I’m Thelma Lou’s age. I can remember playing outside from mid morning til dark, especially in the summer. We went inside for lunch and dinner, and right back outside again.
We rode our bikes, herd-like, all over our small town, played baseball and street hockey. Some of the neighborhood girls also played with paper dolls, building fully decorated, shoe-box homes for them.
When it rained, I played in my room, read books, did art projects.
My aunt worked for a doctor in our small town, and she’d bring me the used EKG paper. It came in large rolls, with green graphing on one side, clean white on the back. I would draw on it for hours with my crayons. My parents thought coloring books stifled creativity (at least that was their stated reason. I suspect they just didn’t have the cash to be buying coloring books). My grandparents bought me the “big box” crayola crayons for birthdays and Christmas. Life was good.
ETA: I don’t remember spending a lot of time hanging out with my parents, except for vacations and car trips. I suppose I did some, day-to-day, but I was mostly left to my own devices as far as entertainment.
I’m 32. My mom would play hide and seek and such with us if we asked. For the most part we entertained ourselves. Now that I’m a grown up, I play games with kids when they ask. I get a lot of wtf looks from others when I’m playing freeze tag or something at the park.
Nope. I grew up out in the country, on a farm. There was never any time for my mom to play with me, since she worked a full-time job, then came home to cook dinner, and do farm work. When we weren’t doing chores, we entertained ourselves.
I am 47. We were free-range kids. Thrown out in the morning, expected to wander home for dinner, thrown back out until dark. Never, ever say you are bored! They rarely did anything with us, though we did play the occasional board game. After my parents divorced when I was 10, my mom quit doing anything with us and my dad basically took us to movies and let us roam on our own.
My two daughters were pretty free-range as well. Allowed to go about a mile to the corner store when they were 8 and 9, allowed to run around with with their friends all day if they wanted. I would play some games with them, but mostly I expected them to be doing kid things. Again, do not say you are bored–I had an endless list of things for bored children to do and they all benefitted me.
I have two grandsons (brothers). The eldest (almost 9) lives with me during the school year and spends summer weekends here. He would be more free-range but we live out in the country and don’t have any other kids around. It’s a couple of miles into town and I’m just not ready to let him go by himself. None of his friends are close by. Which means I actually play with him quite a bit because there is no one else for him to hang with. We had a 30 minute nerf gun war yesterday. Later, we had a massive pillow fight then wrestled around for a while. The problem with all this play is that he is getting big and I am likely to get injured in some of our games.
This summer I also get the younger grandson (19 months) on weekends. Two weeks ago, he hit me in the forehead with a nerf gun while I was “protecting” him during a game and I thought I was going to die! They fall down and get right back up. I fall down and whimper for a while.
Yes! The boring are bored my mother would say, and point out a series of things that needed to be done. It was more - the mother finds work for idle hands.
I’m 33. My parents didn’t play with me, but we did do things like collect seashells on the beach or plant the garden together. My sisters are 10 and 7 years older than me, so they didn’t play with me much either after I was about 5 or so. I learned early on how to entertain myself. Which, in the age before video games, was mostly read, play with my toys, or go outside. Or all three.
I’m 35 (female), and I never played with my parents, nor would I have wanted to. My dad was a total grouch and didn’t interact with his children except to give us orders or punish us; my mom was much more pleasant but still didn’t play with us. My brother and I entertained ourselves.
We had a small woods with a creek at the edge of our backyard, and we’d play there all year round (some of my best memories of childhood are the games we would play in the woods) or play with the neighbor kids at their house. Starting around age 9-10, I would often ride my bike 4 miles to my best friend’s house and stay there until it started getting dark, while my brother played at the house of his best friend down the street. We walked by ourselves to the park in our neighborhood and played with each other or other kids.
Sometimes a large troop of us neighbor kids would explore the large forest that bordered the neighborhood. If you walked far enough through the woods (at least 45 minutes), you would reach a commercial fruit orchard with a bakery, and sometimes we would pool our pocket change and buy cookies to eat on the walk home. (We didn’t do that very often, for some reason, though – if I lived within walking distance of that place now, you’d find me there all the damn time. What a luxury!)
Then when I was 13 and my brother was 11, we moved across town. Before the land was developed, I spent a lot of time exploring the fields and woods on far end of the neighborhood. After a bad experience with older boys following me on the trails, I spent most of my time after school reading and drawing in my room.
I think we must have watched TV and rented movies with our parents, but I have no clear memory of doing that. (I do remember my mom letting me watch the opening teasers to Night Court and Cheers with her on her bed before my own bedtime.)
Thanks for creating this thread, ThelmaLou – I haven’t thought about any of this in years, and it felt good to reminisce.
My parents would certainly sometimes suggest or initiate things to do, some of which they would be involved in as well. But no, they certainly didn’t consider it their responsibility to keep me entertained. There was plenty of unstructured free time during which it was up to me to decide what to do.
