I recall babysitting at 10. The mom didn’t get home until midnight and it was a scary apartment complex. No cable tv and they only had Raiders of the lost ark on this huge video record.
Post by partyinmytummy on Oct 20, 2017 21:11:41 GMT -5
I was allowed to bring in pets for show and tell... a rabbit, a cat, a lizard I'd caught earlier in the week, etc. My mom would show up with the carrier during show and tell time and then bring whatever pet home. We would pass the animal around the circle when it was my turn to "show" lol.
My neighbor friends basically lived at our house in the summers and we had no bedtime. We stayed up until the sun started to come out and then slept until 1 pm pretty much every day. My dad would get mad if we were too loud and woke him after he went to bed, but otherwise we had no rules.
Post by pegasuskat on Oct 20, 2017 21:39:06 GMT -5
I was in the same GS Troop from 3-10th grade. When I was in 8th grade our leader wanted to quit so her high school senior daughter and her friend took over. They had been in scouts forever so regular meetings was fine, they were cool.
But, then we took a winter camping trip in Michigan, there was a blizzard and we we trapped. 2 older teens and a bunch of 13-15 year olds. No cell phones in those days, cabin had a outhouse and we ran out of food, luckily the care taker lived about a mile away and they left us alone, skied to their house and called parents. We all scraped up money we had and they took caretakers snow mobile to a store. We finally took very dangerous roads home on Wednesday, 3 days later. Why would any of the parents have thought this could turn out well? It was a highlight of my teen years, we had a blast. But as an adult I think of how lucky we were.
Post by krisandgrace on Oct 21, 2017 5:18:50 GMT -5
I'm late to this but I grew up in the 70's and 80's and one of my favorite free range kids memories was the neighbors trampoline with no safety net. It was a big rectangle and all the kids would sit on the bar edge with our legs between the springs and act as human sheilds for who ever was bouncing. Your job was to hold on and not fall to the ground if another kid fell into you. This didn't help in the occasional instance of a kid bouncing very high who would fly off which did happen. I was trying to do a back flip but was too close to the edge and crashed into some tree branches and on to the ground once. Never was a parent present at anytime I remember. I can't even think of what the parents of the kid who's trampoline it was looked like.
I swear I just recently came across a photo on Facebook that had tractors in the high school parking lot. The kids drive them to school. Not everyday, it was for something special. I was tilting my head thinking "huh. I guess kids thst age in the country know how to drive them."
This really does happen in a small town near me. I'm not sure the rhyme or reason to picking the day but they all do it one day.
The high school where I teach does this. One day a year, kids drive their tractors to school. It's in the spring during FFA Spirit Week (Future Farmers of America).
Post by loskadoodle on Oct 21, 2017 11:41:04 GMT -5
We used to sit on the center console of the car when we were maybe 5? And my mom would take us for “weeeees”. She would drive over the big hills in town and we would yell weeeee while bouncing all over he car 😂
My nieces middle school is rehearsing for a Thanksgiving play right now. She was cast as a pilgrim bc she is blonde and her BFF who is Latina was cast as an Indian. Yes the PTA mom actually said she would be a pilgrim bc of her blonde hair 😐 😒.
Definitely remember cramming as many kids as possible into the car, even if it meant you had to sit on somebody's lap. It even happened on school field trips a few times. I always volunteered to sit in the way back of my friend's mom's Chevy Chevette hatchback. I felt like a fish in a fishbowl!
ETA: I can't believe I forgot to mention that my friend and I walked to kindergarten by ourselves. I mean, we were together but no adult went with us. It was on the opposite side of the neighborhood but still probably half a mile? I still give her shit for that. We were 5!! And nobody batted an eye apparently.
I also got my mouth taped shut in kindergarten. The whole class did. One girl started crying and we were told to laugh at her (with our mouths taped shut). We also got spanked if we got a bad grade on a spelling test - the teacher would literally put a kid over her knee and wail on his butt. They would go down the line and tap our legs with a ruler if we were talking in line. And one time they washed my mouth out with a dirty half piece of ivory soap that all the kids used to wash their hands with because I said “sucks.” It was a fun place. I don’t think any of us told our parents what was going on. :/
Oh yes I remember all the time being told that little boys harassing me were just "showing me that they like me" by teachers, my mom etc. Horrifying
yup. My mom said this all. The. Time.
