on.
6bi6@reddit
85-95, I was a phantom; I might be next door, I might be in another county, but I will be home by 10
imnojezus@reddit
I was raised by “the village” of older folks in the neighborhood who would keep an eye on things and call our parents if we pulled any stupid shit or got hurt. We used to go visiting them for candy and chit chat, and they had no issues occasionally letting us use their restrooms or making lunch for us.
“The village” is now our parents, and they’d sooner call the police on parents in our generation than communicate with us or give any shits about our kids. They’d probably pull a gun if someone rang their doorbell.
Baggin_clams@reddit
This is true… I m a wanderer yeah im a wanderer
Ultimate_Driving@reddit
Yes, my parents absolutely REFUSED to give us rides ANYWHERE. They were SUPER PROUD of this, and still pat themselves on the back for forcing us to be more independent by telling us that we could go wherever we wanted as long as we were responsible for how we got there and got home.
Huck84@reddit
I was literally told to "get the fuck out of this house" during the summers and weekends
Icy-Decision-4530@reddit
Latchkey Kids run the world
Feefifiddlyeyeoh@reddit
If you can afford to have a stay at home parent, you’re better off than most
Dear-Discussion2841@reddit
I mean nobody was home with me... Well, babysitters. Which is also kind of insane. Some high schooler spent her summer watching me and my brother? How much did she even get paid? Because I'm telling you right now she didn't get paid enough to watch The Little Mermaid every day all summer long.
myballsiche@reddit
Ok, shows and movies always portrayed kids as roaming WO peeps. so that is a bad example of things. It was exaggerated for telling a story.
But everyone's childhood is different.
jim0001@reddit
My fav story is how the actress Molly Shannon and her friend as a child went to the airport and snuck on a flight to NYC
JamMaster420@reddit
Haha, I was pissed that I had a 2am curfew as a young teen.
zdena1970@reddit
Yes they did. I rode my bike all over town even out in the countryside. Had to be home by dark was about all.
travelinmatt76@reddit
by the age of 12 or 13 i was regularly riding my bike 3 or 4 miles from home
travturn@reddit
So many scabs, scars, and scares. No contact home unless at a friend’s house. In an inflatable boat in the canal. Who knows what’s under the water. Go anywhere on a bike. Jump down a huge dirt hill at a construction site and the bottom is below the water table. No way to get out if you fall. Chinese stars from the flea market. A wooden ninja sword. Quarter sticks of dynamite! What a fun childhood! How did I not die a dozen times?!
Whatisgoingon2028@reddit
There were a lot of "runaways" back then too. Missing kids that were written off as having left home with no trace. Times were dangerous for kids back then.
SkullsInSpace@reddit
I'm a pretty protective mom, and I've had the cops called on me multiple times because my kid was playing near - not in - the road. I live in a small town, not a super busy road, and right next to a 4-way stop. This cop half my age was so condescending about my kindergartener playing in our yard unsupervised for like 20 minutes.
It is IMPOSSIBLE to do anything right as a parent now.
Illustrious-Bat1553@reddit
Makes no sense. kids don't go out anymore because of the internet not because their latch key
Wildfathom9@reddit
Shit my mother used to watch me and my bully throw rocks at each other.
rels83@reddit
My kid complains at overnight camp if he has to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night he has to wake up a counselor AND another kid because of “the rule of 3s.” He loves camp but he finds it really embarrassing to wake someone up because he needs to pee at 3 am, which fair. He almost didn’t want to go this summer.
takisara@reddit
Really? I asked my kid what she did and she said she had to be quiet and take her flashlight lol.
rels83@reddit
We tried to tell him just go, we won’t be mad if you break this rule. But this kid is a rule follower
ParchedZombie@reddit
My mother would kick us out of the house during the summer and tell us to come home when the fire house rang the siren at 530 pm. My friends and I would ride our bikes all over town, play wiggle ball or tennis, swim in someone’s pool, and it was fucking glorious. Those were the best days of my life.
