One day in the second grade, many of the kids were dressed in “ethnic” clothes–those that reflected their culture (it was a very multi-cultural school). My mother, being Afro-centric, had me in a batik skirt that was a little too big for me. I didn’t know how big a problem it was until my teacher took me into the bathroom, unfastened my skirt, and commenced to pinning the waist so that it would fit tighter. I was embarrassed because she could see my underwear. That alone seemed scandalous to me!
In high school, my economics teacher gave me a ride home after I missed the schoolbus. Another one would give my sister and I rides to the train station when we’d have to stay late after school. I know these incidents don’t seem particularly scandalous, but according to my sister, who has school-aged children, it’s a big professional no-no nowadays. And seeing as how this was just in the 90s, it was probably a no-no back then as well.
Then there was a teacher who took me to her house and let me hang out for a couple of hours before taking me home. All we did was watch TV and talk about school stuff, but I bet very few teachers today would ever risk having such contact with their students.
We had an outdoor smoking area, outside of a ground floor level emergency exit from the far stairwell door. Girls (it was an all-girls school) could use it before and after school, during free periods and lunch, but this is Pittsburgh and having your coat out of your locker during the school day was against the rules, so girls who wanted to use it midday during winter had to choose freezing or “nic-fitting” and most chose freezing.
Seniors could also have “open campus” privileges which mainly meant that they only had to be in the building/on the premises when they were scheduled to be in a class, they could come in late, leave early, leave in the middle of the day, so long as they checked in and out in the office – by virtue of signing their name on a steno pad.
I live in a city of over a million people, so there must be thousands of kids here, and in spite of school yards and playgrounds everywhere, I rarely see kids playing in them without parental supervision. The ones that are playing in them are very young kids who aren’t school aged yet. From looking at my sister’s incredibly full calendar, I’d say all the school-aged kids are in scheduled activities.
Probably not a whoosh. My father graduated high school the same year, in the same city, and he has mentioned swimming in the nude also. He only attended public schools.
Neither my sister nor I have ever ridden in a car seat.
Being allowed to run around unsupervised miles away from my house at quite a tender age. Playdates didn’t exist, I ran with a gaggle of 5-6-7 year olds.
Parents letting me set off firecrackers for Ganesh Chaturthi when I was in India…at age 6.
My parents used to drop me off at Alewife and let me run around Boston starting at age 14.
I wouldn’t say my parents were neglectful, though-they were generally pretty fair and sensible, probably slightly overprotective.
Although I find it hilarious that I survived never having ridden a carseat only to have my mom and dad thrown DOWN about my plans to swan about Southeast Asia before business school.
Perhaps it varies by location. Around here, there are kids constantly roaming the neighborhood freely. This summer, the kid across the street and one of his buddies were out in the street building Diet Coke & Mentos bombs practically every day for a week. I always see kids riding their bikes aimlessly around here. Only the kindergarten parents pick up their kids from the bus stop. Everyone else (including my own Whatsit Jr., age 7) walks home from the bus on their own. And on my way to drop Whatsit the Youngest (age 2) off at preschool in the morning, I pass by a lot of neighborhoods where there are tons of kids walking to school on their own. It seems to be extremely common around here. I swear that in a 20-minute drive I will typically see around 40-50 kids out, and rarely a parent.
You’re right, though, most of these kids don’t bother going to the actual playgrounds. They’re just playing in people’s yards or whatever. The only kids at the playgrounds are the little ones, preschoolers and such, who are there with their parents.
Some of you from around Chicago may remember the infamous blizzard of 1967. The first day, school let out early, and I mean just let out. Basically they tossed us out on the street to make our own way home. I was 9 – I had to walk more than a mile home through snow above my knees.
Many of my school teachers kept bottles of liquor in their desks. Usually it was vodka that lay beside the cloth, bandages and tape and was primarily used to clean up cuts and scrapes though some did drink between classes which we thought nothing of because adults drank and they were teaching not handling dangerous machinery. I remember one time when there was an accident in the local mines, a teacher poured out large glasses of brandy gave them out to a group of what where 10-11 year old boys, made them drink it, and then told them, their fathers were in the caved-n section.
Like most people, I was pretty much allowed to do and go wherever during the summer. I used to pack a lunch, ride my bike about 4 miles to a classmate’s house, catch one of their ponies (without telling them that I was there or going riding) take the poy on rides around the countryside and eat my lunch. When I was done, I’d turn the pony back out and ride home.
I walked almost a mile to and from school by myself by the age of 8. No big deal.
As the youngest of five siblings, I was lucky if I got to sit in the front between mom and dad. Because if I didn’t, my sibs would sometimes make me lie on the shelf behind the back seat, in the back windshield.
As kids, we were washing dishes as soon as we could stand on a chair and reach the sink. My mother would have me ironing early, starting with my dad’s handkerchiefs. Why should mom do housework when she has five kids to help?
I had a car seat when I was a baby. My dad bought it from the Dodge dealership when he bought his '74 Dart with white vinyl upholstery to match the car. Prior to that, I probably rode in my mother’s arms in the front seat…I was only a few months old when he bought that car. I believe the seat is still up in the attic.
I outgrew it when I was about three years old, and then my car seat became a kiddie sized lawn chair. It was strapped into the back seat with the seatbelt, but there was nothing to hold me into the seat.
