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There's only one house in our neighborhood where I see kids playing outdoors. In the summer Mom puts big washtubs full of water out and the kids get to play with the hose.
They're all boys and they always seem to be outside doing something. Sometimes i see other kids visiting.
Lucky kids are learning how to play without having to buy something first!
My grandchildren play outside all the time. Now they don’t roam the neighborhood like we did, but they go to a friends house or their friends come to their house. Their parents don’t allow video games and greatly limit their tv time. Also, no phones or tablets.
Same, I see the change you are referring to in general, but not so much with our family or neighborhood.
We tell our kids to go outside all the time, and often they wander the neighborhood and hook up with other kids who are out and about. Many of our backyards touch, so it's easy. We also have a neighborhood pool which is the unspoken gathering spot May - Sept.
No phones allowed for us, and if we watch TV, it's after we've spent time outside, and it's always together. A parent has to be very diligent these days to eliminate other options off the table.
But I cringe when I hear some of my peers talk about how their 12 year comes home from school and goes right to their room (and plays games/is on phone/tablet) and doesn't ever come out. That just wouldn't fly in our house.
I think, not unlike smoking, that gen 1 didn't know the negative aspects of screens fully when they came out, but now the current generation are becoming parents and are wising up to the fight ahead of us. Meaning, 6 years ago I heard of more parents giving 10 year olds phones, but now it seems more parents are recognizing thats not a good thing and they are delaying further
Ours are a little too young to go out and play by themselves now, but I can’t think of a more wholesome place to grow up than our farm here in the South of France. They already have horses and puppies of their own. Lol
I can only imagine how much more wholesome it is than where I grew up. I had a pony but we had to be content with the dry concrete-sided Santa Ana riverbed in SoCal. Not too scenic or wholesome. Bums living under the bridges, seedy liquor stores....but we loved it, not knowing any better.
There was a dark side back then too. My friend and I got accosted at age 10 by a man with a knife who forced us into a small building and made us kneel down. Luckily my friend was sharper than I and got up to run out, and I followed. If had just been me, probably would have been raped or murdered since I was taught to never say "no" to "authority figures".
As someone else said, my parents were too embarrassed to call the cops but my friend's parents sure did.
I wish we had heard that. All we heard was "quit playing and get back to work".
Yes, my mother used to yell at us all the time to quit playing and come inside to study or to do our chores.
I grew up in big family with available playmates at all time. We had a courtyard in the front lined with fruit trees to climb, a small fish pond to feed the fish and a veg/flower garden to dig worms for our ducklings.
When it rained, we jumped ropes, played tic-tac-toe, pick-up sticks etc. in the veranda in the back of the house.
IMO, plenty of play times outdoor or indoor is the best thing for a kid.
As kids and teenagers, there was nothing considered more horrible than having to stay at home. Do kids today realize that staying at home was considered a form of punishment?
By age 3 I had "free range" around the block as long as I didn't go in the street, and by age 4 I was old enough to cross the street by myself to visit friends across the street and on adjacent blocks. By the time I was 5 or 6 I got to join the "older" kids in playing games right on the less-trafficked streets near mine (whiffle ball, touch football, street hockey, running bases, pickle in the middle, etc), other games like tag or hide-and-seek across neighborhood yards, and also exploring the "back of the tracks" fields along the railroad right of way behind the homes across the street. Later we built forts, sometimes using materials taken from abandoned buildings down the tracks, and did things like climb the coal piles and collect polliwogs from the swampy area between the high and low tracks, scampering every time a train came to hide from the "railroad police" who we thought would shoot us with "salt guns." In the winter we would play in the snow drifts, and sled down the hillside off of the high tracks, sometimes ice skate on the swampy frozen ponds. In summer we would play "war" or capture the flag, dig holes, and collect/dry cattails to burn like cigars or incense because we thought it was cool. Our forts got bigger, and we even built our own baseball diamond, although the outfield was downhill and the outfielders couldn't even see home plate and hit balls required a shout to the outfield to watch for them.
By age 8 or 9 we would travel for literally miles on city streets and sidewalks, walking or by bikes, going to the big city parks for pickup games of baseball or football, and sometime riding or walking to the zoo or museums which were free at the time. By age 10 I rode my bike alone to the University or to downtown to see where the "riots" had occurred, or just to look around.
