I remember walking to the corner bar at age 12 with my BFF to pick up a six pack of beer for her mom. They had no problem selling beer to a 12-year-old and letting us walk out the door with it.
The shocking and scandalous part is that we never busted into the six pack.
Aside from being a latchkey kid a lot and being supervised by my 11 year old sister (when I was 8, for example)… Oh, I know one.
When I was a teenager – like around 13-15 ish – my dad hated the idea that my sister and I would be home all day watching soaps, doing nothing much else. So he’d give us these heinous took-all-summer home improvement projects. I scraped and stained the deck. Repainted all of the wrought iron on the front of the house. Scraped, recaulked, and repainted all the windows on the first floor. That kind of thing. One year, he gave me a blow torch and instructed me to melt the old paint off the garage and when I got all the old paint off, I had to repaint the entire garage.
To this day, I cannot believe that my sister and I had full unsupervised use of a blowtorch and never once set the house or the garage on fire. If we had been boys, I’m sure my dad would have come home to a flaming house. No, we were dutiful and careful and that garage looked awesome by the end of the summer…
By the time I was 4 and 1/2 - 5ish I could freely roam around the neighborhood, so long as I told my parents I was leaving (and generally I’d tell them where I was going too). Oftentimes we would wander around the woods nearby in a small pack. There were only a handful of ground rules we usually followed (i.e. don’t cross any busy roads), but if we did disobey them no one would really have been the wiser. This was only the mid-90s, and to be honest, I’m not sure it would be “unthinkable” today. It’s really the sort of thing you see all the kids actually doing but if anyone actually says it out loud everyone quietly gasps.
My teacher used to hang us by our shirts on the hall coat racks or sit us on the hat shelf above them. It was common practice. If you were caught chewing gum, you had to put it on the end of your nose and put your nose to the blackboard. If you were too fidgety, they’d make you stand in the front and draw a ring around your feet so you had to stand still. If you didn’t pay attention, they wrote the answer on your face in chalk.
Pretty much as others in the mid 60’s, played outside all day away from the house, rode my bike to school in the first grade, walked almost 3 miles to summer movies downtown, etc.
Heh, at my church camp one of the counselors actually took a kid who wouldn’t wake up’s sleeping bag, pulled it over him, and swung him around until he agreed to wake up.
In the 1960s the YMCA and highschools frequently did not allow swim trunks at all, and this continued to be the case in a lot of UK and canadian schools until well into the 1970s. It mosty had to do with sanitation, basically, schools and such couldn’t provide clean swim suits and towels adn had filtration systems taht were problematic (I’m not sure how though). I can tell you, as a guy who once forgot his suit in his locker for a couple days — RANKNESS!
My dad and uncles all swam in the nude in school, and I remember my friend’s older brother had to swim nude in junior high (that would have been 1970s Michigan public school), but by the time I got there the school changed the policies. The pool area had frosted windows so light could come in, but you couldn’t see any bodies.
When I was in junior high, my family went on a road trip from Ohio to Niagara Falls. We took my stepdad’s pickup truck for this journey. Mom and stepdad rode up front, and the kids – me, my sister and brother, and my stepbrother, ranging in age from 7 to 15 – rode in the covered bed. I think we had a Monopoly game back there to pass the time.
Now, you may think that I am about to launch into a nostalgic reminiscence of how fun it was to ride in the back of the truck, and how awesome those days were, and how it’s just too bad that kids these days have to ride all strapped in.
Fuck no. It royally sucked. Every time my stepdad hit the brakes even a little bit, we’d all tumble around back there. A few times he had to slam on the brakes pretty hard, and I had bruises from sliding into the rear of the truck. It was noisy, smelly, and uncomfortable. I hated every second of it, and I would much rather have been wearing a regular seatbelt in a regular freaking car.
I still can’t believe my mom agreed to that trip. It wasn’t even really that long ago - it was in 1990 or so, when the use of child car seats was becoming much more common.
I think my family thought that there wasn’t any alcohol in the foam on a beer, so it was quite common for us kids, starting as toddlers, to be allowed to drink the foam on the top as a way of correcting for a bad pour. Or maybe they knew there was alcohol, but thought it wasn’t very much? Or something. All my cousins remember doing this, I don’t remember ever not knowing what beer tastes like.
Also, I know my mother didn’t know that there is alcohol in creme de menthe. She’s not a big drinker herself. We were allowed to have this for dessert. I didn’t like it very much, but my brother loved it and would beg for seconds.
I was left in the car quite a bit, we were often given the option of “if you think you can behave, come with me into the bank/post office/whatever” or you can sit in the car. This started when I was about 4 or 5 years old, meaning my little brother was 3. The bank was boring, we stayed in the car.
Also, I was 2 when my brother was born. That was the last day I had a car seat, a stroller, a high chair, anything, because there was a new baby. The idea of having two of any of these things would have been ridiculous and prohibitively expensive.
In 8th grade we had a sadistic biology teacher. Our school had these big 4ft by 8 ft windows, and the window blinds had a piece of 3/4 in oak at the bottom. He used this blind puller as a pointer.
In his classroom, if you spoke out of turn you had to stand up, hold out your hand, and he would take that 4 ft long pointer and whack the palm of your hand. If you flinched, you got it again.
We also had him for study hall. Quietest study hall I ever had.
When my parents got divorced, my mom was driving a small pick-up truck. We routinely went to visit my brother who lived an hour away. My mom decided all 3 of us couldn’t fit up front, so she would often make my little sister (the youngest) ride in back - whether it be spring, fall or winter.
I had to argue with my mom to let me take a turn sitting in back because I felt it was unfair to my sister - it was freezing back there sometimes. And my mom wouldn’t go in my car because she didn’t like me driving. (I am not a bad driver. It was a control issue for my mom. She was/is a little nuts.)
