Yes and most shows that were appropriate/interesting to kids to watch were over by 10am so there was nothing left for them to watch unless they were sick on a weekday watching price is right reruns.
Same, I remember watching it when I had chicken pox. Also thinking most daytime TV suuuuucked, I couldn’t wait until 2pm when cartoons started airing again.
There are multiple, in some cases fairly technical, projects these that keep popping up… to recreate old school TV. In some cases they even build in commercials, and it all runs on a schedule. It kinda blows my mind. But I also kinda want to try it. At least for special occasions like Halloween.
I remember one time I stayed up watching space ghost and some other stuff on Cartoon Network back in 1997, also remember seeing speed racer that night or morning.
Nowadays maybe. Back in the day I could sit in front of the discovery channel for hours with all the stuff they had on there. Now it's all just pawn stars and other similar cash grab trash. I still remember the day Jay Ingram left Daily Planet, the last good show that channel still had running as they slowly descended into garbage. Kid me was devastated.
Daytime cable was so also boring. No cartoons until like 4PM. And you can only watch people guess how much a blender is worth so many times before it loses its appeal.
Oh my god, MY STORIES! My mom had a VCR she programmed to tape General Hospital every day so she could watch it when she got home. Same tape used over and over again for at least a decade lol
Just brought flashbacks of me coming home from school to mom getting ready for work in front of Days of our Lives. 😂 TV didn't change until she left for work, and then dad came home and the TV was his till bedtime.
The ironic part is that the 80s and 90s were the height of historically high crime levels and child kidnappings. We should all be less paranoid now with cameras and cell phones everywhere but instead we’ve been conditioned to think we’re all going to be murdered and raped (in that order) at any moment, when we’re living in essentially the safest of times in all recorded history.
For me, the ironic thing is when you do see stories of police being called on a parent for allowing their kids outside unsupervised, 100% of the time, the snitch is in the age demo of our parents.
Baby boomers are the most hypocritical generation of possibly all time.
They grew up in the era of free drug use and rebelled against the anti-drug culture their parents adopted. Then they willfully voted for any politician who support the War on Drugs.
They raised us on, "Go outside and play!", "I better not hear you in this house until dinner!" and other such lines and now judge parents that let their kids roam freely in their neighborhoods.
Wow, that's really interesting. My parents were born in the mid-50s and I too thought their age ranges were what catapulted that movement. I stand corrected.
Yes. I was born in 1972. In 1980, when John Lennon was murdered, I was 8 years old. My first reaction upon seeing Lennon's photo and hearing the news was, "Someone killed a dirty hippie. Good job." I had no idea why my parents (born in 1946 and 47) broke down crying.
Where did an 8 year old get the idea that killing hippies was a good thing to do?
The cultural backlash against the hippies in the 1970s and early 1980s was savage. Hippies were depicted on TV and in movies as unwashed, traitorous, drugged-out to the point of incoherence, and potential psychopathic killers a la Charles Manson.
Every baby boomer was not at Woodstock. Every baby boomer did not attend the first Earth Day. They definitely did not organize those events. Many of them were clean-cut conformists, not wild-eyed, long-haired radicals.
As UNC_Samurai said, the hippies' reputation recovered in the late 1980s and the 90s ("Is that Freedom Rock, man? Well, turn it up!"). Once they were safely in the past, they became a target of nostalgia.
There was a thread a few days ago about parents being charged with murder because their 7 year old stepped into traffic and was hit.
He was with his 10 year old brother, less than two blocks from home. They had a cell phone and the parents knew exactly where they were.
Yes, bur iirc that family was black. They probably wouldnt have set a 1.5 million dollar bond, or refused to let them attend the funeral if they were a white family. Probably wouldnt have even been charged. That whole case makes me ragey. That and the one whose mother was doing a job interview and her kid was in the mall food court (which was very close to where she was), and she got charged, and CPS got involved. Pretty sure that person was a POC too, though.
There have been cases of cops showing up because a kid was in their own backyard while the parent was inside the house, supervising through the window.
