When I lived in Long Beach, CA prior to age 8, my older brother on several occasions got to with friends of his to the Pike. He could not have more than twelve (and probably was a little younger than that). I remembered being so jealous that he got to go while I had to stay hom. Once a big-deal seaside amusement, as I learned later in life, by the time my brother frequented the place, the Long Beach Pike had seriously degenerated into a seedy-as-hell cesspool.
Not true. I was there in October and November, and both times there were plenty of fishermen’s SUVs on the beach. Not usually in the towns, but definitely east of Frisco and west of Hatteras. Had to get an off-road permit, but that didn’t stop a lot of people from driving out on the beach.
I understand the rules are a little more strict during the summer season, but off season, the proportion of sunbathers to fishers changes, and the rules are relaxed.
There used to be a lot more 4x4 trails in Colorado. We used to just follow our noses, find a ‘flat’ spot and camp. No need for any kind of plan. It’s much harder now.
For our high school graduation, my buddies and I piled in three 4x4’s and took off for two weeks. Covered much of the Colorado mountains off road.
That actually makes me think of something else: in my time, which was the 80s, not the 40s & 50s, mind you, teens were treated more like adults until they gave you cause to think otherwise. This was particularly true of 16 & 17-yr-olds.
I was permitted to do things like overnight babysitting (even once on a school night to help out parents who had to take one of their children to the ER for croup), and to go on trips out of town without an adult present, unless a friend who was 18 happened to be going. We even went out-of-state a couple of times to go to a theme park. And we went straight there and back, just like we said we would.
The degree to which older teens are infantilized today boggles my mind. I know people who won’t leave 14-yr-olds home alone when they have to work, but school is out. That’s a high school freshman. I’m talking about families I know– this isn’t a child with any developmental or impulse control issues.
My son is 14, and I let him go with a friend out for pizza with the friend’s older sister, who is 17, driving-- she was going with a couple of her friends, and being nice enough to let her little brother tag along. It was maybe a 4 mile drive on city streets. In a new and really safe car. But some of the other parents at his school were scandalized. They were practically fanning themselves and swooning, as though I’d let him go to an overnight orgy, or rave, or something.
Most of the things people are posting that used to be done were genuinely dangerous, but this is something which I think has gone too far. Kids need to be given freedom gradually, so when they turn 18, they can handle being adults. So many kids are treated, at 17, not much differently from a 12-yr-old, so that when they become 18, they not only rebel, and go overboard with their “I can do what I want” behavior, but they don’t really grasp that there’s no reset button anymore.
I graduated from high school in 1985, and worked in one from 1997-2000. The huge change in that interval was really disturbing.
In “my” day (high school class of 1966) when kids went off to college, even if they lived in a dorm, they were much more on their own than they are today. [Full disclosure: I lived at home because I had a scholarship for tuition only.] One pay phone in the hall way and a weekly call home. The rest of the time no parent looking over their shoulders.
Now even if kids leave home, they can still be in touch by phone/facetime with mom and/or dad multiple times per day. And choose to be. My generation wanted to get out from under the parental watchful and controlling eye, even if it meant being broke and eating fried bologna and peanut butter. Independence was a goal in itself.
My parents were unusually severe in that regard. When I left home after college graduation in 1970 and moved in with a female friend in another city, I called them one time and asked if I could borrow $50 for a utility deposit. They said, no, you’re on your own now. They never gave me another penny. I needed to get a state loan for graduate school but didn’t bother asking them to co-sign. Instead I asked a college teacher of mine from back home, and he kindly obliged. It was a small amount-- only $600, but all I had to my name was $400 and a job at a local department store. (For you old-time Texans, it was a TOP loan, anyone remember those?) Enough memory lane shit…
Funny.
We live in New York City, but my wife is from a small rural community.
Her niece at some point a few years ago got some kind of junior license (I think she might have been fifteen or sixteen) that allowed her to drive during the day, but not at night.
She also got a part-time job at the only fast-food place in town. Her hours often kept her at work after dark. The fast-food place was too far from home to walk, especially along an unlit highway at night.
So her mother would just call up the local police station (which had one police officer – I’m not kidding) and say “hey, [Niece] is coming through, okay?” and the cop, who knew everyone in town would say okay, no problem.
I’ve noticed over the years that teenagers are less prone to infantilization in rural communities than in urban communities, and especially affluent urban communities, where infantilization is nearly universal.
True. When I went off to college in the mid-seventies, I was hundreds of miles from home. I lived in the dorms and ate in the commons, so my physical well-being wasn’t really in doubt, but none of the stuff I hear about from parents of college kids today was happening then.
No student had his or her own phone. There was a pay phone on the wall in the dorm.
Calls home were maybe once a week. No Skype or Facetime or anything like that, of course.
Here’s something that would never happen today -
My mother would occasionally send care packages to me. A pair of gloves when the weather started to turn (I went to college in a much colder region than the one in which I grew up). Non-perishable food of some kind. Stuff like that.
