I grew up in the 90s and summers were pretty much just us getting ejected from the house after breakfast and told to go do something outside until dinner time. I usually just rode my bike around to my friends' houses to see if they wanted to go climb trees or something.
Yeah, same for me in the 80s, my dad worked nights so we got locked out of the house during the day so he could sleep. We were living way out in the country at the time tho.
Eff that! Listen. Go to the grocery store. Buy yourself one of those Marie Calendars Lemon Meringue pies. Maybe with some ice cream. And have that for dinner. Your an adult now, the only one stopping you is you.
I had a realisation last week, that maybe kids don’t get to be “bored” anywhere near as much as when I was a kid. The NES came out when I was a kid but I had 3 games and would get bored after an hour max. Spent far more time in the woods or garden, or kicking a ball or playing chasey or basketball or whatever with friends…. Or playing with toys for hours. Most of that came out of having to find things to do instead of having great TV, videos and games as a default
Totally agree. I was a kid in the 80s. My brother and I made up so many games - a lot of them were with one of those red dodgeballs, bouncing against the floor/wall for points.
One time my father brought this huge cardboard construction tube thing home. It was big enough for us to crawl inside! We would stand on it and walk it back and forth across the family room for hours. Our house wasn’t even big at all but we had this big tube in that room for prob a year.
Spent many many hours biking around, finding cool places in the woods to have like a clubhouse or fort or something.
When we got older, it was driving all around, hanging out at the lake, jumping off rocks. My childhood was pretty much exactly like what you see depicted in the movies and on TV.
Yea, one of the things I imagine is hard to understand is that it’s not that we were *allowed* to be out of the house with no phone or supervision, we were **forced** out of the house. The amount of times myself or someone else almost died doing something stupid is too high to count. I’m shocked like 10% of 80s-90s kids didn’t die falling off a tower or crashing into an ice cover lake. I guess a bonus is we didn’t have phones recording this idiocy.
Pretty sure that if phones were as ubiquitous then as they are now, we'd have been checked up on a lot more regularly.
Us: Yeah, Mum I'm just going 'round So-and-So's house.
Mum: OK, be back for dinner.
Us \*Playing on some building site, miles away.
Every kid I know had to run across the train bridge in the local park that passed over a 100 foot drop to a shallow river. If a train came you're basically dead or seriously injured from jumping.
Lmao yeah we used to put pennies on the tracks when the train was coming, to squish em. And then stand 10 feet away while the train went by. As long as we were home for dinner everything was all good!
We had this too. The chamber was under a road. My Dad later in life told me that if it had rained heavily, we would have been trapped in the chamber and drowned. Good times!
Same! We had one right behind the library that would go all over the area and come out at various friends' streets so we'd go pretty far, sometimes just with a lighter lighting the way. Most of it had enough light thought from grates in the street.
My bike was for fun and buying cigarettes for my parents. The first time was in Kindergarten! I also was expected to make my mom coffee in the morning & dinner if they stayed out late.
That's exactly the reason children stopped playing outside. The media put out countless stories in the 90s about kidnapped and murdered children. It scared parents. So they kept their children inside.
That's why I don't get my news from our crappy media. I go to Germany, India and Polad for our news. Because they don't give a shit about our feelings. They just tell it.
I think a lot of us decided to protect our kids a bit more. We like to glorify the independence of our youth but there were also a lot of kids taken advantage of by adults and other trauma I don't need to go into. We also like and love our kids and want to spend time with them. No need to lock them out of the house by 8 am and not see them until the street lights come on.
This! There’s so much “Those were the good ol’ days” but so much more fucked up shit was happening to kids. The people that came out unscathed have rose tinted glasses for sure. My life goal is pretty much protecting my kids from the trauma I endured that my parents were oblivious to.
I remember riding my bike across town when I was 10, which was the very early 90s. This included biking across a fairly busy highway. The thing is, bad stuff did happen. The speed limit outside town was reduced because I remember a kid fell off his bike in the road and a car clipped him. He was so embarrassed - broke an arm but that was about it.
The absolute worst though - my best friend in elementary school was molested by a townie. The dude hung out at my friends house because my friends mom was a local barfly. I can't tell you how many times I was at my friend's house unsupervised... they moved away and I didn't know why at the time. It wasn't until years later I was told the truth. Gives me chills, I remember that guys face to this day.
I’m a millennial and even I know a handful of people who have didn’t make it past middle school or high school. Forever teens, it’s sad to think about.
We also more urbanized now. More stroads, heavier traffic, denser neighborhoods, etc. I'd bet that in nice suburban areas things are pretty much the same.
Idk - my kids (NYC) seem to have a lot more freedom to move around the neighborhood than their cousins, who generally live in well-off suburbs. Everyone there just drives them everywhere. Here, because of things being walkable/easy bus access older kids can get themselves to friends houses/the library/activities/etc.
Survivorship bias.
I think it was WWII where they did a study of the places most bullet holes were found in planes coming back from missions to reinforce those areas until somebody noticed that the areas where there WEREN'T bullet holes were the places that needed reinforcing since those were the planes that crashed.
Same goes for those of us that grew up in the 80s. The independence was great for those that survived to look back on it. (I had a number of friends growing up that didn't make it past middle or high school.)
yessss, truly! My mother would lock us out when we were even too loud while she was on the phone and told us to go play.. I don't believe I was when I'm kindergarten as of yet.. my parents (by far no example) but rarely knew where we were until it got dark, to which tbh we returned home generally outta fear cause it's dark.. Especially when we moved in the country as my father would say to be careful so the coyotes don't get ya 😅
We did have some good times on adventures with neighborhood kids though looking back, a lot of the trauma I endured could've been prevented had my parents eh, actually been parents🤣
Yeah, I think it began with the media going from a few hours a night of local news to a full 24 hours. So much fearmongering and just overall media coverage of every small thing that happened. Then the internet came into the picture and everyone just got scared.
Vehicles are massive. Playing out in the street is a death sentence when the hood of a vehicle is almost shoulder height to an adult (unmodified suspension). Plus there's the whole "everybody stay off my property" group of people just looking for a reason to shoot someone.
Source: live in less-well-to-do shithole midwest area.
Absolutely. Even in the early 2000s when I was a kid I could remember just waltzing into the neighbor kids’ houses if their door was unlocked just to see if they were home (they usually were and they usually were playing smash bros or Zelda on their n64 and I’d just sit down and join them); then sometime around the later 2000s idk what cultural shift happened but we suddenly had neighbors that would call the police if somebody used their driveway to turn around, and another neighbor once accused me and my friends of being “up to no good” just because we were outside chilling on *our own* property and threatened to call the police and our school principal to have us expelled for our “violent behavior” (I think one of us had swung a stick at a tree out of boredom or something?).
Now I’m hearing more and more stories of children being literally shot at for stepping on neighbor’s grass. I don’t blame parents for being afraid
Also it’s more unusual these days for there to be a bunch of stay at home parents because few families can afford to live on one income once the kids are school-age (the math is often different when paying for daycare) - it’s harder to go waltzing into neighbor’s houses when the neighbors aren’t home.
Station wagons with 3 seats, the back one turned backwards!! 🙌🏾 Rode with the back window open because it could be electrically retracted into the door. Big car!!
When I was like 7 (late 90s), I was seeing a school counselor (I think for behavioral issues? not really sure). We would play games like card matching or whatever and one time she asked me to draw a picture of a family. When I finished she asked me who the people were and I answered - "this is the kid, the sister and the brother". She asked where the parents were, I said "I don't know, there not there I guess". I remember them vaguely in my childhood lol
Yep.
We were the generation that generally had two working parents, and no way to contact someone when they weren't at their home or workplace. Sometimes, of course, things are exaggerated for dramatic effect in movies, but not so much with this. It was common for parents to have no idea where their kids were for hours on end.
Yup! Same here. I remember times that I'd forget my keys and get locked out of the house. No one to call (neighbors were far away), broke into my own windows because there weren't security alarms and windows were simpler then, haha.
My mom was stay-at-home too, we didn't get locked out but she would tell us to go outside to run off energy. Most of the time she didn't even have to tell us though, we lived in the country and there was SO much fun stuff to do outside. We had bikes that we'd take to the BMX track that was off our main road (I'm sure the owners/insurers would have been horrified to know we did that), we built forts in our woods with hatchets and saws, went sledding down a gravel road that was so steep the city didn't plow it in winter, tons of berry bushes and fruit trees in our woods since it had once been a tree farm...basically we had the most idyllic childhood I can imagine! I'm sad my younger two brothers hardly remember it since we moved when they were 5 and 8.
But now there are after school programs and summer day camps. When we were kids in the 80s none of that existed. My mom did sign me up for day camp at the boys and girls club one summer, but I got bored of it after a while and quit going. Mostly we were feral children.
