How, if at all, was the way you grew up different from the way kids grow up now?

Growing up in the pre-internet era a lot of time was spent outside playing. Did not have rooms filled with toys like kids do now.

I sit right on the cusp of the Millennial generation.

I learned how to use a card catalog in first grade, and in fourth grade was the first student my teacher ever had to turn in a book report that had been printed from a computer (on a dot-matrix printer!). My son checks out ebooks from the library website and reads them on his Kindle Fire, and all of his math homework is Web-based.

I used to ride my bike three blocks to the store when I was seven years old. My son still can’t ride a bike. Too many people drive too fast down my road while staring at their phone for me to teach him, and there are no sidewalks. The park near us with the bike trail was closed a year ago because of a sinkhole and two cities are fighting over who should pay to fix it. In the meanwhile, no park.

Whee.

The most apparent thing is that back then ther were no internet and smart phones. It left more time for outdoor activities. I remember going to the park next door whenever I had time in the evening. Everyone’s favorite entertainment spot was the park, so it wasn’t uncommon to find adults there too. And because there were no internet and smart phones, people were more willing to talk, to the point that I remembered everyone’s name. I made a lot of friends, both children and adults. There was a lot of fun and drama. Too bad those old people have moved away, and the current neighbors are too distant (and even if they aren’t, they are too busy with their phones). The kids can do nothing but starring at the phones. Though I feel that they look dumb, I am baffled by how people kept their kids quiet back then.

No internet meant information was very limited. The only way I could aquire any information was through the weekly magazines that my school sold. I always appreciated every bit of information and kept the magazines safe. With the internet, I don’t know if kids still value magazines that much. Even I don’t feel the same way about the same magazines anymore. It’s like I don’t feel the need to check them that much anymore.

No. Everyone has been grown and matured in incubators for millions of years.

We lived in a neighborhood full of kids that we roamed in large packs. We played Kick the Can, Hide and Seek, had water balloon fights, played in the woods on the other side of the school grounds, and stayed out until called in for dinner, then went back out until after dark. We played outside all day. At one end of the street there was a private golf course that was fenced off. We would walk in packs along the trail past the golf course to the little candy store just past the other end of the golf course. A nickel bought a large candy bar, and there was a lot of stuff to choose from if you only had pennies.

The big differences have already been alluded to above. The most sophisticated electronic personal device was the newfangled transistor radio that could fit in your pocket. The really big change is in regard to the extraordinary freedom permitted us as very young kids to basically roam where we pleased with virtually no supervision. I can remember one day when a bunch of us were walking the 6 blocks back from a local park/playground, my 4 year old little brother managed to dodge us and somehow climb onto a local municipal bus parked at the end of the line with the door open, and the driver across the street buying coffee (or something). All of these things, a 4 year old entrusted to a crowd of 8 & 9 year olds, an unoccupied bus with a gaping open door, and a bus driver actually leaving it that way so that would be passengers might sit in the shade and comfort—all of this would be unthinkable today. My memory of the event is that none of us was alarmed that the little pest was missing, but irritated at having to track him down. None of us even thought to look on the bus as we spread out around the damned thing yelling for him. I headed straight for the donut shop across the street, aware of my brother’s fascination with the multicolored “pretty” donuts, I actually passed the bus driver on his way out the door back to his bus. By the time I’d checked out the phone booth (another of his obsessions) and made my way out the door, I looked across the street to spy just for an instant my little brother standing on the driver’s seat of the bus wrestling with the steering wheel. The glimpse was brief due to the fact that the poor driver had dropped his coffee in the middle of the street and galloping up the stairs, obscured the view.

When I was in elementary school, we kids played army and cowboys in the street till after dark. Neighbors kept their doors unlocked. TV had 3 black and white channels. No air conditioning in homes or movie theaters—just evaporative (water) cooling and fans. Gallon of gas was 16 cents. News came to your door in newspapers and magazines. 7-Eleven had curb service and we had milk delivered to our door. There were only a few cereals, or for that matter, few choices of anything at the grocery store (pre-supermarkets). I don’t recall anyone talking about things that weren’t healthy to eat. A bottle of Coca-Cola was a nickel, a stick of gum was 5 cents and individually wrapped pieces of Fleer’s and Bazooka Bubble Gum, was a penny (as were many kinds of candy). My birthdays were celebrated as huge occasions. Oh, and school days/weeks seemed to last forever, but happily, so did summer vacations.

