somewhere else, please.
I have one of those.
Hi, I was born in 1962.
“Hi Enright3”
Growing up, I shared my bedroom with my two brothers in two beds. My oldest brother got the twin bed, my other brother and I shared the double bed. The other bedroom in the house was shared with my mom and sister sleeping in a double bed.
We walked or rode our bikes to school (about half a mile). Heck, you didn’t have the option of riding in the bus if you lived in town. The school buses were for the farm kids!
All in all, I have nothing but great memories of my childhood. I never realized we were ‘poor’. My mom was awesome. She gave up a successful career when she and my father divorced because she was of the opinion that she needed to move to a small town if she was going to have any chance of raising us by herself, and keep us out of trouble.
I miss my mom. She passed last month on March 23rd. She was 80 years old. 
Oh, and that small town was Shattuck, OK… population 1200. Salute!
i wonder if teachers nowadays worry about their charges like that. /wistful
nowadays kids play on the computers, or when outside they play their handhelds for hours on end. they build in-game characters and dress them up with items bought with real world money. they talk to strangers on the Internetz. they go to the darker side on the web and download things they shouldn’t. contrary to popular belief, only a small number of them live in their mother’s basement. end-of-file
:rolleyes: Depends where here is. In rural VT at least, most kids are still kids. YMWV if you look at suburban or urban area kids.
When I was a boy . . .
. . . and eleven years old I’d get to drive the tractor over to my grandparents’ and back alone, a fifteen-mile round trip.
. . . my brother and I would get new jeans, soak them in water and kick them around the back yard to break them in.
. . . my brother and I looked forward to the Fourth of July, when we would buy cherry bombs and firecrackers from the slightly older son of the Nisei family that lived next to my grandparents. We’d then husband our supply for use in firecracker guns made of pipe, and launching buckets into orbit with the cherry bombs.
. . . we couldn’t have yard waste bonfires on Monday because that was washing day in the community.
[younger than LouisB, older than Sunrazor]
My folks were the same with the AC and if and when they went in they only went in the bedroom windows for sleeping comfort. (No central air in our house). While my bridesmaids and I were getting dressed and ready for my first wedding in 1985 in AUGUST, I had to literally beg my father to put the AC in his bedroom window while we got ready. I guess he felt 90 degrees wasn’t quite hot enough yet.
I definitely live in suburbia in my little house on a cul de sac in a housing development of over 400 homes and my daughter of 8 plays outside with her friends unsupervised each weekend. Of course she does playdates and things with school friends but I love the fact that they all call for each other, climb trees, and last weekend they said they found an old TREE HOUSE on a piece of land that was recently cleared. My only rule is that they stay together and within ear shot of my calling. And yes, like when I was a kid, I open the front door and yell her name for her to come home.
Yes you have to be a little more prudent but kids need to grow and play and be kids. She comes home dirty with stories and plans for the things they plan to do next time they play and I love it. I only regret that I didn’t live in a place that had children the same age as my son when he was growing up.
When I was a boy I lived in a three bedroom rowhouse in suburban Philadelphia with my two parents and my 10 closest siblings.
My brothers and I, nine told, slept in the “master bedroom”… two triple bunkbeds, a double bunkbed and a crib. My two sister had the smallest bedroom. My folks had their own room.
We went to the Y four times a week during the summer. We’d walk the 2 miles each way.
During the winter, we went to the Y twice a week. We’d still walk. Mom said this was so that we could take showers there and not “waste” her water.
Everywhere we went we walked or rode bikes. Church, school, church school, etc.
We were responsible for our own bikes. If it was broken, you fixed it or else you walked. We were masters of our bikes.
We were also made to be responsible for each other. Once, while walking to the Y, we were jerking around on Garrett Road. A car hit my brother Keith. Flipped him up in the air, over the car and he came down “splat.”
Our immediate thought was “We’re in sooo much trouble if he dies.”
He’d broken his hip and his legs in several places. Once we’d dragged him to the side of the road, reassured the freaking driver that he’d be alright, and made sure there was no massive amounts of blood leaking from him, two of us made a chair by linking arms and we carried him to the “Y.”
We sat him in the lobby of the “Y” and went and took our showers. Once finished, we again made the chair, carried Keith home and told Mom what happened.
She took it in stride. As she was dialing up an ambulance she asked us if we all had showered. Once assured that we had, she shooed us outside and told us to stay out until she came back from the hospital with Keith. No freaking. No retribution.
As it was, Keith spent three days in the hospital. When he came home he was in a body cast from the chest down and had to sleep in a rented hospital bed in the living room.
If this happened in today’s world, the driver would be in jail, we’d be in the custody of CPS and Mom and Dad would probably be standing tall in from of some family advocacy judge to attone for their crimes.
Meh, Mom thought. Just another day raising 11 kids (she’d end up topping out at 13 and we’re all still alive.).
Add: I haven’t thought of this little episode for at least a decade. Keith’s nickname – Gimp – stems from this incident and we use it every day.
Yeah, I’m lucky to live where I do, as our neighbors have one kid 2 months older than my daughter and one on the way that will be 4 months older than my other kid to be. (we find out if it’s a boy or girl tomorrow!)
And what’s more representative of America at large, rural Vermont or the Great American Suburbs? I can tell you that in the quasi-urban, quasi-suburb place where I live now, there are just about zero kids who have a childhood that is comparable to the one I experienced in the '70s. We’re basically raising a generation of indoor cats.
