Things from your childhood that would be unthinkable today

[Christina]

There were so many things that we routinely did as children or that people did to us that would be considered neglectful or abusive these days. Most of them were dangerous or dumb things that were stopped for good reasons but most of us survived anyway. Here's a few:

- People didn't use seat belts or car seats for kids or themselves.
- Kids often rode in the back of the pickup truck
- Playground equipment had all sorts of sharp edges and none of that rubber padding stuff you see these days. We were expected to be careful and not cry too much when we fell.
- Parents routinely slapped their kids. So did the neighbor kid's mom if you got really out of line and your mom wasn't around to hit you. Nuns smacked kids around all the time. It wasn't considered abuse, just normal childrearing. Most kids preferred a quick slap to a long lecture.
- Spaying and neutering animals wasn't the norm.
- We were not only allowed but encouraged to feed the animals at the zoo.
- Doctors advised pregnant women to take up smoking to help keep their weight down.
- No one cared if you broke a thermometer and played with the little balls of mercury.
- There was no place that people couldn't smoke except maybe church.

What else do you remember?

[Valheru]

We used to play a game called "Toktokkie" (which is an Afrikaans onomatopoeic name for a variant of the Tenebrionidae (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenebrionidae) beetle family, which makes a distinctive knocking noise to advertise its presence to potential mates). It involves knocking on people's doors at night, then running away. I'm sure it's not purely a South African children's pastime.

It's unthinkable for kids to do this in South Africa today. Basically, kids learn to come inside when it gets dark, and everybody locks themselves up behind 6 foot walls and rivers of razor wire. Everybody has got walls around their properties, and even so, dark shapes get shot at.

[LoneWolf]

Being in grade school and taking off in the morning with my friends and not returning until sundown. Parents didn't freak out about it. And of course this was at a time when they couldn't check up on you by calling your cell phone.

[Notta]

When I was very small, the next-door neighbor was an older, childless woman with immaculate gardens. She hated it when our balls or toys ended up in her flowers. One day, I kicked a ball over our fence and into her yard. When I went over to retrieve it, she came out of her house and spanked me. I must have been only 3 or 4. Can you imagine that happening today?? She'd be arrested for assaulting a child!

[Faerie]

We used to play a game called "Toktokkie" (which is an Afrikaans onomatopoeic name for a variant of the Tenebrionidae (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenebrionidae) beetle family, which makes a distinctive knocking noise to advertise its presence to potential mates). It involves knocking on people's doors at night, then running away. I'm sure it's not purely a South African children's pastime.

It's unthinkable for kids to do this in South Africa today. Basically, kids learn to come inside when it gets dark, and everybody locks themselves up behind 6 foot walls and rivers of razor wire. Everybody has got walls around their properties, and even so, dark shapes get shot at.

Cant play toktokkie by banging on someone's gate.

I got shot at along with my brothers while playing toktokkie as a child. My Dad went out with his own shotgun and accosted the "oom" (uncle). They ended up drinking a beer together on the front lawn if memory serves me right.

Playing soccer/rugby/cricket in the road until nightfall. Riding bicycles all day long in a mob of other kids, some of whom you didnt even know.

Picking a fight with the "rooinekke" (English kids - direct translation red-necks) that lived behind us.

Pinching milk off the neighbour's patio (those were the days it still got delivered)
Bunking school to hang around in the park with likeminded schoolmates
Hitch-Hiking into downtown Johannesburg to go to a club.

Afraid all these things are too dangerous to attempt now.

[tjakey]

YARD DARTS!

[Christina]

Oh yeah, I forgot about those and Click Clacks (http://www.retroland.com/pages/retropedia/toys/item/6204/). You could knock yourself out with those things, not to mention what you could do to someone else's head with them. They were the kiddie version of nunchucks.

[David B]

Split the kipper - widely (pun) played at our school, despite efforts of staff to stop it.

http://strange-games.blogspot.com/2007/10/split-kipper-strange-games-with-knives.html

David

[David B]

Also being able to go to a hardware store as a kid, and being able to buy off the shelf all sorts of chemicals like sulphur, saltpetre, sodium chlorate etc that can be (and were) used to do interesting experiments in rocket making and bang making.

David

[Loren Pechtel]

I went to my grandmother's house by myself at IIRC age 7. I walked to the bus, took it, then walked from the bus to her place, and the reverse to come home.

