What safety things did your mom do when you were little that you don't think most moms worry about?

An adult (my mom, or dad or relative) was always with us when we were in the neighborhood play ground till we were about 12 or at least with a older sibling.

I had to have one of my friends parents call to confirm that I was in their home visiting and call my folks when I was leaving to walk home. Same if I spent the night.

My parents met with my friends parents and would get to know them before I would be allowed to stay over or visit. Numbers were exchanged.

We couldn’t skip a meal if we wanted too. We had to have 3 meals a day or my mom thought it would cause us some horrible harm to our development. Even when sick she tried to always get us to eat something. Not so cool when you had the runs or nausea. Whatever she gave me just came right back up.

Turning off the PC, refrigerator, TV, freezer and even cell phones when it storms. She believes it would attracts thunders and cause explosions.

My Mom was not concerned with safety at all which was sometimes a good thing and sometimes not. We had a lot of freedom but there were things she should have protected me from tht she didn’t.

I lived in Panama when I was 5 and 6. I was not allowed to buy treats from the street vendors that walked the neighborhood. I got in big trouble when I stole some money from my mom and bought sno-cones for all the kids. Something about dirty water…:)

I had to wear a freaking whistle on a string around my neck when playing in the mountains around the family cabin. I hated it! Thought it was the stupidist thing ever. I was a free spirited type, still am, and loathe paranoid types that see danger around every corner. Of course it was a good idea, if i fell and broke my leg maybe, but as far as drowning in the river or being eaten by a bear or mountain lion, well, it had it’s limitations, clearly. “Oh wait, Mr. Bear, let me blow my whistle before you attack me.” lol

“Don’t run with the scissors!” or any other sharp objects. Didn’t think too much of it then but it sure makes sense now.

My mom forbade me from owning a van to prevent me from having a place to boink girlfriends and wouldn’t allow me to own a motorcycle as she once was a nurse and saw first hand the carnage that happened to motorcycle riders who crashed. We also could not go swimming for 30 minutes after eating to help avoid stomach cramps or choking on our freshly devoured lunches. Can’t think of any other rules or restrictions other than to not beat on each other or else!

My mother had a thing about making sure we thoroughly chewed bananas before swallowing. It seems a little crazy but I follow her advice to this day.

Christmas 1967, I got a “ten speed” for Christmas. My mother had read an article in a doctor’s office that people who rode bicycles should wear a helmet.

This was a good 20 years before helmets became commonly available in bike shops, let alone mandated for kids.

My mom gave me a motorcycle helmet that I had to wear while on the ten speed. I looked like a dork doofus the few times I wore it.

Absolutely nothing. My parents were the most “relaxed” people, to the point that, as a mother myself, I wonder if they weren’t nuts! When I was 6 I went to a convenience store, by myself or with a friend. We had to cross a fast, two lane highway.

They put us in those God awful, metal roller skates that you strap to your shoes. Those things could kill us!

Best of all, we lived on a cul de sac. Behind our house was a salt water canal. No fences. My little sister fell off the sea wall once. She was about 3. Thank God the tide was out. I was responsible for her and oh my God I felt horrible. It was too far down for me to reach her so we all went screaming for our Moms.

Our neighbor’s had an indoor pool. It was never locked. I fished my sister out of that pool a couple of times too.

Only rule was I had to be in by dark. Other than that, they had no idea where I was or what I was doing.

I had to sing showtunes to let her know I was masturbating & not to enter my room, was a bit off putting at first but became quite a useful stimulus in the end.
“Ohh whip crack away, whip crack away, whip crack awaaaaaaayyyyyy”

^^^ Ok, just weird.

When I went outside to play in the snow, she put plastic bags between my (multiple pairs of) socks and my boots. The plastic bags were firmly tied around the tops of my calves, but not too tightly. Mom knew that snow would get inside my boots and melt, and she wanted my feet to stay warm and dry.

It always worked. When I returned home, my socks would be completely dry.

I don’t remember any special safety rules except “don’t miss dinner”

Yeah. No seat belts, no helmets, nothing.

^ Us kids from the 60’s somehow survived with no safety equipment and no Helicopter parents. haha

My mom didn’t seem to have any concept about safety.
All three of her kids suffered terrible burns (years apart) because she was inattentive.
The ONLY safety I learned at home was from my dad. That wasn’t a lot.

Haha. I made my husband put plastic bags over his socks inside his boots when we lived in TN and had a snowfall. It makes perfect sense if you don’t have waterproof boots.

Tonight we listened to a race car driver tell a bunch of stories. One story he was driving home late after a race, and up front in the truck a friend was with him, and holding the very tall trophy on his lap. The driver fell asleep at the wheel, crashed, and when he went to look at his friend the trophy had cut his carotid artery. Blood spewing out. The guy actually lived, but it was close. That never would have happened with my mom in the car.

I love so many of the answers thus far. The whistle, unplugging the fridge, those are so funny. Although, I myself am a little paranoid about lightening.