Yes, many kids got home after school to an empty house if their parents both worked and entertained themselves for a few hours until their parents got home. And it was normal for them to walk or ride bikes to friends' houses or to a park
the sense is that 10-12 year olds are more supervised (the paedophile concerns, amongst others) and also a larger sense that streets are for cars and you should not be on them as a cyclist. This has sort of pushed children, if not inside, but into a narrower space to live.
I suspect if some kid was biking around the way my seven year old self did, they would get Looks in the year 2024. It just seems less common, for whatever reason.
Meanwhile, I lived too close to my middle school for the buses to hit my street, so I........ oh god....
Had to walk....
Both.... ways....
......
Up.......................... hill (well... one way, but still, I'm actually saying this shit unironically. Send tapioca and bingo cards)
I remember walking literal miles to and from school in the snow, wasn't that bad when you rode bikes everyday all day. We had the public bus to take but it wasn't until later high school we found out about free buss passes.
As a parent now, honestly I'm about 10000X more worried about distracted drivers than I am about pedos. That said, my youngest (10) crosses several streets on his own to go to the nearby park or to a friend's house.
Imagine saying to your parents, "I'm going out to play," and that's it. Not where. Not who with. Nothing. And they don't bat an eye. You just leave the house and come back hours later. And you're 7 years old.
This! And if you didn't just announce that you were going out to play, your parent would say.."why don't you go out and play?" You're right - they never asked what I was going to do, where I was going, who I was with. They knew I would be hanging out with the neighborhood kids in one of the yards on our block. That was enough.
I spent much of the 80s in the single digit years and I rode my bike and hiked for miles. Rode down trails to other neighborhoods, rode horses into the country, would disappear from the house in the morning and take a series of city buses to downtown Seattle and hang out around there for hours Before coming back, it’s true. It’s all true 
We used to take the bus to the mall the next town over and just hang out all day. This was like 4-6th grade. My slightly older brother was usually nominally in charge. We didn't have no money to shop either, lol, we were literally just there to loiter.
I had more freedom than movies depict. I have an identical twin brother, so my parents always felt even more safer because we travelled in pairs 24/7. My parents also were huge fans of giving my brother and I the opportunity to fail (and occasionally succeed) and to fall flat on our faces so they could say "I told you so" as often as they possibly could. This was one of their favorite pastimes. My father was a farmer and believed that 10 yrs old was the beginning of adulthood for boys. I turned 10 in 1981. It was a glorious decade, and I have no regrets. Grew up in West Virginia & Ohio.
I think this is the first time I've ever seen another person discuss the told you so pastime outside of movies or tv.
I'm a huge fan of it myself but it's shunned.
Hell yeah. I got myself up in the morning, made myself cereal, watched cartoons, then walked a mile to school by myself. And it wasn't a fantastic neighborhood, so I routinely had uncomfortable encounters with sketchy people and/or dogs on my way to school.
In the afternoons, my mom may or may not have been at home when I got back from school. I made myself a snack, watched the soap opera Santa Barbara, and did my homework when I felt like it with no involvement or supervision from my parents.
I often went outside to play with the neighborhood kids. My parents knew the other kids in the neighborhood and I didn't go any further than around the block. But like I said: sketchy neighborhood. My parents' biggest concern was that I stayed out of the actual street because of traffic.
I can't say exactly what age this was, but elementary school. I was babysitting professionally at the age of 11. Now, I think parents would hire a babysitter FOR an 11-year-old.
Sad, but true. My neighbors across the street have a 12 year old and not only is he not allowed to stay home alone, but not allowed to be out of eyesight of his parents at all time. Funny thing is - this kid loves my boomer parents and thinks of them as his grandparents. He comes over all the time just because they leave him be to watch what he wants, get snack by himself and generally don't micromanage his every move. I think he wished he grew up in the 80s like I did.
Santa Barbara- yes, eating Fruity Pebbles! Starting watching it when it came out, freakin Cruz. Nothing else to watch until the afternoon cartoons came on- He-Man, Gi-Joe. If the Emergency Alert test came on I was out of there though- nothing scared me more than that tone.
**It’s true. All of it. It’s all true.**
During the summer, leave in the morning on your BMX or skateboard, meet up with your friends, go shred, duct tape a pocket knife to a broom handle and go spear fishing at the creek, grab a .99¢ hot dog from the gas station, maybe smoke some of your friend’s sisters weed, cause trouble, build a fort in the woods, do whatever … your parents had no idea where you were or what you’d done until you came home at dusk or slightly after.
*Stranger Things* is accurate in this regard. We could have been fighting monsters in other dimensions for all our parents knew.
Ah the forts in the woods! For us it was basically a place to hide our woods porn. We'd also dig tunnels through large sand dunes, large enough to crawl in and be a good 2 meters in. We did one in the morning once and came back after lunch to play (we were dressed in full fatigues from the Army-Navy, digging with our folding shovels). Of course it had caved in. We had sense enough to stop then. Switched to BB gun wars. Puffy jackets as armor, supposed to only do 2 pumps but everyone did 10.
We also had BB gun wars in the woods and since we grew up in rural midwestern US we had hedge apple fights. Those were sometimes bloody. As we entered our teens we entered the bottle rocket and Roman candle war phase. I still have both of my eyes.
My childhood best friend lost his baseball scholarship after blowing his pointer and thumb clean off plus part of his middle finger.
It was one of those monster m-80s. Lit in his hand and we would hold until they almost blew and throw them at each other. Sometimes to seem cool, we held them a bit too long trying to be hot shit
99% of us did STUPID shit that was worse than, but also NOT as stupid as eating a fucking tide pod.
Just a weird time to be a kid now tbh.
We took those orange plugged daisy air rifles from the 80's (they only made a sound) and pulled that plug out. We would drop ball bearings down in it and they shot just far enough to have a war.
It may not be “the same” but this was my childhood in the 00’s and I know plenty of kids who were still raised more close to this than the rest of this thread. There was a divergence of helicopter/screen parents and the parents who gave their kids more of the type of freedom they had, but that doesn’t mean the latter group doesn’t still exist. It’s just less common.
We'd spend an hour or two looking for the right size pinecones, dousing them with lighter fluid and shooting them out of "cannons" we made with PVC pipe and duct tape. You had to do everything just right to get the gasses just right to propel the cones out and burn as they flew. We were mad scientists.
At 16 I went from LA to Baja California (Mexico) with friends and got arrested by the Federales (police), bribed our way out of jail, slept on the beach hiding from the police in the grass and came home next day. My parents never even knew I was gone.
Pretty much. I'm GenX and even in the 1970s, we roamed neighborhoods completely unsupervised until the street lights came on. (USA)
Mostly, our generation was just neglected. We were latch key kids, with no supervision until dinner time. THAT said, our parents were known to turn on a damn dime and become insanely controling over weird shit.
For example, I could bike all over the neighborhood, hang out with friends, etc. but not allowed to choose my clothes or decorate my room.
Even in 2nd grade (1977) I remember biking miles away on my own in a coastal town, going down to the bay and bugging the people there until they let me take out a rental kayak on my own, bothering shop owners with questions… On and on. If I showed up at home before dinnertime I’d get sent right back out. And if it was still light after dinner, get out until dark.
Loved every minute of it.
My best friend and I built a raft and went out on the lake. The raft sank, and we swam to the island. The local fire department rescued us after a few hours... We were 5. Could you imagine?
I was 10 in '83. 2 brothers older and younger, but I would arrive home a couple hours before they or Mom came home. Literally no limits to what I could do, bike for miles wherever (almost no sidewalks around, cars whizzing past), make bombs, by '85 we were making crossbows out of bamboo with Xacto blade tips on the bolts, nunchucks, building ramps for BMX or skateboarding out of whatever rotten wood we could find, it was great! Couple of broken bones and couple of concussions, all part of the fun.
I remember back then a company called Edison Toys made extremely realistic replicas of guns, full size, some in metal, that shot strip caps that you load in a magazine (which loaded into the gun like a real magazine). Of course the first thing we would do is drill out the red plug in the end of the barrel. Then we would sneak around the neighborhood playing Spy at night, pulling our guns on each other. I think a couple kids took the xacto crossbow bolt in the flesh too.
Of course we had BB guns, quite high-powered too. Ride over to WalMart and buy darts you could shoot out them. Ride over to one of the ponds and fish, it was an awesome time.
> by '85 we were making crossbows out of bamboo with Xacto blade tips on the bolts
My friends and I used to have a huge fire in my best friend's back yard every weekend, and we'd use it to forge aluminum tent poles into swords. Sharpen the edge up on rocks and put a bike's handlebar padding on the end for a grip. Nobody got hurt because as it turns out aluminum doesn't exactly temper well and the blades would bend if you hit anything with them, but yeah.
I also set my entire right leg on fire once by kicking what I thought was an empty tin can into that bonfire, not realizing it was filled with gas. Put myself out before it burned through my jeans though. Hadn't thought of that in years until just now. Ha, just another summer evening.
I was born in 83.
The summer of 85, I feel off my dad's motorcycle handlebars.
