I was born at the tail end of Gen X but we were definitely getting up to some crazy stuff.
It was a normal afternoon to take our bikes off the highest jumps we could build in the middle of the road, constructed from the neighborhood wood pile. When a car came speeding through we’d yell out “car” and quickly move our stuff to the side. We used skateboards on vertical ramps built from whatever, and roller skates on shoddy pavement. Our playgrounds were made of reflective metal hotter than lava attached to towers that seemed to reach 20 ft above the ground.
We built dangerous tree houses with rusty scrap in the ravine behind the neighborhood, next to place where the neighborhood’s older kids were surely taking all the drugs and hiding from their D.A.R.E. officers.
I used to load my sisters in the back of a red radio flyer wagon and we’d all ride down the neighborhood’s steepest hill, occasionally tipping at high speed and then sliding the rest of the way down likely removing several layers of skin and rolls of gauze from my mom’s medical kit in the process.
In primary school, I don’t think there was ever a moment without at least one kid on crutches or with a limb in a cast.
While it did harden us up, and provided some amazing memories, just about everyone I know who was a kid at that time knows of some kid who died while digging a tunnel, or got hit by a car, or spent half of his early teenage years in a cast, or who always seemed to have a finger splint.
Somehow through all of this we moved from thinking this is normal childhood stuff to blaming anyone and everyone by way of lawsuits.
There was nothing “safe” about that time. The debate seems to hinge on whether a dangerous childhood results in better adapted adults, perhaps by culling a few unlucky kids who hadn’t learned their own limits, and who know how to be creative in the absence of almost any artificial or algorithmic stimuli.
Same situation, more or less … but I honestly don’t remember anyone meeting their grim fate the way you described … you’d see people with a cast here and there (I got mine in gym class, of all locations), but I think all kids in my extended social groups made it to adulthood without major, life-altering physical damage …
News TV was non-stop filling people’s heads with images of paedophile kidnappers and serial killers lurking behind every hedge. In reality the chances of anything like that happening to your kid is ridiculously small; like nothing on if you sent them to an American school.
I was born at the tail end of Gen X but we were definitely getting up to some crazy stuff.
It was a normal afternoon to take our bikes off the highest jumps we could build in the middle of the road, constructed from the neighborhood wood pile. When a car came speeding through we’d yell out “car” and quickly move our stuff to the side. We used skateboards on vertical ramps built from whatever, and roller skates on shoddy pavement. Our playgrounds were made of reflective metal hotter than lava attached to towers that seemed to reach 20 ft above the ground.
We built dangerous tree houses with rusty scrap in the ravine behind the neighborhood, next to place where the neighborhood’s older kids were surely taking all the drugs and hiding from their D.A.R.E. officers.
I used to load my sisters in the back of a red radio flyer wagon and we’d all ride down the neighborhood’s steepest hill, occasionally tipping at high speed and then sliding the rest of the way down likely removing several layers of skin and rolls of gauze from my mom’s medical kit in the process.
In primary school, I don’t think there was ever a moment without at least one kid on crutches or with a limb in a cast.
While it did harden us up, and provided some amazing memories, just about everyone I know who was a kid at that time knows of some kid who died while digging a tunnel, or got hit by a car, or spent half of his early teenage years in a cast, or who always seemed to have a finger splint.
Somehow through all of this we moved from thinking this is normal childhood stuff to blaming anyone and everyone by way of lawsuits.
There was nothing “safe” about that time. The debate seems to hinge on whether a dangerous childhood results in better adapted adults, perhaps by culling a few unlucky kids who hadn’t learned their own limits, and who know how to be creative in the absence of almost any artificial or algorithmic stimuli.
Same situation, more or less … but I honestly don’t remember anyone meeting their grim fate the way you described … you’d see people with a cast here and there (I got mine in gym class, of all locations), but I think all kids in my extended social groups made it to adulthood without major, life-altering physical damage …
You can do all of that on Roblox from the safety of your toilet nowadays.
The future is now.
just mind all the pedophiles and human traffickers.
News TV was non-stop filling people’s heads with images of paedophile kidnappers and serial killers lurking behind every hedge. In reality the chances of anything like that happening to your kid is ridiculously small; like nothing on if you sent them to an American school.
I am going to teach my kid how to traumatize an adult, so they can annoy the pedophiles back. Fight fire with nuclear bombs.
sounds like enablement of pedophiles and groomers.
where there’s smoke, there’s fire.