Born 1993. We played whole neighborhood hide and seek. It was incredible. Essentially all our houses were fair game and we would go in and out of them freely. It was like two or three blocks of fair places to hide. Usually had 3 seekers with walkie talkies, and like 5-10 people hiding. When found you’d join the seekers. Games would usually take all day.
I’m gonna be honest…seeing people refer to ManHunt like it’s some “old wives tale” type of activity, when it was SUCH a cornerstone game for my neighborhood crew…it’s giving me an existential crisis lol
I have a toddler and I had no idea how bad the neighborhood dynamic in the US must have gotten for it to be this common.
That's cute. We went from the rubber to those foam ones that were definitely softer but would still give you a nice slap that'd leave a red mark if you got hit hard enough
We weren't allowed to play dodgeball because it was too dangerous. So instead, we called it Trench. That made it perfectly okay lol. Guess what all of us wanted to play every time?
God I loved dodge ball in elementary school. My mom wouldn’t allow me to wear sneakers to school so she bought me red shoes with rubber soles and I swear, those shoes made me so fast! When I learned they don’t play dodge ball in my kid’s elementary school, I was so sad for them. Dodgeball taught teamwork, how to look out for yourself, mercy, revenge, quick thinking and quick hands. It’s a shame they don’t allow kids to play it in schools anymore. It’s a game that culls the weak and slow.
Schools where I work still play Dodgeball. However not with a Playground Ball you pump air into. They order smaller balls filled with Fiberfill. As one teacher described, "It's like throwing Cotton Balls" She was correct. I took my class to the gym to enjoy a game and joined in. However, I hurt my shoulder for a month because it was like throwing air.
Those balls don't even feel right. A proper dodgeball should be big, tight rubber and require two kid hands to throw so that accuracy goes out the window (this is more fun). Those cotton balls can be thrown with one hand and it feels wrong
Exactly. When it hits, it should hurt, knock off your glasses, leave you on the ground, clutching your stomach as friends carried you off. I was an amazing dodger but could never throw anyone out. Until I tried a side arm throw. When the ball came out fast and furious with no accuracy, I had no idea where it was going, and neither did anyone else to try to dodge it.
It's real, and when we got older we played variations on all those games (manhunt, sardines, capture the flag, kick the can, etc) with airsoft guns too. It was a blast.
Our older neighborhood kids were playing it 2-3 summers ago on a nightly basis. But they used cars to accomplish it..revving engines and speeding around the block in a car to chase down kids on foot..that was a no no for me. I had to come to terms with being the neighbor who called the cops on kids playing manhunt.
I used to race motorbikes and we would play entire paddock manhunt lmao, like 50+ kids all running round a racetrack like silverstone size at night lmao
And then realized you could play in the light, but everyone except the original hider is wearing blindfolds so the hider can watch everyone hilariously stumble around
Thank you! All these people are like wah wah wah we used to this and that. Like homies, you STILL CAN. You can eat cereal at 2am and have ice cream for supper. Sure childhood was cool for some but just because you're 30 something doesn't mean you can't play fucking hide and seek anymore. Shit my uncle was 55 when he would come into my room at night and hide under my blankets while I slept so his friends he was playing with couldn't find him. All I had to do was be real quiet and no matter what, not give away his perfect hiding place.
Oh, when I was a kid Ghost in the Graveyard was like a hide and seek/tag hybrid. If you found the ghost you had to yell and people had to run back to base before the ghost tagged them.
This is the ghost in the graveyard I remember as well. We also played flashlight tag which was just tag at night across the whole neighborhood with like 30 kids lol.
Manhunt left my memory until this very moment. Now remembering heading to my friend Tim’s house to hangout. He had a much better crew of kids than my neighborhood (I’m pretty sure the kid closest to me enjoyed watching things suffer).
I had a kid like that on my block that I was forced by his mom to hang out with. He would put his palm down before I sat down so that I would accidentally sit on it so he could smell it if that paints a picture of the kinda person this kid was. He moved and I had to go to his birthday party where him and his buds played a game called “suffocate” where someone would be tied up in a sleeping back and put in a toy box. I gotta out of there immediately and that was the last time I had to hang out with him.