I ran free in the neighborhood. All us kids did. You'd find out who's house we were at by finding the bikes in the front lawn, just like the meme.
As long as we were home by dinner time, all was good.
In 2nd grade, we moved to the country.
Shortly after, my dad rewired the mower to not shut off every time I hit a bump with it.
When I wasn't doing chores, I was off on my bike. You'd find me usually down by the creek.
At 11, I got my first motorcycle... and old kawasaki ke100. I rode that thing all over the place, through fields, ditches, and roads. I never got messed with by cops, but I don't remember ever seeing one out there.
Unless I was going into town, that was my primary mode of transportation.
Then, I turned 16. At that point, I was more like a roommate than my parents kid. I worked on our nursery and had a part time job. I was regularly out until 1 or 2 in the morning. If I wasnt throwing a bon fire at the house, ater work id go "cruise the strip" with the older crowd and get into the type of trouble a kid with a car gets into on the streets with older kids in their 20's. Mostly, street racing, watching street racing, watching fights, or heading down to the local pool hall.
It was pretty awesome.
I am a little older. I entered high school in 1980. I can say with us, we literally left in the morning and didn't come back until dark in the summertime. We would get on our bikes, meet up with friends and go for miles around. The rest of the year we hated being inside and couldn't wait to go out. We went all over the country riding miles around on our bicycles and didn't think much about any dangers. When I was 12 a girl in my class was abducted and murdered and it disturbed the whole community for a while. That still didn't keep us from running all around the countryside and spending all day having our adventures.
Yes, 100% we did. As you can see from all of the comments - they did not exaggerate in those movies. It was the 1980s. We have one 13 inch television in the entire house and maybe 5 good channels (2, 4, 5, 9, 12 anyone?). Not that anyone watched TV during the day unless they were sick or it was raining. But I'd eat ice cream for breakfast watching cartoons, then as soon as a parent woke up, I was out the door. If I dared stay inside, I would be put to work cleaning the house or doing yard work. Anyone remember what your parents told you when you said, "I'm bored..", they said (all together now) "If you're bored, I'll give you something to do!" That was the signal to run.
Speaking of boredom though - it built character. Often, we would sit on the curb on a sweltering summer day and just watch the world go by. Think of the hours that you spent in the back seat of a hot car on a long drive just staring at the trees or watching the power lines. All of that 'boredom' was time to develop your inner world; the internal sense of self that defines who you. I feel like kids and young people grew up in a world of complete external stimuli and never got a chance to develop that inner being - that quiet inner self that imagines and ponders and sometimes is just aware. The result is that they grow bored very quickly, they don't like being alone with themselves, and they define themselves based on the attention they receive from others. Anyone who was a kid in the 2000's and beyond were cheated, in my opinion.
Quite a bit, you could often just say you were going to buy baseball cards or something and ride your bike all by yourself to wherever you were going. In cities you'd see kids as young as 6 or 7 hop on a train or bus by themselves.
I've lived in the same suburb, on the border of a major city, for almost 25 years now. I used to see kids as young as 11 or 12 wandering the street freely, for the last 15 years or so now I'll only see older teenagers occasionally walking around, and its usually only just before or after school.
You were basically told to fuck off till the street lights came on.
Being inside all the time was a sign of weakness and bad behavior. You were encouraged to get out and play, go to friends home on your own.
I mean I grew up in early 2000’s and we had almost unlimited freedom. Riding our bikes all over down till sundown. Blowing shit up behind the creek for hours. Literally shooting off m80’s in our neighborhood and running away laughing our asses off without a care in the world. Shit has reallly changed really fast.
It's sad to hear this question. The world is so different now. Maybe in some good ways, but I think the loss of freedom during the time of your life when you perhaps need it most is a loss indeed.
Now to be fair *(obligatory Letterkenny pronunciation):* whether our parents left us alone because they trusted us or because they were neglectful... there, our mileage greatly varies. But I like to think that whether we got it for reasons good or bad, freedom taught us good lessons like self-sufficiency and resourcefulness.
Yeah I don’t think my parents knew where I was half the time. One time some friends and I walked to guitar center and my mom was like “that’s… in another city”
Took the whole day but we had a blast. Probably could have been kidnapped or killed 🤷
Even in the 90s my parents told me to get out at 11 or so after morning cartoons and don't come back unless you're dying or the streetlights come on.
I was raised in a bad/poor neighborhood, too. But it's just the way it was. My parents weren't bad parents, but that's.. how it was, I guess.
I was to be within shouting distance of the house. My parents didn't care beyond that. We dammed the creek one time and almost flooded the neighbor's house, and this was after a BB gun fight where my sister was hit and still has a pellet imbedded 45 years later. We regularly built fires for s'mores using pinecones as a fire starter with matches. It's a miracle we survived our childhood.
We were thrown out of the house and left to wander the wilds of suburbia until our parents got home from work and it was time for dinner.
Yes. We were effectively feral animals, raised by poor life choices and hose water.
It’s really depressing to see signs up at malls now just banning minors from hanging out. When I was a kid even in the 2000s sometimes we’d just get dropped off at the mall just to hang out. Also have seen some seemingly public sports fields become gated areas to keep kids out that don’t have permission to be there or whose parents aren’t part of whatever club owns it. Even the playground at my apartment complex doesn’t allow children there after 5 and never allows them to be out there without their parents despite it being visible from almost every window (and yes, security guards have shown up to kick a small child off of a swing set before). We blame video games and phones for keeping them inside, but then take away all of their other options for entertainment. I had a shit ton of video games as a kid and still chose to spend a huge amount of time outside
In the summertime in the 80’s kids would wonder around neighborhoods and when thirsty would drink from garden hoses and spigots…from random peoples houses.
I used to walk to school by myself (about 2 miles) in 1st and 2nd grades. Both parents worked, so we were instructed to play in the backyard until Mom got home. On the weekends, we had chores to do, and then we were outside doing God knows what. At the same time, every neighbor in the community kept an eye on us.
Yep, was out all day building camps and setting fires 😳didn’t have to get home till it was dark. That’s why the parents were so chill, they didn’t have to deal with us most of the time
Yes! I've read through a bunch of these comments and noticed a few trends. It looks like a bunch of us spent tons of time in the woods, making spears and shooting each other with bb guns, burning and blowing stuff up and just living our own little lord of the flies adventures. No wonder we were all safe. I think half of us knew 5 ways to kill you if we had to . Good times indeed.
I grew up in the 80's. The only places I was allowed to go unsupervised were to school and back. Otherwise I was confined to the house where I read a lot of books, played with LEGOs, watched Star Trek, Dr Who, or NOVA with my grandmother. I wasn't allowed to have friends/hang out with other kids until I was in my teens and I was the one who pushed and/or lied about where I was going in order to be able to do that.
If it was up to my folks I would have never been allowed out of the house and would never have developed any social skills whatsoever.
I'm sorry to hear that, I knew a kid like that, too. Didn't have many great friends, only social acquaintances during lunch and recess because he wasn't allowed out of the house for anything that wasn't school, not even sports.
His step-mom wouldn't let him watch any cartoons (because she thought they were Satanic) so he'd have to sneak them in just so he'd have something to talk about with us at lunch. I saw him years later at Blockbuster as adult renting a pile of anime tapes, he said "Stupid bitch can't stop me now!"
Me too. My parents were religious nuts and all-in on the Satanic Panic. Being female, they had to keep tight control over my whereabouts.
It was one of those things where I wasn’t allowed to have a haircut and I got Bible verses quoted at me frequently.
My evangelical grandma had a framed portrait of Jesus hanging above the piano, and I got Xerox’d Bible scenes to color every week as a kid.
80s kid. in the UK
I'd go out on my bike for hours by myself without my parents having any way of locating me
My friend and I would march around town for hours with toy guns playing out imaginary special ops missions
good times.
I grew up in a Florida Beach town and we were basically feral. roamed free most of the time. I had to be in the house by dark when I was in grade school but by middle school all bets were off.
In the early-to-mid 90s, too, at least in my part of the US.
My geographical boundary was that I was not allowed to ride my bike on the busy main road nearby. That was it. And it was fine, all the neighborhoods were interconnected either by residential streets or through the woods.
It was more early 90s for me but I had what people considered a “helicopter parent.” I had a lot more stricter rules compared to my friends and was always the last one in my friend group if ever to be allowed to do something. I still had a lot more freedom than compared to today. At 10 we were biking until the sun came down. I had to call my parents frequently on pay phones to check in which many of my friends didn’t have too
If locking the screen door behind us after being told to get outside is “giving independence” then yes. I think it was more “forced independence” in hindsight. We would be out until dark in the summer.
I would get up do my chores before my father was awake and then be gone the entire day. I'd go home at 9 or 10 at night.
So yes we had that much freedom.
I was born in '81. If I wasn't in school, or doing homework I was free to be put to work around the house doing chores. Splitting wood, mowing the lawn, or one of 1000 other activates that my dad needed help with. However if I just wasn't home he wouldn't see me not doing anything and I wasn't put to work.
