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.
Gen x with boomer parents who barely parented, so…. Everything?
How’s this for a list? I swear every one of these is honest to god true and I did them all.
- jarts
- Being kicked out of the house for the entire day with zero supervision
- ice fishing / pond hockey. We decided if the ice was safe or not. Like 10 year old kids…
- being allowed to ride our bikes on literally any road except for highways
- riding bikes on the roads with no helmets
- being allowed to go literally anywhere we could get to on our bikes
- being given firecrackers
- carrying and using real guns on the farm at about 10+ years old unsupervised (22s and 410s - the 12 gauge unsupervised wasn't until I was older - like 16ish)
- riding with no seat belts
- riding in the back of a pickup truck
- riding in the way back of a station wagon
- riding on the edge of a tailgate with our legs dangling over (we used to drag our sneakers on the road and make white lines by burning off the rubber soles)
- riding on the side edges of the bed of a pickup
- holding ladders and whatnot onto the roof & tailgate of a pickup (like not tied down - the kids held it down)
- working / playing all day in the summer sun with no suntan lotion
- making jumps and going off them with bicycles
- jumping over our friends with said bicycles and jumps
- riding three wheelers (they stopped making them because they were so dangerous)
- mean green machines
- candy cigarettes
- buying real cigarettes for our fathers from a vending machine
- drinking from the hose
- we we had “real” ninja stars and we hucked those things at everything
- we had real knives at very young ages - like maybe 5?
- I had a real slingshot early. Like 5ish. That thing could kill. Dangerous af.
- I always had a bow and could use it as soon as I could draw it. My friend was lucky enough to have a compound bow. Totally cool to walk around with bows and shoot shit.
- I learned to use a chainsaw around 10yr old
- drove tractors unsupervised at about 8 yr old
- drove tractors on the road
- learned to drive a real car (Datsun pickup truck - stick shift) at about 10. Unsupervised on the farm. Not allowed on the road. We used to drive it fast and do donuts and shit. Parents and grandparents didn’t care - we were just having some fun. “Be careful and don’t crash into trees” was all I ever got warned about.
- siphoned gas with a hose
- sprayed herbicides pesticides and fungicides as a teenager with no mask
- being allowed to camp outside in the woods for the night with friends
- being allowed to make campfires at said campouts (we cooked hotdogs and ate them)
- going to concerts with older brothers (anyone’s older brother) at young ages (basically once you started getting into music - 10ish?)
- carrying a house key with you since day 1 of kindergarten
- being a latchkey kid - I came home alone and took care of myself and my younger sister by about 3rd grade. Before that we got dropped off at grandmas house after school. If we had a problem we just called grandma on the phone.
- allowed to cook anything anytime since about 5
- it was a responsibility to light the wood stove and keep the fire going in the winter.
- mowed lawns unsupervised since a young age. 8ish maybe?
- used weed whackers about the same time
- had a dirt bike at 13ish. Allowed to go anywhere unsupervised
- totally cool to swim unsupervised or even alone once I learned how to swim
- totally cool to eat things that had fallen on the ground - the 5 second rule definitely applied
- it was ok to drink at home a little bit with friends as a teenager. Like a sleepover or out in the woods. Better than drinking and driving. Getting shitfaced wasn’t cool, but drinking some of dad’s beer / liquor was - as long as we didn’t drive. Party at a friends house? Gonna be booze? Ok if parents are around and nobody drives.
- when tromping around the neighborhood-I didn’t have to tell my parents where I was. They didn’t care. There were no cell phones either. If our parents wanted us they’d yell. If that didn’t work, they’d call neighbors and once they found out where we were last seen - that neighbor would yell.
- people had chicken pox parties (I never went to one but they happened - I think I got it from my sister)
- monkey bars - big ass ones at least 15 feet high. Hard packed dirt underneath. Totally could bust your head open or break your back if you fell off one. Wicked dangerous. Was actually scary to climb to the top but you bet your ass we all did it, otherwise you were a pussy and got picked on forever.
