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u/P1g-San Sep 11 '26
“It’s 10 p.m, do you know where your children are?”
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u/Pkrudeboy Sep 11 '26
“I told you last night, no!”
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u/Kevdog824_ Zillennial Sep 11 '26
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u/CpnStumpy Sep 12 '26
I don't click links labeled "Plug", you do you but it ain't my scene
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u/Kevdog824_ Zillennial Sep 12 '26
If you’re on a computer you can hover over the link to see its source. It’s a link to a YouTube video of the Simpsons scene the person above me was referencing
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u/letsgooncemore Sep 12 '26
That commercial started airing in the early sixties. They were telling the silent generation to watch the baby boomers since the oldest boomers were only eighteen in 1964.
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u/Aromatic_Issue_2555 Sep 14 '26
they made that advert for kids like me! I was at clubs breakdancing in 92. You all were in bed by 8pm latest. I babysat some of y'all.
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u/bazilbt Sep 11 '26
This is posted all the time, and yes when I always a kid in the 1990's not even in middle school we roamed around the woods and streets all the time. I walked the dog alone at age six.
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u/IScreamPiano Sep 12 '26
The kids in the neighborhood would ride their bikes to our house in elementary school on windy, hilly roads without sidewalks or shoulders to go in our pool in the summers. We’d go in with them, but my parents definitely didn’t always supervise us. The pool was gated at least.
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u/n14shorecarcass Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
I roamed the neighborhood when I was 6-7 (my gen alpha kid would be laughing hysterically) with my friends. We would run around to each other's houses and the park.. getting snacks, and going on adventures. If my mother knew how far I had roamed, Holy shit, would I have been in trouble. Im fortunate now to where my biggest problem for my kid is summertime wildlife (rattlesnakes) and hot weather. Im not ready to let her roam alone quite yet, even though we're extremely remote and quite literally everyone knows everyone where we live.. she's still too little. Maybe in 6 months. We'll see.
Edit- fat finger autocorrect
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u/Patch86UK Sep 12 '26
I remember, this being pre mobile phone, being asked to check in regularly and using phonebooths to place reverse-charges calls home to let mum know I was still broadly alive.
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u/n14shorecarcass Sep 12 '26
Leaving the 3-5 second collect call intro message to let the parents know your status lmao 🤌🤌🤌 "MOM, IM ALIVE, ON MY WAY HOME SEE YOU SOON!" CLICK
That shit could buy me an extra hour of fun with my friends 🤣🤣🤣
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u/kinkakinka Sep 12 '26
My friends and I used to walk a literal stranger's dogs when we were like 7. For HOURS.
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u/DJDemyan Sep 12 '26
Yeah even in the early 2000s it was still “be home before dark” and give your parents an idea of where you’re going
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u/jocall56 Sep 12 '26
Yeah, after school we’d hop on our bikes and meet up with friends in our neighborhood and the adjacent neighborhood…there was even a big undeveloped area behind that neighborhood filled with dirt trails and a big hill we’d ride up and down, we just called it “this hills” - my parents had no idea where this place was…This was in the late 90’s to early 2000’s.
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u/SBSnipes Zillennial Sep 13 '26
I was talking about the Virginia 5 year old allowed to walk down the street with my spouse and they were like "well I don't think it should be jail time but water is dangerous and there was a pond" What message does it send a 5 year old that you can't trust them to walk down the street? It was a shallow pond in a gated community with a posted guard, not a sheer drop off to the ocean or a fast flowing river,
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u/PortraitofMmeX Sep 11 '26
Didn't they just sentence a mother to 7 months in prison because she let her 5 year old walk unsupervised in their gated community alone, in the vicinity of a pond?
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u/thejoeface Sep 11 '26
Suspended, but yes
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u/MeadowShimmer Sep 12 '26
Suspended from what?
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u/SivakoTaronyutstew Zillennial Sep 12 '26
Jail. If she violates the terms, she gets jail off the bat. This is basically jail bond, but with convictions this time.
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u/MeadowShimmer Sep 12 '26
"I'll let you off this time, but if you misbehave we're throwing you right back in"
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u/wizzywurtzy Sep 11 '26
Mom lets her kid walk alone… gets 7 months in prison. That’ll teach them to not leave their kids while… in prison away from her kids. Fucking Christ.
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u/pseudonym7083 Millennial Sep 11 '26
Truly stunning logic, isn't it?
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u/RoundApprehensive186 Sep 12 '26
lol like suspending a kid from school because they skipped school.
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u/Lystian Sep 11 '26
Children only matter when they are a fetus.
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u/letsgooncemore Sep 12 '26
A fetus is easy to advocate for. It has no voice of it's own to push back against it's oppressor or state it's needs to it's advocate. A child might have an opinion and that's not what the people focused on protecting fetuses are here for.
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u/Additional_Name_706 Sep 12 '26
I do not like the comment I'm about to make...
The case we're referring to happened in Virginia, solid blue area, with very pro-choice laws.
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u/Unlikely_Editor_520 Sep 12 '26
I'm from Va and that blew my mind. I thought for sure she wouldn't get convicted.
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u/Lystian Sep 12 '26
I was aiming at the national level. We refuse to do many things for kids, but by god will people flip out over abortion.
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u/Lythaera Sep 11 '26
that is fucking ridiculous and insane. I played outside on my street that had a pond from age 5 onward, I was rarely inside during the day in the summers. Even the mentally handicapped boy who lived on my street played on our street without adult supervision.