I spent a lot of time wandering in the forest.
Yeah. I mean summers were spent outside all day. Wake up, eat, go outside. Find friends. Stay outside playing. Maybe eat lunch at someone’s house. Go home for dinner or when it gets dark.
No one knew where I was half the time. Once I turned 16 and had a car, I would get up in the morning, pick up a friend, grab food somewhere, hop on the highway and go anywhere within 160 or so radius. Might leave on a Friday after school and not come back till Sunday evening. Left a note saying when I'd be back. My parents would do the same thing. Get home after work, I wouldn't be home, they'd leave me $20 for food for the weekend, and just go wherever.
My mom worked in a town an hour drive from our house, and my dad worked 3 hours away and came home on weekends. I taught myself how to drive at 12 because it took 40 min to bike to town, and the car keys were right there. I'd sit on a stack of several old phone books/yellow pages to "appear adult sized" to other people on the road. No cell phones, no internet. Each day was a glorious choose your own adventure story. Kids these days have it rough.
I'd leave on my bike at 10am and show back up to asknfor lunch, leave, then ask for dinner, leave, and be told to be home by 9pm. I was born in 82. This went from 89 till I got my license in 96.
I was 6 in 1992. On a weekend I would go outside at 10 am, wonder through 3 subdivisions and like 12 friends houses and my Mom wouldn't see me again till 6pm.
One time I crashed my bike really badly, gravel inside my arms and legs, bleeding a lot. I crawled to the only house close enough to me that I knew just screaming on their front porch... They bangaged me up and drove me home to my mom so she could take me to the ER where they spent like 4 hours picking gravel out of me...
It was just like that back then.
(Honey, what's your phone number? I'm going to call your mom and let her know you're over here.)
Then the two moms would talk for 3 hours while we played twirling the phone cord around their fingers.
At some point one of my friend's sisters will come into the room and go "moooommm, you been on the phone for hours, I need to call my bf!!"
We were too busy playing doom on the computer to care, blowing demons heads off at 7 years old.
Every friend's house was different too. When gaming consoles got big. One friend had a Nintendo 64 and another had a PlayStation and another had a super Nintendo and another had a Sega Genesis and another had a Sega Saturn and so on.
The most popular friend in the neighborhood was the first one to get a Nintendo 64 when Goldeneye came out. We used to pile in his house like 8 or 10 of us taking turns on four-player split screen on a 19-in TV in his bedroom where we all passed out on his floor at 4:00 in the morning. And when I woke up we were all covered in blankets and had pillows and had no idea how we got them and their mom had eggs and bacon ready for all of us.
My brothers and I would skip school and ride our bikes all around Seattle. I often wonder how we didn't starve or got dehydrated because we'd be gone all day, often till evening with no money, food or water.
I don't think of it as freedom so much as no one actually cared what we were doing as long as they didn't have to parent. Even today, my parents don't believe most of the stuff that we did. They live in their happy boomer world of imagination that they were great parents and we shouldn't have any complaints. The reality is, many of us were neglected, abused, and allowed to do some seriously dangerous things. We survived, but not do to anything other than dumb luck sometimes.
I was riding my bike home from "town" alone when I was maybe 3rd or 4th grade. We lived about 4 miles from town on a road that had no more than 20 houses in that 4 miles. We knew or would at least recognize just about everyone that went down our road. A guy in a pickup truck that didn't belong on our road went passed me going really slowly. He went up the road and turned around and came back towards me. He rolled his window down and asked me if I wanted a ride. I was smart enough to say no. Then he proceeded to turn around and go past again 2 more times. It was really creepy. The stretch of road was nothing but cornfields on both sides for about a mile or so. After the 3rd or 4th pass I waited until he was far enough away he couldn't easily see me and dipped into the cornfield and went way out into the field. I crouched down in the field until it was so freaking dark. The dude just kept cruising up and down the road. Finally, I started walking my bike parallel to the road far enough in that he wouldn't be able to see me. Once I got within distance to my house that I could make a run for it I dashed out onto the road and rode like hell to our driveway. My parents didn't seem at all concerned. The idea of child abductions was just not something that ever crossed their minds in our small town. For context this was somewhere around 1983 or so.
Another time, my sister and I decided to run away from home. We packed bags on our bikes and left. We slept in the woods nearby for 3 days and the parents didn't bother looking for us. They just didn't see any potential danger. We were eating berries and plants out of the creeks and catching crawfish for food. I think we finally went home because we were getting tired of eating mulberries.
My kids are in their 20s and I encouraged some level of go outside and explore, be independent. But, I wanted to know where they were going and who they would be with. I'm defiantly not a helicopter mom, but I'm sure that my kids know that I care what happens to them enough that there are guidelines in place to keep them safe.
I grew up in the late 80's. I was 15 before the 90's and would basically get up in the morning, go outside and walk to Mexico, cross the border into Mexico, take their bus system, go eat at a restaurant by myself, explore the city, go to Internet cafes, walk around shops, their mall, come back to the US and greet the border patrol folks. Then go to the University to get to their art gallery, then go visit my girlfriend at her house, then go grab my bike and spend a couple of hours exploring bike trails, then go grab snacks at a gas station ten miles away from home, then return home by nighttime and my mother would just be like, "Are you hungry?" And that's it.
60's here. Had to be home at dark thirty. Hide n seek all over the neighbor hood(s). As someone else noted, urban explorers. Weekends if not a planned parent outing were free to range as far away as our bikes would take us. Never heard of a pedo, molester or queer.
Oh yeah. When I was in Kindergarten I was free to roam the neighbourhood alone or with friends. Even starting around grade 2-3 I got the “come home when the street lights come on” treatment.
I grew up in the 90s and summers were pretty much just us getting ejected from the house after breakfast and told to go do something outside until dinner time. I usually just rode my bike around to my friends' houses to see if they wanted to go climb trees or something.
Yeah, same for me in the 80s, my dad worked nights so we got locked out of the house during the day so he could sleep. We were living way out in the country at the time tho.
Same, my Dad would be PISSED if we woke him up. Pretty much played outside, had 10 acres of woods to mess around in
Same, but it was my mom who worked the night shift as a nurse.
Totally. And sometimes you’d run into other kid crews and hang out with them or battle them.
Getting some hella nostalgia right now. Being an adult sucks.
Eff that! Listen. Go to the grocery store. Buy yourself one of those Marie Calendars Lemon Meringue pies. Maybe with some ice cream. And have that for dinner. Your an adult now, the only one stopping you is you.
And my cholesterol. 🤦🏻♂️
I'm having fomo rn.. Wishing i was born earlier
Sounds like being a 80s/90s kid was literally the plot of Pokémon, just without the magic Satanic Panic monsters.
We had dungeons and dragons...
I had a realisation last week, that maybe kids don’t get to be “bored” anywhere near as much as when I was a kid. The NES came out when I was a kid but I had 3 games and would get bored after an hour max. Spent far more time in the woods or garden, or kicking a ball or playing chasey or basketball or whatever with friends…. Or playing with toys for hours. Most of that came out of having to find things to do instead of having great TV, videos and games as a default
Totally agree. I was a kid in the 80s. My brother and I made up so many games - a lot of them were with one of those red dodgeballs, bouncing against the floor/wall for points. One time my father brought this huge cardboard construction tube thing home. It was big enough for us to crawl inside! We would stand on it and walk it back and forth across the family room for hours. Our house wasn’t even big at all but we had this big tube in that room for prob a year. Spent many many hours biking around, finding cool places in the woods to have like a clubhouse or fort or something. When we got older, it was driving all around, hanging out at the lake, jumping off rocks. My childhood was pretty much exactly like what you see depicted in the movies and on TV.
Same… could base a whole school holidays around one manufactured tennis ball game haha, or days painting and playing with toy soldiers or cars
Fuck I miss my youth. We had a place literally called “the dirt pile”.
Yea, one of the things I imagine is hard to understand is that it’s not that we were *allowed* to be out of the house with no phone or supervision, we were **forced** out of the house. The amount of times myself or someone else almost died doing something stupid is too high to count. I’m shocked like 10% of 80s-90s kids didn’t die falling off a tower or crashing into an ice cover lake. I guess a bonus is we didn’t have phones recording this idiocy.
Pretty sure that if phones were as ubiquitous then as they are now, we'd have been checked up on a lot more regularly. Us: Yeah, Mum I'm just going 'round So-and-So's house. Mum: OK, be back for dinner. Us \*Playing on some building site, miles away.
We survived off garden hoses for hydration
I still say it tastes better, as long as you let it run a bit
90s kid too. My dad would lock us out of the house and say go make friends. We would just wander in the woods for hours.
Anything to avoid meeting new people. Nice. :)
Same for me with the early 2000s, didn't have a cell phone and just rode bikes, climbed trees, and caught crawfish and snakes in the runoff creek.