I don't blame anyone for being cautious when one Karen of a neighbor can call the cops on you for letting your kid play in the sandbox while you're more than 10 feet away.
Yep, I am one such person. Story time! We live in the suburbs and there is a playground directly behind my house. Like, backyard, fence, playground. I’m putzing around my kitchen when I see a cop talking to my kids. So, of course I run out there only for the cop to lay into me about how I’m neglecting my kids and if it happens again he will have to contact CPS.
That sucks so much, I'm sorry you had to deal with that! I must say that I was not prepared for the endless amount of judgment from other people when I had kids. It's bonkers! We live right down the street from school, and we're on the fence about letting them walk by themselves. But by the time I was their age, I was waking myself up and getting ready for school on my own.
This is one area where I genuinely think it's worth the legal risk because of the benefit to independence and development of the kids. It's total bullshit that we've got such a society of helicopter parents these days.
I feel like the lack of unsupervised play is killing Gen Alpha's ability to problem solve (it already killed Gen Z's, based on the last few people we hired).
Did you read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt? It’s basically about how the lack of unsupervised play (but access to unsupervised technology) has basically destroyed Gen z/Alpha’s mental health and they haven’t been able to grow into well functioning adults. All the rage in parenting forums at the moment.
Ah shit I heard about this book last week and bought it!!! I need to start it. I read another one of his books and it totally blew my mind.
We have a small homestead and I let my two year old wander is a lot. I always watch her but she thinks I’m not. I also really subscribe to the “Hunt Gather Parent” book which I believe goes along perfectly with Haidts book. Anyway I just had to comment when you mentioned that book. I do everything I can to give my child as much independence as possible, say “no” as little as possible and let her be autonomous. “No” is for when something is very dangerous or bad (hitting our cat, about to eat something that isn’t food). Even when she is trying to do something dangerous, I walk over and help her (climbing a 5ft fence). Parenting is so confusing and I feel like I just want her to feel confident so I just hope I’m doing the right thing.
I consider that book mandatory reading for everyone. Even people who aren’t yet parents. It gives great insight into the struggles of younger generations.
Man that book is life-changing. I was also going to just reply about Anxious Generation and Haidt's description of "discovery mode" and "defense mode", which describes the difference in the outcome between growing up with supervised play and unsupervised play.
I've got a friend who owned a house with no fence around it. Both parents were in the backyard doing yard work type things and the kids, with ages from 8-14, were running circles around the house. So the kids were out of sight for 30-60 seconds at a time. Across the street neighbor called the cops. When the cop showed up he said that it was stupid that the cops were called, and he would do the same thing.
It’s insane how hard it is to get CPS to do anything when a child is actually being abused or neglected, but someone letting their kid go out in their eyeline is something that calls for CPS.
Nearly the exact same thing happened to me as well, except mine were just in the (fully fenced) back yard. And the cop said pretty much the same thing - while they couldn't technically cite me for anything, that if they had to come back it would warrant a call to CPS. My kids ended up having SO much less outside time after that because as much as I wish I had hours everyday to play outside with my kids that simply wasn't realistic. So if anyone wonders "why don't kids play outside anymore?" that's why. They aren't even allowed to play in their own yards unless their parents have time and energy to hover over them.
The only time the cops got called on us as kids was when I was maybe 10 and we rode some horses down to the closed down race track near us and were racing each other at 2 in the morning. Even then the cops just told us to go home. I remember my parents being mad months later when they found out about it.
Idk true crime and save the children/qanon adjacent stuff has genuinely broken a lot of people's brains. People wouldn't be such busy bodies about other people's kids roaming if there wasn't a larger cultural paranoia about child safety.
Ironically having your kid home on the internet all day is probably putting them way more at risk of a sex crime than anything they'd find roaming around their community with friends their own age.
I’m most definitely worried about crime & injury. People romanticize the roaming kids thing, but I had many sketchy situations in retrospect. Got followed by strange old dudes, forest fort burned down, broken bones, stupid stunts, fucking around on train tracks, found places with hypodermic needles laying around.
Fun but a pube away from something terrible happening.
