I would not trade places.

Actually, my dad did wear seatbelts. That came from an incident in flight training in WWII, where some trainee pilot fell out of one of the old biplanes because his harness wasn't fastened.

Not to mention amusement parks like this one...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_Park

...which was about a half hour from where I grew up. The cannonball loop really is unbelievable; my personal "I should be dead" moment came courtesy of the alpine slide.

Yeah...I wouldn't trade places, either. Seatbelts and bike helmets are a good thing, free range or not. I don't think I'll wax romantic about Jarts, either. If my relatively free- range kids get hurt building a fort with real tools, or climbing a tree to look at a cool birds nest, that's one thing. If they get hurt pointlessly throwing sharp, heavy objects around or by forgoing their seatbelts, I'm gonna think they're not quite sensible enough for that amount of freedom.

Funny story, though--- my uncle likes to crow that he was ahead of the times because when he bought his first car in 1959, he wouldn't drive my dad (his baby brother) around until the seatbelts he'd ordered had come in and been installed ( by my uncle himself, of course). Once that was done, he wouldn't drive anyone anywhere without insisting on a seatbelt. It was a good idea.

Yeah, by this logic, I actually shouldn't exist at all, because my parents should not have lived long enough to spawn me. My dad has told me about doing scrap metal drives as a young teen during WWII -- he routinely handled all kinds of pointy and sharp-edged metal objects, and with his bare hands because you couldn't get gloves during the war.

I did make myself get in the habig of wearing the belts when I started to drive. That's because I discovered one of the advantages -- they keep one in the seat and in front of the wheel when one is engaged in "sporty" driving.

Oh, and we had our own version of Action Park... a family-owned amusement park just outside of town, and close enough to ride to on bikes. They had an old log flume ride that had been designed and hand-built by the founder. One of its attractions was that it was actually in a lake, and after you came down the big hill, the ride boat skimmed over a short stretch of open lake water before it got funneled into a chute that took it back to the loading station. If you leaned over during that stretch, you could make it turn some. The game was to make it turn enough so that it would miss the funnel entirely. Then everyone would jump out into the water, push the boat back to the funnel, and swim off to another part of the lake where the ride operator couldn't catch us.

Well, of course the younger ones wouldn't change places. Today's rules are the ones they are used to going by. I think about that when I'm feeling nostalgic for the candy bars of yesteryear. Five cents for a full-size bar. (Sigh...)

I'm nearly fifty-nine. I knew a lot of people who died in car wrecks. Usually drag racing. Usually drunk. (Southern Michigan. Yeee-haaaa!)

By the same token, there were no school shootings, and no one went crazy on drugs, despite all those movies they showed us at school. (Speaking of that--the musical they made of Reefer Madness is wonderful.)

Anyway...what you grow up with is what is "normal". And I will always think we had more fun. Especially on Halloween.

Anyway...what you grow up with is what is "normal". And I will always think we had more fun. Especially on Halloween.

Absolutely agree!

I was reminiscing about this same kind of stuff last night. Middle daughter's boyfriend is closer to my age, than my daughter's so we have similar childhoods. I was telling him about going to the little neighborhood market in the little town I grew up in. My aunt would call down to the store and order a carton of cigarettes, a 6-pack of beer, a 6-pack of Pepsi, maybe a pound of ground beef, and other items and then send us kids to pick it up. We ran roughshod over that neighborhood. There were 7 of us kids between my parents and my aunt and uncle. I can remember at age of 5 being allowed to run the streets with kids not much older than I was. Yeah, I miss it. We had some great times back then. We took risks, we ended up in ER and probably drove our parents nuts, but we had lots of great adventures. Some of my favorite adventures were climbing down the manhole on our street so we could see where it went(we got in HUGE trouble for that stunt)and catching pollywogs and baby frogs in the cement channel that ran through our neighborhood.