- huge Fn seesaws - like would go up in the air maybe 6 or seven feet
- those spin-y things in the playground-dunno what they were called. You know all the kids piled on, others grabbed the bars and spun the shit out of it. We all got dizzy and tried not to whack our heads falling off.
I dunno, that’s all just off the top of my head.
Play outside
We’d grab our bikes and ride across town. If they saw our bikes were gone they knew we’d be back later.
After the abduction and murder of two local girls, this wasn’t so accepted anymore. Kids were still out and about, but you’d get grilled about where you go, who you’re with, where are you coming home. You were supposed to be at someone’s house, mum would call and make sure that’s where you were. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bega_schoolgirl_murders
I don’t see any kids out around town anymore now though. Just the ones that walk from the bus stop to their house after school. That might just say more about todays youth culture though.
I'm GenX, my entire childhood was dangerous.
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.
Back in the 60s, i was a Free-Range kid. On on a nice non-school day, I would go out after breakfast on my bike, and be gone all day, without any money, a watch, ID, cell phone (didn't exist back then), anything, and I'd be gone all day. The only rule was to be home by 5 pm.
Nobody knew where I was, who I was speaking to, or anything. If i bumped into friends, I'd hang out for a while, but if I needed to know the time, I'd ask some stranger. If I was thirsty, I'd knock on a random door and ask for a glass of water. Once, I stopped at the end of a driveway to watch some guy doing woodworking in his open garage. He saw me watching and this stranger invited me into garage, and showed me his tools, and what he was building. Turned out he was a decent guy, and I probably reminded him of his grandson, but what if he wasn't? My primary fear was running into the Robolotto boys, but as long as I didn't see one of them, I was happy.
This was routine for years, and it was the same for my friends. I started doing this when I was about 7 years old.
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.
Too many to count, but I’ll leave you with one of the least dangerous: woods porn.
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.
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
GenX - here's a few:
Lawn darts. Unsupervised play over 1/4 mile from home at age 8. Unsupervised play over 1/2 mile from home at age 10 with a BB gun. BB guns as paintball weapons. (no eyes were put out). Riding a bicycle to school on a highway shoulder from grade 7-9. Latchkey kid. Going fishing with a neighbor (retired man) as an adolescent for 2-2 summers. (Ps. We fished and talked.)
Holy shit man, so much. So so so much. Honestly I'm surprised I survived childhood.
We used to free climb cliffs. One of my step brothers took a pretty bad fall, about 60 feet down. He cartwheeled and banged against the cliff face, then landed in a sitting position. His right arm was torn open from armpit to elbow, and the bones were sticking out. Compound break. We had to walk him though about 2 miles of desert to get back to civilization and get help. He survived with no other major injuries, but that was a close one.
I used to go camping out in the desert by myself as a kid. From like 10 to 14 years old. I'd take a bow and arrows with me and just stay out there for a few days with my parents thinking I was spending a few days at a friends house. So much shit could've gone wrong, and sometimes it almost did.
Then there's the normal kid shit like playing with fire and chemicals, almost blowing ourselves up or burning everything else down.
People wonder why I never had kids and all I can do is think about all the shit I got up to as a kid. I don't need that kind of stress.
I'm an Australian, as a 16 ur old I'd slong my gun over mu shoulder and rodee my trail bike up the range to hunt for pet food. Drape a gutted dead roo over the back of my motobike and bring it jwome, meat for the dogs and skin it. No one batted an eyelid or said anything.
Now I'd be labeled a terrorist, have police helicopters chase me down and be in jail for decades.
Are you asking about things that weren't considered dangerous when I was a kid, but are now? I always thought that was largely a cliche? Pretty much everything that I did as a child that is, or could be, considered dangerous today was considered dangerous then, too.