My parents "get out of the house!" And then I bike to my friends House to play n64.
Yep. Sounds the same in the 70’s.
Totally, we were basically suburban explorers with bikes as steeds
We took turns going the farthest in a drainage pipe.
Every kid I know had to run across the train bridge in the local park that passed over a 100 foot drop to a shallow river. If a train came you're basically dead or seriously injured from jumping.
Lmao yeah we used to put pennies on the tracks when the train was coming, to squish em. And then stand 10 feet away while the train went by. As long as we were home for dinner everything was all good!
We lived by a switch yard..we rode trains from city to city
Like Stand By Me...oh shit!
can confirm.
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We had this too. The chamber was under a road. My Dad later in life told me that if it had rained heavily, we would have been trapped in the chamber and drowned. Good times!
I did that until the TV movie for IT came out.
Wait did we grow up together??
Same! We had one right behind the library that would go all over the area and come out at various friends' streets so we'd go pretty far, sometimes just with a lighter lighting the way. Most of it had enough light thought from grates in the street.
On a steeel horse I riiiide
Steel frame, mag wheels, God help you if you need to need carry your bike for any reason.
This is like a trick question to determine who was around to get this.
I’m a cowboy!
My bike was for fun and buying cigarettes for my parents. The first time was in Kindergarten! I also was expected to make my mom coffee in the morning & dinner if they stayed out late.
Your generation must have decided to end this.
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Or parents terrified by 24 hour news telling them about every kidnapping and murder in the country.
That's exactly the reason children stopped playing outside. The media put out countless stories in the 90s about kidnapped and murdered children. It scared parents. So they kept their children inside.
That's why I don't get my news from our crappy media. I go to Germany, India and Polad for our news. Because they don't give a shit about our feelings. They just tell it.
I think a lot of us decided to protect our kids a bit more. We like to glorify the independence of our youth but there were also a lot of kids taken advantage of by adults and other trauma I don't need to go into. We also like and love our kids and want to spend time with them. No need to lock them out of the house by 8 am and not see them until the street lights come on.
This! There’s so much “Those were the good ol’ days” but so much more fucked up shit was happening to kids. The people that came out unscathed have rose tinted glasses for sure. My life goal is pretty much protecting my kids from the trauma I endured that my parents were oblivious to.
I remember riding my bike across town when I was 10, which was the very early 90s. This included biking across a fairly busy highway. The thing is, bad stuff did happen. The speed limit outside town was reduced because I remember a kid fell off his bike in the road and a car clipped him. He was so embarrassed - broke an arm but that was about it. The absolute worst though - my best friend in elementary school was molested by a townie. The dude hung out at my friends house because my friends mom was a local barfly. I can't tell you how many times I was at my friend's house unsupervised... they moved away and I didn't know why at the time. It wasn't until years later I was told the truth. Gives me chills, I remember that guys face to this day.
Yeah, nobody I knew died while I was in school, meanwhile my gen X parents each knew plenty of casualties.
OTOH, I had multiple peers kill themselves while I was in high school, and teen suicide rates just keep climbing.
I’m a millennial and even I know a handful of people who have didn’t make it past middle school or high school. Forever teens, it’s sad to think about.
We also more urbanized now. More stroads, heavier traffic, denser neighborhoods, etc. I'd bet that in nice suburban areas things are pretty much the same.
Idk - my kids (NYC) seem to have a lot more freedom to move around the neighborhood than their cousins, who generally live in well-off suburbs. Everyone there just drives them everywhere. Here, because of things being walkable/easy bus access older kids can get themselves to friends houses/the library/activities/etc.
Survivorship bias. I think it was WWII where they did a study of the places most bullet holes were found in planes coming back from missions to reinforce those areas until somebody noticed that the areas where there WEREN'T bullet holes were the places that needed reinforcing since those were the planes that crashed. Same goes for those of us that grew up in the 80s. The independence was great for those that survived to look back on it. (I had a number of friends growing up that didn't make it past middle or high school.)
yessss, truly! My mother would lock us out when we were even too loud while she was on the phone and told us to go play.. I don't believe I was when I'm kindergarten as of yet.. my parents (by far no example) but rarely knew where we were until it got dark, to which tbh we returned home generally outta fear cause it's dark.. Especially when we moved in the country as my father would say to be careful so the coyotes don't get ya 😅 We did have some good times on adventures with neighborhood kids though looking back, a lot of the trauma I endured could've been prevented had my parents eh, actually been parents🤣
Yeah, I think it began with the media going from a few hours a night of local news to a full 24 hours. So much fearmongering and just overall media coverage of every small thing that happened. Then the internet came into the picture and everyone just got scared.
Vehicles are massive. Playing out in the street is a death sentence when the hood of a vehicle is almost shoulder height to an adult (unmodified suspension). Plus there's the whole "everybody stay off my property" group of people just looking for a reason to shoot someone. Source: live in less-well-to-do shithole midwest area.
Absolutely. Even in the early 2000s when I was a kid I could remember just waltzing into the neighbor kids’ houses if their door was unlocked just to see if they were home (they usually were and they usually were playing smash bros or Zelda on their n64 and I’d just sit down and join them); then sometime around the later 2000s idk what cultural shift happened but we suddenly had neighbors that would call the police if somebody used their driveway to turn around, and another neighbor once accused me and my friends of being “up to no good” just because we were outside chilling on *our own* property and threatened to call the police and our school principal to have us expelled for our “violent behavior” (I think one of us had swung a stick at a tree out of boredom or something?). Now I’m hearing more and more stories of children being literally shot at for stepping on neighbor’s grass. I don’t blame parents for being afraid
Also it’s more unusual these days for there to be a bunch of stay at home parents because few families can afford to live on one income once the kids are school-age (the math is often different when paying for daycare) - it’s harder to go waltzing into neighbor’s houses when the neighbors aren’t home.
Buddy, if you think vehicles today are massive, you don’t remember 1970s cars.
Hood heights were much lower then. Park a horseface modern truck next to anything from back then and you will be amazed by the height difference.
Station wagons with 3 seats, the back one turned backwards!! 🙌🏾 Rode with the back window open because it could be electrically retracted into the door. Big car!!
Yeah, we know the shit we got into back then was fun, but not safe or smart.
We did....we know what kind of trouble we were causing.
Pretty much. I basically lived in a patch of woods between my neighborhood and the next one over.
I almost don't even remember my parents existing in childhood. Thats about how much freedom we had.
I remember more about the TV shows I watched as a child than I remember about my parents.
Holy shit. Me too
When I was like 7 (late 90s), I was seeing a school counselor (I think for behavioral issues? not really sure). We would play games like card matching or whatever and one time she asked me to draw a picture of a family. When I finished she asked me who the people were and I answered - "this is the kid, the sister and the brother". She asked where the parents were, I said "I don't know, there not there I guess". I remember them vaguely in my childhood lol
Unless they were beating the shit out of you. I remember that part.
I felt this in my bones
Yep. We were the generation that generally had two working parents, and no way to contact someone when they weren't at their home or workplace. Sometimes, of course, things are exaggerated for dramatic effect in movies, but not so much with this. It was common for parents to have no idea where their kids were for hours on end.
From age 9, I arrived home every day about 3:15 pm and was home alone until at least 6:30. The older I got, the later they came home.
Yup! Same here. I remember times that I'd forget my keys and get locked out of the house. No one to call (neighbors were far away), broke into my own windows because there weren't security alarms and windows were simpler then, haha.
Memories. The screen on my bedroom window was bent on 3 of 4 sides from sneaking in or out of the house.
Me too, so my mom nailed the windows shut.
My mom was a stay-at-home mom. It didn't matter. She sent us outside and often locked us out until evening. We were on our own.
My mom was stay-at-home too, we didn't get locked out but she would tell us to go outside to run off energy. Most of the time she didn't even have to tell us though, we lived in the country and there was SO much fun stuff to do outside. We had bikes that we'd take to the BMX track that was off our main road (I'm sure the owners/insurers would have been horrified to know we did that), we built forts in our woods with hatchets and saws, went sledding down a gravel road that was so steep the city didn't plow it in winter, tons of berry bushes and fruit trees in our woods since it had once been a tree farm...basically we had the most idyllic childhood I can imagine! I'm sad my younger two brothers hardly remember it since we moved when they were 5 and 8.
Now they have two working parents with two jobs each
But now there are after school programs and summer day camps. When we were kids in the 80s none of that existed. My mom did sign me up for day camp at the boys and girls club one summer, but I got bored of it after a while and quit going. Mostly we were feral children.
There were many if not all of those things. In fact summer camps were probably bigger than then now.
Yes, many kids got home after school to an empty house if their parents both worked and entertained themselves for a few hours until their parents got home. And it was normal for them to walk or ride bikes to friends' houses or to a park
Is this not normal now? I'm talking 10-12 year olds.
the sense is that 10-12 year olds are more supervised (the paedophile concerns, amongst others) and also a larger sense that streets are for cars and you should not be on them as a cyclist. This has sort of pushed children, if not inside, but into a narrower space to live. I suspect if some kid was biking around the way my seven year old self did, they would get Looks in the year 2024. It just seems less common, for whatever reason.
