Whats funny is this guy only put the safest things we did as kids back then. Our parents would kick us out of the house right after breakfast and told us not to come back till the street lights came on. And they didn't care what we did. Our only rule was don't croak
when the neighbors kid got a air rifle for christmas my momma went out and bought me an air rifle, her excuse was ' well if ronnie shoots kenneth i want kenneth to be able to shoot him back'.
Facts. And I’ve seen the drink out the hose people. Ya’ll living in luxury. My father ain’t gonna have us making his grass messed up. I drank out a bird bath that I knew got filled around three at a nearby retreat lol.
Jay , I was born in 1966 , I'm 58 years old . That stuff is just what our parents found out about . There was WAY MORE STUFF not even mentioned ! Young Man WE ARE VERY LUCKY TO STILL BE ALIVE !!!!!
Very true. The Cumberland River was at the back of our subdivision down a steep hill. When it would flood we played army in 3 foot deep water on patrol. No thoughts given to the possibility of water moccasins in the water. Great memories
Same here I was born in 1966 , we had the time of our lives ,I feel so sorry for young ones these days they will never have the childhood and freedom we did , my daughter had that as well as I left school in 83 and had her in 84 so she grew up with pretty much the same childhood as mine .
dude, I'm Gen X from the 70's and 80's. Here are some of the things I did as a kid that were not mentioned here. Stick fights. After Star Wars released, we would go into the woods, find a good thick stick and start doing light saber battles with each other. Watch your fingers and don't let your guard down. We would also find wild grape vines hanging off the sides of a tree, cut them off about 2 feet from the ground and swing out as far as we could, or as far as we could until the grape vine came free and we fell to the ground. we cut them off with our pocket knives. Yes, even at 8yrs old I was carrying a knife on me. BB gun wars were real. Also remember "professional wrestling" was a big thing in the 80's and we would do all of the big moves on each other. I can tell you a suplex on the hard ground definitely left you speechless, breathless, and immobile for a little bit. The best part of it was, if you broke a bone, everyone wanted to sign your cast. It was instant fame. Yes, Gen X is far tougher than Gen z. To sum it up for you, as Gen X, we are boomers who are in tune with tech.
A variation of the vines we'd do: climb up skinny but tall pine saplings , until they started dropping from the body weight back to the ground, where you'd then when feet hit the ground, you bent knees and push up and let the tree kinda be like a slingshot effect. Momentary weightlessness 😂
All the children in my neighbourhood have carved their own bows and arrows. You just have to find the right elastic branches for the bow. And then off into the forest. That was a lot of fun.
Thought we were the only ones who had the tarzan vines....ours had you swing out over a pit full of rocks and bottles and cans. We also used to collect piles of plastic milk jugs fill them with water and toss them as high as you could while a friend rode his bike down the street through the water "bomb blasts" you know it looked just like when the army jeep would get blasted and flip over in every single episode of the A team 😂😅🤣
Back then: getting hurt = learning a lesson, Now: getting hurt = a danger that needs to be avoided at all costs. Result = fewer lessons learned nowadays
Oh my God I had forgotten about those. That's an expression I have not heard in a while. Too funny but reading this I am starting to wonder how we survived😂
Any video talking about X kids should start with that... literally, before the talking, anything... run the "It's 10 PM... do you know where your kids are" ad with the scary images.
@@leechowning2712 I don't remember there being any scary images. The TV just asks, "Do you know where your children are?" The parents would say, "Pfft, no." and then they'd wait for the next show to come on. . . . but if there were scary images, the parents wouldn't have known either, because they only did that when commercials came on, so parents were in the fridge at that point.
We shot each other with b.b guns , full block man hunt , started fires in woods , went into abandoned building , dilapidated bridges and bombs shelters , we insulted our friends , their siblings , their pets , their everything . Pain was a measure of pride . We all had scars and we nevr cried ….we weren’t allowed, or we couldn’t play that game again We fished , swam. In any body of water pond scum n all ….. we had weapons all the time . Knives slingshots , BB guns , nunchucks , Chinese stars , swords … We beat each other up and made friends in every town we visited , we were social , we looked for fun everywhere , and adventure was the quest…..that’s just the surface
I agree with the never crying. When I cried my Dad would tell me shut up or I'll give you something to cry about. he kept what he called the board of Education under the couch.
All problems with schoolmates were settled on the recess yard or in the parking lot after school. After beating the snot out of each other, there (mostly) was no beef afterwards. Until next time if course....
We were a whole generation of Latchkey Kids. One of the most ubiquitous rules was "If the sun was out, we were out." We weren't allowed to come back in, even if we needed a drink, unless it was time to eat, and sometimes then, we were given food to take outside. I didn't even need the note to buy cigarettes for my mom because everyone in the store knew me and my mom. While playing outside, we never had to check in before going anywhere outside. We had zero supervision and we got left to our own designs for what we did out there.
I am GEN X and this is completely accurate! During the summer, our mom would tell us, "Go outside and play and DO NOT come back until Dinner!" I am so grateful to have grown up when I did. Kids nowadays are so over-protected. I would NEVER want it any other way! :)
I'm a 58yo woman. I was in BB gun wars, pellet gun wars, we hunted water moccasins, rode skateboards off the roof into a pool. On weekends and everyday during the summer, we would leave after breakfast and not come home until dinner. Somebodies mom would see us at lunch, if that mom didn't work, and then out we would go again. At 10, when it was my dad's weekend, he'd give me $10 to walk to the corner store and buy him a 6 pack of beer and some smokes. It was a different time for sure but I wouldn't trade it for anything.
don't forget car surfing. i remember times with a dozen kids in the back of the pickup going down the road at 60 and we kids are laughing as we nearly fall out. I had an extra danger, my parents sent me off to play after breakfast and chores, but we lived deep in the woods. My "neighbor kids" were coyotes I would roughhouse with because I thought they were dogs, until my mom caught me and made me stop... after months of playing with them :D
@JayFlex Gen X ISN'T born in the 1970s the first year was 1965 my year, I know what you said that you weren't born in the 70s so you didn't know how it was to grow up then. So I just figured I would let you know... We are actually mid-60s babies, a lot of us are kids of very straight laced conservative parents and some of us the kids of hippie parents. But either way we were expected to figure it out... We were given a lot of freedom of thought and exploration of our world. We were NEVER sheltered... You were encouraged to go out. If you got hurt, oh well that's how you learned. If you were told not to do something and you did it that's how you learned your lesson and you got hurt possibly then you figured out don't do that again,! So yeah if it wasn't the big injury that's exactly why they laughed at you cuz they were like hey idiot... What did I just tell you? 😂 #NYGenX65BIKERLady
My ex husband's cousin joined the military and when they were doing all his physical evaluations they found a BB still lodged in his butt from one of their wars 😂
I am blown away by your post. I could have been something I wrote. We all these things! Even the cotton mouth! We were in a tree and started throwing rocks at it (from our tree house). We finally killed it, and put it in a huge bucket. I thought it was the biggest snake I had ever seen.
We had an older, single man on our street who had a large yard full of trees, and his back enclosed porch was full of games, chalkboards, children's desks. He had no children himself. We could go play in his yard whenever we wanted, whether he was there or not. He didn't care, and our parents didn't care. He had even nailed boards into a couple of the real tall pine trees so we could climb; it was like a mini-forest. There was never a problem and what great times we had there. Sadly, I believe today, that same man would probably be run out of the neighborhood.
I remember being at the counter of a 7-11 and people would just randomly pay for my stuff or spot me some change. I did it a few times for kids in my 20s, but now I'm too terrified of looking suspicious
@@scarbrow01 Exactly. When we got hurt, the only thing parents would say is, "Kids." That was how it was perceived anyway; we were just doing what kids do. No one was to blame.
Sir, we rode in the back of the truck down the highway, left the house @ 8 am and didn’t return until dark, no cell phones, no parents around. We played in the bayou, lakes and rivers. Rode our bikes without helmets, climbed trees built treehouses and forts. There was a lot of freedom.
The tree houses and forts... great times. Nighttime raids on construction sites for wood and nails... Parents Didn't have a truck, but we was free to roam the back of the station wagon, and the van later. BMX bikes, tracks with Ramps and jumps and berms. Dirtball fights always ended up throwing rocks. Muddy and wet from playing by the river or swamps. These kids nowadays have no idea what life really is.
I remember once my grandpa had to deliver a pin to my uncle's farm about 30 miles away. My cousin's and I rode inside the pin in the back of the truck all the way. 😂
Don’t forget, there were NO seatbelts, car seats, and whoever heard of carbon monoxide poisoning from riding unsecured in the back of any and all pickup trucks. 🤣🤣🤣
@@thothstone4795 Absolutely. My high school teacher cracked a book over my head for being mouthy. I told my mother and she asked me what I did to deserve it. In grammar school, the principle had a huge wooden paddle he used on kids. My parents thought that was great.
@@thothstone4795 I went through during the tail end of the corporal punishment era, where we were given the choice of swats with the paddle, or detentions, and NOBODY took the detentions, not even the girls. Better to get it over with fast, and not sit there all afternoon when everyone was out doing stuff.
We woke up, ate breakfast, watched cartoons for a short time, had to do house chores, and then we were forced to go outside and play all day, except we came home for lunch and then right back outside until street lights came on.
I still like the taste of hose water We also put soap on the slip n slide Restaurants had smoking sections, they asked you smoking or non smoking when you went to eat My dad used to drive with me on his lap, I didn’t wear a seatbelt until I was 12, mom’s arm was the seatbelt. Getting hit in the shins with the pedals, was awful
All true. I think the most dangerous things not mentioned; hitchhiking, for obvious reasons, and playground equipment. Giant swings on concrete, backflips off of metal high bars, teeter-totters (see-saw), metal animals mounted on giant springs that would shoot you into the atmosphere, metal slides, and of course, the gyroscope wheel of death. 💀
I still can remember the freaking metal slides that felt like 180 degrees and would remove skin going down it. We had the genius idea of attaching a hose to the top of the slide. Going like 20 feet through wood chips as we flew off the slide.
I'm a millenial but my private school still had one of those metal swing/slide Chimera of Death. God knows how many kids hurt themselves on that dam thing.
One thing that defines gen-X is the metal slide in the playground! The hot summer sun, steep incline, and 10-20 feet tall! Even better... we brought wax paper with us and used it as a mat, so we'd slide down super fast! I always chuckle at today's slides. Kids today have no idea how to have fun! 🤪
😂😂 we just pour water on it. It took a while since we had to first go find a bottle and fill it up at the water fountain. Let not talk about the merry-go-round that was completely metal and spinning like crazy.
My now 19yo son had his picture put in the paper when he was 2 or 3 because he would slide down the 8' tall metal slide at my older kids school. Then he would run around to the front of the line and force his way in so he could do it again. The kids were laughing and letting him go. It was a field day event for the school, so the local reporter was there to cover it. She asked if she could take his picture and use it for the article.
Gen Xer here: born in the ‘70s, raised in the ‘80s and ‘90s - I don’t reflect too much on the “good ol’ days” like they were perfect, but I can tell you unequivocally that it was a different world and the hype, by and large, was very much real. Feel free to keep exploring this era because it may never be that good again.
Eh. 'Good' is relative. It was def fun for the children, but looking back, us kids were in FAR more danger on the regular than kids today. Kids today ARE soft, but only because we haven't figured out how to pass on many of the lessons we learned in less life-threatening ways.
@@ainnunyabidniz I'd say this is bullshit. We were not in more danger, let alone FAR more, than kid's today. Having less safety measures is nothing when we had more common sense and weren't coddles like pansies. Kids today have access to drugs at almost any time, crime is more rampant, pedophilia seems to be more rampant and even validated if you're in a left wing city. It's way worse to be a kid today and it's not even close. I'd also argue many of us know exactly how to pass on lessons without having to tell them not to jump off a roof blindfolded. It's called teaching your children that life isn't fair or equal, danger is around every corner, and if you do something stupid and get hurt or arrested, you won't be coddled or bailed out, but you'll suffer the consequences. Liberals don't know how to raise their kids, but they were usually raised by drug addled hippies. My people have no issues raising tough kids.
Completely different world. I was cooling whole meals by the time I was 10. I was responsible for my younger brother, we were latch key kids that did what we were told and conducted ourselves like our parents were always around because the village was real. Almost every adult knew every adult because they grew up together with the same sentiment. Parents didn't get mad because another adult corrected you, didn't cuss the teachers out for doing there jobs. If anything they wanted to help and be a part of turning there children into responsible adults. Idk what's happening today
By the time I was 12, I had broke so many bones including my collar bone, had a 6” piece of glass in my thigh, had my pinky sewn back on, etc etc etc… I have battle scars from being a KID in the 80s.. 😉
Way ahead of ya. I was taken to the emergency room six times by the time I was 7: broken bones, third degree burns (the fire-walking experiment gone wrong 😉), lacerations, etc., not counting all the injuries that Mom managed to doctor up herself. And I was a GIRL!! 61 now and still going strong! Fell off a horse a few times a couple years back and the trainer (also Gen X) always just said, "You okay, Ma'am? Yeah? Well then get back up in the saddle! We're not finished with the lesson."