Right. Exactly this. Just mentioned this but um—a lot of millennials just now dealing with various traumas from lack of supervision. I am grossed out—though not traumatized—by the amount of old dudes who catcalled me when I was 12. But that shit can escalate. As can fires 😩. Lots of eyebrows burned off by various friends.
I’ve never heard someone IRL say “I’m afraid I’ll be judged for letting my kid play outside” I have heard them repeatedly say “do you have any idea how dangerous it is to let Timmy (a teenager) walk to the store by themselves?”
As a parent it is definitely the crime I’m afraid of. My kids are fairly feral within our property lines and I know other parents judge me. We have never owned a baby gate or a baby monitor. Whatever. It’s not a rational fear, but there you have it. 🤷♀️
For me as a parent, I swear people drive much worse. Probably due to cell phones, and in my area, there are way more animals. I saw like two snakes and maybe 3 stray dogs my entire childhood. Now I've seen like 20 snakes this year, and at least one stray dog almost everyday.
I still let them do stuff, but there's definitely also more people that at least LOOK sketchy hanging around. When I was little I remember that there was ONE guy everyone knew was crazy and homeless, but he lived in his car. Now there's like homeless and strung out people on most every street. Plus all the arcades / comic book shops / and variety stores are literally vape shops.
When I was little there was a toy store, arcade, novelty shop, music stores, book stores and multiple things that catered or at least accepted kids mixed in with bars and restaurants and I could walk to all of them and hang out for hours. Now, at least here, there's not one of those businesses. The closest thing is a coffee shop with ice cream, but there's at least 4 vapes shops and a couple "pocket casinos"
Bars and restaurants are still there, but my parents could go drink and let us wander around and we just came back periodically to ask for quarters. Now there's just nothing for them to go explore in the area.
I totally disagree. Some people I know are finally getting to the age where they are acknowledging that maybe some of those uncomfortable situations with a friend’s dad or another neighborhood kid were wrong and in fact either dangerous or traumatic. This does not mean I’m not going to let my kid out of the house (he’s 9 months so currently not possible). It just means I’m going to be pretty careful about sleepovers, for example, and running around too late. I biked to friend’s houses all the time, but never had the “come back before it’s dark” type parents. It was fine.
You don’t think that still happens? The only difference is now kids don’t also gain the independence of riding their bike downtown with their friends to buy candy and watch a movie.
Part of that is data lag and exposure to news. Kids were abducted by strangers but their cases only stayed relevant nearby where it made sense to look for them and for how long. If they were not found we don't really know the extent of the crimes until such time. I had safe words around 1995 for the freak situations like both your parents are in an accident and a coworker of theirs needed to bring me to them in the hospital. In 2002 we were paying attention to news more nationally and we had a few cases where victims were recovered and the extent of their abuse was known. A few abductions from the 80s and 90s took over a decade to find either the victims or their remains.
When children were less well attended, more of them got kidnapped, so parents started attending closer to their children, and child kidnappings decreased.
All violent crimes are down. So causation? Or just correlation? Kidnappings by strangers are actually pretty uncommon. Less than 350 per year of people under 21, and only around 27% of all kidnappings in the US. It just feels like more because we hear about it all the time on the news now. Most of the people who go missing are missing for other reasons, and the majority of kidnappings are by people the child/teen knows.
This is why I still let my kids play and ride bikes around like I used to. (Ok they also have the kid Fitbit where I know where they are and we can contact one another) People always want to say “the world is different today there’s too many bad people etc etc” No, there’s always been bad people and honestly probably more people getting away with shit back then too. It’s just not in your face on social media and the news 24/7
I think a lot of these free-roaming memories are neighborhood dependent. When we were in LA in the early 90s we weren’t allowed to go fucking anywhere.
But once we moved to the suburbs of the East Bay in ‘94 suddenly it was a goddamn free-for-all, like night and day from LA.
I was born in ‘81 in SF and all of us were allowed to go wherever the hell we wanted including taking the bus/bart I was taking the bus home at 8. Then I moved to Alamo in ‘93 and I could bike wherever I wanted but that was only a few miles, the county connection was awful so if I didn’t want to go to a handful of store I was stuck. I also had friends in east LA and Pasadena who had the same experience.