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u/riverrocks452 Sep 11 '26
I had a seasonal wetlands behind my house. Just sort of as the back yard. Not all that deep, but I doubt a 'pond' in a planned community was natural, let alone deep. I was out there unsupervised most non-school days.
(Also- the (elementary!) school said I couldn't get a ride on the school bus because I was under a mile from the building. All I'd have had to do would be to walk three quarters of a mile along a state highway/trucking/commuter route with no crosswalks or sidewalks, lined with trees that bore the scars of cars who'd gone off the road! Piece of cake!)
The 90s were absolutely a different environment as far as expected child supervision went.
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u/Future_Telephone281 Sep 12 '26
I was 4 and I rode my bike 2 miles down the highway to my aunts house. People slowed down to check on me but I waved them on down the high way.
Who the hell keeps driving? lol the 90s
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u/elchuyano Sep 11 '26
I remember my mom sending us to the corner store to get Tortillas and Cheese when we were 6
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u/Silver_Flatworm5235 Sep 12 '26
My sister and I used to walk for sandwiches and candy to the corner deli. We were both under 10. Idk why people think kids shouldn't have ANY independence. As long as its reasonable just let kids wander and explore.
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u/Iamnottouchingewe Sep 12 '26
In the seventies my mom sent my five year old ass to the grocery store for milk eggs and bread with the money in an envelope with a note to sell her smokes to me as well. This was a weekly occurrence. Virginia Slims 100s. I would pull my radio flyer wagon through the store and put the stuff in and go to the checkout. 4 blocks each way down a fairly busy street.
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u/throwawayforunethica Sep 12 '26
In the late 80's when I was 11 it was a regular thing for me to walk to the corner store to buy cigarettes for my mom with a note.
Can you imagine that now? "Please sell my 11 year old one pack of Marlboro Reds. Thanks, Mom."
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u/Prestigious_Guava156 Sep 12 '26
I was in charge of this for my elderly neighbor around the same age. I was born in the 80s.
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u/einsofi Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
My mom did masters degree in the U.S. and we lived in her university’s dormitory. She left me with the first friends I made afterschool in the playground and neighbourhood (I was 6 and barely spoke any English in the first month) until neighbours warned her that she might get into trouble for leaving her kids unattended. The said friends dad was still doing his med degree and also lives in the dormitory complex with his entire family of 4. when my mom asked him about it he said oh he’s not under any financial pressure so it doesn’t hurt to further pursue his studies. Really show how good the welfare and economy was back then in the U.S. (early 2000s, Boston
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u/First_Detective6234 Sep 12 '26
I roamed around and we lived next to a lagoon with alligators
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u/kyonkun_denwa Maple Syrup Millennial Sep 12 '26
Maybe it's just my frosty Canadian ass, but this to me seems like a genuinely bad idea.
I used to date a girl who grew up in Victoria, her family lived next to a forest. Her dad never let her go into the woods without an adult. She said how that always pissed her off for YEARS, until one day a cougar ended up bolting through their backyard while they were having breakfast.
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u/A313-Isoke Older Millennial Sep 12 '26
A cougar?! I didn't even know Canada had that!
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u/kyonkun_denwa Maple Syrup Millennial Sep 12 '26
Uh... was that meant to be sarcastic?
The mountains have tons of big kitties. That's a given. What people didn't always expect was when the big kitties followed rivers down from the mountains and ended up chilling in their suburbs.
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u/A313-Isoke Older Millennial Sep 12 '26
No, I have no idea where cougars live. And, I didn't know there were big cats in Canada.
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u/Revolutionary_Ad3850 Sep 12 '26
My parents went on a vacation for a week and left me and my sister home by ourselves, we were like 10 and 12. We had a babysitter show up for like 2 hours a night to make sure we ate. Other than that we were unsupervised.
In the summer we had free reign to go wherever in the neighborhood we wanted and were only expected to be home by sundown.
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u/Blacksad9999 Sep 11 '26
Yes, in a gated community.
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u/flabebebebe Sep 11 '26
And this is why gated communities are so suspicious to me. They pretend they're not pvp zones but they are, it's just a call police first ask questions never type of pvp.
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u/ForeignSatisfaction0 Sep 12 '26
What is pvp?
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u/Exciting-Mountain396 Sep 12 '26
Player vs. Player, in gaming a PVP area means where everyone can turn on each other
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u/Impressive_Recon Sep 12 '26
Thanks, I was confused even though I know what it is in a gaming context, I just never heard it being used outside of that especially for something like this.
Can we please not have this be a thing?
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u/papa-hare Sep 11 '26
She was reported by someone who worked for the community, wasn't she? Absolute shit behavior.
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u/letsgooncemore Sep 12 '26
Neighbor called security because they saw the kid alone, security called cops.
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u/dabear-baby Sep 12 '26
Does anyone remeber the PSAs at 10pm?? Its 10pm do you know where your children are? Yes as a 50 yr old man we wondered far and wide from like 9 or 10 yrs old.
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u/XXCIII Sep 12 '26
Yes , and VA even has a “reasonable roaming” act for this exact reason so they skirted it by charging her with contributing to delinquency. This seems a wild misuse of the law to me
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u/Dazzling_Vagabond Sep 11 '26
They'll do anything to increase US prison population
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u/the_blastomatic Sep 11 '26
Gotta raise those stock dividends! If you elect me President I will executive order all prisons to be nonprofit and/or state managed. Extend minimum wage to prisoners, they should not be deducted for housing if they are required by the state to be housed in an institution.