No big deal--I knew how to deal with big streets on my own--but people would go ape about it these days.

[Notta]

Oh yeah, I forgot about those and Click Clacks (http://www.retroland.com/pages/retropedia/toys/item/6204/). You could knock yourself out with those things, not to mention what you could do to someone else's head with them. They were the kiddie version of nunchucks.I had those. The bruises on my arms as I learned to use them were incredible!

[DMB]

When I was 6, my mother put me on a train in Reading, Berkshire, to go on my own to Cheltenham, Gloucestershire to visit my grandparents. This involved changing trains at Swindon. On the train I got into conversation with a middle-aged/elderly gentleman who invited me to take tea with him in the dining car. He behaved very properly. I think I amused him because I was quite self-possessed at that age and had a very developed vocabulary.

Neither my parents nor my grandparents had a telephone at that time, so I don't think they could communicate in real time about my safe arrival.

[Barefoot Bree]

^^ I had a real bit of culture shock when I started reading Harry Potter about all those mobs of kids age 11 and up going off on a daylong train ride with no adults in sight, and then being basically in charge of themselves the whole year outside of classes, with only some very nominal supervision by older kids and occasional walk-by teachers.

Here in the US nobody would send their kids off like that without an adult/kid ratio of at least 1 to 10, with the adults in constant attendance, clutching permission slips and medical power of attourneys, worrying constantly about losing a kid or getting sued over some scraped knee, momentarily lost kid, carnage from a bus accident, or teenage pregnancy (any being just as likely as the other).

So please tell me, any of you non-USA types, is the transport and school setup as described in HP still common in Britain or wherever you are? Or is that part of the story as much fantasy as the magic?

[Puck]

Yeah, minimum adult supervision all day long in the summer. I'd spend the day at my girlfriends, and her Mother worked. We'd go visit other kids, go play baseball in a field a half mile away, and generally do whatever we took a mind to do. We were trusted to use fairly good sense, and if we did do something stupid, then we'd lose our rights to go off and live life in a manner we wanted to. That imprisonment alone was impetus enough to keep us from the most stupid adventures. Nothing sucked worse than having to stay at home with Mom while all your friends were off having a grand time, because you decided to do something dumb, and got caught.

[Lugubert]

From when I was 8 or 9 in the early 1950's, I got sent every month to the post office to collect the money my father the merchant marine captain sent for the family (mom, me, two sisters) to live by; obviously the better part of his salary.

ID requirements didn't exist (did ID cards even exist?); mother had signed the slip and that was it. Not only did the PO hand me all the money; the thought that I might get robbed just didn't occur to us in the neighbour to Sweden's next largest city.

When we moved to the greater city (I was 11) there was some intital grumbling from the PO, but after discussing with mother, they too agreed.

[Pendaric]

^^ I had a real bit of culture shock when I started reading Harry Potter about all those mobs of kids age 11 and up going off on a daylong train ride with no adults in sight, and then being basically in charge of themselves the whole year outside of classes, with only some very nominal supervision by older kids and occasional walk-by teachers.

Here in the US nobody would send their kids off like that without an adult/kid ratio of at least 1 to 10, with the adults in constant attendance, clutching permission slips and medical power of attourneys, worrying constantly about losing a kid or getting sued over some scraped knee, momentarily lost kid, carnage from a bus accident, or teenage pregnancy (any being just as likely as the other).

So please tell me, any of you non-USA types, is the transport and school setup as described in HP still common in Britain or wherever you are? Or is that part of the story as much fantasy as the magic?

Well it certainly wouldn't be happening with my daughter.

[mecca777]

So please tell me, any of you non-USA types, is the transport and school setup as described in HP still common in Britain or wherever you are? Or is that part of the story as much fantasy as the magic?

Well, the boarding school setup is not what I'd call "common", though it still exists. When I walk past the local schools these days I notice there seems to be an increased amount of supervision in the schoolyard, and far fewer kids wandering around the surrounding streets then when I was a pupil. Having said that, we weren't really "allowed" to leave the school grounds during the day, but there was no real effort to prevent it. On school outings there were normally a couple of parents along to make sure everyone was accounted for at the end of the day but again, I recall giving them the slip without any real repercussions. I suspect that these days UK schools are more cautious about trusting non-staff members with children - there are child protection laws and insurance liabilities to consider.