Being unsupervised wasn't just for playing. Everyone walked to school beginning in kindergarten, never any parents along but usually older kids (kids whose parents came to the school were either the bad kids in trouble, or kids who were made fun of as being "babies" who needed "nannies"). I remember walking alone to the dentist office when I was 6 or 7. I remember riding a bus alone to the doctor's office when I was 8 or 9.
Of course as we kids got older, some of our games and "fun" got more troublesome, especially as teenagers. Homemade slingshots, carpet guns (basically superpower sling shots made with a long wood stock, inner tube band, trigger activated and able to shoot bent nails or pig iron pellets), and a couple kids with BB guns made us a little dangerous. Some fireworks brought in from Canada or Ohio (usually from one of the kids parents). Home made gas-powered mini bikes and go-carts using scavanged engines and spare parts. Later smoking, drinking, other stuff, and doing what teenage boys and girls do in the woods.
All of the above was outside the supervision of adults and parents (although there were a lot of eyes on the street for little kids), though usually with their reluctant acknowledgement that it was up to us to be able to learn to take care of ourselves. The most detailed instructions I remember from my parents was "watch yourself, be careful" and specifically from my father to "not hop on any moving trains" (which I never did).
Last edited by RocketSci; 02-02-2022 at 12:55 PM..
My daughters neighborhood has kids playing outside.
These kids about 5 of them ranged in age from about 4-8 years old.
There was snow during the holidays and it was a pleasure to watch them.
I’m sure there was a parent looking out the window but they were more or less un attended.
You don’t see this that often.
In cities that are big for walking - and have tree-filled, very lovely neighborhoods in the city - 1000's of walkers are constantly out walking on the sidewalks to enjoy the beautiful neighborhoods full of trees, and on the tree-filled paths around the three inner-city lakes in the middle of the city. It's all pedestrian walker oriented.
So in these tree-filled, very lovely city neighborhoods with sidewalks, kids are outside a LOT playing in their front yards and backyards, and some little kids ride their little bikes and push scooters on the sidewalks carefully.
As kids and teenagers, there was nothing considered more horrible than having to stay at home. Do kids today realize that staying at home was considered a form of punishment?
By age 3 I had "free range" around the block as long as I didn't go in the street, and by age 4 I was old enough to cross the street by myself to visit friends across the street and on adjacent blocks.
All of the above was outside the supervision of adults and parents (although there were a lot of eyes on the street for little kids), though usually with their reluctant acknowledgement that it was up to us to be able to learn to take care of ourselves. The most detailed instructions I remember from my parents was "watch yourself, be careful" and specifically from my father to "not hop on any moving trains" (which I never did).
YES! Laughing out loud at the "staying at home was a form of punishment". This was my childhood too! Absolutely free range, and not chicken about it either!
By age 3 I was out on the street (pretty safe suburbia) knocking on neighbor friend's doors asking them to "come out and play". By kindergarten I don't remember ever being "watched". Maybe I was, more than likely not so much.
I had a fantastic childhood.
We explored! The woods behind the grade school were not off limits during recess until somebody took away that fun from us around the time I hit 5th grade, luckily not before then. The creek on the way home, I would grab the snakes by the tail and whip them around to show off for my girlfriends that weren't the tomboy I was. My subdivision was on the edge of town, so we would travel outside the neighborhood and visit the abandoned farmhouse and play in the dugout root cellar, I remember pulling out things like a cast iron for ironing clothes, buckets, assorted junk. We would play in the block foundation that no longer had a house. Then we were off to the abandoned boxcars on the railroad tracks, playing in those. I remember reading the "boxcar kids" around that time, a fiction series. We walked "downtown" unsupervised to go to the candy store, an old house filled room by room with penny candy, or we would go to the library and check out our 5 books we were allowed at a time and lug those home. We would hit kresges fountain counter and rip off a candy bar, bad bad kids we were right? Minor stuff we grew out of.
Then before the new freeway was put in eminent domain took over a street of houses that were now abandoned but not tore down, and we would play in those. That was half a mile ride on our bikes.