We drank from the garden hose because we weren't allowed in the house. When your parents said "Go outside and play" that meant you were banned from the house for most of the day.
Dirt clod fights, BB gun fights, tree climbing, unsupervised archery, swimming in ponds, playing in creeks, walking/riding bikes pretty far from home, no cell phone to keep in touch, riding in the back of pickup trucks, playing crash derby while sledding, “surfing” in the aisle on the school bus while the driver tried to make us fall, playing with fireworks while throwing them at each other, building tree forts using all kinds of tools, digging tunnels as forts (sometimes they collapsed), running around in houses while they were being built, etc. Great times.
My dad would send me down town in our little town with a quarter to buy some Winstons out of the vending machine at the Skelly gas station! I was eight years old and ride my bike. 1965!
@@maxr4448 Remember the candy cigarettes that was basically a stick of sugar wrapped in paper. Between the paper and the candy was a powdered sugar that when you blew through it looked like smoke
My grandfather would give me 20 cents (in the early ‘60s) to buy his Camel no filters. Put 2 dimes in and pulled the handle. The pack would come out with 3 pennies taped to the outside. Got to keep the 3 cents as payment for walking a mile to get his smokes 😂
We were so feral!!😂😂 We were not allowed in the house during the summer until sundown! Mom would bring us food outside LOL! I still drink from the garden hose occasionally!!
I didn't have a garden hose growing up...but we did have a small swamp we used to played in (And you probably see where this is going). Swamp deep enough to swim in parts of it, and so we did...For hours too without any parents for least 2-3 miles away. 😅
Hi, GenXer here 😊 I enjoyed your commentary on this very true video. Parents smoked cigarettes in cars with closed windows, inside homes, restaurants, hospitals even...True story As for the generational divide, my thought is that life is different for kids now because of how we grew up. I always appreciate younger peoples perspective of how we came up in the states. I experienced everything in this video & there's much more they didn't cover. We were feral, they called us slackers & we are the smallest generation. A suggestion: look up "PSA: It's 10pm, do you know where your children are" All this being said, I wouldn't have wanted to come up at any other time in history. What I do wish still happened is kids being outside all day during summer, riding bikes, using our imagination to have fun. It felt so free
There were a lot of things that we did as a kid that we couldn't get away with nowadays. My dad rolled pipe tobacco and I remember it leaving this haze of smoke in the house. Walking to the bus stop with only my older, so the 5 and 8 year olds walked alone with no parents. Good times.
My mum used to smoke like that, she died of lung cancer in 2001. Now I look back and think how bad our clothes must have stank of smoke 🤢 we didn't give it a thought back then.
As a ginger, my mother put sunscreen on me when spf 15 was the maximum you could get. Especially after I came home from the pool one weekend with sun poisoning. I was so sick!!!
Slip and slides were fun. Or really just some plastic bags taped together. SPFs were really low. As a redhead, it was 10-15 until after college. Anything higher was super expensive.
Haha My mom taught me how to get the golden tan. She had a big piece of plexiglass mounted in the yard. Slide under that sucker and get ready to feel the heat. Oh but the golden tan came from a thin sheen of WD40.😂😂😂😂 Mommy didn't play. Best tan around.
My dad had a pickup truck. My sister and I sat in the back rain or shine. We used to love when he would hit a bump in the road. We would bounce up and crash back down in the bed of the truck, all while moving down the road.
I was born in 73. We were the tv remote control. In the U.K. we only had 3 tv channels. In the play park we had hot burning metal slides & a witches hat (who remembers those? It was my favourite) mostly, all play equipment was used as a climbing toy. Yes, I walked with my dads German shepherd, off lead, to the shop and bought my mums cigs & chocolate bar. I loved my bike, but once I learned to roller sk8 that was it for me. We used the same hand built ramps in the middle of the road as the bikes. My baby brother was set in the back of the car in the Moses basket & it was my job to keep it on the seat. I preferred to sit on the floor of the car though. My parents were cub & scout leaders, so I learned to safely build fires & had no problem sleeping in a tent pitched in the school field behind our house, a field where we played every day, because they were open to the public. Fat lips, skinned elbows & knees & yes, ankles taken out by our bike pedals were a daily occurrence. Honestly, we didn’t care because we had fun getting the injuries. Thankfully I gave my kids a similar kind of freedom, but may have started at a slightly later age than I did.
Londoner here. Yep, I remember the 'witches hat' all too well. I was 12 at the time and at lunchtime our teachers would sometimes take us to a local park with a small playground. Before we left the school, my friends and I would 'borrow' some metal spoons from the school kitchen. We'd then climb up the spinning & rocking witches hat, and stick the spoons in the opening gap at the top at just the right time. It took just one go to completely flatten the spoons (and luckily not our fingers). We then slipped the spoons back into the cutlery drawers. The teachers were always dumbfounded as to why and how there were so many flat spoons in the drawers. 😂 When I was 10 and my cousin was 9 in the late 1960's, we used to stand in my father's car with our heads and torso's sticking out of the sunroof driving through London (no compulsory seat belts back then). Also, I still have scars on my shins from those sharps bicycle pedals. When I was 9, my older sister would tell me to go and buy her cigarettes. When I was 11, I had a big knife on my belt as part of my Scout uniform. Oh, and breaking stink bombs (in glass vials) under my shoe on the top floor of a double-decker bus was fun, especially amusing watching all the adults run out of the bus because of the terrible smell! I also owned a pair of Clackers and those things were dangerous - a lot of kids fractured their wrists. Good times. Almost forgot... from the age of 6, I used to walk to school and back on my own. It was a mile each-way, having to cross busy streets, including main roads. All the kids walked... no mummy/daddy car rides to/from school for any of us kids back then!
Oh yes I remember all these. Getting 20 pence and buying sweets like rhubarb and custards, strawberries and cream and cola cubes and they were placed in the small paper bag. Best memory is when bmx bikes came up and playing games like 40, 40 and knock down ginger. Good times lol
Early GenXer here, the trick to sunburns was to get burned just enough to start peeling as the layer of burnt skin would act as low-grade protection. If you burned again, you wore a t-shirt, and you would only stop going to the beach when your skin would start to blister. Then you just had to avoid other kids are they would delight in slapping you on the back.
My grandmother would send me with a note to get her Pall Malls for 50 cents a pack. In high school we had a smoking area for the kids, not the adults. We had actual commercials reminding parents, it’s 10:00p, do you know where your kids are. 😂😂😂
I was there for the tail end of that. I remember going to "the smoking tree" in high school every day after lunch, but I was also there when smoking was banned. Even the teachers couldn't smoke on campus anymore. I remember my principal would go out to his van on breaks, and smoke would be rolling out the door when he came out.😂
@@mimib323 that’s funny 😂 where I’m from we had the smoking tree until 2003 or 4 I’m not really sure I had already graduated but we had such a small poor school that we never had air conditioning just open windows 😭 I had the worst time trying to stay awake because I had to be at school at 5:30 am to start basketball practice, practice til 8:45 then start school. I was always tired 😂 the poor kids today would have the school turned in for child abuse for not having air conditioning (IN ARKANSAS) 😭 it was always so hot plus we had to deal with bats flying around our heads that we would swat with our science books and hope that we killed a couple a day. It was fun back then but I get to thinking about it now 🫣 I honestly don’t know how we didn’t die of heat stroke and/or rabies 😂😂😂😂😂 my god 😭
We played for hours everyday in the local junkyard...broken glass, chemicals, old cars, fridges...we played with all of it. We made forts, swing sets, etc.
The police wouldn't look for missing children in the 70s and would not interfere in what is considered domestic abuse or child abuse today. Adam Walsh was kidnapped from a mall in Florida in the summer of 1981 when he was 6. His mother let him play video games alone in a department store with other kids, which was very common. A store clerk kicked all of the kids out of the store on the outside of the mall, including 6 year old Adam. Back then kids were expected to fend for themselves. He was lost and found by a child predator and murdered. His father John Walsh began a huge child safety campaign that changed laws. He was the host of America's Most Wanted.
Around that same time we had Johnny Gosch get kidnapped too very close to where I grew up, so my dad to me to fight and use weapons as a little kid and I was sent back out into the world.
Yes! They used to drop us off and leave us. I remember being dropped off at a movie theater when I was 7 years old, just me and my 9 yr old sister. Mom came back and picked us up when the movie was over. We used to come home from school to an empty house and me and my sisters would fight over our chores. My sister Sandy was a perfectionist and me and Teresa could never do anything to please her. We slacked off on purpose because she would get mad and lock us outside while she cleaned the house. We played and she cleaned. LOL. Mom would come home from work and Sandy would tell on us for not helping.
@@debbiecaudill8799 Exactly, sister. This was our childhood. I walked my younger brother home from school when he was in kindergarten and I was in the second grade. With my own kids, look out. Nope. I was extremely protective of them and would not allow anything close to what we grew up with.
I'm a gen X. This video doesn't even come close to stuff we got up to, this just showed the safe stuff. But it's hard to find pictures and videos of what we did because cameras, the film and especially video recorders were huge and to expensive for most people, plus we didn't think or care about recording what we did.
I was probably about 8,dad would let me walk to the store with 75cents to get him a pack of cigarettes out of a vending machine.noone ever gave it a second thought.great reaction
Me too. By the time I was 7 years old my mom would send me to the store with a note & $1 & I would bring her back 2 packs of Marlboros. If I was lucky, not every time, I got a quarter for candy & I bought candy cigarettes.😂😂😂 By the time I was buying my own cigarettes they were still only 85¢ a pack. I was only 14 & no longer needed a note 😢
Same here, we had a line of credit at Mr Pat's store. He'd bust us and actually whip us with a belt if we did something wrong, my parents were OK with that shit too. I learned to stay in line at a young age.
@@MaRoach7 Same but, think mom smoked uh.. Palmal? Dad smoked some sort of menthol, Beyer? I dont remember lol. They send us with a note and we hand it to the guy behind the counter along with money and he get what was ordered on the note, us kids got to keep the change to buy candy or what we wanted. We never even thought to pull a fast one, Adults were like an All seeing collective that would know if you did anything bad and you would get it the moment you stepped inside back at home.. Your full name would echo through the house and yup.. hehehe
Mounting pvc pipes to our bikes when The 4th of July came around so we could have bottle rocket fights. When we came home with burns, Dad would say it will only hurt for a day or two, then he helped us build a better deployment system and gave us a couple of dollars for more ammo, so we were better prepared for the next round of chaos.
We never wore helmets, pads, anything when biking and skating. No seatbelt. We would float down the salt river on inner tubes, using only baby oil as sun lotion. I would blister!!!! I lived in Phoenix AZ where it's routinely 115 degrees.
All you fellow GenX remember our slogan back then? It's, "You can take a kid out of the streets, but you'll NEVER take the streets out of the kid". So very, very true.
Im a woman from Great Britain who was born in the fifties and most families were not well off. If we saw a building with a flat roof we just had to climb it . We built bikes with parts from 4 or 5 different broken bikes and if you coulnt get a saddle , you rode the bike without one We made go carts from planks of wood , old pram wheels and string tied to the wheels to guide us . We would get to the top of a hill and race each other down the.hill , and remember we had no brakes. We would play outside from morning until night .
@@whisperinthenight what great fun we had . We also used to play a game called cannon. We would take four wooden dolly pegs from moms clothes line , you would put three slanted on the Kirb ,then one on top. You would throw a rubber ball at it , if you broke the cannon your friends would run , you had to then throw the ball at them until you hit one of them and then it was their turn . hours of fun and it didn't cost a penny
I started walking to school, solo, in the 1st grade. About a mile, and crossing a busy intersection. My mom walked with me for the first week, to make sure I knew the rules and the route. I loved the walk!
Remember the Safe Zone signs people would hang in their windows, since parents were working, so if there was an emergency you could go into that house for safety? That ended up being the total opposite because pdf files used it to find new toys to play with?
Ha, I got to walk to my kindergarten on my own starting at 3. But to be fair, it's only a couple hundred meters but I had to cross a road. 😅 I was SO proud when I got to do it on my own for the first time. To me that meant that I was a big girl now!
We were great climbers, so the roof was no big deal. Omg the slip n slide was awesome but painful. The sprinkler was so much fun until your big brother pushes you onto it. Coconut oil works great for a tan. Our makeshift ramps are the original bike tricks that you kids compete in now with your half pipes. Yeah, I remember faceplanting into the back of front seats when they stopped fast. My big brother had a bebe gun and I was usually the moving target. Thank God I was fast. I still have scars on my shin from those metal bike pedals, my Achilles heals too. That's why they make better lounge chairs. Those cut the hell out of our legs
I wanted a portable handheld TV so bad in the 80's and early 90's. Now I have a hand held portable super computer. I don't particularly miss those times a whole lot. I was the very end of gen x born in 80 so maybe its a little different.