Then we'll have our next "hot" civil war because the southern US is so deeply corrupt that they couldn't operate without slaves from the prison system, and their leadership/churches are so deeply invested in the
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u/alghiorso Sep 12 '26
I live in the third world. I've seen 5 year olds watching 2 year olds out in the streets for hours just hanging out without an adult in sight. Kids at 7 are riding the public transportation without help. Totally different world.
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u/sidewaysorange Sep 12 '26
depends where you live. in PA there is now law for that. kids can walk to and from school without an adult at any age once they start kindergarten.
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u/AprilRyanMyFriend Sep 12 '26
Working as a 911 dispatcher for years I couldn't tell you how many calls I've been involved in where kids around that age, and even a little older, drowned because they were allowed to wander around bodies of water unsupervised. Pools, ponds, creeks, or anything in between doesn't matter.
I think what she was charged with and sentenced to was extreme overkill, but that's just too young to be around bodies of water without someone older to watch and help them if the worst comes to pass.
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u/JeSuisUnAnanasYo Sep 12 '26
The real tea here is that people need to be training their kids to swim from babies age. This shit should be subsidized by the govt
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u/AprilRyanMyFriend Sep 12 '26
Children should be taught to swim, and a lot of things should be paid for by the gov't, but 5yo is still too young to be around a body of water unsupervised even if they know how. It's not worth the risk.
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u/Secondhand-Drunk Sep 11 '26
I mean, 5 years old is a little young to let a kid go about alone to a body of water. Kids are stupid and actively try to off themselves. This is why I needed to be tied up with a rope.
But then my parents would let me and my 4 siblings walk 7 miles to jump off a bridge into fast moving water.
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u/Foreign-Cat-2898 Sep 11 '26
He wasn't going to the pond. He was walking in a neighborhood that has a pond in it.
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u/JeSuisUnAnanasYo Sep 12 '26
So scold the mom, the fact that jail was even a question is legit insanity
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u/Physical_Road917 Sep 12 '26
5 years old is a little young, I'd send them with an older sibling. Or maybe if they're with other kids from the neighborhood. When I was 5, I definitely did not go anywhere completely alone. Prison is ridiculous though.
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u/CherylTuntIRL Sep 11 '26
I was allowed to roam the neighbourhood from the age of 8. I just had to be home by dinner time and could then go back out for a further hour (if it was light in the summer). I did nearly get kidnapped once but I was too fast on my bike. I didn't report it because I was scared I wouldn't be allowed out again.
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u/Wooden-Lab-3077 Sep 11 '26
Same!!! A man kept trying to get me to come up to his car and he was following me. Never said a word about it cause i wanted to still go on walks
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u/ltsouthernbelle Sep 12 '26
It’s important to note that we had boundaries. It varied by family, but we all knew where the boundary was in every direction.
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u/ihadagoodone Sep 12 '26
I mean, they were more like guidelines.
it's not like they could track our every move at all times.
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u/slayergrl99 Sep 12 '26
My father knew everyone in my town and because he ran a business, our number was public and everywhere.
My dad didn't have GPS... but he had a network of people all over town that would tell him I stepped out of line. I remember being 17, and taking a shortcut across town through a bad neighborhood in full daylight.
Before I got to the end of the 5 mile long road, my (nokia) phone was ringing.
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u/ltsouthernbelle Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 13 '26
This! The last thing you want to hear is “Ms. Franklin saw you by the post office.” Because if you lived in a neighborhood where you had freedom to roam best believe it was because they had snitches on every corner lol
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u/tech_noir_guitar Sep 12 '26
I once had some random dude in an 80s Camero stop me when I was walking by myself. He said he was a cop (which there is no way that was true) and told me he was looking for kids that were tagging in the area so I needed to pull everything out of my pockets and show him. I was like okay and I didn't have anything in my pockets because I was like 13. He just looked around and was like okay bye and took off. Still no clue what that was about. We were next to a busy road and I kinda wonder what would hand happened if there were less people around. 🤷
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u/Oddisredit Sep 12 '26
Oh man in summer we played dark tag at night. And being somewhat north, night was like 9pm or so.
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u/Green-Collection4444 Sep 12 '26
We listed and followed rules. Boundaries were set by our parents, and we would not dare cross them. There's a 0% chance of that happening today.
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u/evilisordinary Sep 11 '26
lol we were literally locked out of the house from like 10 am to 5 pm in peak summer heat. I have a scar from a friction burn I got when we decided to use extension cords as rope for a tire swing in the woods. Honestly, great times.
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u/Samysalsaa Sep 11 '26
my grandmother would lock us out. A few times we crawled in through the window to get the playstation controllers. By kid logic we were "playing outside" like she told us. but me and my cousins would mostly roam around. sometimes we'd meet other kids and end up at someone's house we just met that day. sometimes we'd find enough change to go to the snow cone stand. We'd just figure out the day as we went.
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u/Tippmann27 Sep 11 '26
I "think" this is posted all the time.
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u/StandWithSwearwolves Millennial Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
If I’d been left free to roam until sunset as many times as I’ve seen that tweet in this sub, I would have had an incredible childhood.
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u/Zestyclose-Try-5214 Sep 11 '26
Also it's sort of "high horse" - y, like the weird one about garden hoses and shit. Yeah, being a kid was great. The way you lived it does NOT need to be this strange badge of honor
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u/BabyPorkypine Sep 12 '26
Agreed, it’s weird. And my parents 100% did not allow this because of all the high profile kidnappings in the late 80s/early 90s, so it always bugs me when people act like we were a free-roaming monolith.