As far as the transport side of things goes, there are some areas in the UK where most people drive their kids to the school gates. Where I live, a large proportion of school-aged children take public transport to school (not special school-only buses), without parental supervision. When I lived further away from my workplace I commuted by train and it was common for kids to take the train to school alone or with their peers, though I suppose they all have mobile phones these days and can be contacted easily enough. :)

On topic: from the age of about 9 onwards, during the summer school holidays it was no big deal to go out in the morning, roam all over the town and surrounding parkland until it started to get late and then return home without our parents having been unduly concerned. When we were staying with relatives in the countryside the same applied, even on busy working farms and stables where large machinery was in use. If we wanted comic books or sweets we would walk several miles along the side of a nearby road until we reached the nearest small village, hugging the hedge on the side of the road where we could best see oncoming horseboxes and cars. I doubt my brother would allow his son to do that now.

[Free in Freeport]

We used to play a game called "Toktokkie" (which is an Afrikaans onomatopoeic name for a variant of the Tenebrionidae (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenebrionidae) beetle family, which makes a distinctive knocking noise to advertise its presence to potential mates). It involves knocking on people's doors at night, then running away. I'm sure it's not purely a South African children's pastime.

It's unthinkable for kids to do this in South Africa today. Basically, kids learn to come inside when it gets dark, and everybody locks themselves up behind 6 foot walls and rivers of razor wire. Everybody has got walls around their properties, and even so, dark shapes get shot at.

^This. We had two terms for it: Ding Dong Ditch, and a racist one I won't say.

What else, hmm...

On very rare occasions, my father would buy a cigar, or bum a cigarette from my mother. Usually when he had a long way to drive was getting tired. He let us kids puff on them.

Going to the dump to shoot stuff with BB guns. Shooting each other with BB guns.

"Devil's night" pranks were tolerated, so long as we didn't actually damage anything.

[Anne]

Lugubert reminded me---I used to be sent to get cigs for my mom when she needed them. I would be about 5-12 here...

The same place refused to let me buy candy for my mom when she sent me out for sucking candy once when she was sick, because it was obvious I planned to eat it all myself. I went home empty handed...

[Goodchild]

^This. We had two terms for it: Ding Dong Ditch, and a racist one I won't say.

I'm wondering if it's the same term I remember hearing when growing up? Along the lines of 'something knocking'?

When I lived in Germany we kids would take off for the day and go play on the train tracks. It takes all my self control now to let my kids ride their bikes to the store 4 blocks away.

[Garnet]

One activity I really enjoyed when I was a child was riding my bicycle. My father set the rule that I could ride on any residential street I wanted, I just had to stay off the main streets and I had to be home before dark. I followed those rules and had a ball. I rode all over the place for hours almost every day in the summer from the time I was 7 until I turned 10. Then at 10, I could go to the swimming pool by myself, so I did that more than ride my bike.

[crazyfingers]

I and most kids walked down the street to the nearest bus stop. No parents came along even in elementary school. By grade three I was riding my bike or walking to school alone though the woods. (Through the woods was very quick. The roads had to go around)

Now days the bus stops at every freaking driveway even if they are only 50 feet apart!

[Bane]

I used to play hand tennis at school.

This game could've got one black eyes or bruises for sure, so I don't think it'd be played much, if at all, in these litigious times.

My brother used to go to his friends' houses all on his own, when he was 6, and when there was no way to "phone home" (we only had one cellphone and there wasn't a phone where he went). This was in South Africa, before we all moved here.

[Free in Freeport]

Dodgeball!

When boys snapped our bras in school, we elbowed them or turned around and kicked them in the shins, then forgot about it. No cries of sexual harassment, no counter charges from the boys for assault, no teacher involvement.

Boys regularly snuck up on us to pull our dresses up. If caught, they got scolded by the teacher, but it was no big deal.

We called each other fags, regardless of gender and orientation. We "sort of" knew what it meant.

Skitching!! Before the snow plows came, hang on to the bumper of a car, or truck's tailgate, and go for a slide.

I grew up in a fairly affluent neighborhood, but there was no stigma against wearing an older sib's hand-me-downs. I would eyeball my sister's stuff waiting for it to become mine.

And some things that were unthinkable then:

We had school clothes, play clothes, and one Sunday outfit. We didn't dare wear play clothes to school, or play outside in school clothes. Once in a blue moon, we could wear our Sunday outfit to school, to show it off. We didn't dare put school clothes in the laundry after just one wearing! It was perfectly ok to wear the same outfit 2 days in a row; especially for boys.