My daughter's friends used to always ask me to tell stories from childhood, and were always blown away by all the shenanigans. My favorite story is when I was 7 and asked the neighbor boys older brother (13 at the time) to tie my toboggan to his snowmobile and run me around the field and up and down the alley (lived in a small village). Bloodied my nose when the snowmobile stopped but the toboggan didn't. Got in trouble for using the toboggan and not a regular sled. Wiped my nose and kept playing in the snow. Gen X is just built different.
I was born in 1972 When we were 8 years old we would get up on the weekends (or summer vacation) eat breakfast and tell our mom/dad at 8am “I’m going out to play with my friends” Their response? “OK be back for Lunch” For the next 4 hrs we were like a “Fart in the Wind” Once done with Lunch (12:30) “OK I’m going out to play with my friends” Response? “OK be back in time for dinner” When we were done eating dinner “OK I’m going out to play with my friends” response? “OK be back before your bed time!” It’s not that are parents didn’t care, it’s just how things were. During the summer we ate and slept at home, aside from that are parents hardly saw us.
Dude, sleeping in the back window was the best! Also, I used to climb up on the roof and jump off just for fun. I used to chop all of our wood for fun from like 8 to 14 years old. My friends and I used to ride our bikes several miles downtown to the mall by ourselves at like 12 years old and ride back home in the dark when it closed at 9pm. But I'm a stronger more independent person because of it. We figured out how to get stuff done ourselves, and learned that we didn't need anyone to take care of us because we could take care of ourselves. But yeah, we did just about all of these things 😁😅
I have pictures of myself (age 9) and my two brothers (age 8 and 15) jumping off the roof of the house my parent's build when I was a kid. My mom took it from the ground. lol
Kids spend most of their time indoors now, and people wonder why so many have “depression” or “anxiety”. Most are self diagnosed (probably). I think the only time I was allowed inside was to eat, bathe, or sleep. Hell, we played outside in the rain, we played while sick, didn’t have “anti bacterial” everything, and I remember trying to befriend a stray dog that ended up not being friendly. Mom washed the bites with dish soap, bandaged it, and I was back outside. It wasn’t bad enough for a hospital visit.
I'm a older millennial and I did most of all of this. We had cable, Saturday cartoons were the best. We use to climb up on the roof and jump down onto a trampoline just to see who could bounce the highest Everyone drank from the hose. We made slipping slides for tarps and dish soap. My Mom has a photo of me, my sister and all of our friends suntanning. Mom didn't care where we went as long as we were home when the street light came on. Bike ramp showed us who were going to become engineers. I remember being 7 years old and buying my Mom's and Grandmother's cigarettes with just a note. Paid $3 for 2 different packs. We road in the back of the truck for road trips across the U.S.A. and No one wore seatbelts. All of my siblings had B.B. guns. I got shot in the ear during a B.B battle once. Mom was more mad about the blood on my shirt, than my ear.My ear was still in one piece. Now fireworks were a different story. We were not allowed to play with them unless we had an adult or an almost legal older sibling(16 years old) watching us. Lawn chairs became camping beds during the summer, because we would sleep outside during the summer, by ourselves, all night. I truly missing feeling that safe.
Well, an older millennial would be basically Gen X if you were born in the early, maybe mid-80’s. Things started changing in the early part of the mid 90’s big time.
When I was little, I remember fathers having their sons on their laps when they drove. They would let the kid steer the car. Does anyone remember that?😂😂 I was born and raised in New York City.
Man, at 13 my dad said to me “you wanna drive”? He would throw me the keys n tell me not to be home late. He didn’t even come with us, we used to drive on our own. 🤣
Was driving at 13. At 14-15 when the folks were fishing for the weekend I’d take the car and cruise even the neighboring towns to chase girls. No license yet
This is all true. I remember going out at 8am and not coming home till at least 6pm. If you came home it was to get a drink, go to the bathroom, or get bandaged up so that you could go back out to play more. If you didn't have any bruises, cuts, or scars then weren't a kid.
I learned to bandage myself up before my parents found out for fear Mom wouldn't let me go back out. She was very protective after I was hit by a drunk driver while I standing on the grass next to stop sign. He swerved and hit me and a friend. I smashed 3/4 of the windshield with my face and upper body the slid off the hood and across the pavement (the street peeled the left side of my face off). 2 weeks later I was out riding bike when Mom wasn't home...full on mummy mode, bandages still on my face and body.
"If you didn't have any bruises, cuts, or scars then weren't a kid." ~~ No that meant you was not trying hard enough... Rub a little dirt on it, and walk it off... was very common back then..
Playgrounds! Our playgrounds were filled with large metal contraptions on which we happily played in the summer heat. If we fell off of one, the ground was often cement or blacktop (asphalt). Skinned knees were common. If we got one, we got a band-aid from Mom then went back to playing. The two highlights of the playground were the slide and the merry-go-round. The slide was a long metal chute superheated to sear flesh. It went straight at a steep angle, ending in concrete, blacktop, or packed dirt. If you went down the slide too fast, you hit that bottom hard. If you went down too slow, your legs got cooked, especially if you were in shorts. The merry-go-round was a spinning metal disc with bars on it to hold onto, or to get slapped by if you tried to get on while it was spinning and missed. The goal was to get it spinning as fast as possible, then stay on as long as possible - hopefully without puking.
@@scarbrow01 I grew up in Fresno, CA, and there is a park there called Storyland. It's an amazing place, with a bunch of themed exhibits relating to nursery rhymes, folk tales, or children's fiction. Much of it is interactive, meaning there's something for kids to climb on or swing from or slide down. One of my favorites was in the Hansel and Gretel area. Their merry-go-round had a few bars on it, but mostly what you hung on to were statues. There were four of them, one for Hansel, one for Gretel, one for the Witch, and one for the oven. So they're basically chasing each other around in a circle. Definitely my all-time favorite of those. I'd say if you have younger kids and ever go to Fresno be sure to visit there, but having been back there and seen what the older part of the city (the part that was the entire city when I was a kid) has become in the last few decades, all I can say at this point if you have to go there is "my condolences".
I grew up in South Africa and we had two types of merry go rounds. The type you described with bars, then there was another which was elevated higher, like the disc one, but with nothing to stand on. You would have to sit on the frame and hold on for dear life. 😂
Did you have the wobble-board platforms and tire swings too? The ones that were used to the extreme to see who couldn't stay on the thing? That always seemed to result in at least one playground injury a week if there wasn't some parent hanging around to ruin that kind of fun.
I love your videos! Gen X here... lol! Could you please make the image you're watching bigger, please. These old eyes aren’t as good as they use to be! The bea bea guns were adjustable pressure. Usually, we would agree to the amount of pumps when shooting at each other ( i know its not better) the more pumps, the more pressure = pain. We had seatbelts, but usually never worn because parents were usually transporting kids and we would sit on top of each other to all fit. Always on the roof wearing chucks (converse now). Baby oil for tanning, and Dad smoked in the house, in the car and anywhere else he wanted to. One thing the guy left out was getting your pant leg caught in the chain of the bike. Always ended in injury, but more upset to have to put the chain back on your bike regardless of road rash. 💜
i was on the roof in 1969 at nine years old, adjusting the antenna. (i am end off boomers, gen x began when i was 5) my kids got up on the roof in 1980s. i still drink from the garden hose. jumping bikes on ramps was part of living. no smokers in my house :) we went fishing on the rocks that jutted out into the ocean by ourselves (a lot of the time i did it alone). my father was driving a tractor on a farm at 10 so what we did was tame. i also learned how to shoot a rifle at 7. as teenagers we went hunting by ourselves (again no parents). and we rode in the back of my dad's truck all over town. and FYI, people still ride around in Hawaii in the back of trucks, sitting in lawn chairs!
Baby Boomer here! We also had the Ice Cream truck! The bells rang, and we ran out to buy nutty buddies, ice cream sandwiches, and popsicles! Great memories! 🍦🧊
Did your ice cream truck have an ice cream treat called a screwdriver. It was orange sherbet in a clear plastic container the tapered down and at the very bottom was a gumball
My sons were taught how to use all kinds of tools. They helped their dad build our shed in the backyard. Helped him gut my bathroom and remodel it. Skills they'll use throughout their lives. My oldest is now working on becoming a certified mechanic, in the meantime he does the maintenance on our cars. Oh yeah, and they can both cook! You're welcome ladies 😂
Yup. My son & daughter both got the same diy education from me. However, only my son is a good cook. My daughter, who is the eldest, tries. Although she has got better since she became a mum.
No kite fighting for me. Too many trees. For us, just keeping one up in the air was a challege. We had more fun getting strange things stuck in the trees and powerlines anyway. 30 years later, I still occassionally see sneakers hanging off the powerlines, although i think those might be the employees...
Yup. Climbed on the roof, drank out of the garden hose, wrecked many bikes without helmets. Got stung by a scorpion and a hornet in the same day. It makes a child grow up strong and independent.
Water hose drinking, laying in back window of car, buying cigarettes, tonka truck fireworks,bike ramps, sitting in car window did it all . I believe I have 4 lives left. Lol I was told I had to be part cat lol
I’m from south west Michigan and in my youth a friend invited me to go to Mackinac island with her family. Both her parents smoked the entire trip, windows up, on the way there, while there, and all the way home. It was horrible.
55yo Gen Xer from the U.S. here: By the time I turned 12 in 1981, I'd had 2 broken fingers on my left hand, a concussion scare and entered 6th grade ( @11.5 yo) with my right arm in a cast due to a fractured wrist and using a cane in my left hand to deal with a twisted right ankle. (My dad, who had back issues, taught me how to properly use the cane.) Personally, I never had a BB gun, but I had friends who did, though I never used them. And the lawn darts from back then? Think like the darts you find in a pub but sized up to where one was about as long as a frisbee is wide with an appropriately weighted metal spike on the front end. Abandoned buildings, candy cigarettes, diners where the aroma of old coffee mixed with the second-hand smoke: These were all things we encountered, explored and endured growing up, even in California.
@acesup5845 my mom never hit us, just took things away and grounded us. My step dad on the hand had a thick leather belt hanging on the wall and we would have to fetch it for him to hit us with it. That was the scariest moment for me, walking back to him tonhamd him the belt he was about to whip over my backside.
You can’t believe how easy it was to get Cigs for your parents, it was just as easy for kids to just put a few quarters in a cigarette vending machine and get some for themselves.
This video is the tip of the iceberg. At 7, I would walk with another kid who was 5, just the two of us, through woods, across busy streets, through streams, across railroad tracks, through an old car graveyard, through a literal graveyard to a shop so that he could buy his mother cigarettes with a note. He was 5!!!!!! On the way back, we would stop at a candy store where $1 could buy you a large sack of sweets. Later, my uncle would stop by. He would take us to visit our grandmother. We rode in the back of his pickup truck. I was the oldest child at 7 and there would be cousins riding along that were under 2 years old. He would be flying down the road and would take us out, go real fast and slam on the breaks so that we could roll around in the back. We loved it and would beg for more. People used to throw rubbish out of the windows of the cars along the highway. Junk was everywhere. People also had no problem with drinking a beer while driving. The police didn't care much. Also, my father would put us on his lap and drive the car while pretending to let us steer it. For fun, my younger brother and I would go to all night rollerskating where the local roller rink would let us skate from evening until the next morning. No parents to be found anywhere. I do remember seeing teenagers and even the food lady selling weed in the bathroom. Like I said, I was 7. Things have really changed. I grew up in a well off suburb of Chicago.
I'm a GenXer and proud of it!! 1975 represent! 😁💪 Love other generations reactions to what we grew up with!! Its hilarious. We survived and were stronger for it. Miss some of the stuff from back then...mainly the carefree attitudes 🤫😉
😊 Woot! ~👋🏽75'er here too!... Yup, I loved riding my bike everywhere! 🚵♂️ The show "Stranger Things" was so nostalgic!... Definitely do NOT miss the dialup internet I had in college though! 😂
I was a teenager in the 60s and turned 18 in 74. We ate breakfast sugary cereal watched our favorite cartoons and about 8:30-9 am went outside. My parents didnt have a problem with us coming back in to make a pbj sandwich grab a soda and go back out and usually we brought 1-2 friends with us for a sandwich. I went to my girlfriends house and helped with her chores so she could go to the football game or a dance with me on a friday night. We rode in the back of a pick up truck. We had things called clackers you can look them up dangerous lots of busted arms, teeth knocked out and probably quite a few busted eye sockets. We climbed trees, rode our bikes down concrete stairs. Kids now days even mine could never do what i got by with. Although my kids got to do a lot more than their friends did, used axes, saws, climbed trees, waded the creeks, built forts we lived outside the city limits.
