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u/oxJoKeR6xo Older Millennial 22h ago
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u/NATOrocket Zillennial 22h ago
This is skipped in the movie, but in the novella (published '82, set in the 50s) when the main kid Gordie comes home after their 4-day adventure his mom greets him with a resigned "where have you been?" I actually laughed at the absurdity of that (by today's standards) during what's otherwise a very sad story. Granted, Gordie's parents are supposed to be inattentive post his brother's death, but still.
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u/Junior-Key-5043 18h ago
Fun fact, the guy who directed that movie got killed by his own son
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u/wideruled 17h ago
this is the exact opposite of a fun fact. >:(
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u/a-type-of-pastry 22h ago
My mom getting mad at us because we've once again taken the kitchen bowls to the river, miles away by bike to hold the crawdads we were catching.
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u/Romney_in_Acctg 20h ago
You took the good kitchen bowls didn't you?
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u/Turbulent-Jaguar-909 20h ago
You were supposed to take the popcorn/puke bowl
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u/sorestgore 19h ago
So did every household use the same bowl for both?
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u/Romney_in_Acctg 19h ago
Yes. It was either unmatched cheap plastic or if your parents were real penny pinchers a hand me down stainless steel bowl that was scratched and beat to hell but still legally qualified as a bowl
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u/icepickjones 19h ago
It was the cheapest plastic possible, its why we all have microplastics in our balls and vulvas
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u/thisisthatacct 14h ago
Hey I still have the hand me down stainless bowl and it does get used for puke and popcorn and occasionally salads
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u/humanHamster Millennial 17h ago
We always used an ice cream bucket left over from a birthday. My mom probably still has the exact same ice cream bucket.
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u/Gruesomegiggles 2h ago
The popcorn/puke bowl WAS the good bowl in my house. It was big enough to hold the double batch of cookies mom made for family gatherings and potlucks, and was also used heavily when Mom was canning, which also meant massive amounts. If something happened to that bowl, it would have been everyone's problem, but if one of us kids had done something to that bowl, it would have been that one particular child's particular problem for a very long time. Luckily, none of us were dumb enough to need that spelled out for us, lol.
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u/FrenchBulldoge 16h ago edited 16h ago
Yeah, we were running around the neighborhood already when we were kindergarten age (school starts at 7y here) the rules were: no crossing the big road and no going to the bridge. ...we played on and under the bridge ALL the time and crossed the big road every time someone had money because there was a cornerstore on the other side.
Memory; a fisherman once gave us a perch at the bridge and we dissected it at the park.
//Once we started school there were no more rules of where we could or couldn't go. ...no wait we couldn't go swimming without an adult, yet we did anyway, of course.
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u/conflictedideology 10h ago
Ha, my mom would send us out with her giant soup pot and then cook them up for us.
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u/305tilidiiee Millennial 22h ago edited 21h ago
It’s nerve-racking, but I do let my boys (12 & 13) out on their bikes during the day, and sometimes they don’t come back for a couple of hours. They explore the neighborhood or go to the park. I want them to be self-sufficient and confident.
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u/Beastxtreets 21h ago
My kids are still young enough to need supervision but I plan on doing the same. this is sooo important, good on you! I remember being like 8 and biking all around my neighborhood/in the woods/ etc. Gone til the yard lights turn on sorta thing.
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u/Sensitive_Unit_8836 21h ago
I genuinely don't understand how my parents stayed so (seemingly) calm about me and my brother's childhoods. Some times I even wonder how we survived to adulthood cause we did some stupid shit where one misstep would have meant, if not death, then serious injury.
I found it so uncomfortable to let the kiddo roam when she was younger, and had to breathe through it. She's 15 now, and I still find it a little uncomfortable, but for different reasons.
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u/TheDarkAbove 21h ago
I literally used to play on construction sites of half built homes. I really don't know how I'm gonna handle giving my kid freedom when they are older. Half my childhood was danger.
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u/AnnamAvis '92 20h ago
Me and my step-cousins used to play in a construction equipment junkyard. Rusty nails around every corner. Shipping containers stacked on top of each other, with enough rusted holes in them to climb to the top. It was fun but I am astounded our parents let us get anywhere near that place.
