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Run around in the woods with a good stick.
Nobody should be preventing you from running around with a good stick!
Man, the older I get, the more I miss being a kid with a good stick.
You can still run around in the woods with good stick regardless of age. I still do it with my nephews.
ran a Tor exit node. chatted on Bluelight. took over a (small) botnet. tripped on research chemicals.
In that order?
yes, actually!
You sound fun. Shine on you crazy diamond.
Gen x with boomer parents who barely parented, so…. Everything?
How’s this for a list? I swear every one of these is honest to god true and I did them all.
I dunno, that’s all just off the top of my head.
I’m curious, how old are you?
I’m 35 and had pretty much the exact same experience, but I also chalk a lot of that up to living out in the boonies.
51 Born in 74. Dead smack in the middle of GenX. Parents had me when they were real young. To be fair, they are good parents. We were pretty poor, they got divorced and should have never married in the first place, and they do all the boomer things that drives everyone crazy. But, they cared about me and my sister, gave us more than they could afford and we deserved, and I think I had more love from them than most kids got.
But boy-when it came to making decisions about safety. Man, what was considered normal and ok just blows my mind. ;)
As someone that had a sterile childhood of all work and fenced play in Singapore - that sounds like an amazing and well-lived childhood, for the most part.
It was a good childhood from an independence building, learning to explore standpoint. People my age around me are 1) very independent 2) confident 3) clever. It was also a hell of a lot of fun.
But dangerous. Like some guardrails could have been in place without really affecting anything. I also didn’t feel this way - I had good parents. But a lot of kids were pretty much just straight up abandoned on a daily basis. Lots of resentment towards their parents, it’s tough having a parent that literally didn’t give a shit about you. I unfortunately think a lot of kids fell into that category.
The last one is merry-go-rounds :)
I would never have thought to call it that but Wiki agrees: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundabout_(play) to me a carousel or merry-go-round is motorized and huge with fake horses to ride on.
i’m brazilian and 40, put a check mark on a lot of things on the list.
Are you from rural NZ, cause that sounds exactly like my childhood but we made home made pipebombs and moved onto making our own explosives
Also rafted from my house to a mates, some 10km down river - one time coming off and ripping my leg open, the scar is dome 70mm x 30mm. Good times
RI in the states.
Funny how things so far away can be so similar.
Man, what was it with pipe bombs? It was totally a thing to do. Everybody has a story about them. For anyone younger reading - no parent thought that was safe. But so many kids tried to make them…
A kid on my street blew his hand off doing that. For real, I don’t know the details. Me and a couple of other kids strolled up to his crew (they were older and generally got into more trouble than I did). They were out in the woods and he was cutting a galvanized pipe with a hacksaw. When I figured out what he was doing, I took off. I literally got picked on for that - for about a week. I could not have been a bigger pussy. Then he was in the hospital with no hand. Then I was ok to hang out with again - someone with brains - nobody screwed around with pipe bombs any more after that.
We didn’t have a lot of water near us - just some ponds. We did stupid shit, but 1) not considered safe and 2) generally not that bad in the big scheme of things. Kids drowned a lot in pools and ponds. The items above around water were changing. My mom wasn’t a fan, but my dad was all “you’re just moming him to death”. So I suppose those are half truths - mom didn’t think they were safe - but I was still allowed.
I see that we are the same age, even if on opposite sides of the world.
Play outside
We’d grab our bikes and ride across town. If they saw our bikes were gone they knew we’d be back later.
After the abduction and murder of two local girls, this wasn’t so accepted anymore. Kids were still out and about, but you’d get grilled about where you go, who you’re with, where are you coming home. You were supposed to be at someone’s house, mum would call and make sure that’s where you were. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bega_schoolgirl_murders
I don’t see any kids out around town anymore now though. Just the ones that walk from the bus stop to their house after school. That might just say more about todays youth culture though.
Holy shit that is heartbreaking. Thanks for responding to the topic but it’s a rough article.
I didn’t know these two girls because they were a few years older, but I knew other kids who did know them. Wasn’t good.
This is one of the reasons cars have such a chokehold, kids don’t bike places as often because of safety concerns.
I’d ride across 8 lanes of road at the busiest intersection to get to my friends house and my parents didn’t care. I also had a few hours a week at a pet store when I was 12, so I could bike to my friends house and we’d just order pizza and hand out during the summer.
I’m GenX, my entire childhood was dangerous.
Back in the 60s, i was a Free-Range kid. On on a nice non-school day, I would go out after breakfast on my bike, and be gone all day, without any money, a watch, ID, cell phone (didn’t exist back then), anything, and I’d be gone all day. The only rule was to be home by 5 pm.
Nobody knew where I was, who I was speaking to, or anything. If i bumped into friends, I’d hang out for a while, but if I needed to know the time, I’d ask some stranger. If I was thirsty, I’d knock on a random door and ask for a glass of water. Once, I stopped at the end of a driveway to watch some guy doing woodworking in his open garage. He saw me watching and this stranger invited me into garage, and showed me his tools, and what he was building. Turned out he was a decent guy, and I probably reminded him of his grandson, but what if he wasn’t? My primary fear was running into the Robolotto boys, but as long as I didn’t see one of them, I was happy.
This was routine for years, and it was the same for my friends. I started doing this when I was about 7 years old.
Did this upbringing influence your later life?
I think it helped shape me into a an adventurous, curious person, because that was what motivated me as a kid. Other Free Range kids might have gone out to play sports, or to look for trouble, etc., but i was just exploring.