I once heard Sarah Marshall (podcaster) say something to the effect of “girls growing up in the 90s were told we could be anything we wanted to be as long as we didn’t get murdered first” and for me that really captured the vibe I grew up with.
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[removed] — view removed comment
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u/arequipapi Sep 12 '26
Especially since we're seeing all-time lows in crime. We had more freedom as kids in the 80s and 90s than kids do now, and the world is demonstrably safer now.
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u/Migmatite Sep 12 '26
I mean the one who took risks and those risks didn't work out aren't exactly here to advise against this? I don't know. I don't have kids so I don't have a horse in the race.
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u/sunshineparadox_ Older Millennial Sep 11 '26
It also feels much less tolerable outside than it did in the 90s in the same town. Yea it was bad, and the hose water was actually awfully hot too. But there was less development (so more trees, more shade), and it wasn’t just nonstop oppressive. It was 97F today (36C) before factoring in humidity.
And the third spaces thing is a really big deal in the context of oppressive heat. There’s nowhere central to meet up - even outside to get water together or ask for help from an adult. And people have made it very damn clear in some communities that they will shoot you if you so much as ring their doorbell.
It also didn’t make me a more resilient kid to have this sort of childhood. I’m still super sensitive and can’t stand the heat.
Our kids are inheriting a fundamentally different world than us, and their behavior (and ours) adapted. I won’t fault kids for existing in environments they can’t choose for themselves.
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u/LongboardLiam Sep 11 '26
You've hit the nail on the head. I took my kids to a creek my family would go to, it was a pull off next to the county route a short distance from the end of our long ass driveway. It never had sidewalks or anything, just a wide shoulder. Even then my parents were not terribly happy if we hoofed it to the creek, but it was grudgingly allowed. The traffic is so much higher these days. Growing up we'd be down there for an hour and hear the whoosh of a passing car every few minutes. It seemed nearly constant. Even quiet country living is so much noisier.
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u/Mountain-Donkey98 Sep 11 '26
Okay. Im not on social media besides reddit and I've seen this DOZENS OF TIMES. enough, honestly. Lol like let's stop having the same discussion 1000x. Its ridiculous
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u/Artichokiemon Hi-C Ecto Cooler Sep 11 '26
This meme gets posted like every other day in this sub specifically, and it always seems to get enough upvotes for the bots to keep posting it
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u/QuercusSambucus Older Millennial ('82er) Sep 11 '26
When my kids were in elementary school about 10 years ago, we lived literally three blocks away from the school - and could watch them walk virtually the entire way on sidewalks.
We had other parents calling us irresponsible for not dropping them off. Completely insane.
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u/IScreamPiano Sep 12 '26
Our neighborhood isn’t gated or anything, but thankfully I do see kids walking home from elementary (which starts in first grade), and there are sidewalks everywhere though.
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u/Own-Raisin5849 Sep 11 '26
It was partially this, way less micromanaging kids, but I think that people also fail to realize, is there are way more single parents now, two parent homes still working full-time, and the whole breakdown of extended families in general. I mean, I am 42... I spent a ton of time at my Grandmas house when I wasn't exploring the town with my friends, not counting when I was hanging at friends homes, or my aunts house, etc
I would say greater than 60-70% of my friends had extended family abodes to hang out, between their regular two parents in a two parent household, not to mention, many of us had at least one parent that didn't work or worked minimally.
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u/Lokkdwn Older Millennial Sep 11 '26
I tell this to my dad all the time when he bitches about me needing money for daycare/school.
I then remind him he’s an absent grandparent/parent who left me with all of my extended family while my parents worked, and I don’t have that same fortune because of that breakdown in extended family. I am also 42.
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u/sunkencathedral Sep 11 '26
True! But on top of work, there were all sorts of other reasons parents might not be around - because it was more socially acceptable to just leave kids at home. I spent most weekday evenings by myself from age 6 or so, because my dad went to the pub. And on the weekends, both parents could just go off to do whatever they were interested in, and it was no big deal. It was just "See you at 6pm, there's a microwaveable blah blah in the freezer".
So although more kids are growing up in houses with two working parents today, I don't think it's the critical or only factor that's different. Parents back then had plenty of other non-work things they'd just go off and do, as well.
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u/Own-Raisin5849 Sep 11 '26
Oh, absolutely. I think my examples show it is multifaceted for sure, heck, add another to the list... a lot of us grew up with siblings to look after one another in an empty house. More people than ever are having only one kid, not super uncommon for those of us old to have grown up with a sister or brother that was 3. 4. 5+ years older that was essentially the stand in babysitter.
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u/PurseFullofNotebooks Sep 12 '26
When I was a kid we constantly were at friends house's where their 15/16 year old sibling was "in charge". All of my friends (and mine too) had 3-4 kids or more per family.
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u/DarkLordKohan Sep 12 '26
When I was like 7, my friend and I would play by ourselves down at the river. Throw rocks and build forts on driftwood. We had to come home at streetlights. My mom would literally yell out the door, “Time to come home!” When it was time.
Now my daughter of the same age and barely left an adults eyesight. She can play in our own backyard by herself, not even the front yard. She probably wont ride on her bike around the neighborhood by herself until she is ten.
When you hear traumatic stories of kids being kidnapped or parents charged for child neglect for letting kids play by themselves outside, it makes the thought of having kids even tougher.