When my kids were toddlers, and my mom came over to sit with the kids, she complained about all the child-proofing in the house. “You all survived!”

Then I reminded her that my sister drank bleach when she was three, and had her stomach pumped. That when i was two, I played with coke bottles on a cement floor, broke one, crawled on it and came very close to losing my leg. That my younger brother fell on the sharp edge of a table, cut open his forehead and bled profusely and needed multiple stitches.

But when I was seven, I took the city bus across San Francisco, from the Castro to Pacific Heights, to get to school. When I was in middle school, I regularly took the train by myself to San Francisco, tok public transit to the orthodontist, and then explored the City until my dad got off work and could drive me home.

For me, the biggest change in child rearing is that the need to keep kids safe has removed a lot of adventure in kids’ lives. I have worked hard to encourage adventure in my kids.

I was latchkey from about the age of 10 and my sister was 7/8. Now, if kids are left alone at that age people freak out. We played outside after school or went over to the houses of friends in the neighborhood.

We had local stores we could walk to that we bought ice cream, pizza, and candy in. Not that we bought it daily, but it was a treat. I recently went back to my home town when I was very little (near to where @jca lives) and there still is a toy and candy store down in the village. The entire “main” street is little shops and restaurants.

I remember going to story time at the local library, and festivals and events in the park. Events like Easter Egg hunt, May pole, the fair with rides, and others.

The other half of my growing up when I was older I lived in a master planned community and we had bicycle paths to go everywhere, an ID card to any pool, tennis court, or rec center in the town, and tunnels under main roads to the pools and elementary schools so we didn’t have to cross them. I think very few people grow up with that.

I still see kids playing outside in some communities, and riding bikes without parental supervision constantly on top of them, but I think it’s less often.

I know walking to school has statistically gone way way down. I took a bus when I was very little. When we moved I walked until high school. Now, the majority of children are brought to school by their parents.

There were next to no cars when I was growing up and no TV’s or Internet. No one even imagined the Internet. We could walk or cycle anywhere we wanted and we made our own amusement. I was 11 when we got our first television. We had two channels and had to switch aerials to get them. I remember the ‘horizontal hold’ kept slipping on our black and white TV making half of programmes unwatchable. No one worried too much about the health and safety of us kids, if we skinned our knee we skinned our knee and we tried not to fall out of trees. It was a simpler world and perhaps a happier one.

One word. Outside.

I hated video games when they first came out, when my kids were little, and refused to have one in my house. My Mom knew this, but she bought one at a garage sale for my kids anyway. When I protested, she angrily said, “It’s just a game!”
My kids immediately quit going outside as much, until I found a way to get rid of the SOB.

I raised my kids the same way I was raised, resisting all of the technology that was flooding their world at the time. Outside.

It’s crucial children learn technology today. Video games in moderation are part of this. I spent most of my time playing outside yet we had an NES system as a kid. It got played mainly at night. We still were outside kids. Just having games does not mean kids will automatically be shut inside.

I like what @zenvelo posted. People think nostalgically about their own childhoods, because they survived them.

My husband talks about going to the beach with his uncle (who is six years older than he is), and drifting out to sea on an inflatable pool raft. He was seven years old. Dad called the Coast Guard. It was a huge deal. Sure, they survived but it could very easily have gone the other way.

Ask the mom of the kid in Mitch’s neighborhood who drowned in a foot of water because he got caught under the bridge whether she wished she’d kept a closer eye on him.

I wandered away from my parents’ house when I was seven, a couple of times, and was gone for hours. My son’s never been out of adult contact for that long. Besides, where we live there’s nowhere to go and it’s too hot to walk anyway. And that’s not even taking into account the registered sex offenders…

I almost crushed my own windpipe when I fell on the clothesline. My parents did not even bother to call a doctor.
You know, the good old times.

I buried my brother in the backyard once.

He had an air hole. What?

My kids learned it just fine @ARE_you_kidding_me without games.

Well, here is one of the results of my kids’ upbringing. I’ve posted this before.

When I was raising my kids in the 80’s and 90’s, I refused to have cable, internet, or video games in the house. They spent a LOT of time outside. They’d get on my nerves and I’d holler at them to go run around Farmer’s Field, across the street, 10 times! And they would.

When my daughter was about 13 or so, she could feel her childhood slipping away. One day she asked me to take a walk with her….and we spent the whole afternoon walking through the pages of her childhood.

