No helmets, no car seats, out until the streetlights came on, and nobody knew where we were. Many say it built resilience the 'cotton-wool generation' will never have. Others say plenty of kids from those days simply didn't survive to post about it. Were we genuinely tougher, or do we just not remember the ones who got hurt?
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Add your commentSurvivorship bias, plain and simple. The kids who DIDN'T make it aren't on here romanticising it. My brother went through a windscreen at 9 in 1971. He'd have loved a seatbelt. We don't talk about him in these threads.
Oof. That stung because it's about my father exactly. 'Tough' and 'numb' looked identical in his generation and we called it strength. He died never once telling me he was proud of me.
Best of both: buckle them in the car, then let them out of the house. Safe from the things that actually kill, free from the things that just scare us. That's the childhood worth fighting for.
We rode in the back of the pickup, fell off bikes onto concrete, and figured it out. Today a kid can't walk to the corner shop without a phone tracker. We weren't tougher by accident. Freedom MAKES you tough.
It's not the hose or the seatbelts. It's that we were BORED and had to invent our own fun, solve our own arguments, come home and find our own dinner. That part we really should bring back.
Look, I buried two friends from those 'free' summers before I was 15. I also had the best childhood imaginable. Both. Stop making me pick. The truth has room for the grief AND the joy.
Read that comment about the brother and felt it in my chest. We lost a boy from our street to a pond nobody was watching. 'Out till the streetlights came on' has graves in it that we conveniently forget.
Honestly the thing I miss isn't the danger. It's that adults trusted us. A 9 year old was assumed competent. Today a 9 year old is assumed helpless, and shock, they grow up helpless. Trust was the real ingredient.
Both things are true and this thread refuses to allow it. Car seats save lives AND kids today are over-supervised into anxiety. You can buckle a child up and still let them climb a tree. It was never either/or.
Counterpoint from a 66 year old: I LOVED the freedom and I also got followed home by a man at 8 and never told my parents because 'kids were tough.' Some of that silence wasn't strength. It was abandonment in a nicer outfit.
Nurse for 40 years. I have seen what 'no helmets' does to a child's skull. Nostalgia is a luxury for the ones who got lucky. I never get to be nostalgic about it.
My dad's whole parenting philosophy was 'you'll live.' And mostly we did. But 'mostly' is carrying the weight of a few small coffins, and we owe it to them not to pretend otherwise.
73 here. We were tougher about scraped knees and softer about feelings. Today's kids are the opposite. I'm honestly not sure which trade is better, and anyone who's SURE hasn't thought hard enough.
My grandkids have never once been bored, never built a den, never settled a fight without an adult. I worry we've raised a generation that's safe from everything except life itself.
the 'we turned out fine' crowd. did you though? generation that won't go to therapy, won't say i love you, drinks every night and calls it 'fine.' maybe we just lowered the bar for what fine means
The honest answer is: we were lucky AND something real was lost. Modern safety is good. Modern smothering is not. The skill we've forgotten is telling the difference between the two.
Mum had five kids and didn't hover over a single one of us, and we adored her for it. Now my daughter watches one toddler on a phone camera all day and is exhausted and miserable. Something got worse, not better.
I'm 70 and I let my grandkids roam the village like I did. Their mother is furious with me. I genuinely don't know if I'm the wise one or the reckless one and this thread hasn't settled it.
We also breathed lead petrol, had a smoking section on the PLANE, and asbestos in the school ceiling. 'The good old days' were trying to kill us in about nine different ways we didn't even know about.
we turned out fine is doing a LOT of heavy lifting in a generation with the highest rate of men quietly drinking alone after 6pm. just saying.
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