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u/strangebutalsogood Millennial 1988 Sep 11 '26
My mom was a chronic worrier and often overprotective but even her instructions to me were usually just:
"Don't go past the gas station and be home when the streetlights turn on"
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u/LoanGoalie Sep 11 '26
My kids still do. It's why we chose to live in the area we do. It's safe, plenty of fun things for them to do, and a great community. It's wild to me that people wouldn't let their kids go out on their own
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u/GlowingDuck22 Sep 11 '26
It's perception vs reality. Generally violent crime has gone down every year since the late 90s.
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u/SnooChickens5474 Sep 11 '26
Its not crime preventing children from playing outside, it's other people calling the police or CPS the moment they see a kid playing outside unsupervised.
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u/rabidrobitribbit Sep 11 '26
It’s less about violent crime for me and more about out drivers on their phone. But my kids are still too young for this. I’ll check back in a few years
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u/lily_the_jellyfish Sep 11 '26
Because now you can get charged with child neglect. Yes I hate it.
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u/freexe Sep 11 '26
People over entertain their kids. Just let them get bored and go entertain themselves. It's hood for them and it's good to have a bit of free time
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u/Astra-Fang Millennial Sep 11 '26
Borderline rural life is the SHIT.
10 minutes from anything, but close enough that all the kids can play. My street has 10 boys under 6 so it’s gonna be expensive in 10 years.m
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u/Abi_giggles Sep 11 '26
Crawled around in ditches, barefoot in creeks, busy making mud pies, playing kickball in the culdesac. I was expected to be gone all day then come home when mom whistled for us like cattle.
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u/spacebeige Sep 11 '26
I didn’t, because I was a weird goblin child. But if you lived on a street with other kids, you were allowed to just go to their houses and see if they wanted to play
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u/Lythaera Sep 11 '26
IMO we need to go back to this. The problem with kids today is they are missing out on the crucial part of childhood where you develop life skills and social skills that can only be learned by playing unsupervised with other kids. Helicopter parenting is actively impeding normal development. I know 25 year olds who are scared to go outside and who cannot keep jobs because their parents never let them go out alone.
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u/creep_show Sep 11 '26
Man the stuff I did in the 90s: follow a creek to a river and found a dead body, rolled bowling balls down hills, biked 4 miles to Winn Dixie to buy .25 cent candy bars, blow up mailboxes with m80s, dig a hole to China, make dry ice bombs, cull a mountain bike trail, street hockey, 4x4 flag football, street luge with skate boards, build lame bike ramps, roller blades in half pipes, I mean we did a lot of dangerous stuff, but never suffered irreparable harm. So 🤷♂️
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u/_Belted_Kingfisher Millennial Sep 11 '26
Date range on this is too broad. At some point Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped and things changed.
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u/thejoeface Sep 11 '26
That was 1989, there were still a ton of free range kids through the 90s. Myself being one of them.
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u/Neat_Mortgage3735 Sep 11 '26
I (43) was a latch key kid. Walked about 1/2 mile home after elementary school. Let myself in. Hung outside with friends until I wanted dinner then came in to cook myself something or make a sandwhich.
On weekends I was outside all day. Lived in a subdivision and on a dead end so I freely rode my bike and hung out with friends at their homes. Mom knew who they were and they sometimes came to my house.
I had to come home when the street lights came on. If she knew I was within a block she would go outside and whistle loudly for me to come home if it was daylight.
I never abused the freedom and loved my childhood.
My wife (46), was about ten when this guy they knew as a farmer in the area would drive down their road calling for children. They got in the bed of his pickup and he took them to his farm a few miles away. They shucked corn for a dollar an hour and then he would drop them off on her street later. I cannot fathom letting my kids do that now lol.
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u/PuzzleheadedChest167 Sep 11 '26
I let my daughter go out and explore with her friends. But the problem is finding the time ! Between their activities and both parents working full-time, you almost need to schedule it which defeats the purpose.
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u/NoEntrepreneur39 Sep 11 '26
My parents told me to go outside and not come home until it was dark. I had a blast going on adventures! Life was so simple back then
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u/cheeseymom Sep 11 '26
My son is 17 now and an only child. He's been free roam within age apropriate reason.
Fully supervised up til kindergarten
Allowed to play in the apartment courtyard unsupervised with the neighbor kids all through elementary school, he had a gidget watch that could call 4 numbers
Allowed to be home alone for a few hours at a time starting around age 8 and got a flip phone. Allowed to use the stove/oven unsupervised around age 10
Once he hit teenage years he got a smart phone and him and his friends have been freely mobbing around the city via bus or walking doing whatever they feel like ever since
I don't feel like it's much different than my experience, other than I didn't have a phone til late teens, and I lived in a neighborhood instead of apartments
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u/Usual-Jackfruit4746 Sep 11 '26
Depends on your parents. I did more free-ranging than my children, but my children also have less interest. They have more entertainment inside. I was allowed minimal free-ranging.
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u/AvidAth3ist Sep 11 '26
Allow us to? They forced us to stay outside, until the street lights came on.
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u/OkayDay21 Sep 11 '26
My parents never know where tf we were. I am not that extreme but my kids do roam a bit.
There was a whole commercial campaign asking “do you know where your children are” before the 10pm news lol.
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u/Fish__Fingers Sep 11 '26
Nah I wasn’t allowed this, though there wasn’t really a neighborhood to play and many kids nearby.