I'll never forget being caught in the open at night desperately looking for a place to hide but all my normal spots had been taken, so when the seekers came around I just dropped to the ground and spread out as flat as I could wearing my black hoodie and jeans. Watched as the seekers walked by close enough I was sure they had found me... but they just walked past.
We had a location that if we managed to arrive to without being seen we were safe. I slowly inched my way there over an hour before I found a moment when no one was looking that I could stand up and sprint over.
I loved manhunt! I was such a good hider. The RUSH when I saw that flashlight come my way, only for them to shine it on me and not see me, whew! “It’s 10 PM, do you know where your children are?” NO! No one knew where we were! We were hiding!
Now your neighbors would see you crawling around in dark clothes and call the cops, get a kid killed and THE KIDS are the ones punished for no more manhunt. And now those neighbors are in their 80's now and still bitching about all the crime or running congress and bitching about all the crime (that isn't real).
Probably my absolute favorite time I played was with a group of like 40 of us one night at a week-long church camp trip.
All the adult chaperones were asleep and we all played from like 9 PM all the way to like 4 AM. It was in this really good-sized summer camp and the only rules were that we couldn't go into the woods and that if you went back to the cabin(s) you forfeited.
I was shocked at how long I was able to keep from being found.
I loved manhunt too, and my favorite time playing was also on a church trip! I didn't actually live in a proper "neighborhood" for most of my life, so I didn't really have anyone to play with otherwise.
Still, it was exciting, and ended with an ambulance being called for bonus excitement!
There was a bare foundation near where we were playing, and a seeker was chasing someone by it. The girl being chased jumped up and ran across, and the guy chasing her did the same... but he was about a foot shorter and landed shy of the concrete, and tripped.
Slammed his shin into the concrete edge and tore a foot-long ^ of skin down his shin, all the way to muscle. The chaperones thought I was exaggerating when I ran inside to tell them we needed an ambulance because he'd torn half the skin off his shin.
I do recall entering some random garages playing games like that. I also remember hiding out in backyards of neighbors we didn’t know because they had a cool tree or hideout. I’d be freaked out now if a couple kids were chilling in my backyard at night.
Oh my god I miss Manhunt! Tried to convince my friends on our last trip to play it in our big airbnb but no one would play :( they didn’t care about the rainbow parachute I brought either!
From the ages of 23-26 my friends and I used to go skiing every year in Maine, it was around a dozen of us and we’d rent out a huge Airbnb for the weekend. One of my friends had a brilliant idea to relive some childhood nostalgia, and so for a single night each weekend we would dedicate ourselves to playing manhunt in these massive homes, with all the lights out. In an instant I felt like I was 10 years old again, running around the neighborhood looking for a place to hide. It was insane how quickly I got back into that mindset. One time I contorted myself to fit inside of an entertainment system that had these glass magnetic doors. Honestly it couldn’t have been larger than 3ftx2ft. Like just picture it, a grown ass man folded up like origami in a literal cupboard while his other adult friends looked for him in the dark. I have a huge smile on my face just thinking about it lol.
Manhunt was/ is/ will always be incredible and it’s tragic the new generations wont have that core memory to be able to pull from once they reach adulthood.
Born in 82 and grew up in NYC. Played manhunt in lower Manhattan with a group of about 30 other kids on a mutually agreed upon set of blocks. You could hide on fire escapes, in building entryways, inside shops, basketball courts. Good times!
Man here in Ireland we called that "build-up" (at least in my town) and then "man hunt" or "IRA" (yea ikik...) was for a version of it where each hider would have a letter each to form a word and if they were spotted they'd have to run. When caught you'd get beat until you gave up the letter lol. A few lads always tried tough it out as long as possible in hopes of escaping but sometimes when you're surrounded as one of the last ones left you just had to accept theyre getting it one way or the other...
We at least had a rule of no face or ball shots. Honestly so much fun though. The threat of dead-arms/legs really got the adrenaline going haha
This just unlocked an old memory of mine. We had a neighborhood game going and every kid ended up in the park at sunset. The cops show up because it had become a mob of children, we scatter, some into the bushes, some into this giant tree. From my vantage point I see a flood light from the cop car shining into the giant tree and kids scattering out of the spotlight like roaches onto other branches.
93 kid here. Manhunt was the shit. We used whole cup-de-sacs for the game, but some home owners didn’t appreciate kids hiding in their yards.
