Five year olds roaming the streetsFollow

This topic comes up at family gatherings all the time. We've pretty much concluded that if we were being raised today, our mother would have been jailed for any of a number of offenses. Kinda funny actually.

We lived next to a big lot of empty land. My mom had a deal with the county where if she kept it fenced and kept vandals and squatters out, she could use the land for grazing for the horses. This worked pretty darn well, but also meant that us kids essentially had a *really* huge backyard (some 80+ acres). There were hills and gullys, and rattlesnakes, and even an old abandoned house. All for us to play with.

We built forts in the hilside out of huge standing boulders, bits of sheet metal that were lying around, and old 2X4s with nails in them. I disctinctly remember only having to get mom to help us out of a jam once when we were playing around in the rafters of the old house (we'd propped up a matress frame and used it as a ladder to get up there!). My little brother got scared and wouldn't climb down by himself, so we had no choice but to bring mom and a ladder. Realize that he was like 3, I was 4, and our sister (the oldest one there) was 6. We were somewhere around a half a mile away from the house accross basically wild countryside.

There was also the storm drain that went under the freeway that we used as a shortcut to get to the candy store. Full of snakes and spiders, but that didn't deter us one bit.

My older brother got stuck in a barbed wire fence when they first moved there (before I was born). Fortunately, he had a dog with him (Nike I believe, long before the stupid shoe company came alont. My mom often named her champ level shepards after greek gods). Nike essentially pulled a Lassie and went off and got mom (who pulled my brother off the wire).


Heh. Then there was apparently an incident where she couldn't keep an eye on that same brother (again before I was born), but needed to do a bunch of work, so she tied him up to a loungeing stake. That's a big stake with a flat round bit of metal at the top, you put a rope around the stake, pound it into the ground, and that holds the rope to one spot, the other end is generally attached to a horses bridal. The whole bit allows the hourse to range in a circle around where the stake is without requiring a corral to keep it in. Worked like a charm from what I hear, but would probably get a parent jail time today. Yes. I can hear the gasps of horror coming from you all...


Sure. Our chances of getting hurt as children were pretty high. The upside is that I'm pretty convident you could drop me in a wilderness pretty much anywhere and I'll be able to find civilization somehow (how hard is it really to just keep moving in one direction until you get to a road?). Oddly, the only broken bones any of us sustained as children, was me getting knocked off a horse in 3rd grade while about 20 feet from the house in front of a bunch of adults. We never fell down anything, or got seriously hurt. Heh. I even remember playing around with an old freezer someone had dumped at one point (what? Those were dangerous? no one ever told me...). Parental supervision while we played was pretty much nil as a child, and yet we still managed to survive...


Dunno. I can understand people wanting to make their children as safe as possibe. On the other hand, I really do believe that by sheltering kids and making sure nothing hurts them, they don't learn many of the basics about consequences in life. At some point, your children will have to walk out of your sight and make decisions on their own. You can't possibly teach them how to handle every situation. I'm a firm believer in learning by experience. Someone can tell you something 100 times, but one experience of getting hurt doing something leaves a much deeper impression. It also teaches people caution. They learn to assume that anything they don't know about might be dangerous. Kids who grow up in environments in which everything is "safe", are being taught that everything that they can touch with their grubby little fingers is utterly unable to hurt them in any way. At some point, that wont be true though. I think the earlier that lesson is learned, the better the kid is. But that's just me...


EDIT: Hell. Almost forgot this one. We used to play, unsupervised with some of my moms "tools". I distinctly remember the clippers used to cut off the tails of Dobermans. Oddly, I never stuck my finger in that thing (or if I did, I never chopped it off). God. There's probably a million ways I could have killed or maimed myself as a child.

Edited, Mon Apr 26 18:22:37 2004 by gbaji

I can't help thinking the one thing we were expected to do as children was to use a lick of common sense (and when that didn't work, get Mom!)

Go out alone as small children? We were ordered to go outside without parental supervision pretty much every day. Keep in mind there were 9 of us and it's probably the only peace my mom had after the sun came up. We watched out for each other and neighbors would give us what for if they caught us misbehaving. Of course we knew where to go to make sure there were no snoopy grown-ups could see us.

The nature of neighborhoods has changed over the course of my lifetime. Many moms didn't work outside the home when I was young and people tended to know their neighbors. We didn't always know them well, but we knew who they were and which house was theirs (and which kids). People moved less often. I could go on, but you get my point.

Times have changed, and not just in the way we now treat children.

I did kill myself a few times growing up. was annoying. I got better though.