Things that were done in your childhood that would never be allowed today

In My Humble Opinion
61

Age 8, I wasn’t allowed to stay in the house by myself at weekends, but I was allowed to walk to my parents’ business, about 3 miles away, or play with a friend somewhere in the village. This would have been the early 1990s. I also remember playing in the footwell of Dad’s car, with the understanding that I’d duck if I saw a police car.

Not my school, but a guy I knew who went to my brother’s school was given a weekly detention by one of the teachers for ‘being a fag’ as pretty much their first openly gay student (I think the intent was to harass him into leaving, as the teachers could give detention but not suspend or expel a student). His friends all thought that was horribly unfair, but it went on until he left that teacher’s class, with no repercussions.

62

The class I TAed for did exactly this, 1975 - 1977. I’m sure the classes I took in college did the same thing, but I wasn’t involved in creating those lists.

63

I’m almost 48 (born in 1972), and here are things I remember doing that wouldn’t pass muster these days:

Being allowed to roam in stores/malls freely as a pretty small child. We’d go to whatever store, and I’d say “I’m going to the toy section/toy store/arcade/etc…” and my parents would say something like “Ok, stay there and we’ll come get you when we’re ready”, or when I was older and had a watch, something like “Meet us at the Orange Julius in 45 minutes” or whatever.

Being able to go around the neighborhood unfettered- I’d say something like “I’m going over to Ken’s house”, and from there, we’d roam the neighborhood for hours more or less unsupervised on our bikes and get into all sorts of shenanigans with other neighborhood kids.

64

The first place I ever ate by myself was the Automat on 42nd Street, and that was surely before the Fair. My father worked for the UN so I often rode in with him, but I got back home by myself.
I used to take allergy shots, and when our doctor moved from a few blocks away from us to across Queens, I took the bus by myself to him some times. Only one bus, but a long ride for an elementary school kid.

65

I just remembered, when I was very small, I would ride in my mom’s shopping cart at the A&P. Sometimes, if she bought hamburger, she would open the plastic wrap and pull off a little bit and give to me to nibble - raw!

66

Oh good one, Elendil’s Heir! We used to eat raw hamburger too. Delicious.

67

Late 60s-- 7th grade-was in public school in Norfolk VA. First period was French. We said the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord’s Prayer in French when the morning announcements came over the squawk box.

68

Hit reply too fast–In the early 60s, living on mid west US Air Force bases. The general rule was get out of the house! We came home when the street lights came on. My sister reminded me the other day that we used to ride our “banana bikes” behind the DDT fog trucks which ran through housing in early evenings. Explains a lot.

69

When I was a kid An unmarked van would occasionally stop at our bus stop selling candy.

I can’t believe Super Elastic Bubble Plastic was ever legal.

70

Most of the instructors at my first community college did this as well. 1989-1992.

71

My best friend’s dad was a veterinarian. Sometimes, when he got called to a farm, he’d invite us to ride with him in his two-seater Volkswagen. We’d just crawl in the back space to crouch on the thin cardboard boxes with all his vet stuff. Open syringes. Liquid nitrogen. Tissue samples and drugs of all kind.

That was late 80s.

72

Just under a mile for me.

I walked it every day except maybe heavy rain.

Other crazy things

We rode in the back of pickup trucks.

We went out to play without carrying cellphones and without informing Parents where.

Yes, we’d go to the Kiddie matinee- walk there, watch and gorge for 4 hours, walk back. Routine.

My parents used to take me and “my little friend” to Disneyland, and sure we rode some things together, but they’d see us off to Tom Sawyers island, then go enjoy the Golden Horseshoe review for maybe two shows, then we’d meet them. This was when I was 8-12 yo.

Helmets? Ok, maybe a surplus army WW2 helmet or a cheap plastic copy of one, or even a cheap plastic Astronaut hemet or something, but no head protection- well maybe the WW2 steel pot would have helped (My Dad was still in the Natl Gd and I had all sorts of cool surplus stuff).

Pretty realistic and loud toy guns. I started carrying a knife every day around 7th grade. It was a small “gentleman’s EDC knife” then I went to a SAK in Jr College. I still carry a SAK everywhere I can.

Front door usually locked, back door never. Of course you’d have to get thru the dogs.

My parents were just about the least racist people around (My Dad threatened to punch out some neighbor that wanted Dad to help block a black family from moving in) but my Mom still called brazil nuts “niggertoes”.

When I was 19, I got hired as a Security guard. They checked my age, asked me 'doyouknowhowtouseagun" and handed me a .38 and a badge.

73

I pretty much had the run of the two towns in Alaska that I grew up in, especially after I got a bicycle. I walked to all of my schools, a couple of which were at least a couple of miles away. I goofed around with some pretty serious fireworks like M-80s and cherry bombs as early as ten years old. We played with toy guns that looked VERY real: no orange plugs or other identifiers.

I don’t remember any kids who had “helicopter” parents, nor do I remember being warned about ‘stranger danger’. Our doors were never locked. In fact, my present wife had to train me to automatically lock our doors, as the habit had carried over until my 40s. “Not everyone out there wants to be your friend,” is how she put it.

I learned how to responsibly handle firearms when I was about eight years old, and had my own rifles by the time I was ten. Until I joined the military, I thought everyone grew up that way.

74

We used to say the official New York State prayer in school every morning.

“Dear Lord. We acknowledge our dependence on thee. We ask your blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our country. Amen.”

75

Yeah, my Dad bought me a .22 right after I passed the Scout gun safety course.