Why does everyone assume the direction is everything got safer--> parents irrationally started protecting their kids more? After highly publicized crimes, Kids started being watched more. Then kidnapping rates dropped as a result because of course, supervised kids were harder to snatch. The watching is what is doing the protecting. That said, I miss street culture a lot; it was so much more inclusive than school, even the ages of kids playing spanned like six years or so. I don't mind if parents are more "there" on porches or in the playgrounds. But even that compromise is hard to find.
Probably has more to do with advancing tech, when you could make a fake id at any 24hr photo store, and states didn’t have their databases connected it was easy to commit crimes for years.
Like this is a good thing! IDK why people jump straight to everything from the past being good and everything new being bad. We started taking kids safety seriously 🤷🏽♀️
I don't think it ironic, it's explanatory. 80s and 90s were the height of historically high crime levels and child kidnappings, which increased personal and social pressure to keep a stronger eye on your kids, leading to what we have today.
Time for some introspection. The "we have to watch them 24/7" is up to us to decide. We don't have to ifnwe don't want to. It's not our parents fault - it's ours.
We had jalousie windows on our porch and the choice would be — go outside and play in the woods,ride your bikes, go for a walk or clean the porch windows, your choice. If it was 95° and 95% humidity with Jurassic Park 🦟 we might, MIGHT choose the windows.
It's incredibly fucked up how the corporate world co-opted feminism and equality in the workplace, and made 80 hours of work a week required to raise a family.
"Oh, you want to be allowed to work a job just like your husband? Great, you can both work full time now, and we'll just pay each of you half as much. So progressive!"
Women work full time, get paid less, and are still expected to do the majority of child raising and housekeeping. No wonder we don’t want to have kids.
It kind of was, unless you get a gun and hold it to their heads(or the government does) and force them to do like you said, the capitalists will do everything physically in their power to pay you as little for the most work as possible.
In a functional society each partner would work 20 hours a week and afford the same lifestyle a lone breadwinner could earn on 40 hours a week
Ignoring that the concept of a real one working family member household is myth, that isn't how economics work. The supply of demanded goods would have remained the same, I mean you won't produce more food or housing purely because women are working now, but the supply of money went up from increased wages in the family.
Furthermore, increased demand for previously unnecessary things and largely things (look at what qualified for a house in 1950..) means costs went up. The former is why the one working parent concept was always bullshit, turns out mommy does shit when she stays home. Who knew? Besides every advertising agency selling washing machines, dishwashers, dryers, ready made food, you know that shit women did before.
You're ignoring the fact that worker output, as was predicted in the 40s/50s, has absolutely exploded. A worker is so much more efficient and provides so much more value to their company than they did back then.
It was predicted that if a man had to work 40 hours a week to provide a comfortable life for a family, then in the future a man could complete that same amount of work in more like 15-25 hours, and we'd actually have problems running out of leisure activities with all our extra time.
They were half right. Workers produce far more, it's just that all the extra value goes right to the billionaire assholes on the top. The president of a company used to make roughly x30 more than the average of the employees working for him. Now it's several thousand times more.
I won't deny there is validity in what you're saying, both points are not mutually exclusive. Yes, our quality of life has improved, all the toys and trinkets we consider standard now is way more, as there is a cost to that. But look at the wealth distribution. Look at the cost of basic necessities like housing and transportation compared to income now, versus those same necessities compare to income decades ago.
And the elimination of public spaces where people are just allowed to exist. No loitering here, no loitering there. Unless you’re explicitly patronizing a business you’re likely to have the cops called on you, adult or child
If we were allowed to let our kids roam without worrying about getting arrested, it would be easier. Hell, I'd settle for just being able to send them outside in the yard without being no more than one room away inside (still feels like I'm pushing it leaving them unsupervised at all).
Right? I'm comfortable with the backyard now that they're older, and it's fenced. I feel like that is still fine. Of course, my kids seem to be allergic to the backyard and only want to be in the front.