(They may have considered themselves to have some responsibility to make sure I had access to some books, toys, records, etc. with which I could entertain myself.)
You’re welcome. It’s nice to read these memories, too.
I’m encouraged to know that people as young as 30’s had plenty of time on their own as kids.
Is the local neighborhood THAT much more dangerous now that kids can’t walk to school or spend unsupervised time outside? I realize that electronic amusements keep kids indoors, too, under the watchful eye of their parents.
But that seems tangential to parents feeling like their kids can’t be allowed to be bored.
I am 42 years old. Growing up, I mostly entertained myself with the other kids around (which weren’t many, we lived in a fairly rural area, only about a half dozen kids my age within walking/biking distance). I rode my bike a lot, played baseball/football depending on the season (with heavily modified rules to accommodate the fact that we could never cover the whole field) played in the woods, built forts… mostly outside stuff. My friends and I played a lot of Monopoly too, but weather permitting that was usually outside too, on the picnic table with rocks to serve as paperweights. Many a summer day I turned out of the house after breakfast and didn’t go indoors again (except to use the bathroom, sometimes not even then), drinking water from the garden hose and occasionally grabbing something to eat out of the garden. Good times. Notice I haven’t yet mentioned my parents. Good people, but not my playmates. We would occasionally play a board game at home (I recall it was a huge coup if we could convince our dad to play).
With my own kids, I am a little more likely to play games with them than my own father was, but I still expect them to entertain themselves for the most part. Their opportunities for outside fun are a little less than mine were (we live in the same area but it’s not that rural anymore) but still plenty to do. My job is to provide the board games, the bikes and baseball bats, the community pool membership, etc… But beyond that I think they are (and should be) responsible for entertaining themselves.
I think those of us in our 30s are among the last generation to be “free-range” as a rule rather than an exception. I remember hearing about the rise of helicopter parenting when I was a teenager and when I taught freshman comp five years ago I had a lot of those kids in my class (judging by how many parents were upset about their child’s grades. Dude, they’re in *college *now. :rolleyes:) I’d like to see how many people in their 20s had time to be bored as children.
Also this. Complaining about being bored was a good way to get assigned household chores.
My sisters and I and the neighbourhood kids entertained ourselves all day, every day. I don’t even know what my mom was doing all day - mom things, I assume.
I’ve noticed that, too. We live in suburbs with playgrounds and large school yards everywhere, and there are never any kids in them. There are school and playground zones for drivers, but never any kids walking on the streets. It’s a strange world we’re living in.
46, female, Canadian.
As my mother and most of my friends’ mothers said, “Find something to do or I’ll find something for you to do.” We were expected to entertain ourselves and not cause trouble. In the summer we would usually leave, come home for lunch, then go out again until dinner. My husband grew up in Chicago, and once he was twelve or so he would skip the lunch part and just stay out with his friends all day playing baseball or football in Marquette Park.
Of course we are talking about the fifties and sixties, and life was different then.
I’m in my mid-50s, grew up in the middle of Minneapolis in the '60s and '70s. We spent virtually every free moment roaming around outdoors, even in the winter. All of our mothers developed special yelling cadences and could get us to come home from several blocks away, but they left us alone for the most part. We also had very little money, so we didn’t travel or have a lot of superfluous “entertainment” options. We had occasional family activities like rock-hunting, Sunday drives, trips to the scary amusement park out by Lake Minnetonka, and visits to the library, but from my earliest memory my free time was left up to me (sometimes with the “supervision” of my older siblings).
I think one of the major differences is that our parents were a lot less afraid of losing a child or of having a child harmed than parents are now. They accepted that risk as a natural part of raising children. At age 6 I was allowed to get on the bus and ride downtown to the library by myself, and all of the neighborhood kids walked a half mile to the lake to swim or to the park to sled or swing. We often walked along the railroad tracks or climbed up on roofs and our parents seemed unconcerned, although they were sure to instruct us in how to stay as safe as possible. We had a lot more direct contact with random people, which helped us learn how to assess character and intent. We also learned the physical layout of our environment intimately, and that was invaluable when one needed a quick escape route.
My nieces and nephews were mostly free-range (thanks for that, stretch ;)), but the ones that lived in the suburbs had more extracurricular activities and fewer transportation options, hence more parental involvement. Didn’t seem to do them any harm.
I feel sorry for modern kids, because most of them don’t appear to have that kind of freedom and breadth of experience, and from what I’ve seen it deeply affects their self-confidence.
Hah - I remember how well “supervised” I was by my two older sisters, too. It’s a wonder anyone made it out of the 70’s alive.
Modern parents have people telling them to be afraid all the time, even though the fears are not always very well-founded (the statistics of child abductions indicate that stranger abductions are actually quite rare).
Aussie. I was another free range kid. We did go fishing aa a family unit and telly watching. My parents were not not totally uninvolved with our activities but we had a lot of freedom (yeah and mentioning boredon =housework)