I'm an older gen Xer (1965), and in the late 70s, my father had a side gig paper route he needed a car for (492 papers/day). I would go out with him on Sunday mornings... starting at 3:30am to deliver them. That was my allowance. When he broke his leg, I did the route ALONE on Sundays. I drove the massive station wagon. I was 14. No license. The cops knew. As long as I didn't hit anything/anyone and was home by 7am ...all was good.
I’m a boomer and my husband and I had 3 of those routes (1200 papers a day, 7 days a week from 11:00PM to 6 AM) as our full time job since we couldn’t find any other work in the late 70s-early 80s in Detroit. Couldn’t afford a sitter for the kids so we bundled them up in the back of whatever beater car we were driving and they slept all night until we finished up around 6 AM. And thats how my young GenX kids grew up. They didn’t even have a bedroom until they were around 7 or 8 years old. Good times.
In the 60s, we had regular pickup for regular household garbage, but leaves, grass, branches were burned, and old appliances were taken to a spot on the edge of town, designated the Town Dump, and dropped off - no fences, no attendants, just a general understanding of drive in and dump your junk. I was also a great place for us kids to go hunt up stuff like electric motors, wheels, gears, and such. In the 80s the EPA came in and fenced off the whole area as a HAZMAT Supersite. Took them 20 years to clean it up. Ah, the memories . . .
70s baby here. You always were on the lookout for just the right dumped prams in the UK for the right wheels for that summer's go kart. Once constructed you'd drag it (drive down downhill parts, that was your test shakedown) then take it to steepest hill you could find, not dirt track public road, wait for a moment without traffic and "Geronimo!!". If your design worked you got to the bottom, if it didn't (quite a lot of the time TBH) you'd find yourself sprawled out half way down across the tarmac hoping a car didn't come along as you saw your smashed wheels bouncing down the hill. And so the lookout for dumped prams started again to make your next attempt.
We left the house after breakfast and came home at dinner. Unless you were bleeding or had a broken bone you didn’t dare go home or you would be cleaning, mopping or ironing.
That's how I got out of yard work (during the summer). I would make sure to be gone before my dad could give me a list of chores. He made sure I wouldn't escape the next day.
I remember running around all day alone or with my sister then coming in while the news was on and hearing about how a serial killer was targeting young boys in Atlanta
As a Gen-X'er, I MUST remind you that while we were outside doing our thing mostly unsupervised.... when someone DID misbehave, it was highly likely the kid with the CLOSEST parents would be the first one to either dish out a spanking, or the first one to tell the kids to stop doing what they were doing and go home.... to GET a spanking because that parent had already called ahead to let your parents know what you've done. So, yeah ... we could cut loose and do our own thing, when you KNEW that a spanking was likely around the corner from someone NOT your own parents, you tended to keep things "moderate" in regard to questionable activities in the open. The other "not moderate" stuff you tended to be far more likely to test the waters first with who you would be okay doing it with OR you did it in a way NOT to draw attention to yourself.
I was recently telling my friend’s children about how other people would spank or discipline kids that were not theirs. Or if you got a spanking in a public space, other parents would clap and say you deserved it. They were in shock!
This must have been early Gen X, because late Gen X people were not touching other people's kids. We still had corporal punishment in schools though, but teachers were considered to be trusted/qualified to be able to do it appropriately. That was nothing though, my school did paperwork when I received a punishment like that, then I would have to go home and get my parent's signature. That's when the real pain occurred.
To answer your question of "how?" We just did.😄 And the best thing is that we survived and it was the best time to just be a kid. Oh, I used to declare war on ants, dogs, cats, rats, mice.... by throwing pop snappers at them. I declared war on a hornet's nest, but they won THAT DAY.
A garden hose sitting in the sun the water in the hose got hot enough to cook noodles in. You let it run to keep from scalding your mouth. We literally learned that the hard way.
We used to have crab apple wars but they took place in the middle of the night. To add to the "mystery" was that they took place in a housing development across the street from my grandmother's house. My nana did not care what we were doing most of the time because "God rest her soul" was a very heavy drinker. Anyway, the housing development had all these dark or barely lit pathways between the buildings so it was pretty easy to hide from your enemies or sneak up on them in the dark. We had a blast but looking back on it now as an adult I see now that this would have been a great opportunity for some sick person to snatch one of us up. When I told this story to my own kids they couldn't imagine themselves ever doing anything like that.
If you think buying cigarettes at the counter was wild, bear in mind that there were cigarette vending machines everywhere. I even remember seeing one in the foyer of my local donut shop.
latchkey kid in the 70s, walked home alone from school in the 3rd grade and waited for my parents to get home from work. I could make myself something to eat if I was hungry , parents told me to make sure to turn the stove off as to not burn the place down.
💙 older millennial here, a LOT of these things were still around in my childhood. Vivid memories of my sister coming in from playing absolutely covered in blood because she tried to take her bike over a ramp the neighborhood boys had set up extra tall, at the bottom of a hill for the extra speed boost. She got cleaned up and bandaided and sent back out. My brothers and their friends playing airsoft tag (airsoft is like BB guns) - get shot, you're out. We'd spend all day outside, just... digging holes and stuff. That part I remember fondly.
Things changed gradually, but it was around the mid 90s when things really started to get safety crazy. I'm sure in certain regions people may have grown up in an older way, but generally speaking most of this was on its way out by then. The cell phone becoming something everyone owned, even kids, totally destroyed this way of life.
In Australia we called those bad boys 'Thunders' and let them off at 3am in the storm water tunnels that ran underneath my mates parents neighbourhood - and it would echo throughout the whole suburb for a good 15 seconds - good times :)
M-80s were pretty potent yes, but they were nowhere close to anything like "a quarter stick of dynamite". That was an urban legend, and I've personally heard multiple different versions with different figures given. None of them were true.
I was born in 1964 the last year of the Baby Boomers. I grew up in the 60's and 70's and 80's. The last few Years of the Baby Boomers and Early Gen x ers faced the same dangers. I drank out of the Garden Hose as well. I went on the Roof and played with the Slip and slide and the Water Sprinklers. I rode my Bikes without Knee Pads or Helmets and jumped Ramps.
Also born in 64. Remember those 10ft bike flags, one of the neighbor kids threw one of those about 100 yards and it stuck in my leg. I was hit between the eyes with a bb, and was pushed off a 30 ft bridge. Crazy stuff 💙
'63 here. We're what's known as Generation Jones which is more or less a subsection of the Baby Boom generation. Technically, we're Boomers, but our experiences during our formative years for the most part are more in line with those associated with GenX.
I was born in 1971. In the 70's the cars had a hug space above the trunk in the back window, this was my play area when I was riding with my mom on errands. When she slammed on the brakes I would fly over the back seats, bounce off of the back of the front seats into the floor, then I'd climb back into the back window and we continued on. That must have happened dozens of times. These stories go on and on.
They didn't even mention the shenanigans us farm kids got up to - Climbing up the side of a grain elevator when we went to town to visit the grandparents, using retired farm equipment as our jungle gyms, dodging crazy livestock, wandering miles from home on our horses, bicycles or dirtbikes and our parents had no clue where we were, Dad letting us take the .22 out solo to plink at gophers or the occasional coyote, learning to drive as soon as we could both see over the steering wheel and reach the pedals (often even before!) because Dad needed the help.... To this day, I'm still surprised my brothers, cousins and I all made it past puberty!
We used to have bottle rocket wars when I was a kid. That's a fire cracker on a thin stick. You stuck the end of the stick in a pop bottle, then aim it at your opponent, as they would aim at you , you ran out of the way and aimed right back. No helmets while riding skate boards or bikes. Many of the boys would go to the woods fish, catching box turtles for pets, grabbing crawdads, or even go frogging. Also road in the back of pick ups on the freeway. My dad smoked, but I also grew up in the Rust Belt were all the factories were located. Every winter you would go out for a breath of fresh air and get a breath of stinky chemicals. Always drank from the hose. I'm sure Gen X, which seems to be rarely spoken of, had lots of vitamin D, we used baby oil to sunbath. Sure there were bumps, and bruises, and we learned not to be so dam sensitive to verbal language, but it made us stronger people emotionally.
Born in 1946...learned to rollerskate on a brick sidewalk, jumped on a pogo stick, tried to go down a metal sliding board on a sled..was really hard to get the sled up the steps! Didn't worry about cuts and scrapes, taught ourselves to swim, and lived life to the fullest!! The 70's were tame, compared to the 50' and 60's! Still bike, skate, and jump on my great-grandsons pogo stick!❤
Gen X raised themselves we didn't have people watching us because we were on our own. If we got hurt, you better luck it up. We still had playgrounds with concrete so if we fell oh well. We had rock fights and did a bunch of scrap we weren't supposed to. We would be miles away from where we were supposed to be. You had parents to watch you, we had each other.
I was 10 years old in 1985. I remember my grandma and grandpa sending me to the corner store 3 blocks away from their place to buy cigarettes for grandma and beer for grandpa. They would give me a note signed by one of them, the money to pay for the items, and a little extra to buy myself some candy, soda, or another snack. The person at the store would always let me buy their cigarettes and beer, with no questions asked.
This video makes me miss growing up in the 70's and 80's. Children today don't get to enjoy the freedoms we had as kids. Playing outside until the street lights came on. Technology has imprisoned kids to inside. Willing prisoners ignorant to the joy lying just outside the door.
@smokabis5015 I know. When my friend got the 1st Nintendo I was over his house every second. We were together. I'd watch him blow into the cartridge when it was acting up. Also going to a video game. (An arcade or a corner store), when you wanted to play next you'd put a quarter on the screen between the play portion and the screen
I have nothing with the younger adults. I know times change, but I can tell you this: It was always an adventure in the Gen-X era. I have so many memories that I treasure. I believe being a Gen-X and also understanding Gen-y and Gen-Z has helped me know your perspectives on things now; I don't criticize you all just wish we all were taught to deal with things in a better way.
Whats funny is this guy only put the safest things we did as kids back then. Our parents would kick us out of the house right after breakfast and told us not to come back till the street lights came on. And they didn't care what we did. Our only rule was don't croak
Yeah, but me and some of my compatriots had a couple other off the book rules......😈
BB gun wars... Firework wars... Etc...
when the neighbors kid got a air rifle for christmas my momma went out and bought me an air rifle, her excuse was ' well if ronnie shoots kenneth i want kenneth to be able to shoot him back'.
Facts. And I’ve seen the drink out the hose people. Ya’ll living in luxury. My father ain’t gonna have us making his grass messed up. I drank out a bird bath that I knew got filled around three at a nearby retreat lol.
I had to come back for dinner, then when it got dark.
I woukd usually come in and have Mom make me some lunch too. Growing boys have to eat.
"Sticks n stone will break your bones, but names will never hurt you." That sums up Gen X.
Wimpy people today need to learn that.
@@ICoyote65 True, but the wimpy people today are our kids and too many of my GenX friends have raised a bunch of weaklings.
And Baby Boomers too! !
"I'm rubber, you're glue, whatever you say to me bounces off and sticks to you!" XD
@@TonyMontanaDSbecause we had to work full time to take care of the pansies and the government raised the p*ssies we see nowadays
Jay ,
I was born in 1966 , I'm 58 years old . That stuff is just what our parents found out about . There was WAY MORE STUFF
not even mentioned !
Young Man
WE ARE VERY LUCKY TO STILL BE ALIVE !!!!!
I'm the same age as you and we probably are lucky to still be alive, but we had a blast navigating through those times.
Very true. The Cumberland River was at the back of our subdivision down a steep hill. When it would flood we played army in 3 foot deep water on patrol. No thoughts given to the possibility of water moccasins in the water. Great memories
Same here I was born in 1966 , we had the time of our lives ,I feel so sorry for young ones these days they will never have the childhood and freedom we did , my daughter had that as well as I left school in 83 and had her in 84 so she grew up with pretty much the same childhood as mine .
I'm the same age,we rode I n the back of our pickup truck no seatbelts.
I am the same age too. 58. This was just the safe stuff! Lol. You should hear the real stories 😂😂😂😂
dude, I'm Gen X from the 70's and 80's. Here are some of the things I did as a kid that were not mentioned here. Stick fights. After Star Wars released, we would go into the woods, find a good thick stick and start doing light saber battles with each other. Watch your fingers and don't let your guard down. We would also find wild grape vines hanging off the sides of a tree, cut them off about 2 feet from the ground and swing out as far as we could, or as far as we could until the grape vine came free and we fell to the ground. we cut them off with our pocket knives. Yes, even at 8yrs old I was carrying a knife on me. BB gun wars were real. Also remember "professional wrestling" was a big thing in the 80's and we would do all of the big moves on each other. I can tell you a suplex on the hard ground definitely left you speechless, breathless, and immobile for a little bit. The best part of it was, if you broke a bone, everyone wanted to sign your cast. It was instant fame. Yes, Gen X is far tougher than Gen z. To sum it up for you, as Gen X, we are boomers who are in tune with tech.