Finally, one time in the winter my mom got pulled over by the cops who thought we had a homeless person in the back. That finally ended it and my mom sold her truck.
From grade school, we pretty much would go out and play with the neighborhood kids after school. Nobody knew where we were, and we would often ride our bikes all over town. Just had to be back for supper.
Also, now that I think of it, when I was a teenager (16+) and school was out, I had no curfew. If I called my parents and told them who I was with, I could pretty much come crawling back to the house at 7 am. I was a good kid and they trusted my judgement.
Walking/biking anywhere I wanted in town anytime I wanted. Usually I’d tell mom where I was going and when I’d be back, and I’d call if it was going to be later.
Buying smokes for mom and dad, although the store insisted on a note before selling to a 6 year old.
A full blown 100 chemical chemistry set in the basement at around age 8
A BB gun range in the basement at around the same age
I think the think that would brown most people’s shorts today is in late middle school/early high school (82-85 or so) my best friend David lived outside the city limits with a back yard that butted up to a large copse of woods. A couple times a week I’d sling my rifle over my shoulder, put a couple hundred rounds in a knapsack and ride the four miles out to his house. Today that would probably make national news and have me in jail on a domestic terrorism charge.
My friends and i basically lived on our bicycles every afternoon and all weekend, and would often be gone hours without our parents knowing exactly what we were doing.
For high school (grades 7-12 in Australia), i went to a public, selective boarding school. Many infractions were dealt with by corporal punishment, which involved holding out your hand and receiving anywhere from one to six whacks from a long piece of cane. It was a co-ed school but only boys got the cane. By the time i left school (mid-1980s) the practice had become less common, and i believe it was eliminated altogether not long afterwards.
Pretty much, and why yes, I do have some mad home improvement skillz. My dad’s style of Wax On-Wax Off parenting did pay off in spades when I bought my house.
I was outside roaming around from morning to night, starting by about 5 years old. I wasn’t supposed to cross any busy streets, but there was a candy store on the other side of a four lane main street that I was crossing by the time I was 7.
I first started walking to school in second grade (7 years old) in the mid-1970s, but the school was only a couple of blocks away. In fifth grade, the walk was nearly a mile. The next year I was in the middle school, and the walk was about 1.5 miles if I stayed on the sidewalks, but only a mile if I went cross-country, including crossing (and walking along) the railroad tracks, through various neighborhoods, another school, etc.
The really scandalous thing was my stepfather deciding that it would be a good idea for me to ride with the movers when we moved from California to Texas. I was 12 years old. :eek: To this day, I can’t imagine what he was thinking. I guess he thought that it would be an adventure for me. He had just met the movers, but decided that they were trustworthy because one of them had served in the Army, and my stepfather was in the Army. :rolleyes:
Some highlights: The moving truck had a sleeper cab, but that was for the owner of the truck. His assistant and I slept in the trailer on (separate) bedrolls with wool blankets. Oh, and did I mention that the only thing they had to drink on the trip was room-temperature beer? :rolleyes: (I have a vivid memory of standing outside the truck during some pit stop in Arizona eating salted avocados washed down with warm beer.) When we finally got to our destination in San Antonio, I had to take a Greyhound bus by myself to Houston because my family had gone to my grandparent’s house for Christmas. I was so nervous about missing my stop in Houston that I kept asking the bus driver if we’d arrived in Houston yet. He made a stop at the outskirts of the city, and I asked the bus driver if we’d arrived in Houston yet. He said yes, so I told him to let me off there. The driver got my bags out from under the bus and left me in the middle of nowhere, about 20 miles from the main bus depot in downtown Houston. I finally found a pay phone and called my grandparent’s house. My grandmother was hysterical about the trip in general and trying to figure out where I was, because I wasn’t on the bus when it arrived at the main depot. It was way past dark when the family finally found me.
The whole trip actually was an adventure, and the two moving guys treated me well, but I can’t imagine sending my 12-year old son off with a couple of strangers on a 2,000 mile road trip.
Sometimes I can’t believe I survived to adulthood.
Same here; we had to head back when the streetlights turned on or when Dad yelled, whichever came first. Until the year I turned 11, it was impossible to be in town and more than five blocks from home; our town was on a 3×5 grid.
We used to ride in the beds of pickup trucks all summer. My father took a load to the dump when I was 10. My little sister and I rode in the back with all the garbage. I never thought anything of it
My parents were in Amway in the early 70’s. They went to several Amway meetings in suburban St; Louis, and instead of hiring a baby sitter they had my sister and I stay out in the back of the station wagon in our pajamas for a couple hours. We were probably six and four years old.
My stepfather (later determined to be an alcoholic) used to have me make his drinks, starting when I was 10 or 11. He’d yell at me if they were made wrong, so I always tasted them first to make sure they were made correctly. :eek:
Also, I was allowed to put Kahlua on my ice cream. I liked the taste, so sometimes I made myself virgin White Russians (i.e. Kahlua only, no vodka). It’s a wonder I didn’t become an alcoholic like my stepfather. (I’m a very moderate drinker today.)
In grade five in 1976, we had a teacher who liked to whack desks with his yardstick (THAT’LL get your attention when you’re goofing off in class). He was no barbarian; he’d whack boys with it, too, but not girls.
(And of course the principal still had a strap, that you’d get to experience if you were a misbehaving kid.)
ETA: I thought of one from the other side - when we were young (late 60’s, early 70’s), my dad would sometimes spend the afternoon in the bar in the big city while we all waited out in the car. My mom wasn’t allowed to go in and get him out - women weren’t allowed in the bars in Saskatoon in those days.