FirehawkLS1@reddit
Yeah we were told to go play outside as long as the weather was nice, be home in time for dinner, then go back out and play until the street lights came on. Only rule was call if you're at a friend's house and plan on going somewhere with their parents and them. I too really value and appreciate that time of my life.
Bad-Moon-Rising@reddit
My Mama would lock the doors and tell us not to knock unless we were bleeding. We came home when the street lights came on.
kellyk311@reddit
BullCityCoordinators@reddit
We would roam all over our town. Found all kinds of odd stuff.
SweetyDarlingLuLu@reddit
Ahaha ha yeah no one asked us where we were going or where we were. We wandered all around lol 😂.
ShoeBitch212@reddit
I’ll give it to Boomers: this is the one thing they did right. I’m glad my parents weren’t glued to my hip growing up.
Prossdog@reddit
Oh yeah. My parents both worked during the week and throughout the summer when we were out of school, they’d leave me and my little sister home alone all day. Every weekday for 3 months 😂
djmagicio@reddit
I was a “latch key kid” once I hit first grade. It was awesome. Spent a lot of time wandering the woods (we didn’t have computers and TV had good stuff on before you went to school and before bed).
DrewBaron80@reddit
The thing is even if I stayed home all day over the summer and my mom was around, she would chain-smoke and watch soap operas/talk shows in the living room while I entertained myself in a separate room.
If I am home all day with my 10-year-old we’re doing stuff: playing video games, building Legos, reading together, going to the flea markets and thrift stores, playing sports, etc. my wife does bigger things with him like go to the zoo and take him to the waterpark. He’s pretty much always with us and always has something fun to do (he also hangs out with friends on a regular basis, but they’re not roaming around the neighborhood like we did when we were kids).
Frequent_Alfalfa_347@reddit
I was babysat at a neighbor’s house who had kids my age. We were out and about in the yard, knew where the boundaries were, as young as 2,3, and 4. I’m guessing at that age, the mom might have been outside with us. But it wasn’t a lot older that we were NOT supervised- riding tricycles in the barn, playing on the swing set. One time - we were young enough to stand UNDER the edges of a hammock, 2 of us on either end, swinging the children the middle, on the hammock. I know we were unsupervised because we once went up too far, and I (who was in the hammock that time) fell out and got the wind knocked out of me. We did not tell mom. We couldn’t have been older than 4,5, and 6 to fit under the hammock.
ledbedder20@reddit
Ditches, trees, storm drains, runoff pins, mountains, train tunnels, abandoned buildings, sinkholes, friend's sheds, old haunted schools, under bridges...
vjason@reddit
My friends and I basically did the full on stand by me routine on a regular basis, and I managed to survive.
It’s hard to explain what changed, and when.
LordDaxx1204@reddit
Consistent-Chapter-8@reddit
Gen Xer here, can confirm we roamed miles from home daily as kids. Need to call home, find a payphone or go to a friend's house to place a call.
Contrast that with some cases today of parents getting in trouble by allowing their kids to go less than a block to play in a park playground. The socially acceptable range kids can roam is becoming more constrained every year.
IHAVENOIDEA0980@reddit
Yes. And, we didn't have mobile phones. So our parents just had to take our word for it when he said we were going to the skate park.
Heavy_Pin7735@reddit
Yep - be home by sundown for dinner, otherwise only call if you’re hurt or in jail. Man, that was the life!
Naive-Direction1351@reddit
Its 10pm do you know where your children are?
No_Understanding7431@reddit
I lived near a river, and abandoned grain co-op, and an arcade. Its a wonder if ever went home
zonie77@reddit
I agree
zoey8068@reddit
Yup we tormented our neighbors for 8ish hours a day.
SnooMemesjellies7469@reddit
Yup..... our childhoods were like the first season of Stranger Things. Just instead of monsters there were pedophiles.
culturebarren@reddit
Was just telling a story the other day about how my best friend and I would spend hours wandering through the woods with a machete we found. We were like 10-11 years old? Was totally normal back then
Rude-Associate2283@reddit
Correct
Tsunamiis@reddit
The parenting was so bad there was public ads to do you know where your kids are. It’s 10 o’clock at 10 o’clock every night of our lives.