[Free in Freeport]

Oh! Oh! Made soda can cannons! Stack the cans up, duct tape them together! The top of the top can was taken off, maybe the one below it too. Drilled a hole in the bottom can, big enough to stick a match in. Squirt lighter fluid or propane in the hole, light it, and watch the tennis ball shoot out.

Remember Estes Rockets?

[Daydream]

How about keeping the front door of our house unlocked?

[Lugubert]

How about keeping the front door of our house unlocked?Like I've been told about Swedish farms not terribly long ago: A key in the lock on the outside of the front door meant that nobody was home, so it was no use knocking or shouting for people.

[Christina]

I grew up in the south Bronx and you would have been out of your mind to go out and leave the door unlocked. We locked ourselves in with a bolt lock and one of those bar things that stuck in the floor. Now we never even bother. If we aren't around and someone wants to get in all they have to do is break a window or a sliding glass door anyway and no one would hear them.

[Garrett]

YARD DARTS!
That was the first thing I thought of when I read the thread title, though we called them lawn darts.

http://www.mastersgames.com/images/outdoor/garden-darts.jpg


http://www.core77.com/blog/images/vanbezooyen_core77_worsttoys.jpg

[Puck]

Oh gods. BB gun wars.

No one lost an eye, either. How we made it out of our childhoods alive, I don't know. :)

[Free in Freeport]

Do kids even have water balloon fights anymore?

[Anne]

yes. out here at least.

[Anne]

IIRC, the incidents of emergency room visits, child abductions, child maiming and child deaths has also plummetted since we were kids.

While I enjoy the laffs, the changes have made more kids survive in one piece.

Of course, part of me says it was only the stupid kids who died, though... or the ones with stupid parents ;)

How about not wearing seatbelts and instead having a parent believe her arm across your chest actually would do something other than bashing your chest?

[Puck]

How about not wearing seatbelts and instead having a parent believe her arm across your chest actually would do something other than bashing your chest?

Thalia got a fine head bump on the windshield when she was small. There was no way, as strong as I was, that I could hold her back with both arms. I did keep her held enough that it was just a bump, though. No seat belts, no safety car seats back then, kids just became projectiles if you hit something.

[DMB]

^^ I had a real bit of culture shock when I started reading Harry Potter about all those mobs of kids age 11 and up going off on a daylong train ride with no adults in sight, and then being basically in charge of themselves the whole year outside of classes, with only some very nominal supervision by older kids and occasional walk-by teachers.

Here in the US nobody would send their kids off like that without an adult/kid ratio of at least 1 to 10, with the adults in constant attendance, clutching permission slips and medical power of attourneys, worrying constantly about losing a kid or getting sued over some scraped knee, momentarily lost kid, carnage from a bus accident, or teenage pregnancy (any being just as likely as the other).

So please tell me, any of you non-USA types, is the transport and school setup as described in HP still common in Britain or wherever you are? Or is that part of the story as much fantasy as the magic?

I don't really know what happens now. My first proper job after university was teaching at a girls' boarding school in Switzerland (ages 11--about 20). We had pupils from all over the world, but a fair proportion came from France and England. At the beginning of every term, a single teacher from the school would be responsible for taking charge of the English girls at Victoria station. They then took the boat train (not a special one like the Hogwarts train, but an ordinary train with all sorts of people on it) to Folkestone, where everyone had to get off and board a cross-Channel ferry to Calais. At Calais they disembarked and got on another train. This went first to Paris, where the French contingent joined the party. The train travelled all night, changing engines very noisily at Dijon, and crossing the Franco-Swiss border at Vallorbe. At about breakfast time, the party arrived at its destination station and had to go through customs before being picked up to go to the school. At the end of every term, the journey was made in reverse.

On one occasion I was in charge of the return party, being given a list of girls and group tickets for the different stages of the journey. I was then 21. This We departed in the late evening, with the girls in couchettes, and crossed the frontier at around midnight. The first problem was that the girls bound for Paris were in a different carriage from those going on to Calais. The train personnel insisted on keeping the doors between the carriages locked, so that I couldn't get through to check on the girls going to Paris and I was holding all their passports.

The next problem was that as we approached the frontier, I opened the envelope the school had given me marked "group ticket for France" and it was empty. When we got to the frontier and the people in charge of the train changed over, the new ones insisted that we would have to disembark. I got into a furious argument with them and I think beat them down with the sheer force of my resistance.