Nobody got seriously hurt. Yes a concussion I received for colliding while racing bikes with the neighbor. A friend broke her arm on her own swingset in her backyard because we were always finding unconventional uses for everything, so up the side bars we climbed and up onto the top of the swingset main bar.
We climbed out my bedroom window and played up on the garage roof all the time. We had a swim club membership at a local lake on a farm and spent our summer days free roaming the acres and acres of woods. I had the best of everything being both close enough to our downtown and the adjacent countryside. Even the church had woods behind it that we built a fort in, I accidentally once dug up part of a yellow jacket's nest.
My subdivision streets were safe and everyone played out in the street. We would take a giant barrel, put a kid in it, and roll them down the street. The houses didn't have fencing around them and we would run through yards to get to so and so's house to play with them. Later assorted neighbors started putting in fences and it destroyed relationships between neighbors, walls between parents who used to be friends.
We were innovative, constantly on the go, we wore out our bicycle tires.
I suppose what is now video game addiction was me with a good book back then. I remember my mother coming into my room asking why I was inside on a beautiful sunny day when usually I wasn't seen until supper. I had discovered LOTR and read the books without pausing. But then inbetween days I was outside all day, everyday. I remember sitting at the dinner table, rushing through meals all the time in the summer, antsy, itching to get out of my chair and get back to whatever imaginary world we had created for the day. Mom saying eat slower, trying to force us to sit in our chairs for a minimum of 15 minutes. Being "grounded" was excruciating!
We pounded the candy and were never fat, we were lean muscle thin, we were constantly on the go! Mom and dad were on the go too, with bowling leagues and card game nights and whatever they were doing, and we had a slew of babysitters, some fantastically fun, some absolutely horrible, but we survived and more than likely terrorized them all!
That childhood made me who I am today, fiercely independent, creative, high energy, and always looking for the next way to explore life.
Raising my own I picked a fantastic neighborhood with a private lake, acres and acres of woods to roam, a huge park, a setup never to be seen again that was designed that way a hundred years ago.
For example, I remember as a kid, if school was cancelled due to snow, the neighborhood kids would go out and either volunteer or ask for money to shovel snow at houses that seemed still "snowed in".
Even if you volunteered, you might get hit chocolate and a few bucks anyway.
Or neighbors might ask kids if they'd take leaves for a couple bucks.
Now a days that doesn't happen anymore because of media hysteria that,you know, your kid might get kidnapped, raped and murdered.
When we were kids, kids carrying guns wasn't a "thing's, unless they were old enough, had a license and were going hunting after school. Gun racks in pickup trucks, with a rifle in the rack in the back window was not uncommon, but I grew up a "country kid".
Now, kids are getting ahold of, or buying gun parts online, and assembling them to use for nefarious reasons.
No internet in our day did not give us option, you had to go to a store to buy a gun.
In our day, sure some kids would group together and tease or play games beatings other groups. It could get nasty, but a few bruises would be the most of it.
Nowadays they join rival gangs and literally kill other gangs.
One way to prove your loyalty to the gang you joined, was to kill members of the rival gang.
When we were kids, mother's most likely stayed at home, and if got in trouble at one house, by the time you got home, that mother had called your mother, simply by looking up your number in the phone book.
Your mother was waiting with a punishment ready when you did home, and/or father if after work.
Nowadays finding someone's number can be a mystery.
After I got my first phone of my own, you betcha I looked in the next new phone book to see my name/listing. I knew then I was "somebody"! And was an adult.
Nowadays trying to find someone's number can either be easy to look up, or you gotta pay to see their whole number.
Today kids are taught at school how to report abuse.
If you go to a doctor they ask if "you feel safe at home' to identify domestic abuse.
Parents NOT keeping a eye on their kids can be turned in to CPS or Social Security.
We were taught manners and respect. All adults were addressed as "Mr. Or Mrs.", We were taught to be polite and and say "please & thank you", "yes/no Sir/ma'am.
Apparently that's not done nowadays.
We were taught "you can look, but don't touch/keep your hands to yourself/stay out of mom/dad's purse/wallet".
The world is changing, not for the better.
Ugh
Best
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