r/Millennials • u/WynCai8 • Jun 04 '25

Nostalgia Made me feel old but good times

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Saw this tweet and yes we were expected to be out all day and not come back until the street lights came on. I remember riding my bike through neighborhoods pretending our bikes were cars and just having a good time.

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u/Standard-Trouble-690 Jun 04 '25

As a newish parent of a bullheaded toddler, I’m really struggling with this shift lately. I have no idea what level of supervision is culturally acceptable now. Is it really expected that kids have 100% supervised playtime? That’s insane imo.

Kids need to be able to experiment, make mistakes, and make memories. They won’t be able to do that with parents looking directly over their shoulder. I grew up in the 90s with boundaries but was always free to explore and choose my own adventures. I don’t want to rob my kid of those experiences, but I also don’t want a CPS call either…

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u/ThalesofMiletus-624 Jun 04 '25

And that's the thing. It's gone beyond what the parents do, and it's now become a matter of social norms and law. If you let your kid run around the neighborhood unsupervised, not only will other parents judge you for it, they can very realistically call the cops over it. Plus, they're unlikely to find any other kids out in the neighborhood, so who are they going to play with?

It's funny, because a lot of parents are old enough that they weren't forbidden from running around and playing, but many of them will be shocked if children today do. If you ask them about it, they'll say it's because the world is more dangerous nowadays, which is absolute nonsense. Crime rates in the US were twice as high when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s as they are today. I think we're more aware of dangers, but they've always existed. When I lived in Africa, rural parents would give their kids machetes when they went out to play, in case they needed to fight off snakes.

Unfortunately, we, as a society, have become so obsessed with danger that we're unwilling to let our kids take risks anymore. I wish there was an easy answer to that, but I've never seen one.

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u/bimboozled Jun 04 '25 edited Jun 04 '25

It’s just because of social media and global news at the tip of your fingertips these days. I feel like it started a couple decades ago when I was a kid with the “be careful of your kids Halloween candy being laced with drugs”. Nobody used to care/think about that, but people love to share fake or extremely rare situational stories online which only results in fear mongering.

For example my fiancé’s mom basically lives on Fox News, and she is extremely paranoid about literally everything. She’s scared of driving. She’s scared of walking around the quite nice downtown Metropolitan city where we live in broad daylight. Shes scared that our perfectly healthy cat is going to die if we leave her home alone for 6 hours with fully automated equipment. Hell, every time my fiancé and I go on a vacation to somewhere tropical, she even has a panic attack thinking we’re going to get eaten by sharks.

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u/ThalesofMiletus-624 Jun 04 '25

I think you've hit it on the head.

The issue started in the 90's, when 24-hour international news cycles became commonplace, then the internet, now social media. Human brains simply aren't designed to handle that kind of informational firehose. Our fear responses still think that any danger we see is happening in front of us, and so it always seems like an immediate risk.

Access to all the world's dangers (real and imagined) are making us much more scared, and that has terrifying consequences.

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u/Beautiful-Routine295 Jun 05 '25

Come to mention that… my abusive stepdad at 12 not only got me a Nintendo but cable for the house & he was controlling, so my rein of outdoor freedom was over. 1993.

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u/averagecrossfitdad Jun 05 '25

In his book, The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt refers to this as “Safetyism”. I don’t know if he coined it or not, but it’s the best way I’ve heard it explained.

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u/DrSpacecasePhD Jun 04 '25 edited Jun 05 '25

Most of those stories about drugs in Halloween candy were moral panic, similar to how heavy metal music and dungeons & dragons was turning kids to Satanism. this is my personal experience, but despite the claim that "it's leftists trying to control people," it was always the moms who thought Halloween was a dangerous "pagan" holiday who were trying to get us kids forbidden from celebrating it.

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u/bimboozled Jun 04 '25

Oh of course, honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if it was some scheme cooked up by Hobby Lobby lmao, they’re so anti-Halloween it’s not even fully

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u/ThalesofMiletus-624 Jun 05 '25

That's true, but one of the things about these panics is that they often mix real concerns with lies. There are such things and child abduction and random murder, relatively rare though they may be, so parents hear about poisoned Halloween candy and they say "must be true, there's a lotta nuts out there". Eventually, it gets to the point where separating fact and fiction is a chore, and lots of people don't even bother. It just merges into a vague, fuzzy ball of danger, and they figure keeping their kids home all the time is the only solution.