One thing that does come to mind: I don't think the general public back then was as aware of the danger of second hand smoke. So, exposing kids to cigarette smoke (by smoking indoors, in cars, or even going to public places with smoking sections) didn't seem to be considered risky or dangerous.
Otherwise, pretty much everything I did as a kid that would be considered dangerous today would also have been considered dangerous back then in the days when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and the wheel had only recently been invented. That includes activities sanctioned by adults, like riding in the bed of a pickup truck, and those which weren't, like mixing random chemicals together to see what happens.
Created flashpowder from 70% Potassium Perchlorate, and 30% 400-Mesh German Dark Alumium powder then subsequently blew shit (mostly earth) up. I also set a lot of stuff on fire. I created Molotov Cocktails out of gasoline and styrofoam and threw them at a block wall of a barn-ruin in the back yard. I also remember creating a Napthalene charge(think cardboard paper-towel roll stuffed with ground up mothballs sitting atop of some Black powder) that was suppose to create a big fireball and though I had no black powder prepared, I did have some excess flash powder I needed to get rid of so I used that. -For the briefest, loudest moment my buddies and I lit up the night sky.
--It was dangerous back then but it was before 9/11 and a visit from the feds was highly unlikely. Afterwards it became much harder to acquire German Dark 400 Mesh Aluminium Powder and today I would wholeheartedly expect a visit from an Alphabet agency. I did scald my face when nickel(bottle)-rocket fuel (made of carmelized sugar and potassium nitrate) ignited in my face as I was melting it together.
Walking to school alone.
Make pipe bombs. It was dangerous then, too.
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 😆
My grandfather was building a deck on his house and had a bunch of lumber piled up for it. I had the genius idea that I could use it to make "roller coaster" tracks down the steep hill behind their house. Then I had my brother climb into our wagon to test it out. He was about 1/3 of the way down the hill when I realized that he was heading for the tree line with no way to stop... so I ended up sprinting after him and flipping the whole thing over.
A lot of LSD
Occasionally we would walk the mile home from elementary school. We'd sometimes stop to play in the creek along the way. We made sure not to do that one in spring though because there was a flash flood one year while a schoolmate was playing down there and drowned him.
Don't ask any Gen-Xer or older. Surviving dangerous stuff was a minute-to-minute activity for us.
Before the age of 20: Made gunpowder and made our own enormous firecrackers/hand grenades, played with matches, climbed to the very top of very tall trees, whittled with knives all day long, cutting into high pressure car tyres with knives, made “bazookas” with firework rockets and shot them after other kids on the street, made petrol powered go-carts and raced them on public streets, disappeared out to play all day and came home for dinner, swam in lakes, climbed rocks with sheer drops into the bay, disturbed enormous ant-nests and got bitten all over (I’m sorry ants, that was a shit thing to do), dipped our fingers in melted wax, placed small stones on train tracks and waited for them to get pulverised, played a crazy game that involved throwing knives into the ground right next to bare feet, chopped firewood with sharp axes, burnt large holes in the carpet in my room (turned out a piece of tin foil was not sufficient insulation for burning sparker powder), did a lot of sleeping outside, threw each other into forests of nettles for fun, crawled through drain pipes running under the road, skateboarded down hills on country side roads, built our own skateboard ramp out of doors and nails that were sticking out ready to impale us, walked on thin ice because we liked the cracking it caused, did night time hikes through swamps, wild water rafting, sprayed burning gasoline out of bicycle pumps, played with aerosol cans and lighters, flew gliders age 15, got drunk a lot from 15 onwards (not at the same time as flying), took down the school computers with a homegrown “virus” (that’s being generous, a few scripts that modified autoexec.bat to make all the school’s computers print “teachers are dumb” instead of booting; it still caused them to call in “the experts”, got into fights and ended up going to A&E after being hit in the head with an iron rod, raided countless pear and apple plantations, played with magnifying glasses in the sharp sun and lit up a