I offloaded the Parisian contingent OK and got the rest of the girls, about 22 of them IIRC, onto the ferry, where I told them that if they needed me on the voyage they would find me in the first-class bar (in those days there were different classes of travel on boats as on trains). We seemed to be over the worst of the problems, and then we got to Folkestone, where we had to pass through customs and immigration. There were separate doors for British and non-British and one of the girls in the party was a 14 yo Pakistani. I had to go through the British route. Once the other side, there was a boat train waiting with our reserved seats on it. The only trouble was that the Pakistani girls had not emerged. I had to go with the majority, because when we got to Victoria I had to make sure that they were picked up by parents or guardians. So I trusted to the resourcefulness of the Pakistani girl, explained the situation to the station staff and hoped for the best. That turned out OK, because the girl was able to catch the second boat train and I was able to make sure that her parents picked her up.

But then I found myself stuck with a 13yo for whom no-one had come. We hung around at Victoria for ages and eventually I was able to telephone her father at work. He was furious with me, claiming that his ex-wife was supposed to do the pick-up. But I hadn't been able to raise the mother at all.

All in all, it was a rather stressful experience for me, for which I was rewarded by having my own journey for free. The girls seemed to enjoy everything with no particular bothers.

[Loren Pechtel]

Remember Estes Rockets?

Yup. They're still in the hobby stores, aren't they?

[Loren Pechtel]

IIRC, the incidents of emergency room visits, child abductions, child maiming and child deaths has also plummetted since we were kids.

While I enjoy the laffs, the changes have made more kids survive in one piece.

Of course, part of me says it was only the stupid kids who died, though... or the ones with stupid parents ;)

How about not wearing seatbelts and instead having a parent believe her arm across your chest actually would do something other than bashing your chest?

The problem is the safe things have been removed along with the risky ones.

[Hevvin Machine]

When I was very young we lived downtown in a big city. The summer when I was 6yo I took swimming lessons Saturday mornings at the local YMCA. The first day my mother walked me there and showed me how to find it, signed me up then went home. After that, every Saturday morning I walked myself about 8 blocks, carrying my little swim trunks and towel. I went up to the second floor where the pool was for a one hour lesson and then an hour of free swimming, then I walked home. Back in the mid-sixties the Young Men's Christian Association was still an all male place. Bathing suits were optional in the pool. So what you had on Saturday morning was a bunch of little boys getting naked with any guy who came in off the street, in a huge old warehouse of a building, with almost no supervision. Talk about a pedophile heaven.:eek:
Hev

[hecaterin]

Seen this? http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/

For me the biggest one would be going outside to play without sunscreen or hat.

I used to walk or cycle to school and back, but kids here still do that. Though not necessarily from as young as back when I did it.

[Puck]

The summer when I was 6yo I took swimming lessons Saturday mornings at the local YMCA.

Same here. How I didn't get lost, I'll never know. I didn't have a clue what I was doing, really. Ours was co-ed, however, and the pool was outside. But that long walk there and home, and being so doubtful as to where I was going, whew.

[Christina]

We had to walk to the bus stop and take a public bus to grade school. The rule was that if you got mugged for your bus pass you should give it to them so that you didn't get beat up, walk the mile to school and the nuns would give you a new one to get home with. We went as a group because all of our parents worked and didn't have time to take us. Catholic school kids were at the bottom of the wimpy pecking order for getting beat up so we were late for school at least every other day.

[Eudaimonist]

Skitching!! Before the snow plows came, hang on to the bumper of a car, or truck's tailgate, and go for a slide.

In Buffalo, we called that pogying (sp?).

Anyway, I remember having these "laser rifles" that would shoot these small, flat colored disks -- a clear choking hazard.


eudaimonia,

Mark

[Deacon Doubtmonger]

Remember Estes Rockets?
Yes indeed. Besides the ones with the gunpowder-based engines, they had some cold-propellant models powered by Freon (R12), which you could once easily buy off the racks in any auto parts store.

[Goldie]

How about keeping the front door of our house unlocked?Like I've been told about Swedish farms not terribly long ago: A key in the lock on the outside of the front door meant that nobody was home, so it was no use knocking or shouting for people.

Still leave ours unlocked... car too, when it's home. If I leave for a long period of time, I lock it all up

I suppose I should start locking them at night...but we live in such a safe place...it seems like over-kill.