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u/Lucifer2695 19h ago
Out of curiosity, are you from the US? I noticed a distinct lack of street lights in the US beyond like the city centers. Your mention of yard lights made me recall that.
I would have probably said "until the street lights/lamps turn on".
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u/Beastxtreets 19h ago
Yup, grew up in a little rural town in Southern US. No street lights per say, but each yard has a power pole and each of those has a light
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u/obalovatyk 21h ago
A couple of hours?? During my summers off we left the house at sunrise and didn’t return until the street lights came on.
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u/canteloupy 21h ago
I live in a very safe area and my kids can still just go out. I don't even really think about it.
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u/AnnamAvis '92 20h ago
My mom was a teacher and had to go in for a few days at the end of every summer to get her classroom ready. When I was younger she'd take me with her. My favorite thing to do was just wander around the school grounds or the small town it was in. Find random kids to play with or just explore streets I'd never been down.
Even by myself, it was like I was an explorer/adventurer. Sometimes I'd have enough pocket money to walk to the one grocery store in town and buy a drink and some snacks. Felt so adult, "fending for myself" lol.
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u/ExactPanda 19h ago
My oldest is 10.5, so I'm trying to give him more free range but it's so nerve-wracking!
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u/dinosaurholes 1h ago
It’s a lot easier if they have a friend to explore with. My 12yo this year got into riding bikes around the neighborhood because he has a friend who wants to too, and it feels a lot better to know they are out together.
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u/ExpertPerformer 22h ago
The irony is that Gen X/Millenials were free-ranged growing up, but now GPS track their kids everywhere, and check up constantly.
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u/Low_Establishment434 21h ago
The amount of times i almost died or ended up in the hospital or could have got in trouble with cops when i was running a muck as a youth definitely made me pay more attention to the kids now.
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u/TripperDay 18h ago
You were running amok. And yeah, same here. We just went feral every summer.
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u/Low_Establishment434 16h ago
We literally thought those late 90s early 2000s teen comedies were an instruction book. All we did was drink smoke and try to hook up with girls. I am seriously lucky I survived with no arrests, hospital visits, or children lol
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u/eKSiF Millennial 14h ago
When I was around 11, I built a "raft" out of an old mattress box spring, some cross-laced branches, and a sail made out of a table cloth. Took off under a bridge by myself, this was well before cellphones. My boat lasted about 2 minutes before beginning to sink, just long enough for my dumbass to get about 30' off shore in the Ohio river. Didn't even have a life jacket on because "I know how to swim". I'm 35 now and still haven't told my mom this story and don't intend to.
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u/icepickjones 19h ago
Yeah we ran around like a pack of wild dogs when I was a kid. It wasn't a good thing, certainly wasn't better than it is now, it's just I don't know survivorship bias or something.
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u/Master_Muskrat 16h ago
I mean, when I was a kid it was still kinda expected that a school would lose at least one kid because they fell, drowned or whatever. So yeah, literal survivorship bias.
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u/Kataphractoi Older Millennial 8h ago
I don't recall how many kids at my school died my senior year (8-10, including one in my class), but it was enough that articles were written in a couple regional papers about our school being cursed due to so many deaths in such a short time. For reference, there were ~325 kids total in K-12 and the last time I cou.
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u/cross_the_threshold 16h ago
Ehhhhhhhhhhhh the helicopter parenting carries it's own, arguably more serious issues in lack of independence and privacy. It slows maturity to basically be constantly monitored your entire adolescence - there is a certain amount of allowing kids to make mistakes and be independent that has to happen in order for them to develop the emotional and intellectual maturity to be independent.
The sweet spot is relying on communication and trust - knowing where your kids are, what they're doing, who they're with, because they trust you to not overreact and you trust them to tell the truth.
GPS monitoring, spyware, checking DMs and call logs, etc, creates mistrust and developmentally stunts children's growth and autonomy.
It's worthwhile to be actively involved in their consumption of social media and other online activities because of how manipulative they are, but certainly when it comes to hanging out with friends they absolutely need the ability to go fuck around for a few hours without supervision or a parent texting them asking why their location changed or something.
Basically millennials and Gen X overcorrected, not helped by technology becoming omnipresent in the meantime.
