Lights! I remember when we used to clip candles to the tree and light them. (It scares me just to think about it now.)
But just to add some perspective:
<python>Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o’clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!</python>
Bubble not burst. I’m not talking about the incredible things that people get up to with skateboards (and roller skates too I believe) these days, I’m talking about unsupervised six- and seven-year-olds regularly skating down the centers of streets and hanging onto the back of the occasional car, with full knowledge and tacit approval of our parents. Maybe it still happens, and that’s how those stunt guys got started, but something makes me think it would probably be in an untrafficked urban area, even purpose-built.
I started driving a beater around on my grandfathers property at 12, as did my brother. I regularly swam across Silver Lake both with my dad and alone, and swam along the shore to get to my cousins house.
mrAru chimes in with the whole not just pocket knives, but actual sheath knives, guns in the pickup trucks belonging to the farmers kids. When they were in Boy Scouts, they had a regular client list for fire wood - they worked deals with local farmers to cut the orchards when the farmers wanted to change crops, or cut down trees in the hedgerows when they got dangerously close to falling over from age. When he and his family got moved in with an aunt and uncle who owned a grape farm, at the age of 10 he decided instead of living in the sort of cramped house he would move into a small 20 foot 60s vintage travel trailer that was more or less abandoned along the river and he had to carry a gun when he stepped outside to pee because of dog packs. They didn’t move into town until after his mother graduated nursing school and got a job so they could afford an apartment [60s divorces were not always kind to the mothers and kids]
He and his best friend at the time Kurt made fireworks …Kurts father was an inveterate horse trader and at some point in time had acquired bulk chemicals that made great box bombs. They used to make pocket money hauling bent metal grape stakes and other assorted crap to junk dealers for recycling. He, his sister and brother frequently did the latchkey kid routine, at 12 mrAru took care of his infant brother and 8 year old sister from after school until his mom got home from her second shift job - she took care of Patrick during the day, and worked nights so she could save the money by not hiring a baby sitter. 12 year old kids made their pocket money babysitting at the time. Heck, I even babysat off and on for a year when I was 12.
I really miss the freedom to run around and learn from your own mistakes. We did get warnings about not getting into vehicles with strangers, and there were not a few families where you avoided being alone with a strange uncle or cousin. There were not the number of divorced families with custody issues that there are today.
I read the first 20 posts or so, and figured I would jump on with a bit of a counter point. My apologies if someone already beat me to this.
A lot of the things that my parents generation, and the older ones of my generation are bragging about are just stupid. Teachers supervising fights? Stupid. Criminally stupid, imo. Playing with lead, lead based paint? Sure, you could do it then because nobody thought much about it. Now, we know better.
I’m also amused by how many of you are bragging about how great the things were, immediately followed by “And then I burned/cut/killed myself, and my parents didn’t give even the tiniest of shits”. That’s just sad.
Now, as stated earlier, the general consensus is that kids today do MORE homework than I did when I was in school (graduated, class of 1993… barely).
I’m going to pass on the internet, as any parent who takes 20 minutes of googling can figure out how to defend their kids from the basic stupid out there, and it’s hard to quantify, as my daughter has gotten email pics of peni with outlandish suggestions from forum goers (not here, obv) and she just deletes them with a sigh. It’s a non-event for her. She’s 15.
You know why teachers wouldn’t supervise fights today? Because they would get shot. As would students. And encouraging kids to deal with interpersonal issues by slugging it out is just dumb anyways. Again, we know better now.
Not to say there isn’t some “precious snowflake” issues out there, but every generation always decries both how stupid the upcoming generation is, and how soft they are. Been happening since the greeks, at least, and I’m sure it will continue to happen.
People have mentioned lawn darts. What I haven’t noticed is the way you play with them mentioned.
Given any group of children in sizes larger than one, it inevitably becomes Lawn Dart Catch.
Firing a loaded 10 gauge shotgun (that’s bigger than 12 gate) to scare crows. At age 8.
Having a Model T at the age of 14ish. Welding your own rollcage onto it. Pulling the tires off the rims. Driving it down onto the river at top speed, cranking the wheel to make sure it flipped, and counting the number of spins.
This was called ‘making your own fun.’
Blowing up stumps with homemade explosives.
Mumbletypeg, of the ‘spank-the-baby’ version.
Sewing. Also, washing cloth diapers.
Oh. Mowing the yard with a scythe. Digging ditches. Cutting down trees with an axe. Sawing said trees. Splitting wood with a maul.