*awaits chastising*

[frazier]

Still leave ours unlocked... car too, when it's home. If I leave for a long period of time, I lock it all up

I suppose I should start locking them at night...but we live in such a safe place...it seems like over-kill.

*awaits chastising*
Goldie, we've lived in our house 14 years, I have no idea where the keys are. We never lock up, even when leaving town. What's someone going to do, steal our dirty dishes?

When I was about 10, my older brother took a piece of 1/2" pipe, melted some lead soldiers in a boy scout pan, and cast a couple bullets. Then he pounded one end of the pipe closed, nailed it to a 2x4, and charged it with a firecracker. Then we went up to the village green, and fired it at the town water tower. It made a bang and a clang, and we ran like hell.

Good times.

[Goldie]

Still leave ours unlocked... car too, when it's home. If I leave for a long period of time, I lock it all up

I suppose I should start locking them at night...but we live in such a safe place...it seems like over-kill.

*awaits chastising*
Goldie, we've lived in our house 14 years, I have no idea where the keys are. We never lock up, even when leaving town. What's someone going to do, steal our dirty dishes?

When I was about 10, my older brother took a piece of 1/2" pipe, melted some lead soldiers in a boy scout pan, and cast a couple bullets. Then he pounded one end of the pipe closed, nailed it to a 2x4, and charged it with a firecracker. Then we went up to the village green, and fired it at the town water tower. It made a bang and a clang, and we ran like hell.

Good times.

:)

In my neighborhood we had 62 kids on our block. It was like living with the little rascals. There was always something "big" going on. We made our own plays, talent shows, carnivals (the prizes were things we saved from cereal boxes) We had go-cart races and played cowboys and indians, cops and robbers, war, kick the can, curb ball, red rover, street hockey, pickle, baseball...and my favorite...Man Hunt. (An older kid's version of hide and seek done with walkie-talkies.)
We camped in our back yards, stole MD 20/20 and Caramellow bars from the corner store. We jumped off roofs on top mattresses, jumped our bikes, walked on stilts, rode pogo-sticks and unicycles. If one kid got one we all rode it or got one or made one.
I sometimes think the only thing that saved me from the insanity of my childhood was my vibrant neighborhood..... tough and scrappy as it was.

[Laton]

Remember Estes Rockets?

This is what my friend & I used to do with them:

Mount a glass marble over the ejection charge using some bent wire 'claws'. Glue on some spare fletchings from archery classes and a tube to act as a guide rail for the launcher. If you did it right you had a rocket that flew fairly straight with a payload that would get 'fired' at the intended target. :) (Only non-living - we were inventive, not malicious)

[Free in Freeport]

I was 7 or 8 when my dad showed us how to smash his used hearing aide batteries with a hammer, to get the ball of mercury out. Great fun to play with! I coated a silver dime with it, making it appear in near-mint condition. I sold it to a neighbor kid for far above it's book value. He thought he had conned me until a few days later, when the mercury went funky and the dime turned black. It was all good, he had cheated me plenty of times. We stole back and forth.

[Zygote]

We routinely rode on the tailgate of station wagons or pickup trucks. I fell off once and got gravel in my chin, requiring stitches. Didn't stop me from doing it again.

We wandered all over the hills around the house. The only houses around belonged to uncles and my grandparents, so it was fairly safe from a human predator standpoint.

I remember running for help when my cousin fell out of a remote tree and broke her arm, and another time using the dog to lead us home when we got lost and disoriented in a thick fog. My mom had an Austrian hunting horn that she would blow to call us home for dinner.

When I was 13, I took the bus or train alone 25 miles to San Francisco about once a month, stepped over the drunks in the doorways of the SF stations, walked through a nasty part of town to Market street, caught a local bus and then hiked solo up a lonely road through a forest to my uncle's house near the top of the hill. I'm not even sure I was given instructions to call home to say I'd arrived safely.

[Zygote]

We also left the house unlocked all the time. I can remember locking it once. Mom pointed out that with a remote house like that, all someone had to do was break the plate glass window next to the door. They'd rather not have to deal with fixing a window in addition to dealing with a burglary.

I can remember getting in trouble for putting the car key in my pocket. With four drivers and only one copy of the key (why?), it was much easier to keep the key in the ignition than to try to hunt it down. But, once again, this was a remote location where even people who wanted to visit us couldn't find us. The person who lives there now has an electric gate and cyclone fencing around the property.

