Good one.
I touched on this in post 49 when I remarked that you didn’t call “people”, you called places with the hope/expectation of finding the person you want.
But, yeah… “What if her father answers?” is a question few 16yo’s worry about today. Now it’s “God, I hope my parents don’t find out I’ve been sending nudes to Michael!”
It sounds like a funner time if you want the truth. The smart phone era while interesting in its own ways is so much less spontaneous. I was born in 1990. By the time I was 16, I already had a cell phone, so unfortunately I never got to experience it. I never got to experiencing arranging a date and not talking to the girl for hours until it was time to meet, and then sweating with anticipating hoping she’d show. Honestly, while having say, Michelle’s dad answer the phone wasn’t fun, dating in general sounds like it was overall.
Plus, as far as the nude pic thing…The chase must’ve been a lot more fun too. Nowadays people sext before they even meet up so you know every nook and cranny of a woman’s body before even the first date. Discovering it for yourself without a nude photo to act as a guide must’ve been just so…real is the only word I can use.
Cell phones are a great tool, no doubt, and have probably saved countless lives, but…What society traded in safety, we traded also in spontaneity.
This reminds me of long distance calling back in the day. Yes, you mostly called places, and hoped that the person you wanted to speak with was there. This was a “station-to-station” call, and usually could be direct-dialed.
But it was also possible to make a “person-to-person” call. You had to go through the operator for this one. You told the operator, “I’d like to make a long distance person-to-person call to John Smith at 555-555-2368.” She would make the connection and ask whoever picked up for John Smith.
If he was there, she would connect you when he came on the line. But if he wasn’t, no connection would be made. More importantly, you would not be billed for the call at all, unlike the station-to-station call, which was billed regardless of whether John Smith was there or not. Person-to-person was a lot more expensive than station-to-station, but it did make sure that you only paid for the call if the party you wanted to speak with was there.
I remember my dad calling his mum in Scotland, from Canada.
He waited until after something like 11:00 PM, which meant it was like 4:00 AM in Scotland.
He called the long distance operator with the information, and then hung up. The long distance operator, in Canada, would then call over to the UK and get a hold of an operator in my Gran’s area.
Once that connection was made the Canadian operator would call us back and then the two operators, in Canada and Scotland, would bridge the connection.
The call would last two minutes maximum.
We had to sign a piece of paper saying that it was OK for our son not to be met at the bus, but for him just to walk to the apartment by himself. It’s about 60 yards. And it wasn’t even an option in kindergarten and the first grade. Walking home isn’t even an option, and he’s four blocks from the school. But there’s a major road and no crossing guard. When I was in school, there would have been an adult crossing guard. 10 years before I was in school, the crossing guards would have been 5th graders (the oldest grade in the school).
I asked if I could walk to school and meet my son and walk home with him, and they asked me please not to do that, because it made things over-complicated. They were set up to release kids to the car pick-up line, or put them on the bus, nothing else.
When I taught religious school last year, the kids had davening with their parents in the sanctuary, and then walked to class as a group-- it was in one building, and the classroom was maybe a quarter of a city block from the sanctuary. There was still one kid equipped with some kind of smart watch so he could send his mother a text that he got to the classroom safely.
The thing is, though, if something happens to your kid, anymore, there’s a lot of judgment. Because it’s possible to put an RFID chip on your kid, why the hell don’t you, and if he’s lost, it’s completely your fault, it’s not just something unfortunate that happens, and you deserve help.
When I flew with my son by myself when he was 16 months old, I had a dogtag on him with my cell number, and a child leash for him. If I didn’t have the child leash, I never would have gotten my shoes back on. I felt kid of silly with the dogtag precaution, but he wasn’t old enough to tell anyone his name yet. I just hoped he didn’t choke himself with it.
When my mother was in Prague in the early 1980s-- 81 or 82, she didn’t have a phone in her room, and had to walk to a public phone station to call us, which she did a couple of times. It was always arranged ahead of time with a telegram, because it had to be when the call station was opened, which was like, 9-5 Czech time, so we had to get up in the middle of the night. They didn’t have coin operated pay phones on every corner in Prague-- or, at least, you couldn’t call internationally from them.
When I lived in Indianapolis in the late 80s, long distance still wasn’t free, and I was poor, so I wrote letters to my aunt and uncle who only lived 75 minutes away. They called me maybe twice a month. When I drove down for the holidays, they slipped me gas money.