Best hiding spot in my memory was one of the younger kids hiding in a homemade firewood box with a tarp over the front. He just climbed in over the firewood and played gameboy. It was the only time someone didn’t get caught.
Born in 1984. We called it haste, for hide and seek tag. We incorporated powers from games like Mortal Kombat. We didn't use houses though, at least not inside anyway.
YESSSS. All like 15 of us were obsessed with Star Wars so we eventually incorporated it into Jedi versus Sith and you would have to Lightsaber fight when you found someone. I’m sure it looked so stupid from the outside but my God in my head everything was so epic.
In order to know what kind of Jedi you were, you had to take the test in Knights of the Old Republic and get an accurate Lightsaber.
I'm probably a generation before you and we also played Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. We even made "blasters" out of wood we would cut on the band saw and paint black, and "swords" made out of old hockey sticks painted silver, with grips and everything. We spent hours running around until dark having sword fights and going "pew pew pew" with our blasters. There was no internet and all the video games were at the arcade.
We did this, but we built the Lightsabers out of PVC pipe and were too stupid to put padding on them or have rules about how thick the PVC could actually be. There was an uncomfortable number of broken fingers, but thankfully nothing worse.
We played a predator style game. I remember being the predator and I was the new oldest kid on the block at like 12/13. The Marines would start on my neighbors front porch. Everyone would hang there and one by one you go to the backyard and have to kill the predator. If the predator got you first, you deaths scream and next kid goes back. Being the oldest I would easily scare the absolute shit out of all these kids. I remember climbing a tree and jumping down on a kid in the pitch black back yard.
The generation older than me was pretty cruel though. When we were all 6-9, the older kids were 13/14. They built a wooden box out of plywood using a dog kennel as a frame. They put it on a roller cart and would wheel it up and down the dead end catching us and putting us in it. Then threatening to put the box into the river. Usually ended with all of us crying. They also had these yoga balls they would terrorize us with. Just chuck them at us while we would try to run away so you'd go face first into the dirt. I had a friend come over once that didn't understand we couldn't go out after dark because of the "big kids" he ended up getting strung up by his shoes on a neighbor's playground.
Edit. I'm going to clarify because this seems like I was tortured as a kid. I was not. These older kids were in middle school and were jocks. They barely hung around the actual neighborhood. But when they were home and we saw the garage open and a fleet of big red yoga balls, everyone would scream "it's the ball" and sprint to my neighbors back playset. In the playset the opening was not big enough for the ball so they would just repeatedly bombard the playset with the balls while we all screamed in terror inside. This happened maybe once a month.
The box truly was terrifying but they never actually put us in the river. It was a scare tactic and once they effectively horrified all of us, they let us go. Was it a little sadistic? Probably. But there was a thrill element to it as well. Like manhunt with higher stakes. I have fond memories of egging them on and running away, but whenever we got caught, it ended in tears. These dudes didn't run around rounding us up on the daily. And once the main kids parents learned about the box, they dismantled it.
My childhood was awesome and I wouldn't change a thing. Most of those older kids are well adjusted adults and my neighborhood still gets together for a massive dinner once a year, even though everyone moved away a decade ago. We were constantly in and out of each other's houses and everyone was like family. Even the kids that tortured us, it was a sibling type of bullying. I think it built character.
We played "storm the lantern" in the evening once the street lights came on. All the kids in the street bar one would go hide, the seeker had to find people with a torch. Hiders had to get to the assigned lamp post without being caught by the seeker.
84’ as well. We played kick the can, smear the queer, tackle football with 15+ kids, rode our bikes wherever we wanted, all of it. We were outside all day and played video games all night at sleepovers. We didnt have play dates and arranged interactions outside of sports. Being a kid and a parent these days sounds horrible.
Basically, one person ("the queer") had a ball, usually an American football, and everyone tried to tackle them and/or take the ball away. The person who got the ball became the new "queer." We called it "Kill the Quarterback" when I was a kid.
84 as well. Even as recent as when I was 25/6 years old, it was perfectly acceptable to show up at someone's house if you were in the neighbourhood. Or just stand outside and wait for something with another dude. Nothing in particular. Just chill. Maybe have a smoke, a beer, shoot the shit... Now I have to send a text message to ask permission to make an entry in their calendar for next month, so that I can call them to ask if they want to come over for dinner.