@JLeslie Lord, you have no idea how hard it was growing up with my free spirited personality surrounded by the safety police. My aunt & uncle actually painted the steps to their cabin in flourescent safety red. I mean really? haha
Don’t forget chewing your food forty times before swallowing and no swimming for an hour after eating. lol

www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-hLh1uKGTM

Nothing, that I can think of. My mom isn’t a big worrier. Her response to hypothetical bad things happening is “oh well. If it does, it does.”

@Coloma I’m probably an 8 on the safety police scale. Some people think I’m worried all the time about what accident or emergency can happen, but for me it’s just automatic, and I just take care of it, and it’s out of my mind.

I’m not “worried” the bad thing will happen, I worry when I know it’s possible for something to go wrong, and no precaution was taken. Even then, I’m not sitting around worried, I’m just annoyed when I have to say I told you so, I really really do not want to say I told you so. I want to prevent being annoyed, angry, upset, or having to deal with spilt milk when it was predictable.

My mom knows a ton of crap that can go wrong that a lot of people wouldn’t think of, but she also didn’t buy into old wives tales much, which was good. She knew the whole thing about swimming after eating was garbage, but we could not swim alone.

I had to have a drink while eating, in case it was difficult to swallow my food, but I wasn’t told to chew my food 40 times.

Mom used to have us wear bread sacks over our stockinged feet when we went out in the snow, even though we had rubber galoshes. We put rubber bands around the tops, supposedly to keep the snow out. When we went to play in the snow she also gave us 2 or 3 pairs of dad’s thin work socks so we could layer our feet.
None of that really helped when we broke through the ice on the creek and went in up to our knees! Lord that was a cold, frozen trek back to the house! I won’t forget the feeling of my jeans freezing so it was hard to bend my knees to walk.
We never, ever wore shoes except to school and church.
My sister was bitten by a water moccasin down by the creek once. She was barefoot, but shoes would not have helped anyway, as the sucker got her on the calf. That was interesting.

My sister and I had to wait 15 minutes after applying sunscreen before we could go into a pool—to give the sunscreen a chance to soak in. My mom said she had seen too many pools with a greasy sunscreen sheen on the top… And we had to reapply every 1.5 hours I think it was… To this day I wait for sunscreen to soak in before getting wet, although I rarely remember to reapply. (No friend of ours ever went home sunburnt… we can’t say the same for when we came from friend’s houses.)

My mom was very protective of what we were exposed to on the TV, particularly in terms of gore and violence. I can’t say she was mistaken in her judgment—I got so scared that I ran out of the room during Matilda… and another time, after seeing a foot fungus cream commercial that illustrated burning/itching as a foot in flames, I had nightmares of feet getting burned off legs for weeks (I still remember them.)

The other aspect of TV that my mom guarded us against was “mindless” TV… when we were kids, we understood this as “no cartoons,” especially not from Cartoon Network. I never minded. When I went over to friends’ houses and they had me watch Spongebob with them I was unimpressed and bored (I had come over to play!) Now that I’m older and I look back at the various media my mom would introduce to my sister and me that I realize how hard she worked to introduce us to quality storytelling in its varied mediums.

No allowance. We were still expected to do chores—and from what I understood about other families growing up, my sister and I were often doing more housework and yardwork than our peers who were getting paid for it. We were also expected to help with various construction projects. But no allowance. My mom didn’t want us to see chores as a means to some external reward—we did them because it was the right thing to do, and we did them together because we were a family.

In most other respects, my mom was pretty liberal, and trusted my sister and me to stay safe—and probably getting an occasional skinned knee along the way.

Gosh. We watched cartoons on Saturday morning. That was it for TV! If we watched in the evenings, we watched what Dad watched.
As I got older I had a little more say. We got to watch Wild America and Lassie on Sundays. And they gave me The Monkeys on Monday night.
Other than that we all watched whatever together. Laugh In, Carol Burnett, Johnny Carson, although I usually wasn’t up that late. If we didn’t want to watch we went to our rooms to do our own thing, or outside.

The TV comments reminded me that we weren’t allowed to sit very close to the TV when I was a kid. My sister and I watched a lot of TV, but my family didn’t when we ate dinner. Dinner was in the dining room without a television.

My mom also didn’t allow anything purple or red in the living room. Meaning things like grape juice or fruit punch.

My father was very big on reading in good light.

WAIT!! THEY LET ME WATCH THE MONKEES ON TUESDAY NIGHTS!!

And everytime there was an upcoming show featuring the Jackson 5 or Donny Osmond I would start sobbing, and they usually let me watch it. If it was on Johnny Carson they let me stay up late to watch.

@Dutchess_III The good ol’ days!
60’s TV was fabulous!

Oh man. Was it ever. Carol Burnett. Johnny Carson. And everybody in the country was watching the same thing at the same time. Except maybe not everyone was watching The Monkees. Maybe.