And, once in a while, a carton of cigarettes!
No parents, but if you were in a dorm, the school was varying levels of paternalistic. There was a meeting at my Benedictine run college in 1978 or so - one parent was very upset that the school wasn’t cracking down on whatever it was his son was doing. Father Michael (school president) wryly noted that “we aren’t a Jesuit institution”, implying I guess that the Jesuit schools were a bit more hard-core.
My time there was I think when the norms of what the school would allow were loosening. Of course a 19-year legal age for alcohol probably played into that. I think things are tightening up there (I believe they instituted a “4-year everyone in the dorms” rule in the last few years (of course Covid may have put paid to that).
Don’t know if they allow drinking in the dorms now or not (it was allowed in my time if you were of age (and winked at otherwise)). My middle son went to a different Catholic university from 2012-2016 which allowed alcohol in the dorm, assuming you were 21.
Actually, there are various services to send care packages to students these days. The only difference is that it’s more likely the parents send them instead of making them themselves.
Sure. It wasn’t the care package thing itself that I thought was a thing of the past, it was the fact that it contained cigarettes.
This may have already been mentioned, but it’s a long thread and I don’t want to go back and reread the whole thing. But apparently my high school had a smoking area for students who smoked back in the 1970s and 80s. By the time I started high school in 1994 it was long gone; by then the entire campus was non-smoking except, I think, for the teacher’s lounge.
There was a discussion starting back at post #40 about high school smoking areas.
There was a really drastic difference in colleges’ degree of control over students living in dormitories between the mid to late 60’s and about the mid 70’s; the time and speed of the changeover varying from school to school. The parent complaining in 1978 would have themselves gone to college under the old rules, and was probably freaked out by how much they had changed.
Not childhood, per se: but the dorm I lived in for several years in college did not have fire alarms. It was 10 stories tall, made of brick and cinderblock, and considered unburnable (what about all that paint? flooring?..) so by code it was not required to have alarms. This was in the 1970s and early 1980s; pretty sure it has them now. The time we had a bomb thread (common prank), that meant the RAs had to knock on every door to get people outside.
When I was young - 1960s - Mom would shoo us outside to play, and not be surprised when she didn’t see us for hours. Which was fine when we were 8, 9, 10… but she would send us out to play for a bit even when we were 3 years old. I know this because she once described how I would be outside, and lie down in the snow to rest because I was tired. Yes, I was tired, because I couldn’t BREATHE and was exhausted from the effort. Somehow I survived.
Oh yeah. I don’t know how old I was, but it must have been under 5, because after that we were living in a town without a park right across the street. Apparently I was forbidden from going to play in said park by myself (I guess the older siblings were allowed to take me there). Mom looked out side to see me walking backwards across the street towards the park. Apparently my little brain decided that that would fool her into thinking I was coming back and that coming home from a forbidden excursion was not punishable.
Sometime around 1996, my old high school went totally smoke-free, including teachers’ lounges. (Yes, plural-- there was one in each department-- it was a big school.)
This is how I remember things as well. When I arrived at my small, conservative southern school in 1970, the dorms were pretty much the wild west. I learned later that rules were enforced much more stringently just a few years before and Sunday chapel attendance had been mandatory. I think I was inside our chapel once during my four years.
And to echo others, even though we were free range kids in the sixties, almost everyone wanted to get out from under the “repression” of our households’ rules. The first apartment may have been a dump – even if you had a degree, good jobs were hard to come by and you were starting from scratch – and you may have needed a roommate even to have afforded that, but by god ma and pa weren’t there to tell you what to do.
At another board during a similar discussion, I pointed out to a younger fella who was defending his generation’s parental over-protectiveness that things were actually a lot safer now and thus his caution might be unwarranted. His response was that maybe things were statistically safer now because of the precautions his generation had taken with their children. I didn’t know how to answer that.
Teachers could probably talk about this stuff all day. Even as an administrative flunkie at a small college, I’ve had my own curious interactions with helicopter parents.
Regarding smoking: I graduated HS back in 1963, and not only was there no smoking on the school property, but it was prohibited anywhere across the street on all four sides.
In 1963!? not doubting you, but I’m astonished. Where was this?
That’s crazy. I attended high school in the early 90s and as long as we were technically over the property line, nobody cared. There was a little mom & pop convenience store/deli right next to the school, it was practically in the parking lot it was so close, run by a Korean couple. We were all clearly underage but you’d go in there, ask Mrs. Kim (“Miss K”) for a pack of whatever, and she would shake her head, then say, “Too young, too young… $2!” then slap the pack down on the counter.
And like many others here, I was allowed to roam the neighborhood freely as a small child. My stay-at-home mother really had no idea where my brother and I went most of the time; most days she would feed us breakfast then shove us out the front door and say, “Go play. Be back for lunch.” No “Be safe!” or “Stay near the house!” just “Go play.” People around here have been investigated by CPS for that!