(Most of these are my experiences. The Model T is my dad’s. As are the cloth diapers. I used the scythe, though… didn’t get a lawnmower till I was in high school.)
I was born in 1964 and grew up in Texas so everything above and anything else likely to be mentioned in this thread applies. I just wanted to give a special shout out to rope climbing in gym class and actual, all-out, no-holds-barred dodge ball. Yes, we had winners and losers, some kids were picked last, blah, blah. Invariably, after their noses stopped bleeding, the losers came back for more.
Also, fights part and parcel of recess time. Two kids duked it out and when it was over we all went back to playing smear-the-queer.
I think you’re making the mistake of assuming everything in this thread is bragging. Some is, sure, and some is nostalgic, but other stuff is written with clear knowledge that it was stupid. Riding in the back of a pickup or even a station wagon, standing in a car’s passenger seat with no restraint? I don’t think these are brags, they’re “can you believe we did this shit?”
My dad’s reaction to my cut finger, however - I still think it was a good one. I’m much happier with his “deal with it” response than him fussing over me and making it into a huge drama, as I suspect helicopter parents would do now.
And I’m glad me and my kid friends got to play all day every day of the summer, unsupervised, in our local woods. We got scraped and bruised and we fell out of trees and hurt ourselves and had black eyes from pine cone fights, stung by yellowjackets, cut ourselves on our pocket knives while building our forts and got into trouble lighting fires, but I’d rather have done that than some sanitised ball pit with a parent constantly hovering in the background.
Mom would leave us home alone starting about 8 years old. She’d tell our neighbor she’d be out and to check in on us if she heard any screaming.
We also got to order pizza while my mom was gone. She’d leave us a few bucks and some soda and we’d always invite the pizza guy in to wait in the foyer while we got the cash and paid him.
I also miss riding around on ATVs like we did around age 12 and making mazes through the corn for hours on end.
Almost everyone I knew had a utility knife (and I’m female) and most families had guns even though mine didn’t.
I got my first black eye (excluding those I got falling down stairs as a toddler) when I was 8 or so during a fight I got into at school.
Oh, and what’s the deal with teachers referring to all students as “our friends” nowadays? I had to explain to my son that some girl in his kindergarten class wasn’t his friend when she was calling him dumb, then had to explain the difference between people who were friends and who weren’t.
There is a park in Salem, MA that has a concrete slide… you would bring a large piece of cardboard with you and slide down on it. I still have the scars. The slide is still there, which surprises me. I’d think there would have been several lawsuits by now.
Nobodsy thought anything about a grown up befriending groups of children and taking one into their house for special treatment.
Today, that would have the cops checking you out.
We middle-aged posters who did the before mentioned antics in the 60’s and 70’s now know that some of this stuff was “stupid.” I don’t take it as bragging, we were reminiscing. The world has changed dramatically and I wouldn’t have allowed my kids to wander around the streets of East Detroit as I did at age 9. We also now know of the dangers of lead, but didn’t back when my brother was making lead toy soldiers.
My parents were not so focused on the children like the “helicopter” parents are today. Some of it is now necessary, some is not. It’s zero tolerance policies, and a changed society with many more people and a major increase in car traffic.
I got drunk for the first time at the age of eighteen months.
Apparently my parents had a party and I crawled around taking a sip from people’s glasses, however everyone that saw it thought I had just done it to their glass and it was just hilarious/adorable. So we’ve no idea how much I actually drank. Apparently I was a very moody little thing the next day.
Born 1974.
Exactly what I was coming in to mention. And we kids were dumbassed enough to watch the things fly up into the air, then come back down, dodging only at the last minute.
Canned beverages had removable pop-tops, which could be razor sharp, and frequently littered the grounds of parks, picnic areas, beaches…just about anywhere kids would be likely to be running barefoot…
As the fist comment said the car. My parents told me that when I was an infant they put a portable play pen in the back of the station wagon and put me in it. No seat belt, no car seat.
Smoking, my parents both smoked in the house and in the car. It was just the way it was. In fact as a kid I found it strange when I met someone who didn’t smoke.
Guns, I got my first shotgun at 13 and was shooting every weekend with rifles and shotguns. When I was 15 I did so un-supervised.