She took me down an alley, then stopped at a privacy fence and said, “Look through that knot hole. The guy has a Japanese garden in his back yard! We watched him build it! He adds new stuff every so often. Isn’t it cool?!” It was VERY cool.

South Western College campus was their play ground. She showed me a funky tree on campus that had limbs that grew almost horizontally to the ground. She said kids would collect there and sit on the limbs and make plans for when they grew up.

It wasn’t just the campus…they knew the buildings inside and out too. She took me to the new science building they had put up a couple of years before. She showed me where Alvin the Alligator’s living place was. She described where he lived in the old building and how much nicer his new digs were and how much happier he was….until one day he wasn’t there any more. He had died. She took me on a tour of the whole building. Really NEAT stuff in there! Then we snuck out a back door before we got chased away!

She took me to so many, many secret places around town and told me the stories and memories that were tied to each one. I could sense that she didn’t want it all to end, didn’t want to close that book, but she couldn’t stop it. It was a tide relentlessly sneaking up to claim her childhood, and she could sense it coming. It brings tears to my eyes to this day. It was one of the most precious moments I’ve ever spent with one of my kids.

And then my baby started slipping away after that, stolen by the tide and boys and bad attitudes. I turned around twice, and she was having children of her own. But I’ll never, ever forget that walk that day.

Thank you Corrie, my love.

@Seek I look back on my childhood and I am just floored. Utterly floored at the lack of supervision especially when I was <6, and was the oldest. I was put in charge of “the little kids” a lot. I had two sisters. One was 3 years younger than me, the other was 4 years younger than me.

^^6 years old was about the age my mom let us start being on our own. Prior to that she, or another adult, was always with us, with the exception of walking to a friend’s apartment inside the building.

We still were supervised more often than not until I was about 8, but she would leave my little sister with me. I don’t think she worried much about us doing something reckless, she did worry a little about bad people who might be out there, but in pairs she figured we were reasonable safe I think.

My mom put me in charge of my younger sisters when I was 6. Well, the one that was 3 years younger than me. I think she kept the other one in the house. We had a salt water canal in our back yard in Florida. My little sister fell off the seawall once. Thank God the tide was out.
Our neighbors had an indoor pool, completely unsecured. I fished my little sister out of that pool twice. I could barely swim myself.
Another time a girlfriend who was way older than me, like 8, and I got a wild hare to paddle a little boat to an island that was out in Tampa bay. It probably had alligators and poisoning snakes and shit on it. I told Mom what we wanted to do, and she packed a lunch for us, and off we went. No life jackets.
Coming back was very scary. I think we were fighting the outgoing tide at that point. I didn’t think we were going to make it. Really scared.
I remember walking with that same, much older, friend, to a convenience store that was across a nearby highway. One time, as we were walking, a truck went by us, and just then the trailer that he was hauling came off the hitch and flew across the highway into the ditch, on the opposite side of the road from us.
I think my parents were crazy.

Yep, I’m in the older crowd here too, grew up in the 60’s playing outside until after dark every night, riding our bikes miles and miles from home, playing in the local park until dark in the summers, no worries.
You came home at dinner time, wolfed down your dinner to your parents admonishments to “slow down” and off you went again. Parents kicked the kids out by 10 a.m. on Saturday mornings with the order to ” go outside and play” after a few hours of the morning cartoon scene. Yes, 3 channels, B&W TV, ( It was a big deal, when, in about 1968, our next door neighbors, and older, retired couple bought a color TV and they invited us over to watch National Geographic specials. Super neato! haha )

Backyard camp outs with friends, going off camping with each others families, no cell phones, no contact, for days and your parents just hoped you didn’t drown in the lake. lol
The neighborhood ice cream man coming along every evening, door to door salesmen still, like the Fuller Brush man, the knife and scissor sharpener guy, the Avon Lady. Good times, excellent, carefree days they were. Then there were the 70’s.

Coming of age in the mid-70’s was unforgettable. ;-)

Coming of age in the mid-70’s was unforgettable. ;-)
Um….then why can’t I remember it @Coloma? (ha ha!)

Good one, @Dutchess_III. So true.

@Dutchess_III LOL! Burned through a whole lotta brain cells huh?
I was lucky, I guess I had surplus to spare, just as sharp as I ever was. haha

What were we talking about?

^ We were just about to snort some more Cocaine and have a bong hit, remember? LMAO!

@Dutchess_III, I don’t recall.