But also the reason people watch kids 24/7 is because thanks to spread of information we know too much about what can happen otherwise
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u/panoutlaw Sep 12 '26
I and many parents I know are still raising our kids this way. It hasn’t gone away. Some folks are just more scared to let their kids live these days 🤷
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u/TinyBuccaneer Sep 12 '26
Honestly, It was the best of times. I grew up in a small village in Scotland and we spent all Summer riding our bikes around the countryside, building dens in trees, and long, stony dams in the icy cold river. We ate strange berries and drank stream water daily with no worry that it could ever make us sick. We lived in muddy wellies and made friends with cows and horses, while trespassing fields to explore abandoned barns and cottages, making up ghost stories about them to scare each other witless, until one of us would start crying.
We often found soggy dirty magazines in the bushes and flicked through them with giggling fascination and repulsion, declaring the whole time that it was ‘so disgustin’ and how we’d never, ever want to do that!
We dared each other to knock on doors and run away or fly down the steepest hill in Scotland on rollerblades and of course we bloodied our legs and broke bones and got a mad telling off from Mum, but I doubt any of us would go back and change one glorious minute of it because it was the most alive we ever got to be.
We always begged for ‘just a wee bit longer’ when it was time to come in because outside was a wonderland, and being grounded was the worst punishment in the world.
Kids today have missed out on so much magic.
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u/skygirl555 Sep 11 '26
The kids on my street are all free roam. Just like in the 90s...except now the scooters are all electric and those kids absolutely will run you over on the sidewalk if you dont jump out of the way.
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u/Carthonn Sep 11 '26
We used to throw giant rocks 🪨 and other giant rocks to see what was inside. We’d do this for HOURS.
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u/JellyfishPashmina Sep 11 '26
Depends on the parents. Born in the early ‘90s. I could obviously go and do play dates and whatnot but I was never allowed to roam out and just go exploring. If I wanted to ride my bike to a friend’s house, I could, but my mom would drive behind me to make sure I got there safely (which I appreciate now since there were some sketchy with blind spots where I could’ve gotten hit). I could run around the mile loop around the neighborhood as a teen (with my cell on), but that was about it.
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u/KreepyKaylee242 Sep 11 '26
Millennial here, actual ditches tho. Catching tadpoles was a genuine, unsupervised activity.
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u/Tiny-Distance-42 Sep 11 '26
I feel like around 9/11 we started to have helicopter parents. Before that in the 90’s you could walk up and down the street to other kids houses to play- even at 5 or 6
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u/Clancy3434 Sep 11 '26
Yea 100% true. Born in 1980, so in the no man's land between Gen X and Millennial.
By 4th grade I was just told to be home by dark. We would just get on our bikes and go. Most summer days would leave in the morning and not see my parents until it was dark out, other than occasionally stopping back home to eat. Played sports in the street and at the park. Manhunt in the woods.
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u/Scared_Vehicle_3406 Sep 11 '26
So I was allowed to roam around and play. I live beside my elementary school. We rode bikes, played baseball, etc.
Is it Gen X or Millennials who aren't allowing their kids to go outside and play?
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u/Sad_Slonno Sep 11 '26
Couldn’t agree more. My dad tells me he barely saw us during the day. I, now myself a dad, constantly have to come up with entertainment for the kids or risk them stealing a phone and hiding somewhere with YouTube. I am barely alive :(
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u/Environmental_Bus623 Sep 11 '26
I used to wonder NYC alone when I was 12. I even took the subway to Manhattan on my own
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u/CZall23 1992 Sep 11 '26
My mom just stayed in her room while we kids watched TV or played in our rooms. We went outside but it wasn't because she needed to be away from us.
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u/HoliAss5111 Sep 11 '26
10 hours? People in my country were shipping the kids to grandma for the whole summer. The only time we saw a parent before September was when one of the kids broke their hand. His grandma took him go to the doctor and everything, but the parents still wanted to make everything is fine.
And he still spent the summer with grandma
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u/Cpalmer24 Sep 11 '26
I feel like my best friend and I were pretty tame when it came to unsupervised shenanigans. But still, as soon as we were 12-13 or so we would play outside, swim, eat, play video games, and then ride our bikes miles into "town" to a store or something.. and not see our parents or barely tell them where we were going for most of the day. They expected us home by dinner/dark, but id leave my house in the morning to go to his house and not talk to my family again until i got home at night.
When we left his house to ride into town he might just yell into the ether if one of his parents were home that we were leaving, and that was largely it. This was really early 00s.
Now my mom watches my nieces while their parents are at work and she barely let's them play outside in the yard, no pool, on a dead end street for too long without being supervised - and the oldest is 10. Times have changed lol
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u/ketamineburner Sep 11 '26
I intentionally let my kids roam freely. It's important for development.
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u/chubgrub Xennial (1984) Sep 11 '26
as a 10 year old me and my friend wandered around our neighbourhood freely. mum told us to watch out for weird cars stopping near us and run 😂
we were vigilant, but the thought of it kinda astounds me now.
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u/HollowAbsence Sep 11 '26
at 5 year old (almost 6) I drove my bike to my friends places. to the convenience store. I played hours in a large stream near my house build rock damn to raise the water level a couple inches. I walked to school by 6. It was marvelous there was alway 4 to 6 children playing around the street or park sometime we had to run from older kids. It was a small village of 10 000 people. I feel the life of my 8 years old is so boring in comparison. Theres almost no kid outside or at the park and they dont interact if they are...