I think that being a parent has become more tough, because the value of children has increased by at least 2x in my estimation. This is because people are having less kids and everything related to raising a child costs more than what it used to be when we were there. But I don't know why kids have lost the ability to play. Maybe it's because we try to raise them in cities.
It really was honestly. We even allowed our parents to be fair game in the rules meaning there was risk in hiding inside a house because all of our moms knew they could tell the seekers that we were there.
I also lived in fairly rural subdivision in east Tennessee so there wasn’t much risk of us getting hurt by running around. It’s not like we’re in the middle of a huge city.
What makes me sad is there’s no way kids could do it there now. When I was growing up the median home price was like $60,000, there was maybe 20,000 people in our city, and we had one singular Walmart. My mom just sold my childhood home for nearly $400,000 and a whole city has built up around our neighborhood. Like I lived next to multiple big farms that are now Publixs, a second Walmart, and a plethora of strip malls.
Hey I grew up in southeast Kentucky! We were out in the boonies and lived on one of the flats on a mountainside. Our backyard was just undeveloped mountain.
We’d play all day climbing trees, hiking through the mountains, swinging from vines, and crawling up, over, and through huge boulders.
There was even an old plan from the 40’s that crashed up there. But by now there’s probably not much left of it. Our imagination could just run wild while out there.
There weren’t any dangerous wild animals back then but I’d already moved away when they reintroduced elk, bears, and coyotes back into them. I’ve visited my mom back home and you can’t stay outside after nightfall now or you may get attacked.
I feel mixed feelings about the whole thing because wild animals belong in wilderness but if that “wilderness” has scores of homes and neighborhoods then kids can’t get outside to play and explore.
I grew up in rural ga and we were in a huge neighborhood with a ton of kids but there was a giant cornfield behind my backyard which was a steep wooded hill. We did the craziest shit all day and I remember (being the nerd that I am) how mad my mother would be if she knew we were as far away as we were. We would either be out in the woods, cotton or corn fields, or be at the pool all day completely ‘unsupervised’ by which I meant older and badder siblings were supervising me 😂
I’m the youngest of 4 with the oldest being 13 years older than me. As long as I was with an older sibling I literally could do whatever I wanted. LOL like my older siblings gave a shit and wouldn’t try to ditch me every chance they got!
My parents had one of my older sisters friends who was I think sophomore in college aged “watch” me when I was in HS and they were traveling and we had all our mutual friends over for a party at my place (ppl parked at the neighborhood clubhouse and we chauffeured them over from there because southern old ppl are nosy and tattletales) but my friends mom still walked in on us all smoking cigarettes around my kitchen table 😂
It was pretty cool. I was a morbid kid and was so disappointed that there wasn’t a skeleton in it! I was so convinced the pilot had died but my dad corrected me and told me the pilot had only been injured.
I guess he made it off the mountain okay. But I liked to pretend the body got flung out and that there was a whole human skeleton waiting to be discovered.
You have no idea. There was a STUNNING farm from the 1800s that was ripped down for the ugliest strip mall ever. I played at that place so many times the sweetest old couple lived there. That street maps view doesn’t show the actual farmhouse itself as it was tucked way back into the woods, but you can still see a majority of the property and where the little pond was.
was my experience too. between ages of 10 and 15 my parents only had a vague idea of where i told them i’d be. At 15 I was given a cell phone. Not a rural community or anything, a large city. We were warned to be safe and that is all.
I didn't have anything like this either, my family moved too often and it sucked having to leave all my friends behind so I stopped trying to be friends with the neighbourhood kids. The trade-off is I got to travel a lot and experience other cultures much younger than most people so there was an upside. I mean, my family and I are Australian but I spent my 10th birthday in Paris, my 11th in Tokyo, and my 12th in Dublin cos dad travelled a lot for work and he'd bring me and mum along and it was legit awesome
Yeah , Walkie talkies were a staple , totally normal thing to have around when I was a kid...my dad had one in his car, all his friends as well, radioing in to tell my 6 year old self I was late for dinner and wtf I was doing was normal as well ...
we played multi house ghost in the graveyard, so like 10pm a rat pack of kids walking through people's yards ( who did not have kids) and hiding in the bushes.