Hash oil! Yes! That was it! I swear that stuff makes the sky purple.

For many years we lived within walking distance of several of my extended family. I was the second oldest cousin, so I got to meet each of my cousins as they were born. Children in our neighborhood were allowed to roam free. We went to the library, the shopping center, the movies and the park alone. My sister and I gathered up soda bottles and Popsicle wrappers to earn money and prizes. I still remember saving thousands of wrappers for a telescope, only to receive a toy that was cheezier than this one.

We also hiked along the free flowing stream/creek and picked fresh asparagus, wild berries and occasionally rhubarb. There were many ranches nearby and they allowed us to pick cherries, peaches and walnuts. They also allowed us to ride their ponies bareback in the fields. As time went on, the ranches were all sold to developers. While the new houses were being built, my brother, sister and I made a fortune selling koolade and lemonade to the workers until a lunch truck owner told us he would call the cops.

One year in the park, there was a lot of snow, and some parents build a real igloo. It was so much fun. Speaking of snow, when my parents moved to a house that was “in town” we walked 8 blocks in every kind of weather to school. There were very few “snow days” when the school was closed. That happened while the snow was actually falling. Most other days were regular school days.

We moved to a turn-of-the century house. The back yard was big enough for us to play baseball with the neighborhood kids. A family with four children lived across the street, five lived next door and an astonishing nine children lived three houses down. One summer day, a sink hole appeared in our backyard. It was the former sewer pit from the time before the city installed a public system.

They used to dig giant pits in their yard and just let the sewage flow into that. A pumping service would come by and pump it all out once in awhile. When the city hooked up to their system, the old pit would be sealed off. My dad was able to convince the hazard insurance company to cover the cost of pumping and filling the pit with dirt.

I looked on google earth the other day, and that entire neighborhood is now covered with condominium apartment buildings.All those beautiful 1900’s houses are gone.

There were no bike helmets, and bike helmets were not required by law.
Parents let us go out by ourselves exploring the neighborhood.
No caller ID. Many prank calls, including calling the police, were done.
No cell phones.
We got to play with toy guns that were not stupid colors.
The bar for parental freakout was way way higher.
The bar for school corrective action was way way higher.
The bar for attracting news/police action with pranks and delinquent antics seemed way higher. (I remember when I first saw BREAKING NEWS: kids throwing rocks at cars! When I was growing up, kids (young middle class kids) I knew threw stuff at cars weekly at least.)
The news media actually seemed to merit some degree of respect.
Movies weren’t generally nearly so stupid.
Massively less overt sexuality in media.
No Internet.

Except for the reduced access to information via Internet, I am very grateful for all of the above, and think the changes in these areas are mostly for the worse.

We played out in the street. When we weren’t at school or with our families, we were out playing.
There was a greater sense of community. All your mate’s mums were watching you too.
When you went home, you left your friends and were only with your family (no social media).
Parents were less afraid and more willing to let their kids take risks – walk home from school, play out unsupervised, go to friend’s houses.
Less money. We didn’t have as much as kids have now. I don’t think we were any less happy.
Less pressure. I think kids these days have pressure to achieve much earlier than I did.
Less media. We had a TV and a radio, but it didn’t dominate our lives.
Closer family ties. I saw aunts and uncles and my nanna a lot. They were an important part of my life. I think people are busier these days and families are more dispersed.
Simpler food. We never ate take-out food. If we did it was a treat while on holiday.
Bigger families. Most people I knew had two or three siblings.

My daughter and the children in our town play outside, bike around town and come home when it gets dark.

They also have friends from all around the world thanks to the internet and they get to watch television when they have their teeth cleaned. My best friends lived down the street and I was lucky to stare at a poster of kittens when I had my teeth cleaned.

What it was like then that is not done today or is near totally different:

• Parents did not freak out of you were running around the neighborhood just so long as you were home when the streetlights came on, or within yelling distance.
• Teachers had command of the classroom, there was no acting out, because he/she would send you to the principal’s office and you would get detention and a swat, then when you got home you got worse.
• The milkman came by in a truck to leave milk, eggs, and cheese, etc.
• One dollar at the drug store actually got you a bag of chips, a 12oz can of soda, a candy bar (and not the dinky things they call a candy bar today), several pieces of hard candy, and a large cookie and still had a few cents left.
• You could not get the number and addresses from girls if you had a billion dollars, not like them giving out their email, Facebook, and other info today.
• We rode in the back of pickup trucks, and the cargo area of station wagons and no one cared.
• Couples drove with the woman under the arm of her man with no seatbelts (those were bench seats), no one cared.
• You had to be lucky to find the stash of your dad, uncle, or those of friends to even see porn that by today’s standards are like flat root beer, no pulling it up on your Smart phone while sitting in the back of math class making it look like you are studying.
• No kid threw a temper tantrum in a store because they would get spanked on the spot.
• Teachers could take students on a trip the shooting range with no one getting their panties n a bunch.