I haven’t had a land line in about 10 years, but is long distance not still expensive if you dialed the old fashioned way? I honestly don’t know.
I agree that there’s a lot of truth in this. A kid out on his or her own disappears, is hit by a car, falls into a hole–Parents’ fault. What were they thinking? They SHOULD HAVE KNOWN. They are AT FAULT. It’s no wonder, as you say, that people are increasingly unwilling to let their kids out of their sight. I still think my neighbor who picks her kid up at the bus stop is crazy, but you’re right, she;d be judged, and viciously so, if anything went wrong.
–In contrast, here’s a story from about 1970. This happened to a family that was friendly with my wife’s parents; my wife, who was maybe 8 or 9 at the time of the incident, knew the girl in question but not well. The mom was driving the station wagon home from a weekend away one night with the kids (husband had not come with). Daughter, about 10 or 11, is asleep in the far back. Turns out that the tailgate latch is not fastened properly. At some point it opens, and the girl falls out. I don;t know whether the fall kills her or she is run over by another vehicle, but…she dies.
To make matters worse, the mom is a heavy drinker, a fact known to the people in her social circle (including my later in-laws), and she has been known to drive under the influence. How much this affected what happened I can’t say, but it’s easy to imagine that if she had been sober, she’d have checked the latch more carefully, or that her inebriation caused her to drive erratcally (increasing the likelihood of the kid falling out), or something.
So we have an unbelted kid, riding in an unsafe part of the car, and being driven by a woman who is likely three sheets to the wind, and the unthinkable occurs. And yet, from everything I can tell, no one really blamed the mom for the death. After all, everybody put their kids in the far back. (I rode there myself regularly.) Nobody used seat belts. And lots of people drove drunk. One of those things, right? Well, in 1970, I guess so. Now? You’d be pilloried if you were the driver.
(I do think there is one exception to the judgment you mention, and that has to do with older teens who are driving. It seems to me that once a kid hits 16 and gets a license, that the earlier “I will never let you leave my side” morphs very quickly into “hey, have fun, see you in a few hours.” We had neighbors whose 16-year-old daughter was driving to sports practice one morning a few years back. She flipped the car on a straight, flat section of two-lane highway and died; no one knows exactly what happened, except that apparently it did not involve cell phone use. People were in general very kind and very understanding to the family (it helps that the parents are wonderful people), and there was not much judgment, rather a sense of “what can you do, bad things sometimes happen.” But I couldn;t help thinking then that if she had been 14, not 16, and been waylaid as she walked to practice instead of flipping the car while driving there, that the Judgment Police would have been out in force. Maybe I’m wrong. But I don’t think so. I find it puzzling.)
In CA, you can’t drive with other teens in the car (and no adult) until you are 18. But seriously, why would parents let their kids get a driver’s license if they didn’t expect they would, at times, drive the car by themselves? If some parent tried the: I can’t believe you let your 16-year-old drive without a parent in the car, I think that person would be seen as a nut.
Holy Cow
When i went to kindergarten, i walked there.
I don’t think we even had a bus for kindergarten.
It was a 2 room school house with a bell on the top.
Stop laughing
I remember buses in 2nd grade i think, but they were only for the kids who lived far out
like 5 miles or something.
Most kids just rode their bicycles, or walked.
It depends. With most U. S. carriers, you can make unlimited domestic long distance calls for no extra charge. You can buy a plan that lets you call international numbers for about $10 or $15 a month more.
There is a trick to that.
1st clean them good, make sure no water deposits built up on them.
Then take a tiny bit of crisco and wipe down the tray and the dividers
Then dont over fill.
Yes, in the old fridge in the garage i still have those old aluminum trays
beats the plastic ones where when you twist them, they just snap :(
If you have a landline, you can choose from different plans. My mother has an unlimited plan. My stepmother-in-law has a plan where LD is 3 cents a minute. An hour long call is $1.80. The last time I had a landline, I had the best plan I could find, and it was 10 cents a minute/day, something less at night. That’s why we switched to a broadband line as soon as we got broadband, and broadband lines existed: FREE LD! At that point, we just had one cell phone between us, and whoever was out usually had it. We got a second cell in 2006, when we had a baby, and got a second car again. But, cell plans were limited. DH used his a lot more, because he was still in the reserves, so he paid like, $80/month for unlimited minutes. I paid $15/month for 500 daytime minutes and 1,200 nighttime/weekend minutes. So we still kept the broadband line. Later my phone came out with a plan with $35/month for 1,500 anytime minutes, and unlimited texting. We finally got rid of the broadband line.