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u/Sensei_Ochiba Sep 11 '26
If there's two things I know about Millennials for sure, it's 1, that our parents did let us roam free in the 90s, and 2, we make sure to thank them by posting this same post 3 times a week
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u/TheMagicalLawnGnome Sep 11 '26
I remember how our youth sports league had a fundraiser every year, where you'd sell candy bars.
I literally set up a stand on a corner about .5 miles away from my house, and would walk up to the cars of strangers, and sell candy bars for cash.
Any one of those people could have just yanked me into their car and sped off, if they so chose. I was probably around 10-12 years old.
I'd be gone for several hours, and walk home when it started to get dark. Cell phones didn't really exist back then (at least not for anyone who wasn't a CEO, lawyer, or doctor), and I'd just have a box of cash on me. My parents didn't ever come to check on me.
Thing is, this wasn't even that weird. Other kids would do the same thing for their sports. Or Girl Scouts would just walk around unsupervised, selling cookies all day.
It's wild to me, how little freedom children have nowadays. They're basically tiny prisoners in their own homes.
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u/PancakesandMaggots Sep 11 '26
Yah I saw this happen with my own family. I was the oldest and a young millennial. Spent summers from breakfast to dinner in the woods and fields. By the time my youngest siblings were the age to explore like that. The woods and fields were replaced with strip malls and fast food joints. No where left to just be a kid.
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u/Comfortable_Mess152 Sep 11 '26
I was just talking to a coworker about this. There were time my parents had no idea where I was cause I was out. And no one cared as long I was home on time. It's crazy how constant parents have to or do check in. I wonder if there is any correlation with anxiety rates in the younger generations? Or risk taking abilities?
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u/dark-femme5454 Millennial Sep 11 '26
"Jesus fuckin Christ, go outside and play and dont come back til the lights come on." - my dad, circa 1989-2000. I'm an 85 baby and when i turned 15 and noticed boys, he wanted me home more 🤣
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u/CommissionSpiritual8 Sep 11 '26
in the summer i was fed breakfast and pushed out the door. with the comment "come home when the street lights come on." We got cheese or PBJ sandwich from what ever mother saw us around lunch time. But my Mom knew everything I did wrong before I got home.
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u/wabawwea Sep 11 '26
60s & 70s yes, but by the 80s we had the stranger danger panic and the leashes and helicopters came out. I roamed wide and free as a child but my kids were never out on their own the way I was.
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u/old-legs-623 Sep 11 '26
I roamed with the pod as far as a mile from the house no questions asked, and I wasn't even a guy. 1950s.
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u/90s_vibe Sep 11 '26
Its true. I'm 1981. I also didn't have the same attachment my kids have today. Spent a ton of time at my neighbours & best friend's house. Had dinner there, went to their cottage at a young age, sleepovers. Today a huge no-no. I think kinda sad.
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u/JayNotAtAll Sep 11 '26
Older millennial here. We absolutely wandered the neighborhood. As long as we can home before the lights came on. We were gone for hours at a time. And no cell phones so no one couldn't check up on us.
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u/MorningCool2806 Sep 12 '26
From 6 years old I used to go out to play with the other local children in our cul de sac. From 8 years old I used to go out for the day, playing in the local streets and the woods behind the houses. It was just normal in the 1980s. Strange how things have changed.
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u/Internal-Dark-6438 Sep 12 '26
I had strict, over protective parents in the 80s: I wasn’t allowed to play outside without adult supervision until the old age of 5.
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u/Rhakha Sep 12 '26
Third spaces in neighborhoods and communities are becoming increasingly rare. There’s a pond in my childhood neighborhood where all the kids would go to relax, chill, fish, swim, read(sometimes playboys and the like due to the troves found), race, and shoot each other with airsoft guns. Now it was bought up and the owners have threatened kids for coming close to it.
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u/ModernSouthernQueer Older Millennial Sep 12 '26
True. We were told to be home by the time the streetlights came on lol. And I was raised in a city, not suburbia.
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u/forever-mild Sep 12 '26
My parents let me roam freely by the time I was 9 as long as I was in the neighborhood or park and home by 7 or 8. They are now grandparents and barely let their 10 and 13 year old grandkids play out front of the house without supervision. It’s funny how different it is.
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u/Ancient-Victory1186 Sep 12 '26
From 10yo+, you have no idea how hard - and irresponsibly so - we went fucking around and mostly never finding out. "With great power comes .. oh shit, is that an empty house?"
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u/Banaanisade Sep 12 '26
I can't remember an era in my life when I wasn't allowed to leave my front yard. I know it existed in the toddler era by my mum's reports of me clinging to the fence in the backyard and screaming, but I was already wandering before school, and first graders are 7 years old here. I got in a reasonable amount of trouble: sometimes broke into abandoned buildings and repeatedly played in the ruins nearby that were just as repeatedly forbidden due to danger like glass shards and nails and falls, dipped frequently down into manholes to catch frogs which was EXPLICITLY forbidden and subsequently explicitly ignored, and wandered the woods freely but that's less of a concern in my culture than it might be for others.
Kids here also typically walk themselves to and from school from very early on, as soon as they learn the way, and the rule was basically that I was allowed to go to my friends' places as long as I called home about it, but sometimes I forgot, and then my mum would throw a fit as one does when your kid doesn't show up from school but nobody knows where they are.
Generally though, I was either outside for hijinks or I was minding my own business playing in my room; my parents definitely had a lot of time to themselves.
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u/JakeTehNub Sep 12 '26
Yeah I'm glad I grew up without having to basically be GPS tracked. Some kid I know has this thing on his phone that let's his parents see when/where he is driving and how fast. Screw that.