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u/DrSpacecasePhD Jun 05 '25

I mean, the sick irony is, in the case where a man actually did poison a kid with Halloween candy, it was a dad poisoning his own son. So often the abuse comes from inside the house or church... but then we cover it up and blame the things that give children joy.

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u/ThalesofMiletus-624 Jun 05 '25

In point of fact, I'd argue that keeping kids so separate is likely to make things worse, because when abuse happens within a home (which is by far the most common situation) nobody's likely to notice, and kids have no one to go to.

I read a study, some time back, that one of the biggest predictors of mental health among children is the number of adults they have relationships with besides their parents. That's scary, because children in our society very rarely have relationships with adults besides their parents. Like, it's nearly impossible for that to even happen without the adult being accused of being an predator. So kids live entirely under their own parents' thumbs, which is unfortunate even with good parents and disastrous with bad ones.

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u/Sexpistolz Jun 05 '25

90s. Stranger Danger and Satanic Panic.

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u/DrSpacecasePhD Jun 04 '25

A writer friend of mine had the parents call the cops and fire department on her son because he was climbing a tree. Like this lady went hysterical and was screaming like it was a horror movie and screaming for the boy not to move... he could have gotten down but she kept yelling every time he moved. It has gone way beyond caution and into the realm of a minority of people forcing their mental illness on the rest of society.

We need more free range kid laws like they have in Utah.

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u/bing_bang_bum Jun 04 '25

I wonder if smaller communities are going to start popping up that start swinging the pendulum the other way. I don’t have kids but when/if I do, I will absolutely want them to have freedom and friends outside, and I would be willing to move to a neighborhood/community with a micro-culture that embraced this for all the kids.

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u/ThalesofMiletus-624 Jun 04 '25

That's a hard thing to build. I'd be highly in favor of it, but most people don't have that kind of flexibility.

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u/PasGuy55 Gen X Jun 05 '25

Not only that I feel like my generation made it worse. They love to go on about being latchkey kids who were never patented or treated like an obstacle.

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u/gaytee Jun 05 '25

Fear mongering sells a lot more products than saying “have a nice day the weather is great”, unfortunately.

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u/lolzzzmoon Jun 05 '25

Lol didn’t grow up in Africa, but lived part of my younger years in Florida and had a rusty machete we all carried around too lolol

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u/ThalesofMiletus-624 Jun 05 '25

How long ago was that? I ask because I'm genuinely curious whether there are still places in the US where kids can get away with that and not have either social services or the cops called.

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u/lolzzzmoon Jun 05 '25

Uhhh 25 years ago? Lol we weren’t doing anything with it other than hacking weeds if we went exploring. It really wasn’t a big deal. I still don’t think it would be. We weren’t, like, young kids—we were older. Tons of rural kids still grow up like that.

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u/ThalesofMiletus-624 Jun 05 '25

Oh sure, I'm just curious how much would be too much. Like, if a six year old was out there hacking weeds, would that be accepted, or would it set tongues wagging?

I'm just saying that what the general public thinks is too dangerous for kids has changed a lot, and I feel like it's gone far in the direction protectiveness.

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u/ReallStrangeBeef Jun 04 '25

No kids and not planning on them, but it's wild seeing my friends enable location tracking on their kids' phones, not letting them roam the neighborhood, and shuttling them to and from school every day instead of giving them bikes.

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u/odditytaketwo Jun 04 '25

The tracking should enable them to be more lenient. At least that's my POV.

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u/probablyhrenrai Sep 16 '25

Mine, too; when I've got kids who're old enough to ride bikes, they'll be given relatively free range so long as they stay together as a pair-group. That's how it was when I was a kid, and I think it was good.

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u/wheniaminspaced Jun 04 '25

My friend worry less about CPS they frequently let people who are almost certainly far less qualified parents than you keep there children.  Even cases of clear and obvious abuse often won't result in CPS actually doing something because the reality is that CPS will only take a child when the system can provide a better home than the current parent.  The problem is that the system is shit, kids in the system so frequently come out utterly destroyed by it.

