Back in the 60s, i was a Free-Range kid. On on a nice non-school day, I would go out after breakfast on my bike, and be gone all day, without any money, a watch, ID, cell phone (didn’t exist back then), anything, and I’d be gone all day. The only rule was to be home by 5 pm.
Nobody knew where I was, who I was speaking to, or anything. If i bumped into friends, I’d hang out for a while, but if I needed to know the time, I’d ask some stranger. If I was thirsty, I’d knock on a random door and ask for a glass of water. Once, I stopped at the end of a driveway to watch some guy doing woodworking in his open garage. He saw me watching and this stranger invited me into garage, and showed me his tools, and what he was building. Turned out he was a decent guy, and I probably reminded him of his grandson, but what if he wasn’t? My primary fear was running into the Robolotto boys, but as long as I didn’t see one of them, I was happy.
This was routine for years, and it was the same for my friends. I started doing this when I was about 7 years old.
Did this upbringing influence your later life?
I think it helped shape me into a an adventurous, curious person, because that was what motivated me as a kid. Other Free Range kids might have gone out to play sports, or to look for trouble, etc., but i was just exploring.
There was another direct influence on my life: Once, i headed to a nearby “woods,” to watch animals, and bumped into some friends. One jumped over a small creek to greet me, and stepped right onto an underground bee hive. They all poured out of that hive like water, and came directly for me. The first stung my lip, then neary eye. They got in my hair, up my t-shirt, stuck in my socks etc.
I jumped on my bike and started racing toward home, hoping to outrun them, but they were the kind of bees that don’t lose their stingers, so the ones stuck in my clothes kept stinging me. By the time i got home i had at least 30 stings.
I’m okay now, but i was really afraid of bees for many years. Gardening helped me learn to lose my fear.
Overall, i think it made me a person who isn’t afraid of the world, and i know i can navigate any situation that comes up.
I see a lot of similar stories here about wandering free and living like feral kids but I want to second making homemade Explosives from hobby shop Rocket engines.
I’m an Australian, as a 16 ur old I’d slong my gun over mu shoulder and rodee my trail bike up the range to hunt for pet food. Drape a gutted dead roo over the back of my motobike and bring it jwome, meat for the dogs and skin it. No one batted an eyelid or said anything.
Now I’d be labeled a terrorist, have police helicopters chase me down and be in jail for decades.
Some friends and I used to soak a tennis ball in lighter fluid, light it on fire, and play “hacky sack” with it. I’m completely shocked none of us ended up with any bad burns.
Edit: to be fair I do have plenty of burns but they are all from baking or getting baked, not from playing with fire.
We sprayed hair spray on our hands, lit them, and did flaming high fives.
We did this too. We used hacky sacks, socks and idk what else that would absorb lighter fluid and then play in the dark. Learned what burning hair smells like and melted some shoes but we kept doing it.
My grandfather was building a deck on his house and had a bunch of lumber piled up for it. I had the genius idea that I could use it to make “roller coaster” tracks down the steep hill behind their house. Then I had my brother climb into our wagon to test it out. He was about 1/3 of the way down the hill when I realized that he was heading for the tree line with no way to stop… so I ended up sprinting after him and flipping the whole thing over.
Freedom.
When I was a kid I was told that if I professed my love for Jesus publicly that I would be ridiculed and possibly physically harmed. I grew up in suburban America
Pretty sure people still believe that and are teaching that to their kids today.
lol
Not really a young child, but in my late teens my parents told me I had no curfew.
Their only rule was, lock the front door when you get back, and let one of them know I was home, even really late.
I would leave at 8pm in my truck, drive to pick up my friends, then hit various late night stops like Dairy Queen, Subway, Denny’s, etc. My friends and I would spend like an hour or two at each place, chilling, playing cards, eating snacks, chatting, and then go hit the next place.
Often we would all find some random parking lot and just chill there chatting and listening to music. I would frequently get back at 2-3am.
Many gen-Z kids don’t even drive. My spouse’s youngest sister is 20 and doesn’t have a drivers license. She hardly hangs out with her friends in person at all, same with most of them. They all just game together on Discord. I was a pretty mild mannered kid when I was that age, but they make me seem like a wild west bandit lol.