Amen I did plenty of those only we swan on Willow tree branches and slid down cactus hill avoiding the cacti till we stepped on one with no shoes
And dirt bomb wars out in the woods, building forts and digging our own bmx bike tracks in those woods
A variation of the vines we'd do: climb up skinny but tall pine saplings , until they started dropping from the body weight back to the ground, where you'd then when feet hit the ground, you bent knees and push up and let the tree kinda be like a slingshot effect. Momentary weightlessness 😂
All the children in my neighbourhood have carved their own bows and arrows. You just have to find the right elastic branches for the bow. And then off into the forest. That was a lot of fun.
Thought we were the only ones who had the tarzan vines....ours had you swing out over a pit full of rocks and bottles and cans. We also used to collect piles of plastic milk jugs fill them with water and toss them as high as you could while a friend rode his bike down the street through the water "bomb blasts" you know it looked just like when the army jeep would get blasted and flip over in every single episode of the A team 😂😅🤣
Back then: getting hurt = learning a lesson, Now: getting hurt = a danger that needs to be avoided at all costs. Result = fewer lessons learned nowadays
Absolutely right 👍
exactly, every time I got hurt doing something stupid the response from any adult was bet you won't do that again.
@@gsf23
That's exactly what my mother and father would say to me too
And that is why you get adults who are clueless. Because no lessons have been learnt due to them not being Gen X
@@andrefischer5025 FACTS. 💯
They literally had commercials that said "It's 10pm.. Do you know where your children are?"
My mom's response to that was to think about it for a minute, then go, "Oh them. I dunno, they're around here somewhere."
Oh my God I had forgotten about those. That's an expression I have not heard in a while. Too funny but reading this I am starting to wonder how we survived😂
😂😂😂 yup!
Any video talking about X kids should start with that... literally, before the talking, anything... run the "It's 10 PM... do you know where your kids are" ad with the scary images.
@@leechowning2712 I don't remember there being any scary images. The TV just asks, "Do you know where your children are?" The parents would say, "Pfft, no." and then they'd wait for the next show to come on. . . . but if there were scary images, the parents wouldn't have known either, because they only did that when commercials came on, so parents were in the fridge at that point.
We shot each other with b.b guns , full block man hunt , started fires in woods , went into abandoned building , dilapidated bridges and bombs shelters , we insulted our friends , their siblings , their pets , their everything . Pain was a measure of pride . We all had scars and we nevr cried ….we weren’t allowed, or we couldn’t play that game again
We fished , swam. In any body of water pond scum n all ….. we had weapons all the time . Knives slingshots , BB guns , nunchucks , Chinese stars , swords …
We beat each other up and made friends in every town we visited , we were social , we looked for fun everywhere , and adventure was the quest…..that’s just the surface
I agree with the never crying. When I cried my Dad would tell me shut up or I'll give you something to cry about. he kept what he called the board of Education under the couch.
All problems with schoolmates were settled on the recess yard or in the parking lot after school. After beating the snot out of each other, there (mostly) was no beef afterwards. Until next time if course....
Literally just described my child as well,every single thing 😂😂
Crawdad fishing in DRAINAGE "creeks". 😂
there was no video games so you made your own fun we were very fit hyper activity does that
We were a whole generation of Latchkey Kids. One of the most ubiquitous rules was "If the sun was out, we were out." We weren't allowed to come back in, even if we needed a drink, unless it was time to eat, and sometimes then, we were given food to take outside. I didn't even need the note to buy cigarettes for my mom because everyone in the store knew me and my mom. While playing outside, we never had to check in before going anywhere outside. We had zero supervision and we got left to our own designs for what we did out there.
I am GEN X and this is completely accurate! During the summer, our mom would tell us, "Go outside and play and DO NOT come back until Dinner!" I am so grateful to have grown up when I did. Kids nowadays are so over-protected. I would NEVER want it any other way! :)
exactly
FREEDOM!
Relate.
I was told not to play in traffic, and not to chase parked cars. That was my instructions for the day.
Totally. Younger generations do not have any street smarts what do ever!
I'm a 58yo woman. I was in BB gun wars, pellet gun wars, we hunted water moccasins, rode skateboards off the roof into a pool. On weekends and everyday during the summer, we would leave after breakfast and not come home until dinner. Somebodies mom would see us at lunch, if that mom didn't work, and then out we would go again. At 10, when it was my dad's weekend, he'd give me $10 to walk to the corner store and buy him a 6 pack of beer and some smokes. It was a different time for sure but I wouldn't trade it for anything.
don't forget car surfing. i remember times with a dozen kids in the back of the pickup going down the road at 60 and we kids are laughing as we nearly fall out. I had an extra danger, my parents sent me off to play after breakfast and chores, but we lived deep in the woods. My "neighbor kids" were coyotes I would roughhouse with because I thought they were dogs, until my mom caught me and made me stop... after months of playing with them :D
I had a friend who had a huge scar from getting shot in the head from a pellet gun. Somehow, it never occured to us to stop playing with them😂
@JayFlex Gen X ISN'T born in the 1970s the first year was 1965 my year, I know what you said that you weren't born in the 70s so you didn't know how it was to grow up then. So I just figured I would let you know... We are actually mid-60s babies, a lot of us are kids of very straight laced conservative parents and some of us the kids of hippie parents. But either way we were expected to figure it out... We were given a lot of freedom of thought and exploration of our world. We were NEVER sheltered... You were encouraged to go out. If you got hurt, oh well that's how you learned. If you were told not to do something and you did it that's how you learned your lesson and you got hurt possibly then you figured out don't do that again,! So yeah if it wasn't the big injury that's exactly why they laughed at you cuz they were like hey idiot... What did I just tell you? 😂 #NYGenX65BIKERLady
My ex husband's cousin joined the military and when they were doing all his physical evaluations they found a BB still lodged in his butt from one of their wars 😂
I am blown away by your post. I could have been something I wrote. We all these things! Even the cotton mouth! We were in a tree and started throwing rocks at it (from our tree house). We finally killed it, and put it in a huge bucket. I thought it was the biggest snake I had ever seen.
We had an older, single man on our street who had a large yard full of trees, and his back enclosed porch was full of games, chalkboards, children's desks. He had no children himself. We could go play in his yard whenever we wanted, whether he was there or not. He didn't care, and our parents didn't care. He had even nailed boards into a couple of the real tall pine trees so we could climb; it was like a mini-forest. There was never a problem and what great times we had there. Sadly, I believe today, that same man would probably be run out of the neighborhood.
right we were climbing up everything, the roof was probably among the least dangerous
I remember being at the counter of a 7-11 and people would just randomly pay for my stuff or spot me some change. I did it a few times for kids in my 20s, but now I'm too terrified of looking suspicious
in today's world, a kid would get hurt and the man would face legal troubles. In the 70's lawsuits were not so common.
@@scarbrow01 Exactly. When we got hurt, the only thing parents would say is, "Kids." That was how it was perceived anyway; we were just doing what kids do. No one was to blame.
@@k_salter They would even go as far as say, it's your own fault 😂
I will never trade my childhood from the 80s and early 90s to grow up this day of age.
Sir, we rode in the back of the truck down the highway, left the house @ 8 am and didn’t return until dark, no cell phones, no parents around. We played in the bayou, lakes and rivers. Rode our bikes without helmets, climbed trees built treehouses and forts. There was a lot of freedom.
The tree houses and forts... great times. Nighttime raids on construction sites for wood and nails...
Parents Didn't have a truck, but we was free to roam the back of the station wagon, and the van later.
BMX bikes, tracks with Ramps and jumps and berms. Dirtball fights always ended up throwing rocks. Muddy and wet from playing by the river or swamps.
These kids nowadays have no idea what life really is.
Mudbugs, and treefrog hunting for pets.
I remember once my grandpa had to deliver a pin to my uncle's farm about 30 miles away. My cousin's and I rode inside the pin in the back of the truck all the way. 😂
Word up!! I miss those days.
Don’t forget, there were NO seatbelts, car seats, and whoever heard of carbon monoxide poisoning from riding unsecured in the back of any and all pickup trucks. 🤣🤣🤣
Not only could you get spanked at home, but it could happen at a friend's house, too. Parents generally backed each other up.
and at school also from a teacher
I had the cane, twice, before i became a teenager. Kids today don't know they're born
@@thothstone4795 Absolutely. My high school teacher cracked a book over my head for being mouthy. I told my mother and she asked me what I did to deserve it. In grammar school, the principle had a huge wooden paddle he used on kids. My parents thought that was great.
@@thothstone4795 I went through during the tail end of the corporal punishment era, where we were given the choice of swats with the paddle, or detentions, and NOBODY took the detentions, not even the girls. Better to get it over with fast, and not sit there all afternoon when everyone was out doing stuff.
“It takes a village to raise a child ..” no parent should be left alone to raise children 🙂
Nothing better as a gen x, waking up on Saturday morning to watch cartoons. Otherwise, go out and don't come back until dark.
We watched cartoons and wrestling after that. While wrestling was on, we tried the moves out on each other. 😂 Good times.
After school, I watched “general hospital” I think, with mom, because cartoons came after. Haha
That's why there was so many kidnappings and murders.
Exactly . I used to cycle miles away to see my friends. Nobody knew where I was , they didn't worry as long as you came home by dark.
We woke up, ate breakfast, watched cartoons for a short time, had to do house chores, and then we were forced to go outside and play all day, except we came home for lunch and then right back outside until street lights came on.
I still like the taste of hose water
We also put soap on the slip n slide
Restaurants had smoking sections, they asked you smoking or non smoking when you went to eat
My dad used to drive with me on his lap, I didn’t wear a seatbelt until I was 12, mom’s arm was the seatbelt.
Getting hit in the shins with the pedals, was awful
All true.
I think the most dangerous things not mentioned; hitchhiking, for obvious reasons, and playground equipment.
Giant swings on concrete, backflips off of metal high bars, teeter-totters (see-saw), metal animals mounted on giant springs that would shoot you into the atmosphere, metal slides, and of course, the gyroscope wheel of death. 💀
I still can remember the freaking metal slides that felt like 180 degrees and would remove skin going down it. We had the genius idea of attaching a hose to the top of the slide. Going like 20 feet through wood chips as we flew off the slide.
Metal slides and the dome climbing bars... ouch.....
I'm a millenial but my private school still had one of those metal swing/slide Chimera of Death. God knows how many kids hurt themselves on that dam thing.
ahh yes the merry go fly across the yard get up do it again wheel. gawd i miss those.
I still have scars from flying off the gyro o' doom. Lucky I didn't get a concussion or broken neck.....
One thing that defines gen-X is the metal slide in the playground! The hot summer sun, steep incline, and 10-20 feet tall! Even better... we brought wax paper with us and used it as a mat, so we'd slide down super fast! I always chuckle at today's slides. Kids today have no idea how to have fun! 🤪
Yeah, that was a blast except that thing was HOT!!!
Oh yeh❣️😆
I look at that shit today, and I'm like "that's for toddler's, right?"
😂😂 we just pour water on it. It took a while since we had to first go find a bottle and fill it up at the water fountain. Let not talk about the merry-go-round that was completely metal and spinning like crazy.
My now 19yo son had his picture put in the paper when he was 2 or 3 because he would slide down the 8' tall metal slide at my older kids school. Then he would run around to the front of the line and force his way in so he could do it again. The kids were laughing and letting him go. It was a field day event for the school, so the local reporter was there to cover it. She asked if she could take his picture and use it for the article.
Gen Xer here: born in the ‘70s, raised in the ‘80s and ‘90s - I don’t reflect too much on the “good ol’ days” like they were perfect, but I can tell you unequivocally that it was a different world and the hype, by and large, was very much real. Feel free to keep exploring this era because it may never be that good again.
I was born in 78, so I know what you mean.
Eh. 'Good' is relative. It was def fun for the children, but looking back, us kids were in FAR more danger on the regular than kids today. Kids today ARE soft, but only because we haven't figured out how to pass on many of the lessons we learned in less life-threatening ways.
@@ainnunyabidniz I'd say this is bullshit. We were not in more danger, let alone FAR more, than kid's today. Having less safety measures is nothing when we had more common sense and weren't coddles like pansies. Kids today have access to drugs at almost any time, crime is more rampant, pedophilia seems to be more rampant and even validated if you're in a left wing city. It's way worse to be a kid today and it's not even close. I'd also argue many of us know exactly how to pass on lessons without having to tell them not to jump off a roof blindfolded. It's called teaching your children that life isn't fair or equal, danger is around every corner, and if you do something stupid and get hurt or arrested, you won't be coddled or bailed out, but you'll suffer the consequences. Liberals don't know how to raise their kids, but they were usually raised by drug addled hippies. My people have no issues raising tough kids.