76

A branch of the family lived in Orange County, California. Both my aunt and uncle worked and in the early sixties their son – my cousin – was about ten. During the school year they trusted him to come home at three-ish and be okay, your archetypal latch key kid.

During the summer, they figured he’s get bored, then in trouble, by himself all day, so Mom would drop him off at the entrance to Disneyland with money enough for entrance, a D ticket to take the raft to Tom Sawyer Island, and lunch at Aunt Polly’s. Days end she’d pick him up at the gate on her way home.

Nowadays, you can’t be unaccompanied in the park until you’re fourteen.

77

When I was maybe 10, during the summer holidays, there would be an organised “Sausage Sizzle” on the beach. I would be sent off (on my own, in the evening) with a fork tied to a bamboo pole and a pack of (raw) beef* sausages, and there would be a driftwood bonfire where everyone cooked (maybe) and ate sausages. There were dozens of us, all unsupervised, with no experience of cooking - I don’t remember anyone getting sick.

Later, on holiday in Wales, in a pub, I remember my very staid mother explaining to the barman that I was 15 and would it be OK for me to have a pint of (hard) cider? He looked me up and down, said “Yeah, he’s big enough” and that was that. (Drinking age was "officially"18).

j

(*) - beef for safety, y’know?

78

We had cap guns and BB guns that all looked very realistic, if a bit undersized for kids.

When I was little I would stand in the middle of the bench seat on our old Plymouth, with its nice old Plymouth style all-metal dash, and would “help” my dad shift the gears.

Adults had guns, and nobody cared. My neighbor would take us kids to the gun range to go shooting.

If you bought cigarettes or liquor, they just assumed you were buying it for your parents and didn’t question you at all.

We had lawn darts. Nobody lost an eye.

If we had a beef with another kid, we got into a fight, as in an actual fist-fight. You’d get arrested for assault for that these days.

My father died when I was 5 (car crash). For the first couple of years we went to the neighbor’s house after school and over the summer, but after I was about 7 or so my sister and I were just home alone.

I have never worn a helmet on a bicycle.

We would catch a bus downtown, watch a movie, and catch another bus back home, also around 10 years old or so. Mom knew what movies we were going to see.

We’d also go to the library once a week or so, and would go to the swimming pool on most days in the summer, again unaccompanied and taking the bus.

I remember candy cigarettes.

Yep.

Yinz went there often? (if you are from that area you know what I mean)

I grew up in Wheeling. Went into Pittsburgh often.

79

My parents, who didn’t smoke and were vehemently against smoking on the grounds that it was bad for your health (my father, a doctor, knew this back in the 1940’s and was furious at the US government for getting soldiers addicted by including cigarettes in their rations), nevertheless always put out ashtrays for guests in our house in the 50’s and 60’s. It would have been considered intolerably rude to ask people not to smoke in one’s house.

When I went off to college, in 1969, they asked whether you smoked or not, and as a separate question whether you minded whether your roommate smoked or not. I answered no to both questions and was assigned a roommate who smoked. I didn’t think anything of it. It’s hard to imagine now that the smoke didn’t bother me, but it didn’t at the time.

I don’t remember eating raw hamburger, and I thought raw eggs on their own would be to yucky-textured to try – but eggs were considered to be sterile inside, and raw eggs were a common ingredient in foods that didn’t undergo further cooking – eggnog, for instance. This one is probably less a change in attitude than an actual change in the situation – salmonella inside unbroken eggs, because it was inside the oviducts of the chickens that produced them, was quite rare until, I think, some point in the 1980’s, when it became common in large chicken-raising operations due to the crowded conditions; as these operations sold infected chicks to everybody else, raw eggs became hazardous to eat.

80

In 1977, I was 10. I left our apartment, by myself, crossed the square to the bus stop, waited for the #10 bus, a rode it for a few miles, to get off at a stop about six blocks from my school, and walked the rest of the way.

This was in Moscow, and we hadn’t been there long when I started doing this, so my Russian was far from perfect.

After school, I reversed the process, and went home to a blissfully empty apartment, where I had two hours of privacy before my mother got home with my brother. Once in a while, a friend would come home with me.

Not in Moscow, but in the US, I went home with friends after school all the time, and we’d just call my mother when I got there-- or I’d have friends come home with me, and as soon as we got there, we’d call their parents. We knew when there was something after school, like a lesson. When there wasn’t, this kind of thing was acceptable. Frequently this meant getting on a friend’s bus instead of my own. Teachers didn’t monitor what bus you got on, and neither did the drivers. You were expected to know which bus was yours, and it wasn’t uncommon to go to a friend’s after school, so the drivers didn’t question a child they didn’t recognize.

From age 11 to 13, I had a paper route. I managed it totally on my own. My parents did nothing once they had signed the permission slip. They didn’t even drive me to the bank every month to pay the bill-- I rode my bike, with hundreds of dollars in my pocket.

I did my collecting for the route in the evening, with my sack of bills and change. I was just walking around the neighborhood, starting out with $25 in ones and change, and ending up with well-upwards of $100. Nothing ever happened to me.

I delivered the papers when it was pouring rain. I delivered when it was below freezing-- even below 0’F. I delivered in a foot of snow. I delivered in blistering heat. If I needed a sub, I found one on my own, and kept track on a calendar I had in my room. My parents never even asked me about it.

If there was a problem, like an undercount, I called the newspaper office on my own, and ordered more.

I also didn’t charge my parents for our paper.

I earned about $70/month for my trouble, which went pretty far in the late 1970s.