"Anyway...what you grow up with is what is "normal". "

I don't know... parents these days are conducting a giant social experiment, without realizing it. And we already have hints about how it's going to come out. Back in the day: it seems to me that there was a lot more variation in parenting styles. We all know that one kid in the neighborhood who was coddled by his parents. Remember that kid? He had no skills and was no good at anything in particular. He was whiny and was always trying to get people to do stuff for him. At lunch he wanted to trade his apple for your candy bar and he got mad when you wouldn't do it. He was always bugging you to let him copy your homework. When a group that was playing a board game included him, he got frustrated after a few minutes and quit after turning the board upside down and throwing the game pieces all over. He didn't have the patience to assemble a model, but he had all kinds of models that his dad built for him, which he usually broke.

Do we really want an entire society full of that kid? Oh wait, we already have one.

Yes, I remember so many times we kids would ride in the opened back of our father's pick up with nothing but our hands holding on to the sides to keep us from flying out as Dad drove down dirt country roads bouncing through pot holes.

Do that today and he would be arrested and us kids sent to Child Protective Services.

I knew a kid like that, Cousin Dave, except this one was hard to resist. He was also the class clown. He wasn't a whiner, but he was always borrowing money and asking to copy from me. But he had the balls to walk right across the classroom to my desk during class to do it. Crazy little asshole, everybody liked him, including the teachers.

I wonder what happened to him...

What really bugs me is that my generation created the generation that created the current one, and I really wish I could live forever just to see what happens next. I want to see how far it goes before the pendulum swings back the other way.

It bothers me that parents aren't allowed to make mistakes anymore. Authorities are on your ass for every slip-up, small or large. 12-year-olds used to baby-sit. Now they're somehow too immature to be left alone for any amount of time. I keep thinking about that story about the dad who dug a snow fort for his kids, which then collapsed and killed them. What was the point of charging him with a crime? To create a generation of sheltered cowards whose parents were afraid to let them have fun for fear of the overreaching government?

I took my daughter to the doctor for an earache last week and accidentally left behind my son's sippy cup (not a big deal) and my Game of Thrones book (huge deal). When I went back to get them, I left my kids in the running car. It would have taken longer to take them out and put them back in than to go in and out of the building. My primary worry is not that someone will steal my car and/or children; it's that some busybody will sic the parenting police on me. On base, of course, everyone is more reasonable. I can't say for sure that I'd leave my kids in a running car anywhere off base.

And the car has to be running because it's Hawaii.

I grew up as one of the more sheltered kids in my neighborhood, but I had significantly more freedom than kids today do. I was allowed to play outside pretty much all day without supervision, but I was also given a watch and told to check in at a certain time to basically show I was still alive and/or eat lunch/dinner and then to know when to be home at night (usually 8-9 pm when it was getting dark). We didn't have helmets, played in a creek, played on the "dangerous" playgrounds (my own backyard had a bunch of playground equipment that would be banned today), were left home alone for periods of time from the age of 8 and up, etc. I'd love to be the lax parent like that to my own kids when they get a bit older, but it would likely land me in jail. It's just ridiculous how much things have changed for the worse.

And another thing I can't. Stand is people who baby my kids. So what if they trip. If there aren't bones sticking out or other signs of major trauma, calm the fuck down. My MIL is rotten that way. My oldest tripped on a toy and fell on the CARPET. She yells "Oh my God!" and rushed over to pick him up and starts rubbing his head saying "You poor baby" over and over again. He was really confused because we don't treat him that way even with more serious injuries (two broken bones and second-degree burns from spilling hot coffee on himself). I told her he was perfectly fine and he landed on soft carpet. She yelled at me and told me he hit his head, could be seriously injured, and I should take him to the ER immediately. WTF?! How do people get like that in the first place?

That sounds like the MIL from a letter in Slate. She was all overwrought about her son and his wife letting their kid be in a tumbling group. Wondered if it was child abuse, because the kid might get HURT, for heaven's sake.

Speaking of child abuse, there is an appalling but funny video out there about a "First Moon" party advertising kits for menstruation. The party is a joke, the kits are not. Gee, one more thing I was born too soon for, like Barbie's convertible. Sigh...