Completely different world. I was cooling whole meals by the time I was 10. I was responsible for my younger brother, we were latch key kids that did what we were told and conducted ourselves like our parents were always around because the village was real. Almost every adult knew every adult because they grew up together with the same sentiment. Parents didn't get mad because another adult corrected you, didn't cuss the teachers out for doing there jobs. If anything they wanted to help and be a part of turning there children into responsible adults. Idk what's happening today
Life without trigger warnings and kids raised by helicopter moms? Yes, please.
By the time I was 12, I had broke so many bones including my collar bone, had a 6” piece of glass in my thigh, had my pinky sewn back on, etc etc etc… I have battle scars from being a KID in the 80s.. 😉
Way ahead of ya. I was taken to the emergency room six times by the time I was 7: broken bones, third degree burns (the fire-walking experiment gone wrong 😉), lacerations, etc., not counting all the injuries that Mom managed to doctor up herself.
And I was a GIRL!!
61 now and still going strong! Fell off a horse a few times a couple years back and the trainer (also Gen X) always just said, "You okay, Ma'am? Yeah? Well then get back up in the saddle! We're not finished with the lesson."
We drank from the garden hose because we weren't allowed in the house. When your parents said "Go outside and play" that meant you were banned from the house for most of the day.
We would be 2 blocks down the street till we hear our name being called from the porch like Lassie🤣
@@karatekoala4270and if your mom called you by your full name you knew you were in serious trouble lol
@@Retireddriver 🤣🤣 no lies told!
If u went in, u stayed in! We didn't want to stay in! 😂 my mom was usually cleaning when we went outside, so she wasn't letting us run in and out.
You quickly learned to flush out your hose first. A mouth full of bugs taught you that lesson fast.
Dirt clod fights, BB gun fights, tree climbing, unsupervised archery, swimming in ponds, playing in creeks, walking/riding bikes pretty far from home, no cell phone to keep in touch, riding in the back of pickup trucks, playing crash derby while sledding, “surfing” in the aisle on the school bus while the driver tried to make us fall, playing with fireworks while throwing them at each other, building tree forts using all kinds of tools, digging tunnels as forts (sometimes they collapsed), running around in houses while they were being built, etc. Great times.
Truth!
All of this and more. Great childhood that unfortunately will never be again
And parents knew if you were at someone's house because there was 20 bikes in that house lawn....
Dirt clot and BB gun fights were the best!
All that and no adult supervision usually.😂
I am 61 years old. Thanks for the video. It brought back good memories. They used to have cigarette vending machines anyone could buy from.
My dad would send me down town in our little town with a quarter to buy some Winstons out of the vending machine at the Skelly gas station! I was eight years old and ride my bike. 1965!
@@maxr4448 Remember the candy cigarettes that was basically a stick of sugar wrapped in paper. Between the paper and the candy was a powdered sugar that when you blew through it looked like smoke
I decided to try to be cool before I was 18 and would grab cigarettes from a Denny’s vending machine…
My grandfather would give me 20 cents (in the early ‘60s) to buy his Camel no filters. Put 2 dimes in and pulled the handle. The pack would come out with 3 pennies taped to the outside. Got to keep the 3 cents as payment for walking a mile to get his smokes 😂
Or skinny kids could just reach up into the machine with their arms.
I’m in the UK, in the 70’s we would go the shop with a note for cigarettes, no parents present
We were so feral!!😂😂 We were not allowed in the house during the summer until sundown! Mom would bring us food outside LOL! I still drink from the garden hose occasionally!!
I think that's one of the best descriptions of our childhood ... we were so feral!! 👍🏻🤪🤣
@@samanthamcgahan2066 Today's kids are "indoor cats."
@@Aryaba kids today act like caged ginny pigs
What do you mean were? We're still feral. We're the generation not to be fucked with
I didn't have a garden hose growing up...but we did have a small swamp we used to played in
(And you probably see where this is going).
Swamp deep enough to swim in parts of it, and so we did...For hours too without any parents for least 2-3 miles away. 😅
Hi, GenXer here 😊 I enjoyed your commentary on this very true video. Parents smoked cigarettes in cars with closed windows, inside homes, restaurants, hospitals even...True story
As for the generational divide, my thought is that life is different for kids now because of how we grew up. I always appreciate younger peoples perspective of how we came up in the states.
I experienced everything in this video & there's much more they didn't cover. We were feral, they called us slackers & we are the smallest generation. A suggestion: look up "PSA: It's 10pm, do you know where your children are"
All this being said, I wouldn't have wanted to come up at any other time in history. What I do wish still happened is kids being outside all day during summer, riding bikes, using our imagination to have fun. It felt so free
I remember people smoking in movie theatres and on airplanes!
There were a lot of things that we did as a kid that we couldn't get away with nowadays. My dad rolled pipe tobacco and I remember it leaving this haze of smoke in the house. Walking to the bus stop with only my older, so the 5 and 8 year olds walked alone with no parents. Good times.
Gen x was the trial run for the safety of the next generation
My mum used to smoke like that, she died of lung cancer in 2001.
Now I look back and think how bad our clothes must have stank of smoke 🤢 we didn't give it a thought back then.
No sun screen, drinking from the hose, BMX bikes, skateboards, Miami Vice ....Rad dude. Take me back to those days!!!
Jarts enough said!!!
As a ginger, my mother put sunscreen on me when spf 15 was the maximum you could get. Especially after I came home from the pool one weekend with sun poisoning. I was so sick!!!
Slip and slides were fun. Or really just some plastic bags taped together.
SPFs were really low. As a redhead, it was 10-15 until after college. Anything higher was super expensive.
Haha
My mom taught me how to get the golden tan. She had a big piece of plexiglass mounted in the yard. Slide under that sucker and get ready to feel the heat. Oh but the golden tan came from a thin sheen of WD40.😂😂😂😂
Mommy didn't play. Best tan around.
I still have my lawn darts. we did not know what danger was as we were playing with danger like an old friend
My dad had a pickup truck. My sister and I sat in the back rain or shine. We used to love when he would hit a bump in the road. We would bounce up and crash back down in the bed of the truck, all while moving down the road.
Remember fighting over who got to sit on the wheel well when there were more than two kids?
@@MorphicStatesI do
My grandkids want to ride in the back of my truck and I so want to let them, but I don't want to deal with the consequences of today's laws.
We did the same. Great times!
I'd ride in back of pickup
However, you had to have your back, to the cab of truck
Not just anywhere in truck
I was born in 73. We were the tv remote control. In the U.K. we only had 3 tv channels.
In the play park we had hot burning metal slides & a witches hat (who remembers those? It was my favourite) mostly, all play equipment was used as a climbing toy. Yes, I walked with my dads German shepherd, off lead, to the shop and bought my mums cigs & chocolate bar. I loved my bike, but once I learned to roller sk8 that was it for me. We used the same hand built ramps in the middle of the road as the bikes. My baby brother was set in the back of the car in the Moses basket & it was my job to keep it on the seat. I preferred to sit on the floor of the car though.
My parents were cub & scout leaders, so I learned to safely build fires & had no problem sleeping in a tent pitched in the school field behind our house, a field where we played every day, because they were open to the public.
Fat lips, skinned elbows & knees & yes, ankles taken out by our bike pedals were a daily occurrence. Honestly, we didn’t care because we had fun getting the injuries. Thankfully I gave my kids a similar kind of freedom, but may have started at a slightly later age than I did.
Londoner here. Yep, I remember the 'witches hat' all too well. I was 12 at the time and at lunchtime our teachers would sometimes take us to a local park with a small playground. Before we left the school, my friends and I would 'borrow' some metal spoons from the school kitchen. We'd then climb up the spinning & rocking witches hat, and stick the spoons in the opening gap at the top at just the right time. It took just one go to completely flatten the spoons (and luckily not our fingers). We then slipped the spoons back into the cutlery drawers. The teachers were always dumbfounded as to why and how there were so many flat spoons in the drawers. 😂
When I was 10 and my cousin was 9 in the late 1960's, we used to stand in my father's car with our heads and torso's sticking out of the sunroof driving through London (no compulsory seat belts back then). Also, I still have scars on my shins from those sharps bicycle pedals. When I was 9, my older sister would tell me to go and buy her cigarettes. When I was 11, I had a big knife on my belt as part of my Scout uniform.
Oh, and breaking stink bombs (in glass vials) under my shoe on the top floor of a double-decker bus was fun, especially amusing watching all the adults run out of the bus because of the terrible smell! I also owned a pair of Clackers and those things were dangerous - a lot of kids fractured their wrists. Good times.
Almost forgot... from the age of 6, I used to walk to school and back on my own. It was a mile each-way, having to cross busy streets, including main roads. All the kids walked... no mummy/daddy car rides to/from school for any of us kids back then!
I remember when we got channel 4, it was very exciting lol.
Metal bear traps to the shins
Oh yes I remember all these. Getting 20 pence and buying sweets like rhubarb and custards, strawberries and cream and cola cubes and they were placed in the small paper bag. Best memory is when bmx bikes came up and playing games like 40, 40 and knock down ginger. Good times lol
Early GenXer here, the trick to sunburns was to get burned just enough to start peeling as the layer of burnt skin would act as low-grade protection. If you burned again, you wore a t-shirt, and you would only stop going to the beach when your skin would start to blister. Then you just had to avoid other kids are they would delight in slapping you on the back.
My grandmother would send me with a note to get her Pall Malls for 50 cents a pack. In high school we had a smoking area for the kids, not the adults. We had actual commercials reminding parents, it’s 10:00p, do you know where your kids are. 😂😂😂
We had a smoking area in the library in highschool
😂 at my school had the good ole smoking tree 😂 only the kids that you was a little scared of was always at that tree 😂😂😂
I was there for the tail end of that. I remember going to "the smoking tree" in high school every day after lunch, but I was also there when smoking was banned. Even the teachers couldn't smoke on campus anymore. I remember my principal would go out to his van on breaks, and smoke would be rolling out the door when he came out.😂
@@mimib323 that’s funny 😂 where I’m from we had the smoking tree until 2003 or 4 I’m not really sure I had already graduated but we had such a small poor school that we never had air conditioning just open windows 😭 I had the worst time trying to stay awake because I had to be at school at 5:30 am to start basketball practice, practice til 8:45 then start school. I was always tired 😂 the poor kids today would have the school turned in for child abuse for not having air conditioning (IN ARKANSAS) 😭 it was always so hot plus we had to deal with bats flying around our heads that we would swat with our science books and hope that we killed a couple a day. It was fun back then but I get to thinking about it now 🫣 I honestly don’t know how we didn’t die of heat stroke and/or rabies 😂😂😂😂😂 my god 😭
😂😂😂😂
Exactly my childhood , my grandma smoked the unfiltered Pall Mall and had to go get them
We played for hours everyday in the local junkyard...broken glass, chemicals, old cars, fridges...we played with all of it. We made forts, swing sets, etc.
The police wouldn't look for missing children in the 70s and would not interfere in what is considered domestic abuse or child abuse today. Adam Walsh was kidnapped from a mall in Florida in the summer of 1981 when he was 6. His mother let him play video games alone in a department store with other kids, which was very common. A store clerk kicked all of the kids out of the store on the outside of the mall, including 6 year old Adam. Back then kids were expected to fend for themselves. He was lost and found by a child predator and murdered. His father John Walsh began a huge child safety campaign that changed laws. He was the host of America's Most Wanted.
Around that same time we had Johnny Gosch get kidnapped too very close to where I grew up, so my dad to me to fight and use weapons as a little kid and I was sent back out into the world.
Yes! They used to drop us off and leave us. I remember being dropped off at a movie theater when I was 7 years old, just me and my 9 yr old sister. Mom came back and picked us up when the movie was over. We used to come home from school to an empty house and me and my sisters would fight over our chores. My sister Sandy was a perfectionist and me and Teresa could never do anything to please her. We slacked off on purpose because she would get mad and lock us outside while she cleaned the house. We played and she cleaned. LOL. Mom would come home from work and Sandy would tell on us for not helping.
@@debbiecaudill8799 Exactly, sister. This was our childhood. I walked my younger brother home from school when he was in kindergarten and I was in the second grade. With my own kids, look out. Nope. I was extremely protective of them and would not allow anything close to what we grew up with.
3:02 we climbed onto the roof every year for the 4th of July in the US to watch the fireworks all over the county from our rural home.
I'm a gen X. This video doesn't even come close to stuff we got up to, this just showed the safe stuff. But it's hard to find pictures and videos of what we did because cameras, the film and especially video recorders were huge and to expensive for most people, plus we didn't think or care about recording what we did.
Yep. Glad we didn't have the ultra surveillance the kids have now.
Well photos were expensive as well. So didn't take photos of everything.
I was probably about 8,dad would let me walk to the store with 75cents to get him a pack of cigarettes out of a vending machine.noone ever gave it a second thought.great reaction
I remember going to The gas station with 35 cents to get Mama a pack of Winstons
@@MaRoach7 oh my. I'm guessing that had be late 60s or early 70s?.crazy,now they're 8-9 dollars.im glad I never smoked😝
Me too. By the time I was 7 years old my mom would send me to the store with a note & $1 & I would bring her back 2 packs of Marlboros. If I was lucky, not every time, I got a quarter for candy & I bought candy cigarettes.😂😂😂 By the time I was buying my own cigarettes they were still only 85¢ a pack. I was only 14 & no longer needed a note 😢
Same here, we had a line of credit at Mr Pat's store. He'd bust us and actually whip us with a belt if we did something wrong, my parents were OK with that shit too. I learned to stay in line at a young age.