Moonvine22@reddit
I grew up in the 2000s-2010s and we explored all over without our parents around...
ure_not_my_dad@reddit
And sometimes you'd have to get hosed down before parents would let you back inside.
kak-47@reddit
“Crawled around in ditches”🤣🤣 I wonder why ditches were such a fond memory of my childhood too? Catching snapping turtles in the muddy ditches, jumping bikes over muddy ditches, swimming in ditches when it rained a lot.
ImNearATrain@reddit
I was literally in ditches catching frogs in the late 80s early 90s
eyelers@reddit
These are shockingly the parents that turned out to be terrible grandparents lol
mattebe01@reddit
When my brother and I were in 3rd and 5th grade my mom got a full time job to keep us afloat.
We became latch key kids. There was no before or after school.
The economy changed and families became duel income before there was any infrastructure to support it.
water_bottle1776@reddit
Beginning at age 10 in the early 90s I spent the entire summer vacation at home with my older brother (2 years older) while both parents worked full time. It was a small town, so we just wandered for hours and hours, probably miles away from home.
rcbjr@reddit
NoiseTherapy@reddit
Oh man, I was there, and this definitely happened.
aversboyeeee@reddit
Just be home by street lights out. Before that whatever…
Dustyjohns@reddit
Yeah they let us pretty much do whatever, hell they practically kicked us out of the house after breakfast.
As far as safety. I tend to believe that the lack of social media meant our parents basically knew everyone in the neighborhood, so even though we were out of their sight, there were always eyes on us. At least in my experience if me and my friends were doing something stupid pretty much anyone in the neighborhood was free to put a stop to it, and that got you in more trouble when you got home so you learned quick to respect your elders and other people’s property
Dense_Surround3071@reddit
I had to be gone for more than 6 continuous hours with no check in before my mom started to worry. If I came back for lunch, from 9 am to 5pm I was a ghost..
midnight-dour@reddit
Nope. Parents didn’t let us do jack shit.
0peRightBehindYa@reddit
There was a stretch of about 5-7 years when my parents had no fuckin clue where the hell I was. I was just expected to call and check in from time to time so my mom knew I was still alive.
Background-Action-19@reddit
When we were kids it was implied to us we weren't supposed to have kids, because the Earth was already overpopulated anyway.
ridinbend@reddit
I think exposure to all the videos of young people doing stupid things and imitating stupid things has created more fear. In the 80s and 90s I played all over, riding bikes in the forest, building jumps, forts, caves, tree forts and in the street runoff tunnels. They didn't know what we were up to and it was never a problem.
musicnerdium@reddit
46 year old here. Out of the house at roughly 8 to 9 in the morning and be back by sundown or when the street lamps go on. Walked home about 4 miles in high school bus was optional. All school campuses were completely open K thru 12. Middle school had prefabs thay didn't have AC and space heaters in the winter.... all the bad language you can't say today was born in those days. Shit was rough, but also; kind of awesome.
strider0075@reddit
Yep, i remember going on a Saturday bike ride between my city and the next (about 30 miles round trip) with a friend when we were about 14. Only rule was dont get arrested and be home when the lights come on.
As for the difference, the world is too "fuck you got mine" to let kids out on there own often. See when were allowed to roam the parents almost all coordinated. If you acted up, you can guarantee one of the other parents will daisy chain a message back to your mom or dad. Guaranteeing an ass whooping when you got home. Then there was the fact that kids rarely were alone (usually hanging out with friends), knew to not fuck with strangers and knew/obeyed the rules of the road on bicycles (partially because the police would enforce the rules of the road).
jtmann05@reddit
whyyoutwofour@reddit
Was just thinking about this the other day...at 12 yo I used to ride my bike clear across town for tennis lessons in the summer....along major roadways the whole way. It took about 45 minutes door to door....it boggles the mind thinking back on it.