When I was young, back in the '60s, my brothers and I could roam all over Minneapolis without anyone worrying about us or chasing us off. (Well, except for the old lady next door with her slingshot and her once-pristine lawn.) In the summer, we left the house after breakfast, dashed through the kitchen to grab a sandwich at lunchtime, swarmed home when our mothers called us for dinner, and spent the evenings outside playing games. During the day, we played on the railroad tracks, flattening pennies on the tracks or putting our ears to them to listen for trains, or we walked several miles to the river. My little brother and I, 5 and 6 years old, could get on the bus for a dime and ride downtown by ourselves to swim at the Y.
The thing I miss most about those days was running barefoot from May through September. We’d build up calluses so thick that once I stepped on a nail and drove it all the way in to my heelbone without feeling it. We could go into the corner store barefoot and buy some Moxie cola or orange Crush, and then we could stand around popping bubbles in the asphalt with our toes. I think “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service” was the beginning of the end of childhood freedom.
I don’t think it’s the kids that are different now; it’s the parents. Many of them are not willing to accept even the smallest risk to their children. I’m glad I got to be a kid when I did, because I don’t think kids now have anywhere near as much fun.
When I was a boy, I played NES. Now that I am a man, I have put aside such childish things. Now I play Nintendo Wii 
I don’t know which is more representative. I don’t know what percent of children are raised in rural areas. I agree completely that urban and to some extent suburban and even rural kids don’t get the same kind of childhood experiences we had. But your generalized use of the word “here” in your response to Colophon made it sound like the US is one big suburb full of pedophiles.
I still live in the same house I grew up in. (My parents bought it nearly 40 years ago; they moved out and I rent from them.) It’s not a particularly rural location, it’s a typical suburban dormitory town, albeit with lots of open countryside close at hand.
Today’s generation of kids play out in the street until it’s too dark to see the football, just like I used to. Twenty years ago, my friends and I would argue over whose turn it was to knock on the door to ask for our ball back after it went over the fence; today I see a football sailing into the back garden, then answer the door to the sheepish-looking kid that lost the argument asking for it back. I even find myself yelling at them occasionally to get out of the garden and stop trampling the plants. What goes around comes around, but I see no evidence that kids play outside on the street any less now than they did when I was a boy.
You misconstrued my comment, for which I accept my share of blame. I was responding to Colophon’s whole post, not just the last couple of lines. And to judge by his most recent post, there is a big difference between the UK and the U.S. on this score. Kids here play outside on their own a whole lot less than they used to. Again, I’m speaking in generalities and I know there are local exceptions, but if you were to query parents on this board, I’m quite sure the majority would tell you their own kids play outside and unsupervised far, far less than they did themselves. And it’s a sure bet not one of them has sent a five-year-old to the store for cigarettes at any point in the last 25 years.
I thought I had it rough till I read ChiefScott threads. We lived in a 900 sq ft home with my 2 other brothers & me sharing a 9X9 bedroom. Bunk beds with one of us on the floor. My 2 younger sisters had the next bigger bedroom, while Mom had the largest bedroom, by herself.
Lemme back up…My folks seperated when I was 10 yrs of age because of the World Wide Church of God headed by Herbert W. Armstrong. Dad had been married before, so we couldn’t stay together because Dad’s x wife was still alive & according to the church, it was not right in Gods eyes for Dad to have a 2nd wife.
I was a straight “A” student until the age of 9. I was in the top five on the honor roll at school up until my folks seperated because of this religion. I even remember, I’m 52 now, when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade, I got tired of seeing “A’s” on my tests that I deliberately misspelled a word on a spelling test.
At the age of 12, I flunked 6th grade because Dad didn’t get home 'till 6pm & my brothers & me had the run of the town after school. My sisters lived with Mom. That’s when Dad had the smarts to send me to Mom’s home in a different city to do 6th grade over. That was a blessing for me. But eventually my other brothers followed. Dad, I think, used the church to rid himself of raising his own children.
I should have known better. 
This is the Straight Dope message board after all.
I would make a few jokes about it, but the guy that did this deserves nothing but respect. Great guy.
I still want to make a few baton jokes. :smack:
When I was a boy (of two or three, maybe four years of age), we moved onto the family farm in central Illinois. (It has been in the family for 120 years or so, dating back to my great-grandfather.) The existing house was built in 1913. (I don’t remember the house we lived in previously, on property my uncle owned, but apparently it made the family home seem like a palace by comparison.)
It had a coal furnace. The second floor was unheated, except by grates in the ceiling in the first floor/grates in the floors in the second floor. In winter, my older sister and brother and I shared a bed in the front room on the first floor, presumably a parlor at the time it was built. It had two huge single-pane, uninsulated, picture windows. It was damn cold in the winter, but we had some heirloom quilts made from old wool suits to keep us warm. You couldn’t move around all that much once tucked in. We would all spend the really cold days in the small kitchen, which had a supplemental kerosene-fired stove for heat.
You couldn’t run around barefoot in the summer for two reasons: (1) the “clinkers” from the burnt coal (which are like volcanic glass) were used to pave
the various vehicle paths on the property, and (2) we had free-range chickens. Nothing like taking a spill due to hitting one of their of their deposits to dampen one’s enthusiasm for bare feet. To this day, I am not really comfortable in bare feet.
I have memories of getting a bath in the kitchen sink.
The local “venerable” TV station recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. The first TV set that I remember us having was a DuMont, once a big player in television, both as a network and producer of the sets.
When I was in upper grade school (grades 5 - 8), a half-dozen or so of us would occasionally ride our bicycles the three or four miles to school. You probably got it: we were badass.
When I was a boy we used to bike for miles, stay out all day, all drink from the same bottle of pop (and nobody ever got sick) eat apples and pears stolen from orchards (we all got stomach ache)
We’d get home late at night during the summer holidays, parents never asked where we’d been and it never rained.
The sweet sweet days of youth