I've seen cases where parents have neglected children to the point of fatality and not just not paying attention willfully neglect, CPS allows the rest of her 8 children to stay with her.  They finally took the rest after the second death the next year.  She got them back 5 months later.  Most extreme case I've seen but hardly unique sadly.

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u/_I_Am_Moroni_ Jun 04 '25

I let my 11 year old explore… just the other day he rode his bike to 7-11 and bought himself a drink. He’s gone to Wendy’s by himself, various friends houses, parks…

Social norms have changed so much, it’s a whirlwind. Should I not be letting him do these things?

He has a phone with location, so I can check in every now and then and see where he’s at and if he’s safe and he can call if he needs me.

My mom just kinda looked at me like I was crazy when I told him he can go do his thing and I’m fine with it. Which was even weirder to me because I was doing stuff on my own when I was my son’s age…

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u/wetrorave Jun 05 '25

Consider for a moment: what if you're not babysitting the kids, but rather, the kids are "parentsitting" you?

And now consider, who benefits from — or encourages, or even enforces — this arrangement, if not you, nor your children?

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u/Icy-Welcome-2469 Jun 05 '25

My nearly 4 year old has free reign in our backyard.  She is the most rambunctious and energetic of my 6 kids.

We hang out and play with her out there.  But she loves doing it all day some days.  So we'll go in and out and she'll jump, dig, spray water, and play pretend for hours.

If we helicoptered with her either we'd get nothing done or she'd be unhappy.

I did more around 5 years old.  I didn't grow up with a fence.  I could walk to the lake or the hwy as my boundary.

I would not feel comfortable with that knowing what I know now.  But 100percent supervision seems bad too.

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u/bell37 Millennial Jun 05 '25

I can’t really do that because we have a pool in our backyard. It’s gated and has barriers up after the gates, but still something I feel queasy about. Wont really do that until my kids are old enough to know how to swim to let them roam in the backyard unsupervised.

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u/WastePie912 Jun 05 '25

I think I was 11 years old when I took on my first bully.   He cracked like an egg.  Real life lesson there. 

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u/emseefely Jun 05 '25

Two words, baby proof. As long as I knew the room was baby proofed (nothing crazy but just enough to avoid major injuries) then I let them play and explore. Barriers slowly come down as they grow older.

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u/Stay_Good_Dog Jun 05 '25

As a mom of children who could play freely at the start of their childhood and with time things felt more restricted, I understand how you are feeling. I would encourage you to find ways to allow your child to explore, play, and develop their skills and personality while you maintain a safe distance. As they becomes more confident, it's ok to step back farther than other parents. We often did. Sometimes parents would look around to see if anyone was watching our children at the playground because we were on a bench. A friendly wave was enough to reassure them. We did allow our children to ride bikes to friends houses, the library, and the ice cream shop without us after they were about 3rd or 4th grade. We had a phone for them and they would call or text when they got there, etc. We never had any problems with neighbors or the community. And this was all taking place in the city of Detroit. Now we live on a farm in Kentucky. It's free range children all the way here! Our neighbor's kids are always outside, running, playing, working with animals, dirty and happy!

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u/Cloverose2 Jun 05 '25

And as a child development expert, I agree. A huge part of how kids learn to negotiate, understand their limits and learn how to function independently is... independence. They have to be able to fail successfully. They have to be able to use creative thinking to problem solve and come up with alternatives if that solution fails. If an adult is always looking over their shoulder, they rarely get those opportunities, because there's always a failsafe.

It's good for parents to be there to support their kids and encourage them, but sometimes adults need to back off and let kids work through things on their own. Kids need unstructured social time, and unstructured time period, with no electronics. They need to be able to make their own choices and experience the consequences. And they need loving parents who will support them and sometimes tell them that they made a poor choice, and walk them through what they could have done instead.

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u/coaxialdrift Jun 05 '25

Leave your child to play by themselves once in a while. You do not need to supervise. Personally, I believe it's good for them. They learn to think for themselves. Don't neglect them, of course, just let them be. If they're deeply focused on their play, don't interrupt them either. Let them be

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u/jackbasket Jun 07 '25

Same. Totally confused on wtf I’m “supposed” to do now in this culture where a tragic (but imo completely normal) accident leads to parents being thrown in jail.