great deal of forest floors, rode cars down old train tracks, shot guns, shot air rifles, shot bows, shot cross bows, shot sling shots, maced each other, built large swings that threw us over a cliff side and four-five meter drops into water, played around inside a nuclear-protected naval bunker and accidentally activated the emergency lock down alarm, tipped over an army truck after being let out to to “do a bit of terrain driving” by our staff sergeant, set up and blew up 600 kg of TNT to demonstrate the effect of a MRLS cluster bomb in front of the Danish Queen (fun story, it blew her hat off from the pressure wave), fells asleep behind the wheel after a full day of firefighting training and ended up putting my army jeep into a field, made friends with a Soviet diplomat who tried to pump my brother and I for information about our dad’s job as a military attaché (unfortunately the colonel got sent home to Russia after being made persona non grata) - though he did teach us how to ski in the process, set up our own 380V electrics for a enormous LAN party we organised and electrocuted myself, dialled into a lot of weird BBSes to exchange all sorts of pirated software with anonymous network users, war-dialled various remote systems and tried to hack our way into them, drove all over Europe in various wrecks (accidentally smuggled weed over several international borders, which was especially frustrating as I didn’t touch the stuff and didn’t even know it had been brought), did magic mushrooms and had amazing times and dreadful bad trips (fuck MAO inhibitors), went exploring in a fenced off zone that carried nuclear warning signs (Paldiski, not long after the wall came down), detonated gas canisters of all shapes and sizes, etc etc
It was a fun childhood, to be honest, and I’m grateful for it.
Not so much as a child, but as a teenager. Once I could drive I didn’t quite have the same level of supervision and was really really able to have a lot more freedom. I’m pretty cautious person in general, but had a friend that was definitely not and was obsessed with college parties in high school.
We lived about an hour and a half from a college town so every now and then my friend wanted to drive up there and check out the parties. To be honest, there really weren’t a lot of parties going on. However, she did remember the house that had a party that she had gone to previously, so we would just show up at this house every now and then and hang out with the guys that lived there (party or no party).
Here we are 16 or 17-year-old girls showing up to these random college guys’ house. Thankfully, nothing ever happened, but it certainly would’ve been easy for something to happen.
Play on the roof 🤷♂️
rode on the trunk of my dad's sw with several other children.
When I was a kid I was told that if I professed my love for Jesus publicly that I would be ridiculed and possibly physically harmed. I grew up in suburban America
Pretty sure people still believe that and are teaching that to their kids today.
lol
I used the internet without an ad blocker.
Freedom.
Build a flamethrower with a super soaker. Swim with sharks.
Walk and ride my bike alone to school from about the age of six.
With some friends, I built an “unguided SAM launcher” using some wood, a lot of aluminum foil, some metal rods, and a bunch of model rockets, and we tried to shoot down stunt kites we were flying near it.
We’d have probably gotten DHS called on us if we did it nowadays lol
Dangerous then and especially now, but my oldest brother lit off a firework in our backyard, right near or around when school was getting out. We lived a couple blocks away from an elementary school. It was loud enough that the school thought someone was shooting.
This was mid-late 2000s. I imagine if he did it today, the police would have absolutely arrested him without a second thought.
Made a trebuchet that almost destroyed a neighbor's car. Tried to build a fuel-air bomb out of kerosene and a shotgun shell. Made napalm out of gasoline and styrofoam. Huntes squirrels with a .22 rifle.
Weird childhood.
Ate fried veal brain all the time: it's sooo good! Since the CJD outbreaks that's something we learned not to do.
Tell jokes.
Go outside.
Walk to school.
Lawn darts
Launched real bullets out of my slingshot at a dumpster
To be fair that was still dangerous. One actually went off.
Also dumped rubber cement over a kids bike and lit it on fire
Play on the streets unsupervised have knives, playing on building sites and similar and that was about at a guess 6 or 7. We also played in the local park and generally got up to mischief.
Walking alone around the river bank, with a kitchen knife on my belt. I was "adventuring".
Drank tap water.
Surfing
