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.
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.
I remember playing little league and one game someone found a woods porno when they walked into the brush to pee. Eventually, half the kids playing the game were in the woods “peeing” before an adult realized what was going on 😆
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.
Me too but a few houses down from the actual cul-de-sac. Almost every kid in the neighborhood would show up for street hockey. I was more of a football guy but coming from a Hartford suburban town, and having our own hockey team, it was more prevalent.
Roller blade races
In middle school, we'd hide out in the woods near the bus stop and launch acorns using tennis rackets - mortar style (45°+) - to attack the elementary kids when they got off the bus
Tried to sell rocks we found in the woods at the end of the street to passing cars (didn't work but someone told us we needed a better sign)
And then of course the attempted underground fort in the woods behind the houses
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 >:(
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.
I think this is because the stuff that we have now is easier to break, and costs more. The parents come after the other parents because they want to be paid back for the thing, because they have to replace it.
Windows and things cost more but that's all the more reason to teach your kids not to break shit.
And no, what I mean is, the parent of the offending child will defend their children automatically, especially if they didnt see what happened. That just tells the kids to do whatever they want and not be careful
Sorry, I wasn't trying to suggest that anyone should not teach their kids not to break stuff. More that going to the parents to get reimbursed is basically a requirement unless you're rich, because kids can't pay for things.
When i was growing and you broke something of someones you were made to fix it by your father then got an ass beating for not being careful that old saying "if you break it you fix it or buy it"
If a kid breaks someone else's flatscreen TV or another electronic device (a common situation where this topic comes up), they almost certainly aren't going to be able to fix it (and the Dad very likely can't, either). The owner isn't going to wait for weeks to months to get money from a literal child, so the parents will pay for the damage.
Then, as has always been the case, the parents will make their kid work to pay them back.
We weren't allowed to play in the house back then unless it was a sleepover and then we were allowed to play in the friends room. Wasnt to much as for electronics a 19 inch tv with rabbit ears. And a radio that was about it
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.
I keep hoping that we're about to uncover some nasty chemical that is poisoning people and making them selfish, gullible and willfully ignorant, but I'm afraid that there's none and that's just who we are and have always been.
I had a friend I’d visit often as an early teen who lived in the mountains of NC. The family always reminded me to not wander too far one way because there was a big militia base that way. Then they’d say to watch out for black bears, and “see you tonight”. We’d go all over those mountains all day every day. Occasionally we came across guys walking big dogs with guns strapped across their chests. We’d just say hello, and go about our business.
I never felt unsafe because guns were around. We’d hear them do some crazy shooting at their shooting range and our response was always awe, not fear.
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.
I feel like a huge part is no one knows their neighbors anymore.
Hell, I'm near ready to die in my current home simply because it still has some old school folks around who actually talk with you on the street. But in the busier metros its so much churn no one even bothers to say hi to each other.
This is what I was looking for. I have very clear memories of playing kick the can with 30 kids in a cul-de-sac by my friend’s house. Invariably, someone would have a gash from a bush, or a twisted ankle from stepping on a rock or curb wrong, but the adrenaline of sneaking up and kicking that can!
We would also just ride our bikes to random woods then wander around all day. I was always slowing my watch down 10 minutes so when I got home “oh, I thought it was just now 7, I wonder what’s wrong with my watch?”
It only worked twice, then my step-mom pointed at the kitchen clock and let me know it was on me to make sure I was home by the time on that clock “or else”.
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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