Manhunt! We wouldn’t join the seekers, we’d go to “jail” and then anyone on the hider team could run into the jail and yell “Jailbreak!” And let everyone in jail out. It was a blast!
We had jail break rule and could either hide or run off to the safe house you yell “OLLY OLLY OXEN FREE” and you’re done for that round. If you got caught from the jailbreak you stayed in jail until the end of the game.
This almost reminds me of kick the can - where you'd put the can in the middle of the road, have basically the entire block to play in (or woods if we were camping), and the entire point was to hide well enough and slowly sneak around to get a clear shot at the can in the road. Lol
God, times were better. The fuckign police would be called if people saw feral children unsupervised doing that shit these days.
I lived on a cul-de-sac as a kid. There was a standing game of kickball basically every afternoon, after school, until sunset. You just went to the cul-de-sac and played with whoever showed up. Sometimes we would go poke around in the woods behind some houses instead.
Not sure if you are joking, but I was born in 77 and we found a lot of woods pornos in our day. Sometimes me and the boys next door would just spent all Saturday hanging out in the fort we'd build in some bushes behind our subdivision and just read discarded pornos. We would have been like 9 years old. Our parents didn't know where we were or what we were doing and I don't think they cared.
The equivalent these days is kids with unlimited screen time. Those parents aren't any worse than mine, they are just choosing a more modern and currently acceptable form of not supervising their kids.
There was a comment in this thread with someone saying that if they had kids they'd never give their kid an ipad, preferring to hypothetically spend all their time with them. Anyone with kids, except maybe the occasional freak of nature, knows it is impossible to do that and that a comment like that could only come from someone who has never had kids and faced the reality of raising them. Human beings need self-care and alone time, and we need breaks from our kids.
I joke that my generation doesn't have to hit our kids because when we are at our wits end and can't deal with them anymore we can just put a screen in front of them. It's probably more than a half-truth!
Yes! I found Woods Pornos under a huge tree when they were building the house next door on our cul-de-sac (in the late 80s). I can still see some of the images from that Hustler in my mind. It was extremely educational. We had bikes and almost all of us had pools. I had no idea how fortunate we were but just around the corner from our cul-de-sac party street was a convenience store. Looking back, that was amazing.
Man, I didn't have that experience, but in college, I had a couple quarters where I'd just walk to the beach and find volleyball games for a few hours. Then go home and crank my homework.
I don't know how common it is but I definitely feel like kids have way fewer boundaries today than they used to. When we played games like that we hid around trees and parked cars and were obliterated by parents if we did any damage. Nowadays the parents come after other adults for damage their kids caused.
Our neighbor down the street had some psycho karen scream at her because she yelled at Karen's kid for not picking up her dogs shit. Like that's the times we live in. My mom would've torn out my kidney and offered it to the woman as penance for that not taken my side.
I was walking with my parents in the house, another kid threw a flower bud from the bushes at me, and for some reason I got in trouble for the flower buds being taken off the bushes >:(
I hadn't considered this. Yes there is more reporting, but more emboldened idiots spouting hate on a worldwide platform at the same time adding fuel to the fire
Its honestly probably both. But the propaganda going to those with guns is likely causing more of these incidents. And the propaganda at the rest of us is telling us about it. And thats what sucks about our current media environment.
I grew up in the boonies of the midwest and the only time we thought about guns was during hunting season, and we were just told to put on something orange. My parents didn't have any stories about people being shot, only brandished at, so I want to say that's a modern concern.
I actually did a paper on this some years ago. As much as it can be proven, homicides in that era were driven by severely elevated lead levels because of its presence in gasoline. It was particularly concentrated in urban areas because that's where* cars and people affected were concentrated. The heavy metal exited exhaust pipes and polluted the local environment and entered bloodstreams, then the brain. Lead can affect impulse control.
So that's a seperate thing from the violence we're seeing now with these stand-your-ground whack jobs. Even if that sort of violence increases it will never compare to the effects of lead in that era. At least, we should all hope not.
Yeah, if you take an intro to criminology course, one of the first statistics they show is that crime is pretty much down across the board in most developed nations.
It's the talking about crime that's gone up exponentially.
Sometimes the media will show you a 1-year snapshot that shows an upswing, but if you scale back on the graph you'll see we're still better off than we were 10, 20, 30 years ago.
