Comment Re:The 80s? (Score 5, Interesting) 203
I was a kid in the 60s. We lived like barbarian *kings*, going wherever we wanted with no respect for private property or accountability to anyone for how we spent our time or where.
Especially in the summer. We'd get up, have our bowl of cereal and hop on our bike to meet our friends. Then we'd right to the other side of the city and maybe scare up some kids for a baseball game or maybe a fight. Maybe we'd right out the suburbs and go fishing or build forts in the woods. Sometimes we went down to the trash transfer station to throw rocks at rats and root through abandoned machinery and discarded lumber for building materials to make a go cart. Occasionally we'd hop a slow freight train, or climb out on the girders underneath bridges to watch the commuter trains speed below us.
We'd come back home maybe 6:30 for supper, after being gone for eight or nine hours. During that time our families had no idea whatsoever where we'd been or what we'd been up to. Sometime your mom would ask and you'd say, "I hung out with Steve and Joe," and I guess she pictured us sitting around shooting the shit, which we sometimes did, although often it was probably someplace we weren't suppose to be like the roof of the autobody shop. Even during the school year, we didn't have homeowork like kids in the 80s did. There was none at all in elementary school and even in high school it was less than an hour.
A childhood nearly completely free of adult supervision and management was glorious in ways you can't begin to imagine.
What changed was the "stranger danger" moral panic of the late 70s early 80s, and it only got worse when cell phones became ubiquitous. Now it's positively deviant not to know where your kids are 24x7. Even if you don't buy into that, in a way you have no choice. My kids wouldn't have had anyone to hang out with all day; and if they did half of the things we used to get up to, there'd be a report to the police and a visit from social services.