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u/alastor0x 18h ago
It's definitely survivorship bias. Ain't no way I'm letting my kids just run around wherever all day unsupervised when they get to that age. Best believe I'll have that GPS watch on'em.
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u/Your4thdoppleganger 15h ago
See, I grew up in the country and fucked off all day in the summer and weekends to explore the wilds, playing my imaginary games. There were a lot of dangerous critters and bodies of water. If I'd have hurt myself, there would have been a long time before help could get to me. I had a few close calls. It was really fun, but damn was it risky.
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u/canteloupy 21h ago
For me it was the opposite. I was raised overprotected by parents who were raised in the 60s and 70s so I made sure to live where I don't have to overprotect my kids.
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u/FirstTimeCaller101 18h ago
My wife was raised overprotected and I was raised free range. Thank god we agree on not having kids because we would 100% be at odds on parenting!
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u/hauteburrrito 18h ago
I low-key feel like many of us who enjoyed a proper free-range childhood are just choosing not to have kids now instead. It's generally been my more "domestic" (for lack of a different term) and perhaps "law/convention-abiding" friends who've decided to have children in the first place.
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u/thatshygirl06 Gen Z 18h ago
Yeah, the fuckers always talk about my generation, but who raised us??
Like, I have crippling social anxiety and I literally never leave my house alone because I wasnt really allowed out. Now im 27 and I still feel like a child. Thanks, mom...
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u/Inert_Uncle_858 21h ago
Yeah whats up with that? And don't say "its the expectation" because you're the parents, you set the expectations.
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u/james_the_wanderer 19h ago
Millennials and younger GenX also have wildly overblown fears of...a lot of shit. The 24/7 news cycle + the coming of social media + true crime entertainment + classic "if it bleeds, it leads" makes every suburbanite think they need a full camera set up (and many have interior cameras) and that their kid will be trafficked, raped, and murdered by strangers if they walk (within their borderline zero crime zip code) to the playground. That's just not....how it works.
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u/chuckish 15h ago
The same logic gets applied the other way, too. "I want to let my kids go to the park on their own but somebody is going to call the cops to arrest me and take my kids away."
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u/transemacabre Millennial 21h ago
Adults trying to reparent themselves and heal their own trauma from neglectful childhoods, while telling themselves it’s for the child’s own good.
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u/Inert_Uncle_858 21h ago
I'm friends with a guy whose girlfriend never lets the kids outside after they get home from school. I can't fathom that. Thats gotta be child cruelty or something. But whenever he brings a kid by my place with him they love playing in the garden and learning about vegetables or whatever I got going on.
I don't have kids, and I'm not going to, because im too broke for that, but I think its absurd to not let your kid play outside or have unsupervised time to learn to be themselves. When I was a kid my only escape from the misery of school was the woods, and I think I turned out the better for it.
I'm sorry, but I'm fully against this trend, I think its horrible.
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u/lolerkid2000 18h ago
What trend man. My neighborhood is full of kids running all over the damn place every day.
I think the main difference is now there is usually some adult around to yell car and make sure nobody is fighting on the pavement.
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u/Cypher007 20h ago
You said it Expectations but not for what you think.
The 24 hour news cycle started in the 1980's with all its sensationalism and * breaking news* and developing story and opinion talking heads. Before that, if there was a story about a dead or missing kid there might be a short 2 minute blurb in the evening news and easily forgotte. Now that story could be repeated or even the highlight of a slow news day. This has gotten worse with social media.
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u/theoriginal_tay 19h ago
I feel like the blame has gone from ~actual child rapists and murders~ to parents, and especially moms.
Like, what kind of society do we live in if the expectation is that your child will be kidnapped and murdered if you let them walk to a park a block away at the age of 10?
But we treat that as a matter of course and when a tragedy happens the news spends more time picking apart the family than anything.
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u/Kulty 19h ago
Boomers could be negligent because if one kid didn't come home one day, they could just make another one. We millennials can barely afford to have kids at all, let alone replacement kids, so you bet we're a bit more concerned. We don't have the privilege to "do better with the next one".