@@MaRoach7 Same but, think mom smoked uh.. Palmal? Dad smoked some sort of menthol, Beyer? I dont remember lol. They send us with a note and we hand it to the guy behind the counter along with money and he get what was ordered on the note, us kids got to keep the change to buy candy or what we wanted. We never even thought to pull a fast one, Adults were like an All seeing collective that would know if you did anything bad and you would get it the moment you stepped inside back at home.. Your full name would echo through the house and yup.. hehehe
Mounting pvc pipes to our bikes when The 4th of July came around so we could have bottle rocket fights. When we came home with burns, Dad would say it will only hurt for a day or two, then he helped us build a better deployment system and gave us a couple of dollars for more ammo, so we were better prepared for the next round of chaos.
We never wore helmets, pads, anything when biking and skating. No seatbelt. We would float down the salt river on inner tubes, using only baby oil as sun lotion. I would blister!!!! I lived in Phoenix AZ where it's routinely 115 degrees.
All you fellow GenX remember our slogan back then? It's, "You can take a kid out of the streets, but you'll NEVER take the streets out of the kid". So very, very true.
I though the Gen X creed or motto was.. " We are all a bunch of latch key kids raised in neglect and tap water."
Im a woman from Great Britain who was born in the fifties and most families were not well off. If we saw a building with a flat roof we just had to climb it . We built bikes with parts from 4 or 5 different broken bikes and if you coulnt get a saddle , you rode the bike without one We made go carts from planks of wood , old pram wheels and string tied to the wheels to guide us . We would get to the top of a hill and race each other down the.hill , and remember we had no brakes. We would play outside from morning until night .
Has anyone tried telling British kids dog muck used to be white ? Do you think they would believe you ?
We did the same thing...here in the southern part of the United States...
My first bicycle had no brakes & was way too big for me… my brother got some parts from the junkyard & made me a bike! 😍
@@donnawhite5062 but we loved doing it. I am more afraid of things now than I ever was as a child
@@whisperinthenight what great fun we had . We also used to play a game called cannon. We would take four wooden dolly pegs from moms clothes line , you would put three slanted on the Kirb ,then one on top. You would throw a rubber ball at it , if you broke the cannon your friends would run , you had to then throw the ball at them until you hit one of them and then it was their turn . hours of fun and it didn't cost a penny
I started walking to school, solo, in the 1st grade. About a mile, and crossing a busy intersection. My mom walked with me for the first week, to make sure I knew the rules and the route. I loved the walk!
Yep, same here. I walked to school my whole entire time. Only time I had to use the bus was when we moved down to Abilene. That was short lived.
Remember the Safe Zone signs people would hang in their windows, since parents were working, so if there was an emergency you could go into that house for safety? That ended up being the total opposite because pdf files used it to find new toys to play with?
@@erickalear7609 I don't remember safe zone signs in the 70s or 80s. At least, we didn't have them in our city.
Ha, I got to walk to my kindergarten on my own starting at 3.
But to be fair, it's only a couple hundred meters but I had to cross a road. 😅
I was SO proud when I got to do it on my own for the first time. To me that meant that I was a big girl now!
@@vnovice I don't think those came out until the 90s if I'm being honest.
We were great climbers, so the roof was no big deal. Omg the slip n slide was awesome but painful. The sprinkler was so much fun until your big brother pushes you onto it. Coconut oil works great for a tan. Our makeshift ramps are the original bike tricks that you kids compete in now with your half pipes. Yeah, I remember faceplanting into the back of front seats when they stopped fast. My big brother had a bebe gun and I was usually the moving target. Thank God I was fast. I still have scars on my shin from those metal bike pedals, my Achilles heals too. That's why they make better lounge chairs. Those cut the hell out of our legs
The 70's, 80's and 90's were a great time to grow up. The world of today sucks compared to the past.
Yes. I loved my childhood! I miss those day's.
I wanted a portable handheld TV so bad in the 80's and early 90's. Now I have a hand held portable super computer. I don't particularly miss those times a whole lot. I was the very end of gen x born in 80 so maybe its a little different.
Yep so true.
Not the 90s as much
Its 50s-80s
My daughter's friends used to always ask me to tell stories from childhood, and were always blown away by all the shenanigans.
My favorite story is when I was 7 and asked the neighbor boys older brother (13 at the time) to tie my toboggan to his snowmobile and run me around the field and up and down the alley (lived in a small village). Bloodied my nose when the snowmobile stopped but the toboggan didn't. Got in trouble for using the toboggan and not a regular sled. Wiped my nose and kept playing in the snow. Gen X is just built different.
I remember getting that bloody nose and rushing to get back outside with tissue in my nostrils. We were so tough!
That hose water was flavored!!!!😂
Had my first snowmobile at 10, we had the kids pay us each $1 a day for gas, and we would have at least 6 GTs tied to the back. Thanks for the memory!
😂@@LuvaBrutha
I was born in 1972
When we were 8 years old we would get up on the weekends (or summer vacation) eat breakfast and tell our mom/dad at 8am “I’m going out to play with my friends”
Their response? “OK be back for Lunch”
For the next 4 hrs we were like a “Fart in the Wind”
Once done with Lunch (12:30) “OK I’m going out to play with my friends”
Response?
“OK be back in time for dinner”
When we were done eating dinner
“OK I’m going out to play with my friends” response?
“OK be back before your bed time!”
It’s not that are parents didn’t care, it’s just how things were.
During the summer we ate and slept at home, aside from that are parents hardly saw us.
My exact schedule!
Exactly
You are lucky you got lunch! Once we were turned outside we couldn’t go back inside until suppertime.
Same unless except after chores. We always had chores.
The reason we drank out of the garden hose is because we weren't allowed inside the house, and it was the hose or death.
Dude, sleeping in the back window was the best! Also, I used to climb up on the roof and jump off just for fun. I used to chop all of our wood for fun from like 8 to 14 years old. My friends and I used to ride our bikes several miles downtown to the mall by ourselves at like 12 years old and ride back home in the dark when it closed at 9pm. But I'm a stronger more independent person because of it. We figured out how to get stuff done ourselves, and learned that we didn't need anyone to take care of us because we could take care of ourselves. But yeah, we did just about all of these things 😁😅
My favorite private place was the roof even though it was "off limits"
I have pictures of myself (age 9) and my two brothers (age 8 and 15) jumping off the roof of the house my parent's build when I was a kid. My mom took it from the ground. lol
LOL, We took the couch cushions outside under the roof and jumped off the room onto the. 😂
Yeah, we were resourceful.
These videos make me so glad I'm old and I feel such pity for the youth of today. It must really suck to be a kid now 😢
Kids spend most of their time indoors now, and people wonder why so many have “depression” or “anxiety”. Most are self diagnosed (probably). I think the only time I was allowed inside was to eat, bathe, or sleep. Hell, we played outside in the rain, we played while sick, didn’t have “anti bacterial” everything, and I remember trying to befriend a stray dog that ended up not being friendly. Mom washed the bites with dish soap, bandaged it, and I was back outside. It wasn’t bad enough for a hospital visit.
I'm a older millennial and I did most of all of this. We had cable, Saturday cartoons were the best. We use to climb up on the roof and jump down onto a trampoline just to see who could bounce the highest Everyone drank from the hose. We made slipping slides for tarps and dish soap. My Mom has a photo of me, my sister and all of our friends suntanning. Mom didn't care where we went as long as we were home when the street light came on. Bike ramp showed us who were going to become engineers. I remember being 7 years old and buying my Mom's and Grandmother's cigarettes with just a note. Paid $3 for 2 different packs. We road in the back of the truck for road trips across the U.S.A. and No one wore seatbelts. All of my siblings had B.B. guns. I got shot in the ear during a B.B battle once. Mom was more mad about the blood on my shirt, than my ear.My ear was still in one piece. Now fireworks were a different story. We were not allowed to play with them unless we had an adult or an almost legal older sibling(16 years old) watching us. Lawn chairs became camping beds during the summer, because we would sleep outside during the summer, by ourselves, all night. I truly missing feeling that safe.
Me too born in 88
You folks were the last of us. lol, fun, wasn't it? You bet!
Yeh,baby!💯
Well, an older millennial would be basically Gen X if you were born in the early, maybe mid-80’s. Things started changing in the early part of the mid 90’s big time.
Yeah, when I was in high school (graduated in ‘97) cigarettes in California was $1.25. It’s unbelievable how much they cost now pushing ~$15
I'm cracking up because I remember all of these. Those were the best of times!
When I was little, I remember fathers having their sons on their laps when they drove. They would let the kid steer the car. Does anyone remember that?😂😂 I was born and raised in New York City.
As springsteen sang "id sit on his lap, in that big old buick, and steer as we drove through town"
Man, at 13 my dad said to me “you wanna drive”? He would throw me the keys n tell me not to be home late. He didn’t even come with us, we used to drive on our own. 🤣
@@kellyperry559 😂🤣
Was driving at 13. At 14-15 when the folks were fishing for the weekend I’d take the car and cruise even the neighboring towns to chase girls. No license yet
Grew up in the country. I was sent to the neighbors ranch, 3 miles away, at 11 driving my dad’s truck… WITH MY YOUNGER BROTHER!! 😂😂😂😂😂
This is all true. I remember going out at 8am and not coming home till at least 6pm. If you came home it was to get a drink, go to the bathroom, or get bandaged up so that you could go back out to play more. If you didn't have any bruises, cuts, or scars then weren't a kid.
I learned to bandage myself up before my parents found out for fear Mom wouldn't let me go back out.
She was very protective after I was hit by a drunk driver while I standing on the grass next to stop sign. He swerved and hit me and a friend. I smashed 3/4 of the windshield with my face and upper body the slid off the hood and across the pavement (the street peeled the left side of my face off).
2 weeks later I was out riding bike when Mom wasn't home...full on mummy mode, bandages still on my face and body.
"If you didn't have any bruises, cuts, or scars then weren't a kid." ~~ No that meant you was not trying hard enough... Rub a little dirt on it, and walk it off... was very common back then..
Playgrounds! Our playgrounds were filled with large metal contraptions on which we happily played in the summer heat. If we fell off of one, the ground was often cement or blacktop (asphalt). Skinned knees were common. If we got one, we got a band-aid from Mom then went back to playing. The two highlights of the playground were the slide and the merry-go-round. The slide was a long metal chute superheated to sear flesh. It went straight at a steep angle, ending in concrete, blacktop, or packed dirt. If you went down the slide too fast, you hit that bottom hard. If you went down too slow, your legs got cooked, especially if you were in shorts. The merry-go-round was a spinning metal disc with bars on it to hold onto, or to get slapped by if you tried to get on while it was spinning and missed. The goal was to get it spinning as fast as possible, then stay on as long as possible - hopefully without puking.
Lol, I did the fast spinning merry-go-round more times than I can remember.
You got band-aids? We just let them dry and clot on their own unless the bleeding was really bad.
@@scarbrow01 I grew up in Fresno, CA, and there is a park there called Storyland. It's an amazing place, with a bunch of themed exhibits relating to nursery rhymes, folk tales, or children's fiction. Much of it is interactive, meaning there's something for kids to climb on or swing from or slide down. One of my favorites was in the Hansel and Gretel area. Their merry-go-round had a few bars on it, but mostly what you hung on to were statues. There were four of them, one for Hansel, one for Gretel, one for the Witch, and one for the oven. So they're basically chasing each other around in a circle. Definitely my all-time favorite of those.
I'd say if you have younger kids and ever go to Fresno be sure to visit there, but having been back there and seen what the older part of the city (the part that was the entire city when I was a kid) has become in the last few decades, all I can say at this point if you have to go there is "my condolences".
I grew up in South Africa and we had two types of merry go rounds. The type you described with bars, then there was another which was elevated higher, like the disc one, but with nothing to stand on. You would have to sit on the frame and hold on for dear life. 😂
Did you have the wobble-board platforms and tire swings too? The ones that were used to the extreme to see who couldn't stay on the thing? That always seemed to result in at least one playground injury a week if there wasn't some parent hanging around to ruin that kind of fun.
