When I was 4 but close to 5 we moved from the Bronx to Central Jersey on a quiet development street. My parent who had always lived in the City, considered this so safe, I was able to wander over to friends houses on my own.
Two Many Cats: I had a similar experience, I got off the bus in 1st grade at a friends house and when I got home 2 hours or so late, my mom was freaked. I got the lecture about never doing that again without telling them first. No police, but my Mom had called the school.
Our school was about a half of a mile away, and there was a crossing guard on the one busy street. In kindergarten I walked to school with my brother and sisters but came home alone.
My parents both grew up on farms, and so the distance wasn’t an issue. They were used to walking out to the fields as kids so they didn’t think that was very far at all.
We were free range kids during the summer, and just had to be home by dinner. I usually wasn’t out as long as my siblings so that wasn’t an issue for me.
I have three older siblings all within four years of me. We would do things like Trick or Treating together. Probably by the time I was four or five, we wouldn’t need parental supervision as my brother would be eight but more importantly my oldest sister was a very responsible seven, going on 37. As long as they were there, my mom didn’t worry at all.
I don’t remember trick or treating with my parents ever. I’m sure it happened when I was very small but I don’t remember it. In elementary school we would hit my friends neighborhood right after school and then mine after dinner. Just a group of young kids.
As for school I seem to remember being dropped off st kindergarten but I walked home almost two miles. From as far back as I remember I was allowed to run around all day with friends and no supervision. I only came home covered in blood a couple of times.
In fourth grade (so, when I was 9), I walked to school and back by myself, and latchkeyed myself in. And it might have been earlier, except that that was the first year I went to school within walking distance.
I don’t remember when my first no-adults trick-or-treating would have been, but that’s not so relevant: One of my friends lived in a much better neighborhood (both in terms of perceived safety and quality of candy), and so the entire extended circle of friends converged on their house as a home base for the extortioning. Even if there weren’t any adults, there were older kids, and in groups of significant size.
Basically since we were old enough to be able to run around unassisted, we were allowed to play out front and on the street (we lived on a low-traffic one-block-long side street). Like others in this thread, the rule was that we had to come back inside when the street lights turned on.
I don’t think I have any memories of hanging out with my friends while adults were around, so probably around kindergarten/first grade. I remember having foot races in elementary school and snail-hunting in a nearby drainage ditch and running through the crop-duster landing strip in the cornfield that bordered our subdivision until my mom rang the bell for dinner.
With my own kids, my son was about 2nd grade when I started letting him walk to his friend’s house around the corner and down the street; at 12, I either slap a wristwatch on him or remind him to take his phone and give him a curfew or give me a call when he leaves so I know to expect him. He likes the freedom enough he’s great about coming home on time. My daughter is also allowed to go down the street or around the corner to her friends’ houses, though she tends to have a smaller radius and earlier curfew. She’s almost 9.
The rules for us in the late 60’s was, “Get the fuck out of the house and DON’T come back before the streetlights came on”. My Mom walked me to my first kindergarten class at 5, but after that I was on my own, iirc. I have the strangest feeling that if I hadn’t returned it would not have been much of a big deal!
It is somewhat difficult imagining my parents caring about my going trick or treating. There were always a horde of kids and we ranged many blocks in our quest for sugar.
I remember running away from kindergarten on the first day and walking to my Mother 's job, about a mile or so…
By age 7 or so I was taking the streetcar downtown every Saturday to go to the eye doctor. Thought I was the big cheese but realized much later that since my father was a supervisor for the streetcar company the operators were keeping an eye on me
Later my friends and I ranged all over the neighborhood and out to the far reaches of the bus lines.
That should have been horde of kids.
I hate auto correct!
Same here. I was child #5 so all the worry had worn off by then. I walked to kindergarten after the first day, too. Played out in the yard without anyone watching me. Ran around the block. The one thing I wasn’t supposed to do was cross Main Street by myself. When I was six I had to cross Main Street to get to school so there went that rule out the window.
I’m the 4th of 4 kids, born in 1959, and we were pretty free-range. I was usually to be found either at the next door neighbors’ house (surrogate grandparents), or sitting in a tree outside the house, reading. My brothers could have been anywhere… #3 brother was less than 9 when he and his friends were goofing off in a nearby house under construction… and he slipped and fell headfirst through the open stairwell of the house’s second floor.