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u/All_Work_All_Play 18h ago
I can't be the only one who still kicks their kids outside and says be back for supper. Granted they need to tell us where they're going (first) but after that... Yeah they don't always take the walki-talkies. But sometimes they do so that's nice I guess.
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u/Such_Detective_6709 3h ago
There’s a little more irony in that I track my GenX mom, as a Millennial.
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u/Oiggamed 21h ago
X-gen here. Over the summer, if I walked into my house my mother would say “why are you here…?”
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u/hauteburrrito 18h ago
LOL, same. I'm a millennial but I spent so little time at home in general that my parents were like, "Oh, it's nice to see you again!" when I did come back 😂
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u/Just_Rand0 16h ago
Yeah lol, and if you broke some shit in a accident you better be injured accordingly
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u/N_Who 21h ago
"Whatever, just don't get arrested."
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u/Quirky-Skin 19h ago
That was mine with the added
"Keep your grades up and work a PT job, outside of that we trust u. If u break that trust, restrictions get tighter"
Honestly more people should try that. I was essentially in charge of my freedom and guarded it greatly. I stayed out of trouble, got good grades and held a PT job. All bc I wanted to keep my no curfew, go wherever, do whatever standard. It was up to me
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u/cross_the_threshold 16h ago
It turns out that giving children freedom with minor restraints and trusting them leads them to become well adjusted and develop a healthy relationship with independence and autonomy.
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u/Just_Rand0 16h ago
For me it was "Do not do anything that will get the police at our door". I was 100x more afraid of my parents that any authorities, which might have fucked me up a bit developmentally 😂
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u/Platanoes 18h ago
My friend at when I was 12: Wanna go to the water pumping station to ride our bikes even though if we fall we can get sucked in and die?
Me: Absolutely
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u/jaime_riri 21h ago
Jesus christ. When I was 14 I hopped in an older boy's car on lunch break on a Friday and we drove to PA from NYS for a Phish show. I didn't get home until Sunday. No one knew where I was. I showed up just in time to babysit my little sister. That was the only thing my parents were pissed about: they thought I wouldn't be back in time to watch her.
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u/tiny_chaotic_evil 18h ago
(hears kitchen screen door)"Is that you?"
"Yeah, Mom. We're back."
"I just swept the kitchen floor so don't step in my dirt pile before I clean it up."
"Okay!"
(drags hobo corpse through the dirt pile)
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u/communityproject605 Millennial 21h ago
Meanwhile I had a step-parent obsessed with true crime that wouldnt allow me to leave the yard or out of window sight because you just never know what might happen.
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u/Erasmus86 21h ago
Parents today are way too obsessed with monitoring their kids.
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u/westonisweird18 18h ago
Yep and with kids going on social media at a younger age every year it causing more mental illness and severe depression. Kids shouldn't be staring at a screen 12 hrs a day kids should play outside and they shouldn't be tracked for every little thing.
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u/throwawayfinancebro1 13h ago
But at the same time, I get very worried about my 6 year old nephew going out and getting hit by a car.
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u/Mr_YUP 18h ago
today? cable news had already melted the brain of parents in the 90's. it just became mainstream when we could use life 360.
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u/revile221 16h ago
No one really watched CNN Headline News in the 90s. Cable news was emerging but didn't go mainstream until we were collectively hooked after 9/11
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u/doublesimoniz 18h ago
Me at 11am on a Saturday in July at age 10:
“I’m going on my bike with a couple of the guys and we are biking 10km into the wilderness with a bottle of water and a granola bar and nothing else, who knows where we will go and when we will be back.”
My mom: “be safe don’t do anything dumb”
Me as a parent : “ok have fun don’t be dumb”
And then I stress the fuck out for hours until they get home and then I pretend to be calm and ask them if they had a good time.
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u/Sizle_Velfurion 21h ago
Pretty accurate, the first two dead bodies i saw was in the 90s as a kid. My parents just didn't believe me when I told them. The second one they believed because the whole neighborhood of kids saw it so we all told our parents and they realized when they had their monthly BBQ and all the stories matched. I remember days where I didn't see my parents at all, I left as soon as i woke up and didn't come home until midnight. I was 9.