Also if a girl made fun of me she was "just jealous".
Add me to the list of cigarette buying kids. My Dad would rip off the top of his cigarette package and send me down. No note. I just slid the top across the counter and took the cigs home.
I remember walking into 7th grade science class and each table (we sat two to a table, no desks) had a petri dish on it with some sort of solid or liquid from the periodic table in it. Mercury was the most popular. We passed the dish around during class so everybody could play with it.
In first or second grade we had a chinchilla as a class pet and the teacher thought it would be fun for each student to take it home for a night. No notice was given to the parents or permission asked. We just showed up with a damn chinchilla to take care of for the night.
My nieces middle school is rehearsing for a Thanksgiving play right now. She was cast as a pilgrim bc she is blonde and her BFF who is Latina was cast as an Indian. Yes the PTA mom actually said she would be a pilgrim bc of her blonde hair 😐 😒.
I mean...OMG, there is so much wrong with this, I don't even know where to start.
Post by ellipses84 on Oct 21, 2017 23:20:07 GMT -5
I walked home from Kindergarten by myself, about 3-4 blocks although you could see the school in the distance from my house, across the play fields. By 7 I could go further, like to the corner store to buy myself candy, library, etc . When I was 8, I was allowed to take a city bus to the downtown mall with a 9 year old friend. This was all in an industrial/urban city of more than a half million people.
Re: seatbelts. We were always buckled but it was very common to “share” a seatbelt.
Yes, I have no idea how we fit, but my mom and her BFF would regularly drive all 5 of us kids around in the backseat of her BFF's compact car. We had a bigger car with 5 seats for our 5 person family, but my parents would always offers people rides to/from church. As the youngest, I'd always end up on someone's lap. I hated it! When my grandparents came to visit we rented a minivan and I loved it!
A junior high school fund raiser where 8th graders can purchase 7th graders to carry their books and fetch lunch for them. It was abolished just before I got there.
My parents weren't quite "Glass Castle" bad, but The 2 seater roadster my parents bought when my mom discovered she was pregnant with my younger sister? Not only no car seats- no back seat? We had a shelf that got warmish from the batteries underneath. I was in an accident in that car with my dad riding in the front seat without seatbelts- I still have a scar on my forehead from it.
A junior high school fund raiser where 8th graders can purchase 7th graders to carry their books and fetch lunch for them. It was abolished just before I got there.
My parents weren't quite "Glass Castle" bad, but The 2 seater roadster my parents bought when my mom discovered she was pregnant with my younger sister? Not only no car seats- no back seat? We had a shelf that got warmish from the batteries underneath. I was in an accident in that car with my dad riding in the front seat without seatbelts- I still have a scar on my forehead from it.
This reminded me. When I was young elementary school age my dad had a convertible Porsche that only had a bench for the backseat and no seatbelts. My brother and I used to love driving in that car with the top down.
I remember walking past a park by myself on my way to watch my older sister run track. I was about 11-12 yo. A kid said hi to me so I stopped to talk to the kid. The mom came over and said, “Hey, you seem like you’re pretty good with kids, do you want to be our babysitter?” So that’s how I got my first babysitting job. They didn’t know me but they had no problem leaving their kids with me. They were unknown to my parents, yet my parents had no trouble allowing me to hop in a car with a stranger when the dad came to pick me up on Friday night. They lived about 6 miles away and nobody batted an eye at it. I babysat those kids almost every Friday night until they moved, 3 years later. It ended up fine but it sure could have gone in the opposite direction. No way would I agree to that scenario with my DD without thoroughly vetting the other family. Nor would I leave my kids with some other child I saw on the playground. It was just weird.
This really does happen in a small town near me. I'm not sure the rhyme or reason to picking the day but they all do it one day.