But I have memories of being out, unsupervised, quite young - like the time some workmen left a ladder against the side of the house and my brother and I were up on the roof - some neighbors saw us and called Mom. I think I was 4.
I don’t remember this, but apparently when I was at most 3, Mom would send us outside to play in the snow. I had then-undiagnosed asthma - so I’d get exhausted from trying to breathe, and LIE DOWN in the snow. Mom thought that was funny. When she told me of it, many years later, I got the impression that it had happened more than once.
I think a lot of parents back then would have been arrested in today’s world.
I walked to elementary school in 3rd grade. That was a first because it was off base. I would have been 8 and remember stopping to buy candy at a small grocery.
I think that I walked to school in 2nd grade when we lived in base housing. It’s a pretty safe place to live and the school was very close.
I was probably 7 or 8 before I went trick-or-treating by myself. I’m sure that I was told to be back within an hour before full darkness set in. Little kids go out early just as the sun starts to set.
I’m still waiting. My parents keeps saying “next year we’ll think about it”.
4 years of age I was let out on my own, in about 1986. The estate we lived in at the time was designed with lots of alleys and to slow traffic and I knew not to go near the main road.
I forgot to mention that, when I was younger, I had a fenced in playground in my back yard. I was allowed to play in it by myself, but I don’t count that as “alone.” I do remember that, a few years before we moved out (around age 7), I was allowed to play on the street with some kids occasionally. We thought they were rebels, always playing out there.
We moved to a place with a dead end street, and thus there was basically no traffic. So we were on the street all the time.
The main deal with trick-or-treating was that it was dark.
This is me. I was living in San Francisco back in 1972 and I was allowed to walk to school somedays with friends. My Dad secretly followed me the first week. LOL.
shortly after that I started a new school before we moved to the East Coast permanently and my Mom arranged for a crossing guard to give me a ride in what to me was one of the first Volkswagens I had ever seen. I remember how the seats felt so differently with the dimples.
I really don’t remember a time when my parents didn’t let me wander (born 1966). I remember not being allowed to cross the street (I was four when we moved from that house), but there was a girl next door my age, and one across the alley and I remember visiting both of them - so probably about four.
I have vivid memories of kindergarten - the school was in our backyard - but it was a LONG backyard, followed by a small strip of trees, a hill, and then you went down the hill to the playground. I walked to that playground a lot alone. It was, in reality, probably a 1/4 mile or a little more door to door. No streets. But the school had a rule that kindergartners must get picked up. Well, whichever parent had pickup duty was late, and I knew my mother had to have me home because we were going somewhere. So after ten minutes I got up and walked home. My mother was fine with it - the school had fits. (My mother had been a farm kid who at five started the three mile walk into school in a Minnesota Winter because that was how you got to school in the late 1940s. And at eight drove a tractor. The ‘bundle your kids in wool’ was something she still doesn’t understand.)
It seems to be a family tradition - my daughter walked 2.5 home from school when the bus was late one day. She was probably third grade. The school had fits. I laughed and remembered when.
Born in 1970 and child #7 of 8 so I was supervised by older siblings most of the time. But when I was little I wandered the country valley while the big kids were at school and my mom was sleeping (she worked 2nd and third shifts back then). I liked to go down to the bridge that crossed the creek and see how far I could throw rocks. Or wander through the hillside picking gooseberries, mulberries and wild green apples.
At age 5 we moved to the Quad Cities and I was allowed to ride my bike unsupervised in the alley behind my house (only one block.)
At 7 we moved to another of the Quad Cities and I had free range. I walked about 7 blocks to school by myself since my next older sibling was in Middle school and she caught the bus at a different elementary. By 9 I was walking my younger sister to her morning baby sitter’s house (she had PM Kindergarten) which added a few more blocks to my walk so I started riding my bike to school.
Before we moved to the cities we didn’t trick or treat. Once there we went as a family group sans parents. By the time I was 12 it was just me and the little sister since the older siblings had aged out or moved out.
I raised my kids as free range but since we live out in the middle of nowhere the only rules were to stay off the highway/county road (as in literally staying off… they could walk beside it if need be or cross it but no riding bikes on it) and to stay away from the river. The year we moved to our old house 2 boys played and drowned in the river when it was flooding.
Born in '71… I was walking to school on my own by 1st grade. I was turned loose at a very young age, which made for a hella fun childhood. But I also sometimes wonder how I survived to remember it. Man, I got into some shit.