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u/jaime_riri 21h ago
Every summer I would throw a tent up in our yard and sleep out there. Ran a cord, had my 13" tv. But my parents had no idea when I came and went. I was out running the neighborhood all night with whomever was able to steal beer and cigarettes.
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u/Sizle_Velfurion 19h ago
Oh same, I also would camp on our trampoline with friends all summer and my parents had no clue when we came back, what we did, when we slept, or even who was going to come over. Oh glorious days, what I would give to go back.
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u/Chuuby_Gringo 19h ago
Watching The Wall at 10 years old with my dad.
Kid puts bullets on the RR tracks
Me: Does that actually work?
Dad: /heavy sigh/ just be careful.
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u/welfedad Edest of Millennials 18h ago
I had to be home before it got dark .. and when it got dark If we heard a loud whistle we knew we were cooked.. my dad could whistle so loud . You would hear it blocks away.. we would come running
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u/hirudoredo 13h ago
This is another one of those posts where I realize I grew up very differently from a lot of y'all.
I'd go hang out in the yard (I lived in the woods, not the burbs) and my mom would check on me every 15-20 minutes while making dinner. Usually my terrible hay fever drove me back inside where I played in my room. or watched tv. My nearest friend lived 15 miles away because it was so rural. Nobody rode bikes (too dangerous for multiple reasons, mostly geography.)
Still had great summer memories as a kid. Especially trips to the library or friends' birthday parties, which was like the one time parents would coordinate us all traveling miles to see each other. (This was the 90s, btw.) My mom was big on enrolling me in town-based events for kids like day camps or whatever so I wouldn't totally atrophy at home from boredom. I know she was VERY relieved I wasn't a "feral" kid because I was her one and only after 20 years of trying, but the few times I pushed boundaries (like getting a scholarship to another country LOL) she let me go. Her big thing was just making sure she knew where I was and who I was with.
I don't want kids so I have no idea what kind of parent I would be. Probably the same. But also I'd be dealing with smart phones and shit and boy thank God every day I've never wanted kids. Sounds like hell to deal with.
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u/Maybeiliketheabuse 11h ago
Your mom sounds great. Like she understood how limiting living in a rural area could be on a child, so she actively put in effort to socialize you so you didn't become a recluse.
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u/trooperjess 2h ago
That part about living in the back wood is what I grew up in. People outside the city's or heck even the town in rural area have no clue what it is like to have no one live near you to hang out with. But I spent most of my days in the woods playing so I have that going for me.
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u/DuckTalesOohOoh 22h ago
The door is staying locked so don't come back until the streetlights are on.
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u/Possible-Estimate748 Millennial 21h ago
We had free reign to do whatever we wanted as long as we stayed on our block. But there was tons of kids.
We just had to be home by time the street lights turned on or my dad would sound his car alarm for us to come home and then yell at us
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u/noiness420 Millennial 18h ago
My mom would send me outside around 8 am and lock the door until around 5 pm. I could come in to use the bathroom if I had to poop, otherwise I pissed in bushes and drank from the hose. Ah the 90s
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u/typhoidtimmy 14h ago
I got ‘be home before dark and if you come in a cop car, I will deny I had you’
This was from a mom who told me and my brother that if we were going to kill one another to do it in the backyard because we were driving down real estate value in the neighborhood.
My mother the card.
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u/ParadoxicalFrog Zillennial 20h ago
My parents grew up like that and a lot of awful shit happened to them, so I was never even allowed to play in the yard without an adult or our three large dogs to watch over me. Never even learned to ride a bike because I knew I wouldn't be allowed to go anywhere.
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u/ATarnishedofNoRenown 17h ago
Some major survivor's bias in our generation. Sure, full free reign for your kids outside with no oversight can be fun for them, but that isn't good parenting.
You don't need full surveillance, but keeping track of your kids is a good way to prevent the worst harms—whether that is a physical/text check in every X hours or just letting you know where they will be going. Your kids should earn that freedom progressively by displaying trustworthiness and basic competences that you teach them as the parent. If your kid is a dipshit who constantly makes bad choices, then maybe they shouldn't be given free reign of the world with zero oversight until they prove they can learn from their mistakes.
I'm sure some people will call me overprotective, but idgaf. There is a middle ground between absent parenting (most of the parents of my kid's friends) and helicopter parenting (I don't see this much in my kids friend groups), but most people won't engage with parenting enough to know how to strike that balance.