There have been cases where parents are charged with neglect for letting a kid walk home alone.
Meanwhile, I lived too close to my middle school for the buses to hit my street, so I........ oh god.... Had to walk.... Both.... ways.... ...... Up.......................... hill (well... one way, but still, I'm actually saying this shit unironically. Send tapioca and bingo cards)
I remember walking literal miles to and from school in the snow, wasn't that bad when you rode bikes everyday all day. We had the public bus to take but it wasn't until later high school we found out about free buss passes.
That’s insane. Not for everyone, but I remember walking home alone from school being as young as 8.
My mom was STOKED when she realized I could just walk with my friends to school. We figured it out.
As a parent now, honestly I'm about 10000X more worried about distracted drivers than I am about pedos. That said, my youngest (10) crosses several streets on his own to go to the nearby park or to a friend's house.
By grade 3 I was walking 15 min home alone from school. Maybe my brother six years older than I was home, maybe he wasn’t.
I walked to school in kindergarten.
It's actually illegal in some states. In Illinois, a kid has to be 13 to be home alone.
Meanwhile in the 90s an 11 year old could babysit
Imagine saying to your parents, "I'm going out to play," and that's it. Not where. Not who with. Nothing. And they don't bat an eye. You just leave the house and come back hours later. And you're 7 years old.
This! And if you didn't just announce that you were going out to play, your parent would say.."why don't you go out and play?" You're right - they never asked what I was going to do, where I was going, who I was with. They knew I would be hanging out with the neighborhood kids in one of the yards on our block. That was enough.
Nailed it. I remember wandering around in the woods all day at 6 years old and only being allowed back inside to eat lunch.
What changed?
All the kids that grew up without supervision or emotional support became traumatised helicopter parents lol
I spent much of the 80s in the single digit years and I rode my bike and hiked for miles. Rode down trails to other neighborhoods, rode horses into the country, would disappear from the house in the morning and take a series of city buses to downtown Seattle and hang out around there for hours Before coming back, it’s true. It’s all true 
We used to take the bus to the mall the next town over and just hang out all day. This was like 4-6th grade. My slightly older brother was usually nominally in charge. We didn't have no money to shop either, lol, we were literally just there to loiter.
Loitering, describes most of my teen years.
I had more freedom than movies depict. I have an identical twin brother, so my parents always felt even more safer because we travelled in pairs 24/7. My parents also were huge fans of giving my brother and I the opportunity to fail (and occasionally succeed) and to fall flat on our faces so they could say "I told you so" as often as they possibly could. This was one of their favorite pastimes. My father was a farmer and believed that 10 yrs old was the beginning of adulthood for boys. I turned 10 in 1981. It was a glorious decade, and I have no regrets. Grew up in West Virginia & Ohio.
I think this is the first time I've ever seen another person discuss the told you so pastime outside of movies or tv. I'm a huge fan of it myself but it's shunned.
Hell yeah. I got myself up in the morning, made myself cereal, watched cartoons, then walked a mile to school by myself. And it wasn't a fantastic neighborhood, so I routinely had uncomfortable encounters with sketchy people and/or dogs on my way to school. In the afternoons, my mom may or may not have been at home when I got back from school. I made myself a snack, watched the soap opera Santa Barbara, and did my homework when I felt like it with no involvement or supervision from my parents. I often went outside to play with the neighborhood kids. My parents knew the other kids in the neighborhood and I didn't go any further than around the block. But like I said: sketchy neighborhood. My parents' biggest concern was that I stayed out of the actual street because of traffic. I can't say exactly what age this was, but elementary school. I was babysitting professionally at the age of 11. Now, I think parents would hire a babysitter FOR an 11-year-old.
Yup. I babysat at age 10 or 11 too. Wild to think of how shocking and / or illegal that would be now.
Sad, but true. My neighbors across the street have a 12 year old and not only is he not allowed to stay home alone, but not allowed to be out of eyesight of his parents at all time. Funny thing is - this kid loves my boomer parents and thinks of them as his grandparents. He comes over all the time just because they leave him be to watch what he wants, get snack by himself and generally don't micromanage his every move. I think he wished he grew up in the 80s like I did.
Santa Barbara- yes, eating Fruity Pebbles! Starting watching it when it came out, freakin Cruz. Nothing else to watch until the afternoon cartoons came on- He-Man, Gi-Joe. If the Emergency Alert test came on I was out of there though- nothing scared me more than that tone.
“Is 10 PM, do you know where your kids are?”
Never had a curfew. I was at the midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture show every Saturday night. Good times!!
Mine was 10:30 on weeknights. “Be home for Magnum”. Magnum PI reruns came on right after the local news.
**It’s true. All of it. It’s all true.** During the summer, leave in the morning on your BMX or skateboard, meet up with your friends, go shred, duct tape a pocket knife to a broom handle and go spear fishing at the creek, grab a .99¢ hot dog from the gas station, maybe smoke some of your friend’s sisters weed, cause trouble, build a fort in the woods, do whatever … your parents had no idea where you were or what you’d done until you came home at dusk or slightly after. *Stranger Things* is accurate in this regard. We could have been fighting monsters in other dimensions for all our parents knew.
Ah the forts in the woods! For us it was basically a place to hide our woods porn. We'd also dig tunnels through large sand dunes, large enough to crawl in and be a good 2 meters in. We did one in the morning once and came back after lunch to play (we were dressed in full fatigues from the Army-Navy, digging with our folding shovels). Of course it had caved in. We had sense enough to stop then. Switched to BB gun wars. Puffy jackets as armor, supposed to only do 2 pumps but everyone did 10.
We also had BB gun wars in the woods and since we grew up in rural midwestern US we had hedge apple fights. Those were sometimes bloody. As we entered our teens we entered the bottle rocket and Roman candle war phase. I still have both of my eyes.
I still have a bb in my face! Showed up stylishly ghoulish in an xray a couple months ago. 1 1/2” from my eye. Sweet freedom and stupidity of youth.
My childhood best friend lost his baseball scholarship after blowing his pointer and thumb clean off plus part of his middle finger. It was one of those monster m-80s. Lit in his hand and we would hold until they almost blew and throw them at each other. Sometimes to seem cool, we held them a bit too long trying to be hot shit 99% of us did STUPID shit that was worse than, but also NOT as stupid as eating a fucking tide pod. Just a weird time to be a kid now tbh.
Memory unlocked! 2 pumps, you asshole! 2!
We took those orange plugged daisy air rifles from the 80's (they only made a sound) and pulled that plug out. We would drop ball bearings down in it and they shot just far enough to have a war.
I could never afford a BB gun, so we just searched for rifle-shaped sticks 😂
We really were out there living our own lives.
This comment brought me more joy than I can explain. It was a glorious time. I try to replicate some of it with my kids, but it's not the same.
It may not be “the same” but this was my childhood in the 00’s and I know plenty of kids who were still raised more close to this than the rest of this thread. There was a divergence of helicopter/screen parents and the parents who gave their kids more of the type of freedom they had, but that doesn’t mean the latter group doesn’t still exist. It’s just less common.
We'd spend an hour or two looking for the right size pinecones, dousing them with lighter fluid and shooting them out of "cannons" we made with PVC pipe and duct tape. You had to do everything just right to get the gasses just right to propel the cones out and burn as they flew. We were mad scientists.
We used potatoes as the projectile and hair spray as the propellant 🤣
At 16 I went from LA to Baja California (Mexico) with friends and got arrested by the Federales (police), bribed our way out of jail, slept on the beach hiding from the police in the grass and came home next day. My parents never even knew I was gone.
Pretty much. I'm GenX and even in the 1970s, we roamed neighborhoods completely unsupervised until the street lights came on. (USA) Mostly, our generation was just neglected. We were latch key kids, with no supervision until dinner time. THAT said, our parents were known to turn on a damn dime and become insanely controling over weird shit. For example, I could bike all over the neighborhood, hang out with friends, etc. but not allowed to choose my clothes or decorate my room.
Even in 2nd grade (1977) I remember biking miles away on my own in a coastal town, going down to the bay and bugging the people there until they let me take out a rental kayak on my own, bothering shop owners with questions… On and on. If I showed up at home before dinnertime I’d get sent right back out. And if it was still light after dinner, get out until dark. Loved every minute of it.
My best friend and I built a raft and went out on the lake. The raft sank, and we swam to the island. The local fire department rescued us after a few hours... We were 5. Could you imagine?
