Not really a young child, but in my late teens my parents told me I had no curfew.
Their only rule was, lock the front door when you get back, and let one of them know I was home, even really late.
I would leave at 8pm in my truck, drive to pick up my friends, then hit various late night stops like Dairy Queen, Subway, Denny’s, etc. My friends and I would spend like an hour or two at each place, chilling, playing cards, eating snacks, chatting, and then go hit the next place.
Often we would all find some random parking lot and just chill there chatting and listening to music. I would frequently get back at 2-3am.
Many gen-Z kids don’t even drive. My spouse’s youngest sister is 20 and doesn’t have a drivers license. She hardly hangs out with her friends in person at all, same with most of them. They all just game together on Discord. I was a pretty mild mannered kid when I was that age, but they make me seem like a wild west bandit lol.
Also sleepovers apparently aren’t a thing any more?? A ton of parents are totally against them. I guess I kind of get it. Idk, I used to have sleepovers all the time with my friends. Pretty much everybody’s birthday party was a sleepover from age 13-17. I remember staying up super late, playing GameCube/XBox, playing truth or dare, and stuffing ourselves with candy and soda, super fun memories.
Play outside
Run around in the woods with a good stick.
Man, the older I get, the more I miss being a kid with a good stick.
You can still run around in the woods with good stick regardless of age. I still do it with my nephews.
Nobody should be preventing you from running around with a good stick!
Build a flamethrower with a super soaker. Swim with sharks.
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.
Tell jokes.
Go outside.
Walk to school.
Got vaccinated.
That’s a joke. The real answer is almost everything. I was practically feral and lived next to a swamp in Louisiana. RFK Jr. is 100% wrong about disease prevention but there’s no vaccine for snapping turtles.
Bike helmets didn’t get common until 6th grade or so. Same with face guards and mouth guards in anything but football.
We also had a diving board with a full size car spring. A gymnast pal could do double flips off it.
That diving board sounds fucking wild
My brother and I are rebuilding it this summer. The pool at my moms house is also being re-plastered so we’re going to drill and epoxy new bolts in the deck and sand and fiberglass the old wood, which hopefully isn’t too rotten.
Gotta get my 7 y/o diving off it this summer.
Looks exactly like this model but with on thicker spring instead of the 2. My 6’3 230lb dad could just about bottom it out.
We still don’t use bike helmets here in the Netherlands
We were riding off skate ramps at the time though. If I lived in a place with separate bike lanes I might consider going helmet-less. But I’ve also been hit by a car and likely saved a lot of brain damage by having a helmet on. Same with skiing (helmets and accidents, not hit by a car!).
Walking to school alone.
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.
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.
This is one of the reasons cars have such a chokehold, kids don’t bike places as often because of safety concerns.
Made a trebuchet that almost destroyed a neighbor’s car. Tried to build a fuel-air bomb out of kerosene and a shotgun shell. Made napalm out of gasoline and styrofoam. Huntes squirrels with a .22 rifle.
Weird childhood.
With some friends, I built an “unguided SAM launcher” using some wood, a lot of aluminum foil, some metal rods, and a bunch of model rockets, and we tried to shoot down stunt kites we were flying near it.
We’d have probably gotten DHS called on us if we did it nowadays lol
I’m GenX, my entire childhood was dangerous.
Surfing
Driving a tractor by myself, when I was a tween. I was driving a tractor before I could reach the clutch, I had to get off the seat and stand to use it, not that there’s much gear-shifting driving a tractor through a field. I had a dirtbike out at the farm as well. Built a little fort in the woods.
I used to drive a land cruiser around the farm while the men threw hay bales off the back tray. I would’ve been about seven, pottering along in first gear. I was too small to throw hay.
