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Man when I was a kid I would take off on my bike with a backpack full of knives and lighters to go over to my friends house to blow things up and generally be destructive little boys.
My mom wouldn't even know where I had gone or when I was going to get back most of the time. She just had a rule that I had to call her before sun down and tell her where I was or ask permission to sleep wherever I was.
I'm not saying it was better back then, but it was a super different world we grew up in.
Warm hose water.....
The micro plastics make it taste better.
Man, if I ever have a kid… I might just reconcile with my weird and conservative cult like parents just to send my kid down there for a week or two in the summer when they’re young, to experience living in rural America and to be locked outside from sun up to sun down with only a hose and a sandwich for lunch.
Pick up a stick, jump on the trampoline, and use your brain to imagine a fantasy world, instead of plugging into Arcane on Netflix for hours on end.
I hated it as a kid but as an adult now that plays a lot of video games and generally sits on my ass I am more and more appreciative of my mother's insistence that I get outside.
She still let us play video games but much less than other kids at the time.
We basically had infinite forest to explore and we often would set up tree houses or other forts for days or hours. I remember a buddy came over one time and we just spent an entire day making booby traps for our secret base. We hid spike traps under false floors and all sorts of stuff lol.
Really it's a miracle we only got as hurt as often as we did. We did so many stupid things for entertainment.
Gotta flush the earwigs out first
used to leave Friday come home Sunday afternoon
Man, the more I hear about other people's experiences growing up, the more I realize how lucky I was to not really have any issues. I had countless sleepovers, and the worst thing that happened was when we'd stay up all night playing video games and be dead tired the next day.
It's important to at least know the other parents and if possible be friends. That's how it's supposed to work, groups of people who know and trust each other coming together to create a... oh gosh what's the word for a group of like-minded locals who cooperate in social endeavors. Has that ever been done? Crazy stuff I know, but it sounds workable.
oh gosh what’s the word for a group of like-minded locals who cooperate in social endeavors
Communists
/s
Co-ops are popping off in homeschool circles but I don't know if the parents know each other so well as to trust them to host their kids for sleepovers.
While it wasn't a primary factor, part of my decision to not procreate was having zero desire to interact with the parents of other children. Idk what is about many parents, but they are legitimately unwell and have no regard for anyone or anything outside themselves and maybe their children. I could not tolerate that in my life.
My sister got married to wonderful man who actually had wonderful parents and it's genuinely confusing to her sometimes.
His parents are genuinely useful, and kind, and very welcoming. Not the case for my wife or our parents. It's like an entire support system that was never present in her life before.
I got that vibe from one of my ex's parents. They weren't "bad" in a traditional sense, but very distant and self-centered, spending almost all of their time on their phones and throwing money at their children as if it would replace interacting with them. It's subtle, but still harmful, like carbon monoxide, and it weirded me out a little. I had assumed it was just how that generation is nowadays though (like my parents, they were older-ish, they gotta be about 60 years old or so now)
I was an idiot. Parents would call up and say, “Hey, would you like us to drop off our kid at your house so both kids can play?”. I would decline, thinking to myself, “Are you kidding? I already have my hands full with one kid, why would I offer you free babysitting?”
Only later did I learn that kids (depending on age) will play together and entertain themselves. This relieved me of entertaining my kid and the other parents could get a break also.
What an idiot I was.
Wow, I learned this when my kid was like 2. The 4 year old across the street was practically already a babysitter. They could play in the sandbox together for hours, and the older kid would let me know if mine had any potty training accidents.
I have cameras around the property so I could keep an eye on them.
They're 3 and 5 now and practically already live like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, running off into the forest to collect berries, mushrooms, and cook rocks.
All the studies I've seen say the world is safer than ever for kids, but parents seem to live in fear.
My childhood memories were parents saying "don't come back until it's dark", and summers full of building dens, getting stung by nettles and sleeping well. "In my day" vibes, I know, but hopefully there's still a silent majority of parents that give their kids this freedom and these articles are overblown.