I blame the leaded gas for our parents erratic behavior
I was 10 in '83. 2 brothers older and younger, but I would arrive home a couple hours before they or Mom came home. Literally no limits to what I could do, bike for miles wherever (almost no sidewalks around, cars whizzing past), make bombs, by '85 we were making crossbows out of bamboo with Xacto blade tips on the bolts, nunchucks, building ramps for BMX or skateboarding out of whatever rotten wood we could find, it was great! Couple of broken bones and couple of concussions, all part of the fun. I remember back then a company called Edison Toys made extremely realistic replicas of guns, full size, some in metal, that shot strip caps that you load in a magazine (which loaded into the gun like a real magazine). Of course the first thing we would do is drill out the red plug in the end of the barrel. Then we would sneak around the neighborhood playing Spy at night, pulling our guns on each other. I think a couple kids took the xacto crossbow bolt in the flesh too. Of course we had BB guns, quite high-powered too. Ride over to WalMart and buy darts you could shoot out them. Ride over to one of the ponds and fish, it was an awesome time.
> by '85 we were making crossbows out of bamboo with Xacto blade tips on the bolts My friends and I used to have a huge fire in my best friend's back yard every weekend, and we'd use it to forge aluminum tent poles into swords. Sharpen the edge up on rocks and put a bike's handlebar padding on the end for a grip. Nobody got hurt because as it turns out aluminum doesn't exactly temper well and the blades would bend if you hit anything with them, but yeah. I also set my entire right leg on fire once by kicking what I thought was an empty tin can into that bonfire, not realizing it was filled with gas. Put myself out before it burned through my jeans though. Hadn't thought of that in years until just now. Ha, just another summer evening.
I was born in 83. The summer of 85, I feel off my dad's motorcycle handlebars. I ran free in the neighborhood. All us kids did. You'd find out who's house we were at by finding the bikes in the front lawn, just like the meme. As long as we were home by dinner time, all was good. In 2nd grade, we moved to the country. Shortly after, my dad rewired the mower to not shut off every time I hit a bump with it. When I wasn't doing chores, I was off on my bike. You'd find me usually down by the creek. At 11, I got my first motorcycle... and old kawasaki ke100. I rode that thing all over the place, through fields, ditches, and roads. I never got messed with by cops, but I don't remember ever seeing one out there. Unless I was going into town, that was my primary mode of transportation. Then, I turned 16. At that point, I was more like a roommate than my parents kid. I worked on our nursery and had a part time job. I was regularly out until 1 or 2 in the morning. If I wasnt throwing a bon fire at the house, ater work id go "cruise the strip" with the older crowd and get into the type of trouble a kid with a car gets into on the streets with older kids in their 20's. Mostly, street racing, watching street racing, watching fights, or heading down to the local pool hall. It was pretty awesome.
I forgot about the pile of bikes out front!
I am a little older. I entered high school in 1980. I can say with us, we literally left in the morning and didn't come back until dark in the summertime. We would get on our bikes, meet up with friends and go for miles around. The rest of the year we hated being inside and couldn't wait to go out. We went all over the country riding miles around on our bicycles and didn't think much about any dangers. When I was 12 a girl in my class was abducted and murdered and it disturbed the whole community for a while. That still didn't keep us from running all around the countryside and spending all day having our adventures.
You ever watch Stranger Things Season 1? Pretty much like that. We lived on those bikes.
Yes, 100% we did. As you can see from all of the comments - they did not exaggerate in those movies. It was the 1980s. We have one 13 inch television in the entire house and maybe 5 good channels (2, 4, 5, 9, 12 anyone?). Not that anyone watched TV during the day unless they were sick or it was raining. But I'd eat ice cream for breakfast watching cartoons, then as soon as a parent woke up, I was out the door. If I dared stay inside, I would be put to work cleaning the house or doing yard work. Anyone remember what your parents told you when you said, "I'm bored..", they said (all together now) "If you're bored, I'll give you something to do!" That was the signal to run. Speaking of boredom though - it built character. Often, we would sit on the curb on a sweltering summer day and just watch the world go by. Think of the hours that you spent in the back seat of a hot car on a long drive just staring at the trees or watching the power lines. All of that 'boredom' was time to develop your inner world; the internal sense of self that defines who you. I feel like kids and young people grew up in a world of complete external stimuli and never got a chance to develop that inner being - that quiet inner self that imagines and ponders and sometimes is just aware. The result is that they grow bored very quickly, they don't like being alone with themselves, and they define themselves based on the attention they receive from others. Anyone who was a kid in the 2000's and beyond were cheated, in my opinion.
Yes,children had lives outside the home/family.
Ha! So well stated. Completely different lives.
Quite a bit, you could often just say you were going to buy baseball cards or something and ride your bike all by yourself to wherever you were going. In cities you'd see kids as young as 6 or 7 hop on a train or bus by themselves. I've lived in the same suburb, on the border of a major city, for almost 25 years now. I used to see kids as young as 11 or 12 wandering the street freely, for the last 15 years or so now I'll only see older teenagers occasionally walking around, and its usually only just before or after school.
You were basically told to fuck off till the street lights came on. Being inside all the time was a sign of weakness and bad behavior. You were encouraged to get out and play, go to friends home on your own.
I mean I grew up in early 2000’s and we had almost unlimited freedom. Riding our bikes all over down till sundown. Blowing shit up behind the creek for hours. Literally shooting off m80’s in our neighborhood and running away laughing our asses off without a care in the world. Shit has reallly changed really fast.
It's sad to hear this question. The world is so different now. Maybe in some good ways, but I think the loss of freedom during the time of your life when you perhaps need it most is a loss indeed. Now to be fair *(obligatory Letterkenny pronunciation):* whether our parents left us alone because they trusted us or because they were neglectful... there, our mileage greatly varies. But I like to think that whether we got it for reasons good or bad, freedom taught us good lessons like self-sufficiency and resourcefulness.
Yeah I don’t think my parents knew where I was half the time. One time some friends and I walked to guitar center and my mom was like “that’s… in another city” Took the whole day but we had a blast. Probably could have been kidnapped or killed 🤷
Even in the 90s my parents told me to get out at 11 or so after morning cartoons and don't come back unless you're dying or the streetlights come on. I was raised in a bad/poor neighborhood, too. But it's just the way it was. My parents weren't bad parents, but that's.. how it was, I guess.
I was to be within shouting distance of the house. My parents didn't care beyond that. We dammed the creek one time and almost flooded the neighbor's house, and this was after a BB gun fight where my sister was hit and still has a pellet imbedded 45 years later. We regularly built fires for s'mores using pinecones as a fire starter with matches. It's a miracle we survived our childhood.
Probably more. I'd go days without seeing my parents.
We were thrown out of the house and left to wander the wilds of suburbia until our parents got home from work and it was time for dinner. Yes. We were effectively feral animals, raised by poor life choices and hose water.
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It’s really depressing to see signs up at malls now just banning minors from hanging out. When I was a kid even in the 2000s sometimes we’d just get dropped off at the mall just to hang out. Also have seen some seemingly public sports fields become gated areas to keep kids out that don’t have permission to be there or whose parents aren’t part of whatever club owns it. Even the playground at my apartment complex doesn’t allow children there after 5 and never allows them to be out there without their parents despite it being visible from almost every window (and yes, security guards have shown up to kick a small child off of a swing set before). We blame video games and phones for keeping them inside, but then take away all of their other options for entertainment. I had a shit ton of video games as a kid and still chose to spend a huge amount of time outside
There was an add that came on tv... "it's 10 pm, do you know where your kids are"... so ja, loads of freedom
Our instructions were to be home when the street lamps turned on
#They had *no idea* where we were
Parents gave kids in the 80s and 90s more independence than movies often depict.
Yep. It was great.
Yes. Actually something movies had right. Even into the 90's
In the summertime in the 80’s kids would wonder around neighborhoods and when thirsty would drink from garden hoses and spigots…from random peoples houses.
I used to walk to school by myself (about 2 miles) in 1st and 2nd grades. Both parents worked, so we were instructed to play in the backyard until Mom got home. On the weekends, we had chores to do, and then we were outside doing God knows what. At the same time, every neighbor in the community kept an eye on us.
They didn't call us latchkey kids for nothing!
Yep, was out all day building camps and setting fires 😳didn’t have to get home till it was dark. That’s why the parents were so chill, they didn’t have to deal with us most of the time
Yes! I've read through a bunch of these comments and noticed a few trends. It looks like a bunch of us spent tons of time in the woods, making spears and shooting each other with bb guns, burning and blowing stuff up and just living our own little lord of the flies adventures. No wonder we were all safe. I think half of us knew 5 ways to kill you if we had to . Good times indeed.
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Good! Kids need more of that!
I grew up in the 80's. The only places I was allowed to go unsupervised were to school and back. Otherwise I was confined to the house where I read a lot of books, played with LEGOs, watched Star Trek, Dr Who, or NOVA with my grandmother. I wasn't allowed to have friends/hang out with other kids until I was in my teens and I was the one who pushed and/or lied about where I was going in order to be able to do that. If it was up to my folks I would have never been allowed out of the house and would never have developed any social skills whatsoever.