There was another direct influence on my life: Once, i headed to a nearby “woods,” to watch animals, and bumped into some friends. One jumped over a small creek to greet me, and stepped right onto an underground bee hive. They all poured out of that hive like water, and came directly for me. The first stung my lip, then neary eye. They got in my hair, up my t-shirt, stuck in my socks etc.
I jumped on my bike and started racing toward home, hoping to outrun them, but they were the kind of bees that don’t lose their stingers, so the ones stuck in my clothes kept stinging me. By the time i got home i had at least 30 stings.
I’m okay now, but i was really afraid of bees for many years. Gardening helped me learn to lose my fear.
Overall, i think it made me a person who isn’t afraid of the world, and i know i can navigate any situation that comes up.
Climbing trees! I’d end up climbing mostly up to the top…
One time as a kid, a friend lent me her glasses (I never needed glasses, but I always liked them) and I went to climb a tree. In the tree, looking down, the glasses made it seem like I was much closer to the ground than I was.
So I jumped.
It was extremely stupid. There was a point during the fall when I felt like I should’ve reached the ground already, but I hadn’t. In the end I was fine, the glasses were fine, and my friend thought it was funny. But wow, that could’ve gone disasterously wrong.
Woah, I imagined this in my head so vividly. I’m glad you’re okay!
Reading books would get you jailed first these days
I see a lot of similar stories here about wandering free and living like feral kids but I want to second making homemade Explosives from hobby shop Rocket engines.
Our school playground didn’t have a rubber ground. Or mulch. Or wood chips. No. We had gravel. Like little rocks gravel. And a swing set. A big one. Recess for us was jumping as far as we could into gravel.
We also had wooden monkey bars that gave you splinters. We tried to skip bars, and if we were lucky, land on the gravel. If we weren’t lucky, we would fall into a hornet’s nest. Hornets loved those old wooden playgrounds.
But perhaps the greatest piece of school yard entertainment was the steel merry go round. We’d have one of us try to hang off of it horizontally with 3 or 4 of us sping it. Lose your grip and fall off? Where would you land? You guessed it. Face first into the gravel.
That thing would get hot enough in the summer to fry an egg, but as much as we enjoyed eating our breakfast that way, we lost it before the end of 8th grade. A kid from a neighboring school crawled under theirs and tried to grab the axel while it was turning. It ripped his hand clean off. But still, those were the days.
Didn’t rip my hand off, but I definitely fell off one of those things, busted the back of my head open. I kind of… Fell backwards with my legs wrapped around the saddle, and hit the bottom edge with my head.
Split open like a mouth.
Rushed to the hospital. 23 stitches and 13 staples to close it up again. I have to have my hair cut a special way to hide the scar. People are always surprised when I show them.
I still rode those things afterwards. Kids were tougher back then lol, had to be 🤷♂️
Similar story. I was in elementary school and fell off the monkeybars and landed flat on my back and knocked myself out, surrounded by kids. I woke up later and everyone was gone, so I got up and went back to class. I got detention for being late. When my parents asked why I “skipped class” I said that I didn’t know and was grounded for not telling the truth.
I did other dumb things, mostly around bodies of water (cliff diving, rip currents). I’m surprised that I’m not dead. As an adult, I’m afraid of everything.
Yikes, kids are dumb lol.
I never grew up around waves, so when my brother and I visited family on the coast and we were playing in the waves, other people wouldn’t join us. We were going further and further out. Finally we convinced the guy to join us, and no lie, he said he jokingly said “ok I guess I’ll die too”. We didn’t know what he meant. All three of us got stuck in a mild rip current. I almost drowned trying to swim directly into it. Nobody told me any different. My brother and the other guy were stronger swimmers, they were ok. It all happened very fast. We gave that guy an earful afterwards, he was like “I thought you knew” 🤦♂️
I’m a Gen X’er… Not sure if the Lemmy’s word limit on posts would allow me to list it all.
So here are a few:
Drank from the garden hose? Check
Rode in a car without seat belts? As a toddler? As a baby? Check
Rode my bike all over town with no helmet? Had an accident that put me in a coma for 48hrs because of not wearing a helmet? Check
Harvested tobacco on my grandparents farm? Check (Anyone who has done this by hand, working with those stakes knows the risks.)
I started skydiving in the early 90’s. My mother was absolutely appalled and constantly berated me about how “dangerous” it is to jump out of an airplane.
The truth of the matter was I was far safer in free fall than I was during most of my adolescence.
Is drinking from the garden hose actually considered dangerous nowadays? I thought that was just a Boomer meme.
I’m still here.
I keep reading it, so added for comedic effect…
By helicopter parents.
Too many to count, but I’ll leave you with one of the least dangerous: woods porn.
One time in the mid 2000s my friend and I were on a hike in the mountains and we found a tree that was like a cave, all branches everywhere except a little entrance. Inside we found porn magazines with the pictures ripped out and placed on branches all over the inside of the “cave”. After that we always joked about the porn cave we found.
Does 15 still count as a child? I think it does, and driving 300+ miles to have sex with someone I met on the internet is still probably the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done.
I’m 20 and I still don’t know how to drive, America is wild
Jumping on the street while a car is quickly moving towards me in an attempt to jump on top of it and look really cool
LMAO this just reminded me of the time my buddy’s car was overloaded and I still didn’t want to walk home so I asked him if I could ride on the roof of his sedan with my arms holding on through the window holes. It worked, and I didn’t die, so I got that going for me. Glad people didn’t have smartphones then like they do today. A vid would have 100% made it’s way to my parents somehow.
did it look cool?
I think so, but i couldnt get another perspective to verify that