Chawnci7@reddit
💯
RattusNikkus@reddit
When I was a kid during summer break I'd go out on my own all across town. Head to the community center and play basketball, head to the elementary school and play on the playground, go to the bowling alley and people watch while scrounging for loose change to blow at the attached arcade. The year The Lion King came out, I saw it in theater 13 times(!!) by myself. God, I miss people carrying cash; people just left it everywhere. Every day a scavenger hunt!
Sometimes the neighborhood kids would come together and we'd bike all over town looking for an ~~abandoned house to snoop around in or egg~~.
I lived in a pretty safe and walkable neighborhood, though, with no shortage of third spaces. I still live there, actually, but there aren't as many of those spaces anymore, or as many kids. There were families everywhere in the early '90s, but now the whole place is 30-something tech workers walking their dogs at 11PM.
LNSU78@reddit
After breakfast, go outside. Come back at 1130 for Price is Right and lunch. Nap or go outside till 530. Take shower/bath, dinner, play, bed.
Inside was for adults & soap operas.
LNSU78@reddit
If it was raining, we played in the garage.
archliberal@reddit
I definitely had some Stand By Me type adventures early on. My own grade school child wasn’t allowed out of the yard. Some of my adventures from South Carolina include exploring the banks of the Broad River (7) and eating random berries in the woods (5) both while my parents were at work. In Arizona myself and friends used to go out into the desert to see large planes take off, race jack rabbits, or try to catch scorpions (9).
I don’t know if I was lucky or kids die harder than we think but I wasn’t taking any chances with mine
Moonbeam1288@reddit
I was roaming around at 8 with no supervision. Parents were not home - my mom taught me how to use the microwave to heat up a TV dinner, banquet Salisbury steak when I was like 5. Walked myself to school, which meant I was late every morning. Was almost left back one year. I honestly don’t remember when I showered, did homework, went to bed or studied. It was soo much freedom. I went to the park at like 10pm. Kind of miss those days.
I will say I’m honestly surprised I made it out of childhood. I was almost abducted and flashed many times by old men. Folks were pretty brazen back then with no cameras around.
Roobix9@reddit
My dad raised me and my brother. Every summer we went down and stayed with my grandparents (his parents), even if we didn't want to.
After I had my own kids, he told me that those breaks were the only thing that kept him sane. And I totally get it.
urbanlife78@reddit
I would play in the woods and swamps all day. I would ride my bike to any friend's house. The only real rule I had was I had to be home before the street lights on my street came on or I had to call home to let my parents' know I was eating dinner at a friend's house
Mijodai@reddit
I was born in '84. When I was thirteen or fourteen, my brothers were twelve and ten. My Mom got us a pass to the local outdoor pool and every day from 11:00AM until 4:30PM we would ride our bikes down to the pool and swim all summer long. Sometimes we would ride up to the school where there was a bike trail on the back grounds, or to the corner store across town. No cell phones to call us. No need to check in until dinner.
icarussc3@reddit
We are considered quite hands-off parents because we have our kids (one each in primary, middle, and high school) walk or bike themselves to and from school every day, and we let (and encourage!) them to roam around our idyllic little Canadian town by themselves ... and our kids don't have mobile phones to check in with us. Lots of other folks we know are not comfortable with that.
But even so, my wife won't let them go out without saying exactly where they're going and when they'll be back, and she worries if they're one minute late. It's a whole new social landscape of fear for children.
bugwitch@reddit
I saw this post earlier and it got me wondering: Why don't modern parents let their kids hang out alone at home? It was the best time for me. I felt comfortable and safe when no one was around. I looked forward to my family leaving for the evening just so I could feel that.
I don't have kids but I'd like to think I'd give them similar trust. Assuming they'd earned it.
PlagueDrWily@reddit
As young as age 6, I remember myself and all the other kids on the street having free run of our neighbourhood; at that age, the only rule was not to go out of sight of any of your friends’ houses without letting at least one parent know, otherwise go nuts.