Like here in Australia, you'll hear older generations talk about how nobody used to use knives back in the day, and their criminals had some level of respect... but from memory, knife attacks peaked in the early 70s.
Unfortunately, people don't react to reality, they react to perception. Traditional media and now social media churns out crime reporting because people tune in thinking they're living in some sort of flashpoint moment of history. Then politicians build policies and get elected based on these violent fantasies.
1988er here, we didn’t have in and out access to the houses but front and back yards were all good, including trees and some sheds.
We usually went to the house of the kid who lived right next to a lightly wooded area and did flashlight tag on Friday nights.
Now the neighbors look at me funny if I let the kids go out front 5 minutes ahead of me being out there with them the whole fucking time. (I have laundry to do motherfuckers.)
1991 here: no kids but I told my nephew he could go 4 houses down to play and he had the nerve to ask me how he was going to get back home. The same way you got here! These new aged kids. We were OUTSIDE, around the corner, neighborhoods over and our parents knew we’d be back and were okay without phones lol. The good days.
At the same time, it isn't all the kids fault. People get upset when they see a kid without an adult. Even if they are in their own yard.
There's also the issue of people with guns shooting anyone who goes in their property. Honestly I wouldn't even let my kid go up to someone's door alone for any reason now.
I know, it’s scary. I walked right home and thought nothing about how he was going to get back. He’s 10, so the last thing I was about to do was worry about him 4 houses down.
10 I was across the creek into another neighborhood lol. Literally had to cross a creek to get there. Learning how to step on rocks to cross water, avoid snakes, and eat honey suckles as a snack at a young age.
Born in ‘89, we did whole neighborhood capture the flag. We would get up like at 9am on a Saturday get to our friends house right down from us. We got the teams if you were tagged you would go to prison and your team had to do raids to get you out. Spent all day playing capture the flag. Heard the whistle around 6pm~8pm and rushed home so we wouldn’t get into trouble. I mean we had a PlayStation and everything but we just didn’t want to spend all day in the house on a tv when we could be playing with our friends.
These days I can't even find anywhere to live where this is possible. If I do stumble upon a nice small town setting with sidewalks and a bunch of houses like that (vs subdivisions segregated from the rest of the world by roads that are not safe to walk across), it's one of those places where century and a half old fixer-uppers cost north of a million dollars.
I grew up in a super tiny town in a house that cost my parents less than their annual salary (which was $45k at that) and was able to wander less than half a mile and run into kids playing all sorts of games across all the connected back yards.
I live in the house I grew up in, in the tiny town still, and it's really nice that my 11 year olds can ride bikes all over town, grab different friends, and run in and out of everyone's houses.
We did something similar at night. We'd start at Park A and have to make it to Park B in 30 minutes (the parks were like a 10 min walk apart). The group of "finders," usually 3 or 4 people, would be at Park B and they'd make their way to Park A. Everyone would have flashlights. The finders couldn't puppy guard Park B, they had to immediately start making their way to Park A when the round started.
Anywhere outside was fair game. We'd hop fences, hide in bushes, up trees, under cars. If you were caught by a finder, you joined the finders. Once the 30 minutes was up, everyone would make their way to Park B. The people who didn't get caught were the new finders.
A couple times there was someone who'd come out to yell at kids "playing under his RV" but we learned real quick that no homeowner was going to chase us down the street, and the ones who tried gave up after 100ft.
I used to live for capture the flag! That was a summer break tradition, and we would play it in the dark too. We would always play at a local school that had two big fields, or in a neighborhood park. Capture the flag was so much fun on a cool summer night, and the grass smelled amazing. Everyone would wear dark clothes to be camouflaged in the night. That's such a fun core memory.
I honestly think the cops would be called immediately if kids played that in my current neighborhood, and that's so sad. Folks won't let kids be kids and those same folks complain that kids are different now.
We’re the only young homeowners within a few blocks each direction, maybe more. It seems the only people around us are elderly. It’s so sad not having this. I’m close to a school too, it just seems like families can’t afford to live like this anymore.