Also sleepovers apparently aren’t a thing any more?? A ton of parents are totally against them. I guess I kind of get it. Idk, I used to have sleepovers all the time with my friends. Pretty much everybody’s birthday party was a sleepover from age 13-17. I remember staying up super late, playing GameCube/XBox, playing truth or dare, and stuffing ourselves with candy and soda, super fun memories.
Drank tap water.
Run around in the woods with a good stick.
Man, the older I get, the more I miss being a kid with a good stick.
You can still run around in the woods with good stick regardless of age. I still do it with my nephews.
Nobody should be preventing you from running around with a good stick!
ran a Tor exit node. chatted on Bluelight. took over a (small) botnet. tripped on research chemicals.
In that order?
yes, actually!
You sound fun. Shine on you crazy diamond.
Gen x with boomer parents who barely parented, so…. Everything?
How’s this for a list? I swear every one of these is honest to god true and I did them all.
- jarts
- Being kicked out of the house for the entire day with zero supervision
- ice fishing / pond hockey. We decided if the ice was safe or not. Like 10 year old kids…
- being allowed to ride our bikes on literally any road except for highways
- riding bikes on the roads with no helmets
- being allowed to go literally anywhere we could get to on our bikes
- being given firecrackers
- carrying and using real guns on the farm at about 10+ years old unsupervised (22s and 410s - the 12 gauge unsupervised wasn’t until I was older - like 16ish)
- riding with no seat belts
- riding in the back of a pickup truck
- riding in the way back of a station wagon
- riding on the edge of a tailgate with our legs dangling over (we used to drag our sneakers on the road and make white lines by burning off the rubber soles)
- riding on the side edges of the bed of a pickup
- holding ladders and whatnot onto the roof & tailgate of a pickup (like not tied down - the kids held it down)
- working / playing all day in the summer sun with no suntan lotion
- making jumps and going off them with bicycles
- jumping over our friends with said bicycles and jumps
- riding three wheelers (they stopped making them because they were so dangerous)
- mean green machines
- candy cigarettes
- buying real cigarettes for our fathers from a vending machine
- drinking from the hose
- we we had “real” ninja stars and we hucked those things at everything
- we had real knives at very young ages - like maybe 5?
- I had a real slingshot early. Like 5ish. That thing could kill. Dangerous af.
- I always had a bow and could use it as soon as I could draw it. My friend was lucky enough to have a compound bow. Totally cool to walk around with bows and shoot shit.
- I learned to use a chainsaw around 10yr old
- drove tractors unsupervised at about 8 yr old
- drove tractors on the road
- learned to drive a real car (Datsun pickup truck - stick shift) at about 10. Unsupervised on the farm. Not allowed on the road. We used to drive it fast and do donuts and shit. Parents and grandparents didn’t care - we were just having some fun. “Be careful and don’t crash into trees” was all I ever got warned about.
- siphoned gas with a hose
- sprayed herbicides pesticides and fungicides as a teenager with no mask
- being allowed to camp outside in the woods for the night with friends
- being allowed to make campfires at said campouts (we cooked hotdogs and ate them)
- going to concerts with older brothers (anyone’s older brother) at young ages (basically once you started getting into music - 10ish?)
- carrying a house key with you since day 1 of kindergarten
- being a latchkey kid - I came home alone and took care of myself and my younger sister by about 3rd grade. Before that we got dropped off at grandmas house after school. If we had a problem we just called grandma on the phone.
- allowed to cook anything anytime since about 5
- it was a responsibility to light the wood stove and keep the fire going in the winter.
- mowed lawns unsupervised since a young age. 8ish maybe?
- used weed whackers about the same time
- had a dirt bike at 13ish. Allowed to go anywhere unsupervised
- totally cool to swim unsupervised or even alone once I learned how to swim
- totally cool to eat things that had fallen on the ground - the 5 second rule definitely applied
- it was ok to drink at home a little bit with friends as a teenager. Like a sleepover or out in the woods. Better than drinking and driving. Getting shitfaced wasn’t cool, but drinking some of dad’s beer / liquor was - as long as we didn’t drive. Party at a friends house? Gonna be booze? Ok if parents are around and nobody drives.
- when tromping around the neighborhood-I didn’t have to tell my parents where I was. They didn’t care. There were no cell phones either. If our parents wanted us they’d yell. If that didn’t work, they’d call neighbors and once they found out where we were last seen - that neighbor would yell.