Anyone else remember all that hassle? And signing up for “rollover” minutes? I know were in the 90s and early 00s now, but geez.
Just as a contrast, [ETA: to the school walking stories - the thread’s moved on!] here’s the current situation as practised at my Australian primary school.
‘Parent sighting’ is used by Prep (FYOS) teachers for the first one or two terms of school - they let each kid go once they see their parent is in the yard. From about Term 3 onward, that vanishes - you just organise yourselves.
Most kids do get picked up by some sort of carer, but if you want your kid to just walk home, nobody’s going to stop them. The youngest independent home-goers I can think of were in grade 2 (with a big brother) or grade 4 (solo)
Likewise, the degree of monitoring on the way in is totally up to you. I abandoned my 9 year-old just outside the train station this morning (well, to be fair, actually he got tired of waiting for me to finish helping the poor confused person who didn’t know what train she should be on). Electronic snooping tells me he got there on time. I guess that’s a difference from the 70’s…
All the high schools I know of (ie Year 7 - we don’t have middle schools here) strongly encourage kids to get to school independently, and many of them lay down the law regarding the bringing in of forgotten items (short version:don’t). So all this puts a reasonable amount of incentive on parents to practise these skills in a familiar setting before you have to be dealing with new school AND bussing yourself, all at the same time
And it may be it doesn’t have to do with cars at all, but with ages. I’m just trying to get the mindset that says on the one hand “don’t let your 13/14-year-old walk 100 yards down a dead end street alone because SOMETHING MIGHT HAPPEN” and on the other hand says “hey, your 16-year-old can drive all over the place in a ton and a half of metal that can go 100 miles per hour.”
What puzzles me is how blase we seem to be about letting 16-year-olds drive when we are adopting such a protectionist policy toward kids almost up to that point. “You will never, ever, go anywhere by yourself–oh, now you qualify for a drivers’ license? Okay, changed my mind, all bets are off; here’re the keys.”
And yeah, I recognize that the woman who drives her kid a half a block today may not be the one giving her daughter the keys a couple years down the road. But I think society in general has decided that the first of these is DANGEROUS OMG and the second is <shrug>, and I see that as peculiar and if anything reversed from what it ought to be. Obviously, your mileage may vary.
I don’t know what it’s like today, but what I remember is that as soon as we could ride our bikes, we went pretty much anywhere we wanted. I think we theoretically had some limits, but those were out of sight, so as long as we were home on time, there was no way of telling. I have one memory of when I was 7 (2nd grade), we took off for some sort of long ride somewhere, probably not as long as it seemed back then, but it was far enough that we had to stop for water. Of course, none of us had any money to buy anything, so we argued about who was going to go up and knock on the stranger’s door and ask if we could get a drink from their garden hose. Anyone, one of us did, and the lady let us have a drink before we started back home.
And my parents were stricter than usual, so this wasn’t because they were easy going parents or anything. We had to be back for lunch and dinner, but that was it.
Calling from Japan in the 80s was expensive: $3.50 for the first minute and over $1.00 or $1.50 for each minute after. When I worked for a Japanese import company in the mid 90s, we would set the fax machine to auto dial after midnight when the rates were somewhat cheaper. A service came out which required an adapter and used dedicated leased lines but was cheaper. By 2000 everyone was emailing. Now I use Skype and can talk for free compete to computer or a penny or two a minute to call a phone in the States.
Kids raised themselves in the 60s and 70s. We were free range as well, with wondering rights as far as we could walk or later ride a bike. I was the forth child so I usually went with my siblings pretty much anywhere.
We would walk downtown from our home, almost two miles.
On my last trip back to the States, my mother, the woman who didn’t bat an eye back then, cautioned me about letting my kids (8 and 6) about leaving her yard.
You could go see a concert from the biggest band in the world, have great seats, and pay only $10 or less for your ticket.
Motorcycles were big and heavy and handled terribly. Most riders were “too cool” to wear helmets.
The meanest person on television was a middle-aged guy from Queens who called his wife “Dingbat.”
No person known to have smoked marijuana, womanized, or avoided military service would have had a chance at the White House.
Jimmy Carter was president, Brezhnev was the head of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe was mysterious and secretive, and Iran was considered the most modern country in the Middle East.
I just read some of the YouTube comments under this. There are lots of people decrying it for what it was, but what’s disheartening is the number of people defending it and mocking people for being PC, etc.