There is more, but I think you get the picture.

Oh, and when we got thirsty, we did not have to go inside and grab a bottle of water, we just turned on the hose and guzzled until we were full, then went back to playing…...

GA’s @Hypocrisy_Central. We didn’t have bottled water. That was the worst invention ever.

Played our hearts out in 100 degree heat. How we never blasted a baseball through our neighbor’s plate glass window I will never know.

We climbed up and down cliffs, flirted with death and danger at every turn.

Playing Hide n Go Seek after dark, clinging to those cliffs for dear life!

Barefoot. Always barefoot.

My husband’s daughter and a bunch of her various and sundry kids came to visit yesterday evening. At one point one of the kids came up to Mom and said, “Where do I get water?”
True story.
I’m like….“Out of the water faucet..?”
I just threw a plastic water bottle, that they brought over, into the recycle bin. I don’t understand this. I really, really don’t. Every one always talking about how broke they are and shit…and they spend ridiculous amounts of money on water. I understand that there are some Americans who truly have trouble getting clean drinking water. I just don’t know any personally. Yet almost everyone I know walks around with a non-biodegradable, plastic water bottle that they paid money for. They buy them by the case.

When I lived on well wster I would have agreed with that. We moved to the city when I was around 16. The city water tasted like a vat of chemicals.

Water? You Mean Like In The Toilet?

When I was in 4th grade we finally landed in a town in Kansas. The water was really sulfuric and nasty. Smelled like rotten eggs. We had a water softener put in and then it was fine. But I still remember coming in from playing hard in 100 degree heat, sweating, dehydrated, and plugging up my nose and just gulping a huge glass or two of that nasty water. It wasn’t dangerous, just nasty, until we got the water softener.

The last time I had water as good as our old well water was the last time I had filtered stream water while backpacking. Brought back a flood of memories.

Found another plastic water bottle. Pretty sure those guys don’t recycle, either.

Mummy had to have the silver spoon surgically removed from my privileged gob, these days the posh cunts have it removed from betwixed their butt cheeks, subtle changes at play

@ucme I needed some time to realize what you said. Oh boy….

I feel that nowadays kids are treated like they were made of glass. Parents raise them like royalty. When I was a kid, I would spend the whole day in the backyard or playing outside with my friends. We would roll in dirt and mud, play with animals, climb tress and roam around in stalls and barns. We went to school on foot. Going home from school was a fun time, we walked in groups (we called it packs). We even went home in the evening. No one had time nor will to give us a ride and no one would be scared we would be attacked or kidnapped.
We actually had discipline and were afraid of our parents. Nowadays I see a 4yo kid hitting his mom and she laughs it off. If I even yelled at my mom at that age, I would be shitting my teeth! Making a scene in the store or any other public place was an unknown concept. I am not saying we were angels, far away from that, but we definitely were way more disciplined and way less pampered.

We had one same old ass set of toys and we played with it without getting tired. Nowadays get the newest and most expensive toys and get bored with it after two days.

I still remember our first computer and internet connection, CDs and DVDs, radio devices (with antennas and all) music tapes, and even gramophone. No Internet in sight until I was already older. When we got out first computer, we would be amused with card games in it, listened to music and watched movies on it. No expensive, flashy gadgets and high tech, just a simple computer.

Bruises and scratches were treated with “it’s fine, just wash off the dirt”. You would be let to stay at home and not go to school only if you were ill enough to puke, or if you leg was broken. Don’t even think about asking your mom to go and fight with the teacher for giving you a low mark. Parent meetings were a state of fear because you knew you will be yelled at for getting a low mark, or even a slightest remark on your behaviour in class.

I think that today’s parents turn their kids, with all the pampering, paranoia, and sheltering, into oversensitive, spoiled brats. Not all of them, though. I still see kids who are well mannered and polite, but they seem to be a minority. Today’s parents protect their kids way too much.