2w ago

What did you do as a child that would be considered dangerous today?

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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.
- I'm curious, how old are you?
  I'm 35 and had pretty much the exact same experience, but I also chalk a lot of that up to living out in the boonies.
  
  51 Born in 74. Dead smack in the middle of GenX. Parents had me when they were real young. To be fair, they are good parents. We were pretty poor, they got divorced and should have never married in the first place, and they do all the boomer things that drives everyone crazy. But, they cared about me and my sister, gave us more than they could afford and we deserved, and I think I had more love from them than most kids got.
  But boy-when it came to making decisions about safety. Man, what was considered normal and ok just blows my mind. ;)
- As someone that had a sterile childhood of all work and fenced play in Singapore - that sounds like an amazing and well-lived childhood, for the most part.
  
  It was a good childhood from an independence building, learning to explore standpoint. People my age around me are 1) very independent 2) confident 3) clever. It was also a hell of a lot of fun.
  But dangerous. Like some guardrails could have been in place without really affecting anything. I also didn’t feel this way - I had good parents. But a lot of kids were pretty much just straight up abandoned on a daily basis. Lots of resentment towards their parents, it’s tough having a parent that literally didn’t give a shit about you. I unfortunately think a lot of kids fell into that category.
- Are you from rural NZ, cause that sounds exactly like my childhood but we made home made pipebombs and moved onto making our own explosives
  Also rafted from my house to a mates, some 10km down river - one time coming off and ripping my leg open, the scar is dome 70mm x 30mm. Good times
  
  RI in the states.
  Funny how things so far away can be so similar.
  Man, what was it with pipe bombs? It was totally a thing to do. Everybody has a story about them. For anyone younger reading - no parent thought that was safe. But so many kids tried to make them…
  A kid on my street blew his hand off doing that. For real, I don’t know the details. Me and a couple of other kids strolled up to his crew (they were older and generally got into more trouble than I did). They were out in the woods and he was cutting a galvanized pipe with a hacksaw. When I figured out what he was doing, I took off. I literally got picked on for that - for about a week. I could not have been a bigger pussy. Then he was in the hospital with no hand. Then I was ok to hang out with again - someone with brains - nobody screwed around with pipe bombs any more after that.
  We didn’t have a lot of water near us - just some ponds. We did stupid shit, but 1) not considered safe and 2) generally not that bad in the big scheme of things. Kids drowned a lot in pools and ponds. The items above around water were changing. My mom wasn’t a fan, but my dad was all “you’re just moming him to death”. So I suppose those are half truths - mom didn’t think they were safe - but I was still allowed.
  
  I see that we are the same age, even if on opposite sides of the world.
- i'm brazilian and 40, put a check mark on a lot of things on the list.
- The last one is merry-go-rounds :)
  
  I would never have thought to call it that but Wiki agrees: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundabout_(play) to me a carousel or merry-go-round is motorized and huge with fake horses to ride on.

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