The kids down the street from where I live now seem to have a similar arrangement with their parents, so it isn’t an entirely lost form of parenting.
When we got older it was pretty normal to be gone for the entire day on the weekend and I was rarely asked what I got up to or where I went - it was always some combination of arcade, video store, Mcdonalds and comic store, often supplemented with a misadventure into the woods or a random field to smoke or set off firecrackers.
Malicious_Tacos@reddit
My parents were remarkably lenient when I was in high school because I got straight A’s.
In exchange, they let me go to punk shows most nights of the week. On Wednesdays a bunch of us would go dancing at this sketch-ass BDSM bar that played 1980s Synth Pop (they got busted eventually for serving alcohol to minors). We’d stay up to 2am, hit the Denny’s then be back at school 6 hours later.
The only rules my parents had were, Where are you going and Who are you going with? I also had to be at school the next day.
SadDescription458@reddit
I used to play with my matchbox cars on the side of the highway when I was three in Arizona
pm_me_your_lub@reddit
I was roaming free at the age of 6-7.
BrattyTwilis@reddit
I remember having to learn how to walk to school by myself like it was an expectation
elroyonline@reddit
I would ride my bike home from primary school and have to wait several hours before my parents would get home, but I “wasn’t old enough” to be given a key, so I was expected to just kick around in the yard or something until someone came home and let me into the house. I got into big trouble a few time when I was a bit older and figured out how to pop open one of the back windows and climb inside (my own home).
The 80s were a very different time.
brokenman82@reddit
When I was a kid I wasn’t allowed inside on nice days
pyrowipe@reddit
I was out abd about all day everyday. No supervision. Could have used more supervision.
butchforgetshit@reddit
In the summers we left when we got up amd ate something, came back at dinner to check in, eat, amd back out the door til 9 or so unless we were staying the night with a friend or camping. This is in small Harlan County Kentucky. We literally played sports with whatever was in season and then biked around to hell and back. Best days of my life amd its sad to think kids these days are missing out.
5hallowbutdeep@reddit
your bike is your interdimensional craft lol together with friends, its really a weekend adventure
EmmalouEsq@reddit
I was just telling my husband how my cousins and I were out in the neighborhood with no supervision at like 3 and 4 years old. I remember getting in trouble at 3 because my 2 year old cousin threw wood at a neighbor's car and I got a spanking because I was older and didn't stop him. I may or may not ask be bitter about that.
I now have a 4 year old and I wouldn't let him go out unsupervised to wander for the afternoon, and we live in a pretty safe area with lots of other little kids.
Shankar_0@reddit
"Be home by dark"
We would occasionally ride our BMX's three towns over.
wonkotsane42@reddit
We weren't allowed in the house on a nice day during the weekends or summer. The only rules we had were "don't set anything on fire and be back by the time the street lights come on." Rarely did we follow rule #1.
MegaraTheMean@reddit
I can't get my kid to go play outside. I tell her to all the time and she just looks at me like I have some mental health problem, which I do, but still
Delicious_Tea3999@reddit
When I was a kid, my parents would drop me off at the library for a few hours while they did whatever around town. When my son was about seven, someone threatened to call CPS because I was browsing in the nonfiction section while he sat reading in the children’s section. I could literally see him from where I was standing, but social norms have really changed that much.
Choice_Reindeer7759@reddit
Shit not me. My kids are free range. I'll be damned if I let society tell me how to parent.
BlueProcess@reddit
Yup, if the sun was up, we were expected to be outside.
Tiny-Reading5982@reddit
ditches filled with standing water lol
FoppyDidNothingWrong@reddit
The same people who raised us without much supervision will call the cops on you if you aren't ten feet within your children.
TheMacintoshGeek@reddit
Yes. I roamed the neighborhood on my bike from after school till dinner time, and then from after dinner to when it got dark. Riding around with friends on bikes miles away from home, having a mini adventure every day.
Googalslosh@reddit
Not in South Florida it didn't. Adam Walsh and Jimmy Rice cases made parents here paranoid.