- people had chicken pox parties (I never went to one but they happened - I think I got it from my sister)
- monkey bars - big ass ones at least 15 feet high. Hard packed dirt underneath. Totally could bust your head open or break your back if you fell off one. Wicked dangerous. Was actually scary to climb to the top but you bet your ass we all did it, otherwise you were a pussy and got picked on forever.
- huge Fn seesaws - like would go up in the air maybe 6 or seven feet
- those spin-y things in the playground-dunno what they were called. You know all the kids piled on, others grabbed the bars and spun the shit out of it. We all got dizzy and tried not to whack our heads falling off.
I dunno, that’s all just off the top of my head.
I’m curious, how old are you?
I’m 35 and had pretty much the exact same experience, but I also chalk a lot of that up to living out in the boonies.
51 Born in 74. Dead smack in the middle of GenX. Parents had me when they were real young. To be fair, they are good parents. We were pretty poor, they got divorced and should have never married in the first place, and they do all the boomer things that drives everyone crazy. But, they cared about me and my sister, gave us more than they could afford and we deserved, and I think I had more love from them than most kids got.
But boy-when it came to making decisions about safety. Man, what was considered normal and ok just blows my mind. ;)
As someone that had a sterile childhood of all work and fenced play in Singapore - that sounds like an amazing and well-lived childhood, for the most part.
It was a good childhood from an independence building, learning to explore standpoint. People my age around me are 1) very independent 2) confident 3) clever. It was also a hell of a lot of fun.
But dangerous. Like some guardrails could have been in place without really affecting anything. I also didn’t feel this way - I had good parents. But a lot of kids were pretty much just straight up abandoned on a daily basis. Lots of resentment towards their parents, it’s tough having a parent that literally didn’t give a shit about you. I unfortunately think a lot of kids fell into that category.
i’m brazilian and 40, put a check mark on a lot of things on the list.
Are you from rural NZ, cause that sounds exactly like my childhood but we made home made pipebombs and moved onto making our own explosives
Also rafted from my house to a mates, some 10km down river - one time coming off and ripping my leg open, the scar is dome 70mm x 30mm. Good times
RI in the states.
Funny how things so far away can be so similar.
Man, what was it with pipe bombs? It was totally a thing to do. Everybody has a story about them. For anyone younger reading - no parent thought that was safe. But so many kids tried to make them…
A kid on my street blew his hand off doing that. For real, I don’t know the details. Me and a couple of other kids strolled up to his crew (they were older and generally got into more trouble than I did). They were out in the woods and he was cutting a galvanized pipe with a hacksaw. When I figured out what he was doing, I took off. I literally got picked on for that - for about a week. I could not have been a bigger pussy. Then he was in the hospital with no hand. Then I was ok to hang out with again - someone with brains - nobody screwed around with pipe bombs any more after that.
We didn’t have a lot of water near us - just some ponds. We did stupid shit, but 1) not considered safe and 2) generally not that bad in the big scheme of things. Kids drowned a lot in pools and ponds. The items above around water were changing. My mom wasn’t a fan, but my dad was all “you’re just moming him to death”. So I suppose those are half truths - mom didn’t think they were safe - but I was still allowed.
I see that we are the same age, even if on opposite sides of the world.
The last one is merry-go-rounds :)
I would never have thought to call it that but Wiki agrees: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundabout_(play) to me a carousel or merry-go-round is motorized and huge with fake horses to ride on.
Play outside
We’d grab our bikes and ride across town. If they saw our bikes were gone they knew we’d be back later.
After the abduction and murder of two local girls, this wasn’t so accepted anymore. Kids were still out and about, but you’d get grilled about where you go, who you’re with, where are you coming home. You were supposed to be at someone’s house, mum would call and make sure that’s where you were. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bega_schoolgirl_murders
I don’t see any kids out around town anymore now though. Just the ones that walk from the bus stop to their house after school. That might just say more about todays youth culture though.
Holy shit that is heartbreaking. Thanks for responding to the topic but it’s a rough article.
I didn’t know these two girls because they were a few years older, but I knew other kids who did know them. Wasn’t good.
This is one of the reasons cars have such a chokehold, kids don’t bike places as often because of safety concerns.
I’d ride across 8 lanes of road at the busiest intersection to get to my friends house and my parents didn’t care. I also had a few hours a week at a pet store when I was 12, so I could bike to my friends house and we’d just order pizza and hand out during the summer.
I’m GenX, my entire childhood was dangerous.