[Christina]

Mom pointed out that with a remote house like that, all someone had to do was break the plate glass window next to the door. They'd rather not have to deal with fixing a window in addition to dealing with a burglary.

That's why we don't do it. There's no such thing as secure when you have walls of glass and I'd prefer not to have to replace 6' panels in addition to losing the rest of my stuff. In the 25 years I've lived up here there has been one small rash of burglaries and they caught the guy within a week.

[Thalia Thinks]

I took my daughter to the park, oh about, a decade or so ago. I thought it might be fun to jump off the swing. I couldn't convince myself to do it about a foot away from the center.

What in the world possessed us to swing as high as we could and jump off?!?! That was great fun to me back in my childhood. I can remember hurling through the air, kicking my legs all the way.

[Cath B]

What in the world possessed us to swing as high as we could and jump off?!?! That was great fun to me back in my childhood.

I loved doing that too.

[JamesBannon]

Golliwogs! (showing my age). Everyone seems to have mentioned everything else.

[Free in Freeport]

What in the world possessed us to swing as high as we could and jump off?!?! That was great fun to me back in my childhood.

I loved doing that too.

55 pounds bodies fly farther and land softer than 155 ones!

[David B]

What in the world possessed us to swing as high as we could and jump off?!?! That was great fun to me back in my childhood.

I loved doing that too.

55 pounds bodies fly farther and land softer than 155 ones!

Land softer, yes, but given the same take off speed and angle, then they should go much the same distance. If anything the heavier one should go further, since less prone to wind resistance:p

David

[Anne]

my friends and I came up with the videogame reincarnation theory of life.

As a kid, you are just starting out with a new life, so you feel free to take risks and chances, because worst that happens? you start over.

As you grow up, you have more invested, and you don't want to lose your life and start over...

[Loren Pechtel]

What in the world possessed us to swing as high as we could and jump off?!?! That was great fun to me back in my childhood.

I loved doing that too.

55 pounds bodies fly farther and land softer than 155 ones!

Land softer, yes, but given the same take off speed and angle, then they should go much the same distance. If anything the heavier one should go further, since less prone to wind resistance:p

David

I'll agree with your logic on flying farther. However, it's not that they land any softer. Rather, it's the square-cube law: The kid has less mass for the strength of the body. What's simply a hard landing for a kid could be a bone-breaker for an adult.

I recall around age 6 a friend had play structure in the back yard. There was an opening on one side. We used to get down by jumping--roll on landing and it was grass below, no problem. Scared the adults, though (especially anyone who didn't realize the roll was deliberate.) I believe the place we were jumping from was something like 8' up. It was not that we had to jump, or that there were any dares or the like involved, it's just we regarded it as the easiest way down.

[Puck]

To this day, I still miss the ability to run and jump and slide into home base. I tell myself that I should work my way back up to it, but truth is, at this age, I'd break before I'd bounce.

[tjakey]

We made a bazuka like launch tube for those little rockets. The cops took mine when, in a 1-in-a-million shot, I knocked the red light off a moving cop car. (Now days the Department of Homeland Security would have me locked away forever for being a "terrorist." I was around 10 years old.)

We loved those rockets though, built and launched hundreds of them, some with mice "astronauts" in the payload tube. (Mice can apparently take a hell of a lot of "g.") The best were the two and three stage monsters, though it was best to stand well away from them. Occasionally they blew up right on the pad.

We had chemistry sets, jumped our bikes (My brother broke his in half after a spectacular jump. As I recall he broke a rib or two as well.) and ran packs of sleds down the hills in winter. (NASCAR had nothing on us when it came to bumping and crashing the competition.) We played full contact football without pads or helmets, started the summer by getting a good sunburn to get it over with, climbed trees, bridges, and cliffs, explored caves, had dog fights with wire controlled, gas-powered airplanes, and yes, made occasional trips to the E.R.

We were curious about everything, willing to try anything, and grew up outdoors. And though it was dangerous as hell compared to today, I wouldn't trade it for the indoors, computer game, afraid of everything experience of today's kids.

[Garnet]

Ahhhhh. I forgot about the sunburn as base tan. I used to get a really bad sunburn every May just to get it done so I wouldn't have to worry about it for the rest of the summer. As much time as I spent outside, I got a really dark tan every year. I used baby oil to keep my skin from getting too dry.

Yes, I do regular skin checks now.