I'm putting my kids in gymnastics around the time they turn 5, like I was. I'm sure in this day and age many would consider it abuse and too dangerous. I actually want to get a few tumbling mats for the house so I can start trying to teach the kids some things for fun.

I just watched that moon party video someone posted on Facebook.Too funny! When I was in fourth grade my school passed out menstration kits which were two maxipads, a pantiliner, and a Q&A book. This was back in 1990.

By the same token, there were no school shootings, and no one went crazy on drugs, despite all those movies they showed us at school. (Speaking of that--the musical they made of Reefer Madness is wonderful.)

Anyway...what you grow up with is what is "normal". And I will always think we had more fun. Especially on Halloween.

Posted by: Pricklypear at June 18, 2014 9:10 AM

Yes there were, but they were generally local news, and not national leading you to think because you didn't hear about it, it never happened.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States

At age 12 - 15, rode a bicycle around town in Florida wearing sneakers, shorts, hat, sunglasses and a 6" knife on my belt. No big deal.
I drove to band practice at high school with a 12-gauge on the rack in the back window of my truck. No notice taken. There were no Sheriff's deputies in the school (go ahead and call them "resource officers" if you want to hide the fact you have to have a POLICE OFFICER in your kids' school) because the Principal had the power to eject anyone and his staff was expected to know the students.

Yeah, tell me how much better things are run today.

My aunt would call down to the store and order a carton of cigarettes, a 6-pack of beer, a 6-pack of Pepsi, maybe a pound of ground beef, and other items and then send us kids to pick it up.

Posted by: sara at June 18, 2014 9:43 AM
______________________________

I wonder when that stopped being legal? Or when the store clerks, even in small towns, stopped being willing to take the chance that the parent had given the kids permission?

BTW, in Man oh Man, an early 1970s play from Berlin's GRIPS (children's theater), a stepfather orders his preteen stepson to run down to the store and pick up some beer. No idea if that's still legal in Germany.

And that brings me to something I've never been able to find out.

The child labor laws were clearly meant primarily to protect kids' right to go to school, even if that meant that future parents would have to reconsider having kids at all - or even getting married. That is, the parents could no longer put their toddlers in the factories or keep them out of school altogether to work on the family farm, so I'm guessing a lot of them accused the government of discriminating against poor couples. However, especially during the Great Depression, when so many adults were put out of work, it became more apparent to all that keeping kids out of paying jobs was a boon to those adults desperately seeking those jobs, so the supporters of the new child labor laws finally won.

BUT...are there no restrictions, today, on just how much UNPAID work a parent can dump on a kid, so long as the kid goes to school every day? Unless the kid's doctor can prove that the workload is hurting the kid's health and/or grades?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Thanks, Isab. Interesting reading. I sit corrected. I knew someone would call me on that.

I suppose it just seemed like "no" when comparing 1-6 instances per year as opposed to per month, or even per week. I feel so abashed now.

I suppose it just seemed like "no" when comparing 1-6 instances per year as opposed to per month, or even per week. I feel so abashed now.

Posted by: Pricklypear at June 19, 2014 8:47 AM

Schools became a more attractive target to the disaffected, when schools became gun free zones, and you could also get national, and international media attention from shooting up a school.

In other countries without a free press, it still happens, but you almost never hear about it, unless there is substantial carnage.

Price we pay for a free press, and a nanny government.

And Another Thing: Just read about another father who went to work and left his baby in his car seat. Baby's dead, dad's charged with murder. It doesn't say is it's another case of forgetting the kid because the car seat is in the backseat. For the kid's protection. But it wouldn't surprise me.

Gee, that sure beats having us crawling around or sitting in front. Admittedly, I haven't looked up the number of cases of kid deaths in cars over the years.

But Jesustapdancingchrist--I'll pick my dangerous 1950's-1970's youth any time.

Yep, dads who leave babys in cars get charged with murder

Mothers, even ones who take their dogs into the store, or who have had dozens of people testify that they heard her say she'd rather see the baby dead before her ex got custody, well they get about a hundred hours of community service