I’m about 10 years younger, but that’s exactly my experience. There were two different worlds, and they really only intersected at dinner or when we were being punished for something. Big family get togethers were a little different, but not much.
I think we sort of had a limit to how far we were supposed to ride our bikes when I was really young (like 6 or 7), but once I was about 10, we’d just take off all over the place. As others have noted, almost every house int he neighborhood had kids of some age or another, and if they didn’t the people were considered odd.
The only time I remember being entertained was when we were sick. My mom would make clay from dough or home made bean bags. Other than that the concept of being entertained was non existent.
I completely agree with this. And when you combine it with the trend of non-competitiveness in school to (supposedly) encourage self-esteem (“No one gets to be better than anyone else”… Heck, in my exBF’s daughters’ high school, they ELECTED the valedictorian instead of giving that honor to the person with the highest grades), I think it definitely undermines kids’ self-confidence.
I asked the question a while back: is the average neighborhood really all THAT much more dangerous than 20-40 years ago? It’s true that when there is an incident, it’s a lot more horrific and we hear a lot more of the details now than back then… but is that a reason to keep a kid in sight every waking minute of his/her life? (Except, of course, when one leaves them alone at home all day in a locked house…) Somethin’s gotta give.
Maybe when today’s 10-year olds are parents, there will be a huge backlash. It doesn’t seem to me that helicopter parents can GET any closer, short of having a device that live-streams the kids’ activities (audio & video) all day to the parents’ computers at work.
I work in the business department of a small university and my supervisor showed us a letter she’d received from a student’s mother, asking why we would not offer him an internship in our office. My boss is in her sixties and was amused by this.
I was free range. If I hung around the house, my parents called the shots. Out in the fields and woods, I got to make the decisions.
You know ,I keep hearing that from my contemporaries “Oh, it was different when we were growing up” . It was - NY was a lot more dangerous in the 70s than it’s been in my kids’ lifetime. Yet I had more freedom than some of their friends did ( my kids themselves were pretty much free-range). I think a certain amount is general wackiness (my daughter had a friend who literally couldn’t do anything without her mother or grandmother present at all times until high school) but a lot of it is the same desire to wrap the kid in bubble wrap and protect him/her from anything remotely unpleasant that leads to parents arguing with teachers and coaches.
No, the average neighborhood is waaayyy safer than it was 20 - 40 years ago when I was growing up. By most measures, it is safer than at any point in American history. That is easy to see just by picking virtually any crime stat and looking at the graph over time. The vast majority of crimes are at or near an an time low despite what the ladies at the local beauty shop claim. Environmental dangers are less too. When I was growing up, we were free to explore barns and farms that had old-school equipment of every type. That included everything from table saws to large tractors to high explosives. We used them too even as kids even though some of them were dangerous as hell even for adults. Even if kids still had access to such things, the modern versions are almost always have additional safety features that weren’t available then.
I spent most of my younger years riding around in the bed of a pickup truck driven by either my father or my friend’s father who probably had a beer between his legs at all times (it wasn’t illegal then). Today, I know that anyone that takes my kids anywhere is going to have them belted into a car with multiple airbags and anti-lock breaks and won’t be under the influence of anything and I don’t even need to double-check that.
My mom never ever played with us and saying we were bored got us a housecleaning job assigned. My dad did play around with us but mostly on his terms. We got summer swim lessons – not optional. In fact options were generally scarce.
Yeah, we played outside with a gang of neighbor kids and never saw an adult unless we were thirsty or skinned our knees.
I raised my daughter differently, but you need to remember how many more kids there were, and how few women worked outside the home then. Suburbia was like a giant kiddie park.
Also, I was a sensitive introverted kid, and I was treated with brutal indifference, sink or swim, and we won’t save you if you drown. My daughter was also a sensitive introverted kid, and I wasn’t willing to treat her that way.
She didn’t seem to be damaged by consideration and empathy.