Bicycles, no helmets ever. Same with skateboards etc…
School. I got the paddle many many times. In fact in elementary school my Mom told the principal to use it on me I was so bad. As far as corporal punishment at home, if I disciplined my kids today the way my parents did to me I would be in jail. No, they didn’t abuse me, they gave me what I deserved. I feared my parents much more than my kids fear me. Looking back, I truly deserved the spankings I got. Some with a belt, some with the hand. It got my attention.
Oh, I remember when I was about 7 years old I was showing my smart ass off at a bowling alley. My Dad warned me and then he had enough. He raised me in the air by my arm and proceeded to give me a spanking that close to 40 years later I still remember. But what struck me the most was two old ladies, probably in their 60’s. They came up and started yelling at my father for spanking me. In public! I will never forget my Dad’s response as I hung there all smug thinking “he is in trouble now, that will show him”. He turned to those two ladies and said in the calmest, deepest voice I had ever heard “When I am done with him, you two are next!”. Boy, did that ever shut them up. They were no where to be found after that. Dad made it very clear that I was his boy and he would punish me the way he felt fit and no one was going to tell him otherwise. Imagine if that happened today. The cops would be called and he would be in jail.
Lawn Darts. Remember those? Got them for my 12th birthday and I can remember my friend Gary and I throwing them at each other. No one saw the problem.
It does seem today that children are guarded much more than we were. In some ways that is good, but in others I think we are raising a generation of sissy’s. Suck it up and take it just isn’t in the vocabulary any longer.
Mr. Potato Head didn’t always come with a plastic potato with slots. You used a* real *potato (not included), and the parts had these hard plastic spikes that you’d use to plunge into the potato’s flesh. They could also quite ably plunge into a little kid’s heel if he stepped on one in bare feet. Holy crap, did that hurt. I still have a scar.
The playground at my elementary school had a set of monkey bars, a jungle gym, and a swingset, similar to those pictured, all constructed from steel pipes and firmly anchored into a hard asphalt surface. Kids fell off all the time, resulting in scrapes, bruises, head trauma, etc. Anything short of a broken bone (which also did happen from time to time) earned a quick trip to the nurse’s office, then back to class. There was also a bare metal slide, which could get up to about 4000 degrees on a nice sunny day.
My Creepy Crawler Thingmaker was basically an open hot plate. I believe I was 6 when I received that Christmas present.
By the time I was 10, I owned a .22 rifle and a .410 shotgun.
By 11, I was riding a (very unstable) 3-wheeled ATV. No helmet. No supervision. (Hmm. That one didn’t work out so well.)
There was a whole year there (seventh grade for me) when every guy in the school was walking around swishing a razor-sharp butterfly knife around in his hand. I see the interns these days doing something similar with pens flipping around their fingers, and I can’t help snorting derisively.
Jumping a train to ride into town and buy a hot dog at the gas station there.
Playing tag with bb guns while running all over the farm. Our parents did get concerned about this though, and bought us rubber bbs to make it safe.
Pumping gas for my Mom as soon as I could reach the handle.
Riding around balanced on the struts under the grocery cart.
Piling three or four kids every which way on a bicycle.
Parents automatically throwing their arms out to stop kids from slamming into the dashboard when they hit the brakes.
Having a high-school boyfriend explain to me how to use a seat belt and lovingly ask me to wear it “for him.”
Trimming the yard with what was esentially a small outboard motor with sharpened propeller edges. I remember making fun of the kid next door when they got the wimpy “Fishing line trimmer.”
Dogs wandering the neighborhood in packs. (Don’t miss this one.)
Riding down the school staircase on a cafeteria tray.
In fact, almost never being expected to walk down any staircase with a bannister. No one would think of depriving a kid of such a natural and innocent pleasure.
Dodgeball.
I am a Jart survivor. The first time I played Jarts, I managed to dent my Grandpa’s brand new car (1977 Impala, which ended up being my first car 10 years later). The following summer I was playing Jarts with a friend, whipped it hard… into my foot. Stuck it to the ground. I thought the geyser of blood that occurred when I pulled it out to be very cool. Mom did not, and they were subsequently thrown away.
Skitching the bus was popular in the winter. Never thought there was a problem holding on to the bumper of a bus while it tried to maneuver on icy city streets. A friend tried it in the spring, but when she got off the bus wearing roller skates, the bus driver followed her off and watched until she was almost a block away to prevent her from getting a free ride.
Oh yeah:
Rode a bus from Chattanooga to Tallahassee when I was 12, with a confusing bus change in Atlanta. (And kids: there were no cell phones! I was completely out of contact with my parents for hours!)