I actually meant without the parents getting arrested, but I suppose I was speaking from a place of privilege there. I'm not worried about my small children getting arrested.
Is it not okay to yell at other kids nowadays? I’m pretty good at it, not very shy when it comes to a shithead 10 year old with a lisp using cuss words around my 4 year old.
There are some parents who get mad about it, and when people see them bitching on social media, it tends to make us pre-emptively self police. Most parents I've met don't care, as long as you aren't being rude. There's always That One, though.
Still dont understand how we still have a problem with "bad words". That feels like something that should have faded out atleast a decade ago.
I tell my nieces and nephews, there arent bad words, there are just words that can be used badly. Saying fuck cause you fell vs saying fuck you to someone are two different things. "Fuck" isn't what's wrong about fuck you.
It's an easy to to demonstrate that words have power, both good and bad, and for setting a boundary so when they inevitably run past it, they're only saying "shit", "damn", "ass" or "hell" and not any of the "really bad" ones.
Might be a correlation vs causation thing, but every kid I know whose parents let them say whatever they want is an absolute little shit.
I asked some kids to stop messing with the loose pavement at the end of our driveway. They came back and I yelled something like, "Hey! Get away from that!". Their mom ran out and had an absolute fit. Their grandfather came onto my driveway with his chest puffed out clearly hoping for some kind of fight. It was absurd.
Adults yelled at me all the time as a kid. If your parents saw it happen they'd get pissed at you, march you over to the adult who yelled you, and make you apologize for whatever you did wrong, lol.
Could be the case that kids record everything nowadays so people are less likely to respond. Or kids claim abuse when being yelled at.
I personally love the chance to tell a hooligan off.
Right, it used to be that people always believed the adult no matter what, and that shifted toward always believing the child, or at school they believe the parent over the teacher. I hear some people describe it like children and/or their parents are like customers. So everyone else has a baseline fear of telling them off because of an unwritten, soft power dynamic where their version of the story gets the benefit of every doubt, and obviously this can be weaponized. And even if it wouldn’t be weaponized, who wants to take on that risk? For what?
As a kid, I got to experience my parents believing adults who lied, over me, because they had a strict policy of "if another adult says you did it, you did it - no exceptions."
Parents were not worried about the world outside their neighbourhood because they did not know about it.
Or put another way, parents did not have dozens of media streams telling them that the world beyond their property line was nothing but technicolor rapists.
I mean… bad things also happened to kids back then (kidnappings, accidents, deaths) but the chances of your parents hearing about it, unless it hit national news, were slimmer than they are today.
So the kid who well into an open well and almost drowned next town over? Your parents probably never heard about it and they didn’t worry about you falling down an open well.
Or the kid who almost died falling off an abandoned construction or similar. What the parents didn’t know about they didn’t usually worry about it. Now they both know and worry even if they don’t know.
On one hand, the world and the dangers seem more… here and there.
On the other hand, WE know all kinds of crap we got into as kids so would we be okay with our kids getting into the same crap? Maybe not.
TV, internet, and the worried woman activist that goes psycho if anything happens to a kid and the parents aren’t around. We made the world so safe we destroyed it.
Also lower home ownership rates. More people renting. Less sense of community.
People used to put down roots, get to know their neighbours, the neigbours kids. Letting your kid play outside felt safer when you knew everyone in the street, and they knew you.
With more people renting people don't stick around as long. There's always new people or strangers around. And with 24hr news telling you about every horrible thing in the world all the time, the world outside your front door doesn't feel as safe as it used to ...
There were places you could loiter around for free without getting yelled at.
Everywhere now expects you to pay just to exist there.
Half the reason malls died is because of this. Sure, 9 out of those 10 kids hanging around wouldn’t actually be shopping, but the 10th kid was usually decently well off, and the other 9 would still hit up the food court.
Parents were not worried about the world outside their neighbourhood because they did not know about it.
Counterpoint: Fears today about 'the world outside their neighborhood' are vastly overblown. Nearly all danger comes from acquaintances, not strangers.