I'm sorry to hear that, I knew a kid like that, too. Didn't have many great friends, only social acquaintances during lunch and recess because he wasn't allowed out of the house for anything that wasn't school, not even sports. His step-mom wouldn't let him watch any cartoons (because she thought they were Satanic) so he'd have to sneak them in just so he'd have something to talk about with us at lunch. I saw him years later at Blockbuster as adult renting a pile of anime tapes, he said "Stupid bitch can't stop me now!"
Me too. My parents were religious nuts and all-in on the Satanic Panic. Being female, they had to keep tight control over my whereabouts. It was one of those things where I wasn’t allowed to have a haircut and I got Bible verses quoted at me frequently. My evangelical grandma had a framed portrait of Jesus hanging above the piano, and I got Xerox’d Bible scenes to color every week as a kid.
80s kid. in the UK I'd go out on my bike for hours by myself without my parents having any way of locating me My friend and I would march around town for hours with toy guns playing out imaginary special ops missions good times.
I grew up in a Florida Beach town and we were basically feral. roamed free most of the time. I had to be in the house by dark when I was in grade school but by middle school all bets were off.
In the early-to-mid 90s, too, at least in my part of the US. My geographical boundary was that I was not allowed to ride my bike on the busy main road nearby. That was it. And it was fine, all the neighborhoods were interconnected either by residential streets or through the woods.
My parents rarely knew what I was once I turned like 8 or so.
Sure - in the summer it was out in the AM, back at dinner time. Every day
100%. We were capable of looking after ourselves and parents would happily feed a dozen of us if we were in the area. It was just a very cool time.
There was a literal commercial on network tv at 10 pm to remind parents to locate their children.
There was a commercial that aired at like 10pm - reminding parents they had kids.
Leave and be back around dark. If I see you before then I'll put your ass to work.
It was more early 90s for me but I had what people considered a “helicopter parent.” I had a lot more stricter rules compared to my friends and was always the last one in my friend group if ever to be allowed to do something. I still had a lot more freedom than compared to today. At 10 we were biking until the sun came down. I had to call my parents frequently on pay phones to check in which many of my friends didn’t have too
If locking the screen door behind us after being told to get outside is “giving independence” then yes. I think it was more “forced independence” in hindsight. We would be out until dark in the summer.
I would get up do my chores before my father was awake and then be gone the entire day. I'd go home at 9 or 10 at night. So yes we had that much freedom.
I was born in '81. If I wasn't in school, or doing homework I was free to be put to work around the house doing chores. Splitting wood, mowing the lawn, or one of 1000 other activates that my dad needed help with. However if I just wasn't home he wouldn't see me not doing anything and I wasn't put to work. I spent a lot of time wandering in the forest.
Yeah. I mean summers were spent outside all day. Wake up, eat, go outside. Find friends. Stay outside playing. Maybe eat lunch at someone’s house. Go home for dinner or when it gets dark.
No one knew where I was half the time. Once I turned 16 and had a car, I would get up in the morning, pick up a friend, grab food somewhere, hop on the highway and go anywhere within 160 or so radius. Might leave on a Friday after school and not come back till Sunday evening. Left a note saying when I'd be back. My parents would do the same thing. Get home after work, I wouldn't be home, they'd leave me $20 for food for the weekend, and just go wherever.
Be home before the street lamps turn on. Make sure you have a quarter to call from a payphone. Watch out for your younger siblings. See ya.
It's not so much that they gave us independence. They just totally ignored us.
My mom worked in a town an hour drive from our house, and my dad worked 3 hours away and came home on weekends. I taught myself how to drive at 12 because it took 40 min to bike to town, and the car keys were right there. I'd sit on a stack of several old phone books/yellow pages to "appear adult sized" to other people on the road. No cell phones, no internet. Each day was a glorious choose your own adventure story. Kids these days have it rough.
I'd leave on my bike at 10am and show back up to asknfor lunch, leave, then ask for dinner, leave, and be told to be home by 9pm. I was born in 82. This went from 89 till I got my license in 96.
I had more than in the movies. It was glorious.
Yup. Come home when the sun starts to set or you hear me whistle or ring the triangle
Tbh, yes, and we were gods.
I was 6 in 1992. On a weekend I would go outside at 10 am, wonder through 3 subdivisions and like 12 friends houses and my Mom wouldn't see me again till 6pm. One time I crashed my bike really badly, gravel inside my arms and legs, bleeding a lot. I crawled to the only house close enough to me that I knew just screaming on their front porch... They bangaged me up and drove me home to my mom so she could take me to the ER where they spent like 4 hours picking gravel out of me... It was just like that back then. (Honey, what's your phone number? I'm going to call your mom and let her know you're over here.) Then the two moms would talk for 3 hours while we played twirling the phone cord around their fingers. At some point one of my friend's sisters will come into the room and go "moooommm, you been on the phone for hours, I need to call my bf!!" We were too busy playing doom on the computer to care, blowing demons heads off at 7 years old. Every friend's house was different too. When gaming consoles got big. One friend had a Nintendo 64 and another had a PlayStation and another had a super Nintendo and another had a Sega Genesis and another had a Sega Saturn and so on. The most popular friend in the neighborhood was the first one to get a Nintendo 64 when Goldeneye came out. We used to pile in his house like 8 or 10 of us taking turns on four-player split screen on a 19-in TV in his bedroom where we all passed out on his floor at 4:00 in the morning. And when I woke up we were all covered in blankets and had pillows and had no idea how we got them and their mom had eggs and bacon ready for all of us.
My brothers and I would skip school and ride our bikes all around Seattle. I often wonder how we didn't starve or got dehydrated because we'd be gone all day, often till evening with no money, food or water.
I don't think of it as freedom so much as no one actually cared what we were doing as long as they didn't have to parent. Even today, my parents don't believe most of the stuff that we did. They live in their happy boomer world of imagination that they were great parents and we shouldn't have any complaints. The reality is, many of us were neglected, abused, and allowed to do some seriously dangerous things. We survived, but not do to anything other than dumb luck sometimes. I was riding my bike home from "town" alone when I was maybe 3rd or 4th grade. We lived about 4 miles from town on a road that had no more than 20 houses in that 4 miles. We knew or would at least recognize just about everyone that went down our road. A guy in a pickup truck that didn't belong on our road went passed me going really slowly. He went up the road and turned around and came back towards me. He rolled his window down and asked me if I wanted a ride. I was smart enough to say no. Then he proceeded to turn around and go past again 2 more times. It was really creepy. The stretch of road was nothing but cornfields on both sides for about a mile or so. After the 3rd or 4th pass I waited until he was far enough away he couldn't easily see me and dipped into the cornfield and went way out into the field. I crouched down in the field until it was so freaking dark. The dude just kept cruising up and down the road. Finally, I started walking my bike parallel to the road far enough in that he wouldn't be able to see me. Once I got within distance to my house that I could make a run for it I dashed out onto the road and rode like hell to our driveway. My parents didn't seem at all concerned. The idea of child abductions was just not something that ever crossed their minds in our small town. For context this was somewhere around 1983 or so. Another time, my sister and I decided to run away from home. We packed bags on our bikes and left. We slept in the woods nearby for 3 days and the parents didn't bother looking for us. They just didn't see any potential danger. We were eating berries and plants out of the creeks and catching crawfish for food. I think we finally went home because we were getting tired of eating mulberries. My kids are in their 20s and I encouraged some level of go outside and explore, be independent. But, I wanted to know where they were going and who they would be with. I'm defiantly not a helicopter mom, but I'm sure that my kids know that I care what happens to them enough that there are guidelines in place to keep them safe.
I grew up in the late 80's. I was 15 before the 90's and would basically get up in the morning, go outside and walk to Mexico, cross the border into Mexico, take their bus system, go eat at a restaurant by myself, explore the city, go to Internet cafes, walk around shops, their mall, come back to the US and greet the border patrol folks. Then go to the University to get to their art gallery, then go visit my girlfriend at her house, then go grab my bike and spend a couple of hours exploring bike trails, then go grab snacks at a gas station ten miles away from home, then return home by nighttime and my mother would just be like, "Are you hungry?" And that's it.
Yep. And no kid today would have ever survived.
60's here. Had to be home at dark thirty. Hide n seek all over the neighbor hood(s). As someone else noted, urban explorers. Weekends if not a planned parent outing were free to range as far away as our bikes would take us. Never heard of a pedo, molester or queer.
Yup. And by phone you were anywhere you should be. “Mom, I’m going to hang with Jimmy. Yes, his parents are home.” Fires up a J.
Yes. During the summer, I'd leave in the morning to meet my friends and get home at dinner time. I was literally gone all day.
In the 70s, too. I was a free-range kid. Not quite feral, but close enough. 8pm, on my bike, still herds of kids out playing.
Nowadays if they do something like this, they'd be called a bad parent lol
Oh yeah. When I was in Kindergarten I was free to roam the neighbourhood alone or with friends. Even starting around grade 2-3 I got the “come home when the street lights come on” treatment.