KellyAnn3106@reddit
Even when we were all home, we were expected to entertain ourselves. I was a voracious reader so I was usually in my room with a book. I really don't remember my parents playing with us or directly supervising us most of the time. We lived in a place where finished basements were common so if you weren't in your room, you were in the basement. I still have nightmares of my mom hollering my name whenever she wanted something and didn't want to walk up or down the stairs.
Holmes221bBSt@reddit
For summer, my mom would work an hour away and I would hang out with my friend climbing trees, riding bikes around unknown parts of the neighborhood, swimming in the lake, and eating fudgesicles all without adult supervision
TopherYork21@reddit
Yes the numbers are declining but I think 0% of them are because they have to "watch" their kids more than they did in the 1900's. Do people not have kids because they don't want that responsibility for sure, but not due the need to watch them more.
VectorJones@reddit
My parents had no idea where I was from 7am when they left for work, until 5 or 6pm when they got home. After school and during the summer I was often miles away from home, braving busy city streets on my bike to get to friends' houses. They had no idea. Honestly, they didn't care to know. So long at reports of my misconduct didn't come back to them, the assumption was that my activities were not worth fretting about.
Jayman44Spc@reddit
If I wasn’t playing a Nintendo game I was outside playing street hockey or roaming the neighborhood with the other neighbor kids. I was home for meals or video games and sleep that was it.
left-of-the-jokers@reddit
We had a coffee shop in this old Victorian home in my small town back in the early/mid-90s, before Starbucks ruined everything, and on Friday and Saturday nights every kid 13-20 or so was there at some point, if even just to figure out their plans for the night.
I miss you, Wired Angels!
mastergobshite@reddit
At 8 yrs old we were barefoot riding our bikes all over the city
Dick-Guzinya@reddit
I was left home alone every day in 1st and 2nd grade from 315pm to 5pm until my mom would get home from work (my dad wouldn’t get home until much later). This was totally fine. I would get home, grab a slice of cheese, hop on my bike and ride to my fiends house and play in the back yard. It just was how it was.
Foreign_Town6853@reddit
I lived in Colorado in the mountains. My dog and I would regularly play hide and seek for hours. It was a mining town so there were tons of mines with fools gold in them and would bring a bucket to collect some then sell it to shops to sell it to tourists. I had to of been 8-10. After school I'd walk home and my parents didn't get home until 6 pm. Would make a stop at the candy store buy some .03 jolly ranchers and other candies for .50. Then watch nickelodeon. Some friends and I built a tree fort and hung out in it. We found pieces of wood at night at construction sites and nails and created walkways to each fort in the trees. It collapsed after the first rain/ wind and we were so pissed. Was a fun week though.
elkniodaphs@reddit
I just said in another comment that I attended a showing of Antropophagus at a video store with a group of girls from school, so yeah, we were definitely out there unchecked.
Thamnophis660@reddit
Oh god that movie!
MoistPerception@reddit
To be fair, my parents made a point of moving to a suburb frequently called one of the safest in America, but also we did get to largely roam free, within reason. Popping down the street or riding my bike through the neighborhood. Sure, I still have a chip in a front tooth because I was swinging on a swing set and seeing how high I could go and then flip backwards out of the swing and on my last of several tries I landed my face deadass into my knee and a little parental intervention could have prevented that. But also sometimes we would just jump off the highest piece of playground equipment we could find when our parents were around, so can't really put any real blame on my mom there.
Appropriate-Neck-585@reddit
I agree with this entire meme, ALL of it!
TheBewitchingWitch@reddit
My mom never knew where the fuck I was. She still doesn’t.
Tylerdurden389@reddit
According to my parents, my eldest relatives, and others their age, kids were straight up NOT ALLOWED in the house until either dinnertime, or the streetlights turned on. Then you better get your ass home as quickly as possible lol.
myfrigginagates@reddit
There has been a bit of research about how parenting changed beginning in the 80's becoming overprotective. Jonathan Haidt, an NYU sociologist has done a lot of work on parenting, social media and the effect on kids born after '95.