Know what else is really different now? The fucking job market. My daughter’s in grad school now. Because a BA, even summa cum laude, isn’t really enough to get your foot in the door now, unless it is a business or computer/engineering degree. Her highschool cohort hardly had time to be children they were studying so hard to get into the better colleges. Because they were afraid. Everyone is afraid – parents, children. I don’t remember feeling that fear that the future was a narrow little hole, the way families do now. Maybe that’s part of the missing self-confidence thing.
I’d have to agree with this. Was life better then? No, just different. We didn’t live in fear of everything - shit happened, you picked yourself up, you got on with it. You tried not to do that again.
No, after I was 9 my parents said “I’m not here to entertain you”
. Go out and play."
So we’d steal a shopping cart and ride it down a hillside towards Poop Creek, which was filled with broken beer bottles and rats. A dozen kids yelling as they raced for what was basically a sewer.
After a few infections our parents decided to just to pay up and send us to summer camp, where the only thing we had to worry about was Rocky Mountain Fever.
It’s not just danger. We had no air-conditioning, and my room was on the second floor, so it was really hot (we would take our mattresses or sheets and sleep in the living room on the really hot nights) so it wasn’t as if hanging around the house was more comfortable. The suburb I grew up in had a population of one-third the 2000 population, and it was also much smaller in area, so there was no real traffic. We got channels 2, 5, 7, and 9 on TV, and during the day it was soap operas and public TV. No Internet, no Beta, or VHS, or DVDs.
Most of my neighbors were WWII vets, as was my dad, and this was prime baby-boom time, so the neighborhood was full of kids.
There were no microwaves, nor floor steamers, we didn’t have a dishwasher, and the washer was a wringer, so if my mom was trying to cook or clean it was so much easier with all of us gone.
Only a handful of boys I knew were in organized sports, and there was almost nothing for girls anyway (not ladylike), so there was nothing to be scheduled for even if I had transportation, because no one I knew had two cars, and my dad took the car to work. And my mom and many of the other neighborhood moms didn’t drive anyway.
When I say things like this to my daughter, she looks at me as if I grew up with the dinosaurs.
Male, 67. Pretty much like the OP. The only time we ever “played” with adults was maybe Monopoly. And when my grandmother was living with us, I played canasta with her. As far as “being busy” is concerned:
My parents didn’t consider themselves to be the “entertainment committee,” but there was not the vibe that I get from a lot of the previous posters (and from other people in life) of “Go outside and don’t come back until dinner!” We went outside and played, then came back in when we wanted. I never got the impression that my mom and dad didn’t want us in the house or something, or like we were being shooed away so they could do some top secret grownup stuff, or like we had to flee lest we be made to scrub the floors. I’m in my 30s.
Female, 44, for the most part we entertained ourselves: playing in the back or front yards, playing with neighbor kids and the kids my mom watched for working parents during the summer and after school.
Sometimes my dad would come out and spray us with the hose when it was hot or play basket ball with us (we had a hoop over the garage). Sometimes if we asked my mom would play paper dolls for a little while with us. They did spend plenty of time with us. I helped my dad work on the cars. I helped my mom with cooking and she taught me sewing so I could make doll clothes and stuff. The did not “entertain us”.
Female, 38. My mother was a single mom who taught school and had a stack of papers 8 inches thick to grade more nights than not. No, she didn’t have time nor consider it her responsibility to keep me entertained, although she was always cooperative if whatever I entertained myself with was something that could include her half attention. I spent a lot of time playing “teachers” with her, where I’d sit with her grading papers and I’d make a stack of papers and pretend to grade them. Later, I’d do my homework while she graded papers. Later yet, she’d give me objective assessments and tests and I’d grade them for her.
But yeah, many of my peers are much more involved in their kids’ entertainment than I am (or she was.) At this very moment (yes, it’s after 1:00am) my 8 year old and two of her friends are out at the campfire outside my camper roasting s’mores. Up until about 30 minutes ago, they were giggling conspiratorially as I sat about 50 feet away behind them with a book and got up at intervals to hand them another marshmallow. Then one of the boys’ moms came over to check on him. She and I moved to the fire to chat and make our own s’mores…and then she took over their campfire chat. She’s got them doing a group storytelling round now. It sounds like they’re still having fun, but it’s not the spontaneous giggles and dubious preadolescent wisdom anymore; it’s a performance for the grown-up.