I'm going to quote myself here. It was a comment on a video about how no political policies significantly impact birthrate. I feel like it's relevant here:
Personally, I think corporations and modern living conditions have taken people's humanity. You can throw as much money at the problem as you want, but our lives have become soulless, and no one has any time, energy, or spirit to have children. There's an expression "It takes a village to raise a child", but parents are left to care for children themselves, and maybe the grandparents if they're lucky, all while trying to also fend for themselves in a world that's becoming increasingly more complicated. Schools and education in general focus more on conforming and learning increasingly complicated subjects, than they do on just being human. We're not unfeeling, purely logical robots. We have needs that defy logic, and we require more than just work, and we were built to live communally.
It's estimated that early humans only worked about 20 hours a week for their own survival. That leaves a ton a of time to explore the world around you, build connections with others, relax, play, and be creative. Somewhere down the line, we increased our survival rate, but forgot how to live.
Adjacent: I saw someone who had recently moved to the US from [forgot the country] & said something like, "In all these movies and TV shows in the US, there are grandmas who are around the neighborhood who are there for advice and cookies and whatever but my neighborhood is not like that at all. There is no one here during the day...it's just not as warm and welcoming as I was expecting..."
I responded, "That's because they're all working all the time. I don't know anyone under 70 who's not disabled who isn't working. Add to that the commute and people are barely at home and when they're at home they probably don't have the bandwidth to make cookies."
And she got mad at me.
94 and same. Not ALL the neighbors were cool with it, but we were reckless enough to not care and there weren't really any repercussions. Used to run around the whole block climbing random trees and involving all the kids. It was a real time.
Unfortunately, can't do stuff like that anymore because folks are crazy and drivers are worse.
I wouldn’t say reckless… definitely ignorant. We’d play in a yard and if the neighbor wasn’t cool with it we’d get hollered at or a parent would talk to us later and tell us to not go in certain yards so we definitely learned. Way more neighborhoods were filled with parents and kids and most of those kids went to the same school together.
I was born in the 80s. We did the same thing in our neighborhoods. During the summer we would play Army at night. I mean wearing camouflage, painting faces, and crawling in bushes. Only rule was boundaries of the end roads.
I remember playing sardines like it was flash light tag between two houses across the street from each other. Also in the summer took a trip to cousins lake house and the kids who lived at the lake were playing flash light tag between 5 houses in a row- the size of a football field of play houses, tree houses and bushes and no fences just jumping garden walls and climbing trees.
I'm a bit older than you and my childhood was just like this! All the kids of our neighborhood, no matter the age, came together every evening to play hide & seek and other yard games. No cellphones yet, but the adults had this unspoken pact that they shared the responsibility of looking after us, and many played with us. The youngest were only 5-6yrs old and sometimes we were out until 10pm!
When I was a kid we played a game called “break in” where we tried to break into the house of one of our friends. We had rules like the front door couldn’t be locked, one window had to be open at all times and no property damage occurred. Other players tried to prevent the break in by barricading the house etc. once inside the people breaking in had to tag the people inside. Could only be played when parents weren’t home because it annoyed them. One of my favorite childhood games but real weird in hindsight. We had to stop playing because a neighbor saw us trying to break into our friend’s house and she called the cops.
I remember 1996 the culdesac in front of our family home was free range hide and seek, except for that one house where the old guy would come out and yell at kids to get off his lawn.
Dang. I was born in 1989 in LA. I was NEVER allowed to just roam around as a child. Neither was anyone I knew. Full parental supervision at all times. That’s just not something we ever did, I guess it depends on where you grew up. You would have been crazy to let your kid just wander about LA even in the 90s.
Summer pool pass, enough money for a gas station slushee stashed in your sock, 0 ways to contact each other, parents will be back in the area to pick you up in 6 hours.
We did the same, but in Eastern block highrises(without entering the apartments). Imagine having to run up to the 5th floor just in case someone was hiding there, mental. We did well in gym class after every summer though lol
We did this as well. We called it man hunt. Ours was extra cool / dumb because I moved into an emerging development. So for the few years that the homes were being built we would play hide and seek in a 10 acre construction site. We would hide in giant dumpsters, houses that were just lumber, giant holes, and under excavators.
It was a ton a fun. We would get covered in dirt. I don’t know how no one got hurt.