The high school where I teach does this. One day a year, kids drive their tractors to school. It's in the spring during FFA Spirit Week (Future Farmers of America).
This wasn't a thing in my high school, but it was at the school in the next town over. I never thought much of it until I told one of my college classmates and she couldn't believe it.
In the early 70's, there were no strap-in car seats for children. They did have carriers for babies though, so that's what my little sister was put into, then put in the front seat while my mom drove. I would like to note that the car was a '57 Crown Victoria with no seat belts. So my middle sister and I had no seat belts while sitting in the back seat.
My mom put me on a pillow in the back seat for the drive home from the hospital. My then-2-year-old sister sat next to me.
I legitimately asked my grandma about this because my mom and her brother are 11 months apart. My grandma was saying how they held the baby and the older kids sat in the back. I was like, uh well uncle was still a baby too. Did he just roll around in the backseat?? And she was all, yeah I guess so. 😂
Post by lissaholly on Oct 22, 2017 21:16:26 GMT -5
I lived in a cul de sac that had a pretty big depression the middle that would fill with water when it rained. All the kids in the cul de sac called it “the hole” or the “ hot tub” if the water had time to heat up. Every parent in my neighborhood has pictures of their kids chilling in that black top, murky standing water like a personal kiddie pool.
We had rock fights, a la the new IT movie right in front of our houses in that same cul de sac. They always stopped because some kid threatened to tell. Never because an adult stepped in.
My parents would fold down the back seat in the station wagon and lay down sleeping bags for our annual 8 hour road trip every summer. When we got older and got a car with only a bench seat on the back, my younger sister would cram herself on the floor so she could lay down for the majority of that trip.
I had bad period cramps in 6th grade and couldn’t get hold of my mom. My teacher took such pity on me and drove me home on her break. My mom wasn’t home and she dropped me off. I can’t imagine a teacher taking a kid home with no prior okay or leaving them in an unattended home.
When I was in 8th grade band, the last few months of the year were literally devoted to one on one time with the teacher. We did nothing on any real value in that time. The teacher tried to convince the kids she learned were not going to continue band in high school, to change their minds.
I'm late to this but I grew up in the 70's and 80's and one of my favorite free range kids memories was the neighbors trampoline with no safety net. It was a big rectangle and all the kids would sit on the bar edge with our legs between the springs and act as human sheilds for who ever was bouncing. Your job was to hold on and not fall to the ground if another kid fell into you. This didn't help in the occasional instance of a kid bouncing very high who would fly off which did happen. I was trying to do a back flip but was too close to the edge and crashed into some tree branches and on to the ground once. Never was a parent present at anytime I remember. I can't even think of what the parents of the kid who's trampoline it was looked like.
One of my friends did a back flip into his fence and knocked his teeth out. Good times.
My parents would fold down the back seat in the station wagon and lay down sleeping bags for our annual 8 hour road trip every summer. When we got older and got a car with only a bench seat on the back, my younger sister would cram herself on the floor so she could lay down for the majority of that trip.
Omg. I totally forgot about this! My parents drove on every vacation and DROVE. There was no stopping in hotels along the way ever. For our 12-hour drive to DC, they removed the minivan's back seats and put in some sort of mattress. My mother was the woman who pretended the ignition wouldn't work until all belts were buckled, but somehow all bets were off for that trip? WTF?
Also, she did the same thing after my grandfather had a hip replacement and couldn't sit. Instead of having some sort of medical transport drive him the 1 hour on the interstate home, she remove all the back seats and loaded him into the back of the van ambulance style. Double WTF.
We had a Trans Van in the 70s and 80s. It was great for weekend travel hockey trips. No seat belts. This is what the interior looked like, except ours was blue and we didn't have a bathroom. The sofa part folded flat and the table could be turned into a bed as well. Behind the wall with the stunning stained glass (plastic) window was a small sink and a one-burner stove that we never used. Behind the wall with the clock (we never had a clock) was a closet area with a plastic folding door.