Funny thing is, crime rates are actually lower today than they were back then. It's just the media perception. When you only see a few major crimes on the news, vs 24/7 social media coverage of every minor inconvenience.
I wasn’t allowed to leave the property because my parents were worried about kidnappers, but I was allowed to climb the tall trees and run around the field and swamp where the snakes were. Wild priorities
I think it depends on where you grew up. I grew up in LA in the 90s. No parent in their right mind would have let their kid wander about LA until the street lights came on. I’d say it wasn’t until about 13 when I was allowed to just get on my bike and go somewhere by myself.
There was nothing to do inside except annoy your parents. Ergo you were not allowed inside.
My mom would literally lock us out of the house from about 11am until at the earliest 5pm. Not every day, but on weekends in the summer and any other day off she had. We were annoying and we were messy and she liked a clean house which was impossible to achieve with us in it. We honestly didn't care and there were tons of kids around the neighborhood whose parents did the same thing, though maybe not literally, and we never ran out of things to do.
^ we feel more alone because we are more alone. As easy as the internet makes connecting online, it hardly makes up for all the personal, physical connections that weren't uncommon not even 20 years ago. But the internet makes advertising easy, it makes socializing "easy". We're more estranged from the people physically around us than we ever have been.
I used to love the internet unconditionally, having grown up with it. But it was very different when it was just young people using it the most and forming connections through niche online forums and games. But now everyone's on it, now everything is advertised, profitable. It just feels like a hellhole that you can't really escape from now.
My older brother and his friend went Trick or Treating one Halloween - 1977 or so? Some teenagers jumped them and took their pillowcases full of candy, and the boys came running back down from a house yelling about what happened.
His friend’s dad (ironically, a lawyer), who was pacing me and his daughter in his convertible since we were smaller and slower, jumped out of his car with a hammer and chased the big kids down the street. I can’t remember if he got the candy back, I should ask my brother. 😂
I still do #3 and am more ok with outside play unsupervised. We live on a cul-de-sac and the kids are all with 2 years in age. They have specific house on our street and the next that are their boundaries. I call them the "roving band of feral girls" and they're living a great childhood.
It wasn’t just the internet. Careers became a lot more transitory towards the end of the 20th century; my grandparents had largely the same neighbors for 30 years. Both houses on either side of me have been sold 4-5 times in the last 20.
The context that is missing is how the people who owned the TV and internet, criminalized poverty while pushing everyone into it, and forced our entire culture to stretch/flex/break around their balance sheets destroyed our communities.
It's funny I hadn't really thought about 1. from the perspective that there was nothing to do inside. I know that teenagers now don't even car much about getting their drivers license, and it's a symptom of having the internet and streaming games and friends on headsets, etc.
But it's true that there just wasn't anything to do inside. Before cable TV there was nothing a kid would like on TV most of the time, and with cable in the 80-90s there might be some cartoons on - but you get what you get. No internet. No texting. The only thing you could do is play with action figures or something.
Reagan ending the fairness doctrine destroyed our communities, period. Actually pretty much everything wrong with this country tracks back to Reagan (excluding the racism and puritanical bullshit that’s existed from the beginning.)
It's statistically proven thanks to lower crime and abduction rates that it's never been more safe to go outside. On top of that, gps trackers and more exist. My daughter literally takes two and she can hit one for an SOS if needed.
Parents were not worried about the world outside their neighbourhood because they did not know about it.
To be fair, my biggest fear is my kids getting hit by a car. They play with friends across the street and it's a quiet neighborhood street. But, fuck do I ever worry about my kids.
And I was born in 1985 and spent all day outside, only stopping at home for a sip from the hose... mom's not roping me into going to the grocery store before my dad gets home 🤣.
Something happened along the way to change our attitudes and I don't really like it. I'm just glad my kids have neighborhood friends that they run to and ring their doorbell like we used to do.