After the age of 4 or 5, I didn’t use any kind of seat. If I wanted to see out, I stood up in the back seat. If I was alone with one of my parents, I rode in the front with no seatbelt. My experience with seatbelts was playing with the ones in the back seat of my dad’s Dodge on long roadtrips (my mom’s '66 Toyota didn’t have any seatbelts to play with).
The first time I remember wearing a seatbelt in the front seat of a car, I was about 7, in that same Dodge Dart, which had modern 3-point seatbelts. It was raining hard and my dad told me to put on my seatbelt, and he put his on. I had to watch what he did because I had no idea how the 3 point seatbelts even worked. I’d never seen them used in any car.
My mother tried to throw me out of a window. In 1999 (at Christmas). But she’s crazy, so we’ll ignore that…
Living with my dad, I got a full, giant, ridiculously dangerous chemistry set in 1996, and made fireworks, firebombs, smokebombs, gunpowder, acidic chemicals that literally ate through the floor once (less interesting a story than it sounds), and more.
I had full access to firearms, starting in 1997. I never played with them, because guns are not toys.
(I was born in 1990, for clarity’s sake.)
– I walked 15 miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways! Why don’t kids walk anymore?
Answer: A lot of kids still walk, but fewer of them do because fewer schools are being built in neighborhoods anymore. A lot of them a larger schools built on major roads and you wouldn’t want your kid walking 15 miles to school for real.
– I always played with other neighborhood kids all the time! Why don’t kids play other kids anymore?
Answer: Why don’t you let them? The people making this complaint are often parents and their kids never seem to be playing with neighborhood friends either. On top of that, a lot of kids still do play with other kids all the time just because. It’s too general to say they don’t.
– We did [this really dangerous thing] all the time!
Answer: Good for you grandma/grandpa. There’s a reason kids don’t do these things anymore. And that’s because they’re really dangerous. :eek:
I’m another one who was born in the early 80s, so I straddled the divide between “full freedom” and “safety first” parenting, but it amazes me the way people act like kids today have every second of every day scheduled and that there’s no variation for this, anywhere. Or even worse, that kids somehow hate all of these scheduled classes and are just being forced to do it by the parents.
The school probably wouldn’t have liked it, but my sister’s teacher did this several times last year. She’d usually buy her McDonald’s on the way home, too.
My own parents and school were ahead of the curve in the over-protectiveness department, so I’m drawing a blank on much that happened in my childhood that would be incredibly scandalous today, that weren’t scandalous back then. I did ride on my grandfather’s tractor with him as a toddler in the mid 80s. That probably wouldn’t happen today.
Justin, we have posted after each other in many posts. Given your video game namesake, I had pretty much had you pegged for being my age. I’m 27.
I came into this post, wondering what you had posted. Not sure if the OP means to get at us younger people.
However, I think that we can, in a related, if not darker, way.
Thankfully, realtively speaking, it wasn’t THAT bad, but it did happen.
In the middle to late 80s I went to day care.
What I can remember was pretty tame, as far as abuse goes :eek: I remember a handful of times when I got my mouth taped shut as punishment. At one time, the entire room had it happen to them. Go figure on that one.
I even distinctly remember one time, I took my tape off, and the care taker re taped it, and threatened to tape my hands behind my back. All in in All, to this day, I wish I had accelerated it, just to see how far they would have gone. Oh Well.
Years later, it came up in conversation, my Mom said she didn’t remember it at all. [I lost my dad to Cancer in 1991.]
I can’t see that having gone over very well in the 80s, either.
The thing about the whole room getting taped reminded me about the whole classroom punishments that were standard in primary school. Does that still happen today?
I don’t know about today, but as I said, I was born in the early 80s and whole classroom publishments were common right through my last year of high school in 1999.
We’re about the same age (I graduated in 2000), but as far as I recall, those kind of things tapered off around fifth or sixth grade in my school. I remember sixth grade teacher having a real aversion to it, and telling us a few times that she’d never do that.
If you’re asking about situations where the teacher attempts to inspire “peer pressure” in an attempt to correct one kid’s behavior by making the entire class suffer for that one kid’s actions, God I hope not. Having been that “one kid” more than once, I gotta say there’s just nothing quite like an authority figure turning one young kid into the scapegoat that all the other kids hate.
One of my more memorable incidents was in fifth grade (1977 or so). I was idly drumming my fingers on my desk while the teacher was talking. I don’t think I even realized I was doing it, but the teacher didn’t like it. Instead of just asking me to stop, the teacher decided to hold the whole class in for the first ten minutes of recess to listen to me drumming my fingers on my desk (she wouldn’t let me stop). Needless to say, this didn’t go over well with my classmates. Once we were finally released to go to recess, I was cornered on the playground by a few of the bigger boys, who gave me a wedgie and filled my underwear with the bark that was used as playground cushioning back then. :mad:
The swingsets and monkeybars and slides were on grass, but it wasn’t thick cushiony grass, it was thin and the dirt under it was like rock if it hadn’t rained in a week or more. The slides were made of steel and were hot enough to fry eggs on.
Having finished high school only recently, I must inform you that teachers still do the ‘punish the class room,’ or still did until when I left.
I, more often than not, was the object of the punishment, at least until they realized I actually enjoyed causing my peers pain. I’d intentionally do things to invoke the ire of my teachers, to bother my fellow students. And the students would have no part of retaliation against me, because… frankly, I’m not sure, I used to assume it’s because I was awesome, but in retrospect I was a dick throughout most of my school career.