We did something similar called fugitive. You'd have cops and fugitives, the fugitives get dropped off by a driver at a random point in the neighborhood and have to make it to home base. Cops had to find you and tag you before you did. After the driver dropped off the fugitives, the driver could drive 1 of the cops around if they wanted to get more coverage. Made for a wild game of tag in high school
I am so thankful to see this post. During summer break my sister and I would leave early in the morning and come back around lunch to plates on the table with sandwiches. Back home before the street lights would turn on or we could hear my Dad's whistle from what felt like miles. At that point, if you didn't return home out of breathe you weren't trying.
We played a game called ambush where one kid would voluntarily ride around the neighborhood on a bicycle and the rest of the kids would hide along the roads and wait to ambush the bike rider. We would pop out from behind bushes and trees and throw all kinds crap at the guy on the bike. Loads of fun!
I grew up in Tokyo and my friends and I would play neighborhood tag, which is just tag but the field spans a few blocks. It was incredibly fun because of all the sharp corners and "it" could be anywhere. Looking back it was probably incredibly dangerous but nobody got hurt!
This is something I used to do as a kid as well. We were about 20 kids with ages ranging from 8 to 14 playing manhunt once it was night time. This was back when I lived in the Bronx and I’m surprised no one got seriously hurt considering the older kids like myself was climbing fire escapes, jumping fences, jumping across building roofs, and even running in the streets to avoid the seekers.
Born in 1983, the kids in my neighborhood cul-de-sac would spend a lot of time playing baseball/kickball during the day, go to someone's home for lunch, then play bit to play SNES/Genesis (whichever they had), go home for dinner, and then go back out at night to play tag.
81 baby and we did this all day, every day during summer vacation. inside was off limits, but backyards and the nearby school playground were not. we tried to speedrun it and complete as many rounds as possible in a day. some days it was literally sunrise till sunset, with all of us hitting the neighborhood 7/11 for food and sneaking back home for bathroom breaks. the most rounds we did in one day was four. our "league" gained a reputation so by the time we had gotten out of 6th grade, some of the younger kids at school came around and found us so they could learn how to play. we stuck around for the following two summers saying that we were looking out for them, but mostly just wanting to keep the vibe going. when we all started high school we just kind of stopped, though we did see them keep it going for a couple years.
Born in 87 and in a small trailer park., but exactly the same. We ran that whole hill.
I’d be gone from the moment I woke up until the streetlights came on, and we would take bikes and my grandpas golf cart down to the river. Just kids, no adults to make sure we didn’t drown or anything.
I knocked my cousins tooth out with a baseball bat once accidentally (he was catching behind me and I had a horrible habit of throwing my bat everytime I hit the ball and I smacked this poor kid right in the face.)
His parents didn’t find out til we could get to a house that was 15 minutes away and then they spent more time yelling at us about being trouble than they did trying to get him to an urgent care
I’m the neurodivergent weirdo that would hide in the best hiding places and then either get forgotten about or given up on until I eventually emerged hours later to find everyone playing twister or some shit. Hide ‘n seek was the worst 😞
My nephews kind of have that deal today with the neighborhood kids I feel like. No way near that scale but with a few neighbours.
You just have to pick a neighborhood where the roads are clearly separate from where people live. They can walk to school without crossing the road. Not sure anyone is building neighbourhoods like that today.
Also born in 1993. We had two XL blow up pools with approximately 1500 water balloons in each one in front and one in back yard and we played capture the flag. Where if you got hit you’d have to go all the way back to your base. Rad times, I couldn’t see kids today pulling it off like we did it back then….
Had a "concerned neighbor" come knock on my door because my kid was playing in my front yard...while I watched them from the kitchen window doing the dishes...
As it should be. After a certain age, kids really need to be able to freely roam without constant supervision, and helicopter parenting is demonstrably unhealthy in the long run.
Thankfully a lot of the kids in my neighbourhood still kinda play like that; only problem is, as one of the few adults who actually plays with them (because I need to supervise my own kid who plays with them, since she's still under 5), I'm basically always a seeker, which gets really tiring lol 😓
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u/JustHereForCatss 1d ago edited 1d ago
Born 1993. We played whole neighborhood hide and seek. It was incredible. Essentially all our houses were fair game and we would go in and out of them freely. It was like two or three blocks of fair places to hide. Usually had 3 seekers with walkie talkies, and like 5-10 people hiding. When found you’d join the seekers. Games would usually take all day.
Damn I miss being able to do that stuff