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u/Ok_Pop_5054 Sep 12 '26
I was a free range child even as a little kid. I was born in 1983. More than half of the kids I knew were like me, out on the streets and in the fields and in other people’s yards during all of our free time, with no one knowing where we were except our friends. If we were lucky someone’s mom would let us take over a living room and give us snacks but we were usually just outside.
Once I was a teenager they REALLY didn’t pay attention to my comings and goings. When I was a kid I was expected to be home for dinner but as a teen I would not even check in for a day or two and no one would even be looking for me. We would sleep in each others beds and not even tell any parents, or be out in a parked car or on somebody’s back porch until the early hours. Nobody cared where I was. That felt bad, actually, and still makes me a little sad. But being a free kid was super fun.
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u/Vegetable-Bid-2202 Sep 12 '26
It was kind of that way. When I was in primary school (Germany in the 90s), I had 2 good friends in the neighborhood and we were allowed to roam free within the triangle of the houses. We were unsupervised but had certain lines drawn by our parents that were No-Go zones. 2 hours after homework and maybe 1 hour in the evening was our usual time. I was the only one with a SAHM, the others had keys and wouldn't meet their parents before dinner. Crazy from today's perspektive. The other parents were doctors and engineers.
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u/ExplanationFuture422 Sep 12 '26
1950's...one rule "just be home for dinner". I could go anywhere, do anything, just had to be home for dinner.
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u/-hjkl- Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
This is the problem these days. Parents aren't allowed to do anything anymore. You can't let your kid learn how to be independent. And you're not allowed to discipline your kid either.
Kids don't learn any consequences for their actions, and parents never get any free time.
As a kid I used to go over to my neighbors house and we'd take turns shooting his air rifle at tin cans on the fence. We'd go disappear into the woods behind our houses for hours at a time building forts and shit like that.
The rules were don't do anything stupid, don't hurt yourself or anyone else and come home for dinner by the time the street lights came on.
I had to walk like 3 blocks to school in the dark. You cannot do that any of that anymore.
As a Millennial I feel like we had the last of the best times for our childhood.
Everyone bitches about iPad kids but it seems like the only option to not get in trouble anymore.
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u/I-forgot-my-user-id Sep 12 '26
When I turned 10, I got a key to the house. Mom said be home before dad gets home.
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u/andymcpandypants Sep 12 '26
90's kid. We'd all skateboard miles to meetup and weren't expected home until dark, school-year and summers. We'd skate all day, get a Burger King feast for like $2.99, and had a Fight Club in a field by an abandoned warehouse that the cops were totally fine with as long as it was "mutual combat".
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u/Sanquinity Sep 12 '26
25~30 years ago (so age 8~13) I walked to school alone. Which was a 500m walk. And at the end of the schoolday I walked back alone. Or I'd shoot some hoops behind the school with friends and come back an hour later.
On days off I'd roam around the neighborhood on my bicycle, go to the playground, to the small forest nearby, etc. All unsupervised. The only rule was "go back home once the street lights turn on."
Especially between age 13~15 I was allowed a lot of freedom. Sometimes I'd go out to play, and my parents wouldn't know where I even was for a good 3~4 hours. Shooting hoops still, going to the forest still, going to the local mall on my bicycle, sneaking into a construction site to climb on stuff, going to a local small-ish corn field to mess around in (which the farmer certainly didn't like...^^;;), etc. Hell I would even go into the city to the local skate park by myself. A good 15~20 min away on my bike.
It likely helped my parents a lot that they would have time to themselves during those hours. Not having to keep me in their sights at every moment I was outside.
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u/Acid__god Sep 12 '26
Growing up in the summer my mom woke me and my brother up at 7am. We cleaned up and ate breakfast. Then we were told to go outside and play until lunch. This started probably in kindergarten. We would play in our neighborhood around our house until other neighborhood kids came out then we just ran around all day. My mom would know we were around by not exactly where we were. We rode our bikes everywhere. Blockbuster was 3ish miles from our house. I rode my bike there every Friday from about 7yo-14yo. We rode to parks friends houses across town.
I live in a small town now. Kids still play outside a bit. My son is 7 now. Since he was 5 he would let us know he was going to grams house which is about 100y. We could see him the whole way. He always stops looks and listens. We have had a few other parents in the neighborhood comment that it’s unsafe. Anymore I just tell them to mind their business or call the cops. I want him to have a bit of independence. To feel like he can do something’s on his own. Childhood would have been miserable if my parents were just watching every single thing we did. We got to learn lessons and figure out things on our own.
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u/Jebusfreek666 Sep 12 '26
My thoughts are people and bots who post things like this, facebook memes just titled "thoughts?" and the like should just stay on facebook. Can we please not turn this into a boomer style sub.
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u/SideEyeFred Sep 12 '26
I played in the woods every day after school. Rode bikes miles and miles away from my house. Rode horses. I just ran wild in the 80s as a kid.
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u/Mainbutter Sep 12 '26
In middle school (5th-8th grade) I was allowed to wander and ride my bike unsupervised but accompanied by friends/sibling within known bounds of our neighborhood. Being in at least a group of 2 made it safer.
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u/HatIntelligent6028 Sep 12 '26
Yup - my parents were literally on a different city. It was just my grandma and I during the week.
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u/Complex_Solutions_20 Sep 12 '26
I remember in the 90s and early 2000s riding my bike around the neighborhood alone...would have been 10-14years old and probably went 5-7 miles away from home without much thought.
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