Not really a young child, but in my late teens my parents told me I had no curfew.
Their only rule was, lock the front door when you get back, and let one of them know I was home, even really late.
I would leave at 8pm in my truck, drive to pick up my friends, then hit various late night stops like Dairy Queen, Subway, Denny’s, etc. My friends and I would spend like an hour or two at each place, chilling, playing cards, eating snacks, chatting, and then go hit the next place.
Often we would all find some random parking lot and just chill there chatting and listening to music. I would frequently get back at 2-3am.
Many gen-Z kids don’t even drive. My spouse’s youngest sister is 20 and doesn’t have a drivers license. She hardly hangs out with her friends in person at all, same with most of them. They all just game together on Discord. I was a pretty mild mannered kid when I was that age, but they make me seem like a wild west bandit lol.
Also sleepovers apparently aren’t a thing any more?? A ton of parents are totally against them. I guess I kind of get it. Idk, I used to have sleepovers all the time with my friends. Pretty much everybody’s birthday party was a sleepover from age 13-17. I remember staying up super late, playing GameCube/XBox, playing truth or dare, and stuffing ourselves with candy and soda, super fun memories.
Play outside
ran a Tor exit node. chatted on Bluelight. took over a (small) botnet. tripped on research chemicals.
Too many to count, but I’ll leave you with one of the least dangerous: woods porn.
One time in the mid 2000s my friend and I were on a hike in the mountains and we found a tree that was like a cave, all branches everywhere except a little entrance. Inside we found porn magazines with the pictures ripped out and placed on branches all over the inside of the “cave”. After that we always joked about the porn cave we found.
- Walk around town with a pellet gun
- walk home from school alone
- catch fish from the creek and eat them, after cooking on a fire in the field-- started with a magnifying glass.
- build a tree fort in the forest 20-30 feet up
- walk on the barely frozen creek
- read books
Reading books would get you jailed first these days
I see a lot of similar stories here about wandering free and living like feral kids but I want to second making homemade Explosives from hobby shop Rocket engines.
I’m a Gen X’er… Not sure if the Lemmy’s word limit on posts would allow me to list it all.
So here are a few:
Drank from the garden hose? Check
Rode in a car without seat belts? As a toddler? As a baby? Check
Rode my bike all over town with no helmet? Had an accident that put me in a coma for 48hrs because of not wearing a helmet? Check
Harvested tobacco on my grandparents farm? Check (Anyone who has done this by hand, working with those stakes knows the risks.)
I started skydiving in the early 90’s. My mother was absolutely appalled and constantly berated me about how “dangerous” it is to jump out of an airplane.
The truth of the matter was I was far safer in free fall than I was during most of my adolescence.
Is drinking from the garden hose actually considered dangerous nowadays? I thought that was just a Boomer meme.
I’m still here.
I keep reading it, so added for comedic effect…
Our school playground didn’t have a rubber ground. Or mulch. Or wood chips. No. We had gravel. Like little rocks gravel. And a swing set. A big one. Recess for us was jumping as far as we could into gravel.
We also had wooden monkey bars that gave you splinters. We tried to skip bars, and if we were lucky, land on the gravel. If we weren’t lucky, we would fall into a hornet’s nest. Hornets loved those old wooden playgrounds.
But perhaps the greatest piece of school yard entertainment was the steel merry go round. We’d have one of us try to hang off of it horizontally with 3 or 4 of us sping it. Lose your grip and fall off? Where would you land? You guessed it. Face first into the gravel.
That thing would get hot enough in the summer to fry an egg, but as much as we enjoyed eating our breakfast that way, we lost it before the end of 8th grade. A kid from a neighboring school crawled under theirs and tried to grab the axel while it was turning. It ripped his hand clean off. But still, those were the days.
Got vaccinated.
That’s a joke. The real answer is almost everything. I was practically feral and lived next to a swamp in Louisiana. RFK Jr. is 100% wrong about disease prevention but there’s no vaccine for snapping turtles.
go to school in America
Jumping on the street while a car is quickly moving towards me in an attempt to jump on top of it and look really cool
LMAO this just reminded me of the time my buddy’s car was overloaded and I still didn’t want to walk home so I asked him if I could ride on the roof of his sedan with my arms holding on through the window holes. It worked, and I didn’t die, so I got that going for me. Glad people didn’t have smartphones then like they do today. A vid would have 100% made it’s way to my parents somehow.
Make pipe bombs. It was dangerous then, too.
Walking to school alone.
As a 7 year-old in rural Manitoba I went cross country skiing on an old rail road track in town. I got to the edge of town and just kept going. I always knew where I was and just enjoyed exploring. I eventually got to some cross roads that I recognized as being close to a friends house, so I just headed to my friends house. I ended up going about 7-10km on this ski trip. My parents ended up getting a surprise phone call from my friends mom tell them where I was 😆
Go to school
American?