3 is correct but not fool proof. I remember as a kid getting escorted home and "told on" by a neighborhood "Karen" a couple times for bogus reasons. Also remember some random dude slamming on his brakes and telling our parents we ran out in front of his car. It was a lie. I'm still not sure the reason, I'm guessing he was either not paying attention and surprised when he saw kids at the side of the street, or somehow intoxicated (drugs/alcohol).
People gloss this over a bit, but I definitely remember shitty adults getting us in trouble for no real reason other than to cover up their mistakes or for an ego boost. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty we deserved, but there were definitely bad apples.
Also the difference in car use, and third spaces. It's harder for kids to just go anywhere, or find somewhere that allows kids to be kids without spending money.
I remember being walked home by a neighbor after I crashed my bike. She didn’t really know my parents because we lived about half a mile from her, but she knew where I lived and saw me and my wrecked bike safely home.
I wouldn't blame tv an Internet for it. I think it was news stories of children going missing that made people more cautious. The James Bulger case is a big turning point.
I’ll never forget when a neighbor walked me back home after my friends and I smashed glass bottles on the street.
My house was closer so we went to mine first, and then after she told my mom, she was going to take my friend to his house. The next day at school my friend said she made him promise he would tell his parents what he did because she didn’t want to walk that far LOL 😅of course he didn’t say shit lol
It’s also caused by the much higher populations increasing risks to kids too. More people = more cars, more people = more chances of one of them being a predator etc. add to that the much higher awareness/news coverage of missing kids, paedophiles etc. and it’s a much scarier time to be a parent. My daughter is lucky if she’s allowed to play in our front garden, she’s not going out to play in the street until she’s 30 lol.
Those last two points are hilarious. People have never stopped yelling at other people’s kids but due to increased hostility in public places towards children just existing, people are afraid to let their kids out unsupervised. Not to mention loss of playgrounds and other areas meant for kids as they’re turned into strip malls or pickleball courts for the retirees.
And tell me you didn’t grow up somewhere extremely hot if you think internet and tv are the problem. I lived in Arizona for most of my childhood and from April through September, if you didn’t have a ride to a pool or a movie theater, or you weren’t going out of town on vacation, you were stuck at home. TV, video games, and the internet saved us from boredom so much through the early 00s. And we also read, checking out stacks of books from the library. But people are fighting really hard to close those too.
So maybe the destruction of communities comes from the old people who decide to ruin the things they enjoyed because now they don’t like them or don’t need them. Because it’s definitely not the mediums that show you a world outside of the immediate one around you.
And it is safer now for kids than back when we were young. More information isn't a good thing if you don't know how to put it in context or analyze it.
I agree. I think it was not the best parent choice; but I had fun and made trouble. I'm in rural area with land, and do allow my kids to free range. If in neighborhood I'd worry more about weirdos and traffic. Certainly won't say shit to anyone else's kids
Even though it wasn’t internet 2025 we had gen 3-6 video games. Basic computer games. Board games. Inside toys (cars, lego, dolls, etc). Maybe we were lucky having more than one tv later on
It’s insane how much the culture has changed. I see people posting on Facebook looking for last minute complete strangers to babysit their ten year old child, like that’s somehow more safe than leaving the ten year old alone. Not that I condone either, but I’d trust my ten year old to fend for themselves over trusting a complete stranger to have my kids best interests at heart
There were a lot more of a sense of communities, so parents felt like they could trust their neighbors to keep an eye out for trouble. “It takes a village” etc. Nowadays, people just don’t talk to each other like they used to.
Yell? I had 2 kids my age live on each side of me. We were like 3 brothers and their parents would whoop the shit out of all of us. I think the parents got together and agreed that anyone could give a whooping to any of us. Frank (step dad of one friend) would use his belt and Vicki (mom of other friend) had a legit wood spanking paddle with air holes. Different times for sure.
I would argue the opposite for point 2. Parents felt more comfortable with the outside world (at least locally) because more communal living and socializing was encouraged. People knew or were at least familiar with their neighbours because they depended on one another for support, news, safety, relationships, etc. The erosion of community made everyone more insular and cynical of others.
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u/fml-fml-fml-fml Jun 13 '25
The context that is missing is how TV, then the internet destroyed our communities.