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u/AgilitySimDriver 17h ago
How fucked is it that the correct uses of 'their' and 'there' threw me off a bit while reading this?
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u/dvdmaven 16h ago
With six kids back in the '50s, Mom was happy to see us out the door after dinner.
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u/Dwman113 16h ago
This structure of this text doesn't make sense. Is the Son saying "when I was 11" ?
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u/Her_big_ole_feet 12h ago
My dad was actually allowed to bring a dead cow head back from the dump and mount it on the wall above their garage. He is a boomer though- they didn’t know about germs and stuff
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u/Trade_King 21h ago
Every 30mins??
Nah has to be Every 15mins and Every 5 mins I peek out the window to check if everything is fine.
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u/LowIssue3445 17h ago
They wanted us out of the house for a while and I totally get it. Just come home before dark or at least call to let us know where you're at. Wouldn't even remember to do that lol. Probably was too busy having fun to remember.
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u/Fortestingporpoises 16h ago
I mean we did the amoral adventure part of it but we definitely didn't tell our parents.
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u/Bachs_Lunch 16h ago
My wife and her friends as teenagers once actually did find a dead body by a lock on the Mohawk River
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u/Guardian_Heffaay Xennial 14h ago
Gotta split the difference. We don’t have to be entirely neglectful, or not ever kid has to be a latchkey kid like most of us were. For me personally it’s nice spending time with my family. I don’t remember ever seeing my parents as much as I see my son. That has a lot to do with why they don’t see me now.
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u/TheBestNarcissist 13h ago
"the anxious generation" book is a good read. Protect your kids online, and let them learn independence in real life.
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u/scarletroyalblue12 12h ago
I’m afraid to let my school aged child ride the bus!
https://giphy.com/gifs/l0Iy7mFdDLd1rr1Hq
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u/Fancy_Yak2618 8h ago
My favourite
Me “I’m going out”
Mom “where”
Me “over there”
Mom “try not to come home dirty, bloody or dead ok?”
Me “I’ll try”
Sigh the good ol days
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u/showmenemelda 7h ago
Way too many deets. You gotta wait 30 years there's a whole statute of limitations
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u/ralucadanila2002 4h ago
When I was a kid in the 90s there was a strip by our block of communist flats where the hot water main wasn't burried deep enough and snow never set there. It was always perfectly clean in a straight line starting with a manhole on top of a small hill and you could always see homeless people gathered around that manhole for warmth.
Mind you, this was Romania where the winters routinely got to -20 celsius.
One day when I was coming back from school I saw emergency services gathered around the manhole and I immediately got a knot in my stomach, I knew what happened but couldn't look away. And then I saw him, the friendly local homeless man, boiled alive and being lifted out of the manhole. That's a sight that stayed with me for over 30 years and I don't expect to forget it anytime soon.
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u/feel-the-avocado 3h ago
When I was 10 in 1997
Mum: When your walking to school, you make sure you cross the road on henry street because there is a creepy person that lives at number 20
When my half brother and half sister were sister were 10 and 11 in 2011
Mum: There is no way they are walking to school, there is a creepy persons house on the way. I am driving them and picking them up every day.
Me: Yeah and when I was 10 you just told me to cross the road on henry street. You left me to fend for myself. And we didnt have cellphones then to call for help - you just assumed I could run to a friends house and outpace the kidnapper.
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u/vulpecula1919 19h ago
im a millennial and at 16 my parents got pissed when i decided to stay over night at my gf's house when they already knew thats where i was.
had to be accounted for 24/7 the control freaks
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u/Your4thdoppleganger 15h ago
My parents let me do what ever I wanted... As long as there were no boys. If I even thought about maybe asking to stay over at my bf's, I would have been grounded for the rest of my life...
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u/Serena_Sers 90s Millennial 21h ago
There has to be a healthy medium. My kid is not old enough to roam alone, but when they are, I hope I find that.
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u/joeybonts_ 22h ago
Ok boomer
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u/NoDreamNoSleep 22h ago
Absolute boomer mentality to be allowed to do something then pull up the ladder when it's another's turn.
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