I’m just exhausted and want to go to bed, at this point.
Female, 43, only child. There weren’t many kids around my neighborhood when I was pre-teen (I got more roaming range from about 13 onward, but my mother did want to have at least some idea of my whereabouts), so I spent a lot of time with adults. My parents were pretty enthusiastic about board games with however many household members (ranging up to five of us, counting my grandfather and a cousin who lived with us for several years) cared to play that game. I generally entertained myself, via books, Lego, swingset in the back yard, playing with our numerous pets, etc.
What were these household chores that were so terrible you had to flee from them? Cleaning floors with a toothbrush or plucking chickens? If you were genuinely bored, why not do something domestic? It sure staved off my boredom. And your moms might have needed your help. Got to do whatever you wanted all day, and fled from responsibility. You had it better, all right.
It wasn’t that parents didn’t want you around or that chores were so onerous that you had to flee from them. It’s that when you were a child, your job was to be outside playing, getting exercise in the fresh air and sunshine, using your imagination, making friends, and just generally “playing.” Grownups had their own interests and activities, some fun, some not fun but necessary, and kids would not be interested, nor were they to be burdened with them. When you were a kid, you could just be a kid.
Also, as has been said, with lots of kids around, no air-conditioning, no electronic toys, no TV in your room (and maybe not a lot on anyway), you WANTED to be outside. To be kept in was a punishment. The action was outside where you were free-range and the primary decision-maker in your limited child’s world. I think many of today’s children are missing out on this sense of autonomy and independence. It was exhilarating. I still remember the feeling, when I was about six of walking around the block on my own, out of sight of my house alone for the first time in my life by my own choice. It was scary, heady, and thrilling. I liked it.
ETA. If you were genuinely bored, the option of doing something domestic was certainly there. That’s how I got into sewing my own clothes.
I think it’s important to remember that our memories of childhood are distorted, especially the proportions. I remember a major period of my childhood as the time we camped out on the beach because we were temporarily homeless (not as bad as it sounds–it’s a long story). You know how long we were there? Six weeks. But in my memory, it was easily as long as the whole of kindergarten, and an amazing, important experience. The week I spent at sleep-away camp was six months long. And in my memory, I remember spending tons of time exploring creeks behind houses (my parents bought three different houses that backed up on creeks) and wandering the neighborhood, playing intricate games of make-believe. But I suspect that in reality, that was one of the things I did, but that there were a lot of other things that happened, as well. Probably a lot of time bugging my mom. The things that were more adult-centered were more boring, and less likely to stick in my mind: it’s those solo times that my senses were most heightened, when I was most ME, and so I remember them the most.
When I was 15, my mom took me, my sister, and my four best girlfriends on a two week tour of the west. It was one of the best periods of my life. We had a blast. And in my memory, my mom was barely there. I mean, she was driving the van, and I remember her being around, and I am sure that we talked to her and stuff. But what I remember was my friends. But in hindsight, I know she was working her ass off to organize and run that trip (six teenage girls camping out for two weeks, new camp every night?!). The existence of that trip shows how seriously she took the role of keeping us entertained/educated/broadened, how much she wanted to give us lots of positive memories. But in my mind, it was all me and my friends.
These idyllic memories of childhood in the 70s didn’t happen by accident. Parents moved to the suburbs and bought a house near a park or a woodland to give their kids that kind of childhood. They bought them a bike and put up a basketball hoop and made nice with the annoying lady across the street because her kids were the same age. They invested in Encyclopedias and Pianos when those things represented a serious expense. They scouted out the best path to the library and taught their kids how to bike their safely. It’s the kind of thing you don’t even see when it’s done smoothly.
I dunno. I think kids today probably will remember themselves as having more independent, no-one-cared time than it seems to us that they have, and we probably had less independent, no-one-cared time than we remember.