I love your videos! Gen X here... lol! Could you please make the image you're watching bigger, please. These old eyes aren’t as good as they use to be! The bea bea guns were adjustable pressure. Usually, we would agree to the amount of pumps when shooting at each other ( i know its not better) the more pumps, the more pressure = pain. We had seatbelts, but usually never worn because parents were usually transporting kids and we would sit on top of each other to all fit. Always on the roof wearing chucks (converse now). Baby oil for tanning, and Dad smoked in the house, in the car and anywhere else he wanted to. One thing the guy left out was getting your pant leg caught in the chain of the bike. Always ended in injury, but more upset to have to put the chain back on your bike regardless of road rash. 💜
i was on the roof in 1969 at nine years old, adjusting the antenna. (i am end off boomers, gen x began when i was 5)
my kids got up on the roof in 1980s.
i still drink from the garden hose.
jumping bikes on ramps was part of living.
no smokers in my house :)
we went fishing on the rocks that jutted out into the ocean by ourselves (a lot of the time i did it alone).
my father was driving a tractor on a farm at 10 so what we did was tame.
i also learned how to shoot a rifle at 7.
as teenagers we went hunting by ourselves (again no parents).
and we rode in the back of my dad's truck all over town.
and FYI, people still ride around in Hawaii in the back of trucks, sitting in lawn chairs!
Baby Boomer here! We also had the Ice Cream truck! The bells rang, and we ran out to buy nutty buddies, ice cream sandwiches, and popsicles! Great memories! 🍦🧊
Did your ice cream truck have an ice cream treat called a screwdriver. It was orange sherbet in a clear plastic container the tapered down and at the very bottom was a gumball
@anitaharris9095 No ,I don't recall that treat! Just an orange sherbert push-up!
@@anitaharris9095we had something similar but it was called a screwball, and I think it was pink with the gum ball at the bottom.
They still have ice cream trucks around my area of ton, but you better have a debit card or plenty of extra cash. It's not cheap.
@@veronicacanfield5070 That's true!
My sons were taught how to use all kinds of tools. They helped their dad build our shed in the backyard. Helped him gut my bathroom and remodel it. Skills they'll use throughout their lives. My oldest is now working on becoming a certified mechanic, in the meantime he does the maintenance on our cars. Oh yeah, and they can both cook! You're welcome ladies 😂
@@stitcherywitchery8611 yeah Dad!
@stitcherywitchery8611 I mean yeah mom and dad.
Yup. My son & daughter both got the same diy education from me. However, only my son is a good cook. My daughter, who is the eldest, tries. Although she has got better since she became a mum.
Should be called lifeskills. We learned that as kids. Glad yall are showing them that.
No kite fighting for me. Too many trees. For us, just keeping one up in the air was a challege.
We had more fun getting strange things stuck in the trees and powerlines anyway. 30 years later, I still occassionally see sneakers hanging off the powerlines, although i think those might be the employees...
Man, the 70's/80's were such great times to grow up in.
Yup. Climbed on the roof, drank out of the garden hose, wrecked many bikes without helmets. Got stung by a scorpion and a hornet in the same day. It makes a child grow up strong and independent.
And realize most pain is quite temporary. Getting that through your head as a kid made us all so much more resilient and adaptable.
I'm 47 and I catch myself saying "When I was your age...." Sweet baby Jesus I'm old 😲🤦😂
Me too. 😂
Every gen X adult has a physical scar from childhood from playing outside 😂😂😂 yes. we stayed outside
Water hose drinking, laying in back window of car, buying cigarettes, tonka truck fireworks,bike ramps, sitting in car window did it all . I believe I have 4 lives left. Lol I was told I had to be part cat lol
I’m from south west Michigan and in my youth a friend invited me to go to Mackinac island with her family. Both her parents smoked the entire trip, windows up, on the way there, while there, and all the way home. It was horrible.
55yo Gen Xer from the U.S. here: By the time I turned 12 in 1981, I'd had 2 broken fingers on my left hand, a concussion scare and entered 6th grade ( @11.5 yo) with my right arm in a cast due to a fractured wrist and using a cane in my left hand to deal with a twisted right ankle. (My dad, who had back issues, taught me how to properly use the cane.)
Personally, I never had a BB gun, but I had friends who did, though I never used them. And the lawn darts from back then? Think like the darts you find in a pub but sized up to where one was about as long as a frisbee is wide with an appropriately weighted metal spike on the front end. Abandoned buildings, candy cigarettes, diners where the aroma of old coffee mixed with the second-hand smoke: These were all things we encountered, explored and endured growing up, even in California.
Gen Xer here as well. By time I was 12 I had a broken back separated shoulder broke my left arm 3 times
In our house, fingers and toes did not count as broken bones. And certainly not a nose as that was just cartilage
If my mother knew all the stuff I got up to back then, I'd still be grounded today 😅😂😂
One of my cousins favorite thing to make fun of me about when we talk about our childhood is him hearing me get grounded for the rest of my life.
I never got grounded, dad wore a belt and mom wore shoes, so they were always loaded.
@acesup5845 my mom never hit us, just took things away and grounded us. My step dad on the hand had a thick leather belt hanging on the wall and we would have to fetch it for him to hit us with it. That was the scariest moment for me, walking back to him tonhamd him the belt he was about to whip over my backside.
You can’t believe how easy it was to get Cigs for your parents, it was just as easy for kids to just put a few quarters in a cigarette vending machine and get some for themselves.
This video is the tip of the iceberg. At 7, I would walk with another kid who was 5, just the two of us, through woods, across busy streets, through streams, across railroad tracks, through an old car graveyard, through a literal graveyard to a shop so that he could buy his mother cigarettes with a note. He was 5!!!!!! On the way back, we would stop at a candy store where $1 could buy you a large sack of sweets. Later, my uncle would stop by. He would take us to visit our grandmother. We rode in the back of his pickup truck. I was the oldest child at 7 and there would be cousins riding along that were under 2 years old. He would be flying down the road and would take us out, go real fast and slam on the breaks so that we could roll around in the back. We loved it and would beg for more. People used to throw rubbish out of the windows of the cars along the highway. Junk was everywhere. People also had no problem with drinking a beer while driving. The police didn't care much. Also, my father would put us on his lap and drive the car while pretending to let us steer it. For fun, my younger brother and I would go to all night rollerskating where the local roller rink would let us skate from evening until the next morning. No parents to be found anywhere. I do remember seeing teenagers and even the food lady selling weed in the bathroom. Like I said, I was 7. Things have really changed. I grew up in a well off suburb of Chicago.
I'm a GenXer and proud of it!! 1975 represent! 😁💪 Love other generations reactions to what we grew up with!! Its hilarious. We survived and were stronger for it. Miss some of the stuff from back then...mainly the carefree attitudes 🤫😉
And Jolt Cola!
😊 Woot! ~👋🏽75'er here too!... Yup, I loved riding my bike everywhere! 🚵♂️ The show "Stranger Things" was so nostalgic!... Definitely do NOT miss the dialup internet I had in college though! 😂
Same 1975🎉
13:06 🤣😂🤣😂🤣 I was screaming, "AND smoking a cigarette", before he said it!!! Hell yeah!!! GEN X!!!
🔥🖤🔥🖤🔥
I was a teenager in the 60s and turned 18 in 74. We ate breakfast sugary cereal watched our favorite cartoons and about 8:30-9 am went outside. My parents didnt have a problem with us coming back in to make a pbj sandwich grab a soda and go back out and usually we brought 1-2 friends with us for a sandwich. I went to my girlfriends house and helped with her chores so she could go to the football game or a dance with me on a friday night. We rode in the back of a pick up truck. We had things called clackers you can look them up dangerous lots of busted arms, teeth knocked out and probably quite a few busted eye sockets. We climbed trees, rode our bikes down concrete stairs. Kids now days even mine could never do what i got by with. Although my kids got to do a lot more than their friends did, used axes, saws, climbed trees, waded the creeks, built forts we lived outside the city limits.
Eating sugary cereal then, wasn't bad, or even candy/fast food..
Kids burned off the carbs
Unless you had an unusual slow metabolism
@@kathleenking47 dentists gave you lollipops back then
@pjenn1 I remember we ate wherever we were at lunch. Mums never knew how many they were feeding until the time came lol. They all just rolled with it
The water from the tap is exactly the same water that comes from the garden hose.
I'm an older gen Xer (1965), and in the late 70s, my father had a side gig paper route he needed a car for (492 papers/day). I would go out with him on Sunday mornings... starting at 3:30am to deliver them. That was my allowance. When he broke his leg, I did the route ALONE on Sundays. I drove the massive station wagon. I was 14. No license. The cops knew. As long as I didn't hit anything/anyone and was home by 7am ...all was good.
I’m a boomer and my husband and I had 3 of those routes (1200 papers a day, 7 days a week from 11:00PM to 6 AM) as our full time job since we couldn’t find any other work in the late 70s-early 80s in Detroit. Couldn’t afford a sitter for the kids so we bundled them up in the back of whatever beater car we were driving and they slept all night until we finished up around 6 AM. And thats how my young GenX kids grew up. They didn’t even have a bedroom until they were around 7 or 8 years old. Good times.
In the 60s, we had regular pickup for regular household garbage, but leaves, grass, branches were burned, and old appliances were taken to a spot on the edge of town, designated the Town Dump, and dropped off - no fences, no attendants, just a general understanding of drive in and dump your junk. I was also a great place for us kids to go hunt up stuff like electric motors, wheels, gears, and such. In the 80s the EPA came in and fenced off the whole area as a HAZMAT Supersite. Took them 20 years to clean it up. Ah, the memories . . .
70s baby here. You always were on the lookout for just the right dumped prams in the UK for the right wheels for that summer's go kart. Once constructed you'd drag it (drive down downhill parts, that was your test shakedown) then take it to steepest hill you could find, not dirt track public road, wait for a moment without traffic and "Geronimo!!". If your design worked you got to the bottom, if it didn't (quite a lot of the time TBH) you'd find yourself sprawled out half way down across the tarmac hoping a car didn't come along as you saw your smashed wheels bouncing down the hill. And so the lookout for dumped prams started again to make your next attempt.
We left the house after breakfast and came home at dinner. Unless you were bleeding or had a broken bone you didn’t dare go home or you would be cleaning, mopping or ironing.
Exactly! We knew better than to tell our parents, “I’m bored.” That was volunteering to do more chores.
That's how I got out of yard work (during the summer). I would make sure to be gone before my dad could give me a list of chores. He made sure I wouldn't escape the next day.
I remember running around all day alone or with my sister then coming in while the news was on and hearing about how a serial killer was targeting young boys in Atlanta
As a Gen-X'er, I MUST remind you that while we were outside doing our thing mostly unsupervised.... when someone DID misbehave, it was highly likely the kid with the CLOSEST parents would be the first one to either dish out a spanking, or the first one to tell the kids to stop doing what they were doing and go home.... to GET a spanking because that parent had already called ahead to let your parents know what you've done.
So, yeah ... we could cut loose and do our own thing, when you KNEW that a spanking was likely around the corner from someone NOT your own parents, you tended to keep things "moderate" in regard to questionable activities in the open.
The other "not moderate" stuff you tended to be far more likely to test the waters first with who you would be okay doing it with OR you did it in a way NOT to draw attention to yourself.
Our parents KNEW when we did something wrong before we got home and we were dealing with! And to think that was before any cell phones 😂😂
I was recently telling my friend’s children about how other people would spank or discipline kids that were not theirs. Or if you got a spanking in a public space, other parents would clap and say you deserved it. They were in shock!
True!
This must have been early Gen X, because late Gen X people were not touching other people's kids. We still had corporal punishment in schools though, but teachers were considered to be trusted/qualified to be able to do it appropriately. That was nothing though, my school did paperwork when I received a punishment like that, then I would have to go home and get my parent's signature. That's when the real pain occurred.
@@herrzimm FACTS!
What's wrong with getting on the roof? If you get up there, just don't fall off. It's pretty easy to do.
@waltermitty4052 that's why many men took jobs in construction.
We are GenX we likely jumped off for the fun of it. I mean we used to try and get the swings as high as we could and jump off.
We jumped off or to the nearest tree, now someone will call the police on the child or their parent.
The GenZs have been programmed to be "cautious" about danger (read: "fraidy cats" 😉)
To answer your question of "how?"
We just did.😄
And the best thing is that we survived and it was the best time to just be a kid.
Oh, I used to declare war on ants, dogs, cats, rats, mice.... by throwing pop snappers at them. I declared war on a hornet's nest, but they won THAT DAY.
A garden hose sitting in the sun the water in the hose got hot enough to cook noodles in. You let it run to keep from scalding your mouth. We literally learned that the hard way.
We used to have crab apple wars but they took place in the middle of the night. To add to the "mystery" was that they took place in a housing development across the street from my grandmother's house. My nana did not care what we were doing most of the time because "God rest her soul" was a very heavy drinker. Anyway, the housing development had all these dark or barely lit pathways between the buildings so it was pretty easy to hide from your enemies or sneak up on them in the dark. We had a blast but looking back on it now as an adult I see now that this would have been a great opportunity for some sick person to snatch one of us up. When I told this story to my own kids they couldn't imagine themselves ever doing anything like that.
If you think buying cigarettes at the counter was wild, bear in mind that there were cigarette vending machines everywhere. I even remember seeing one in the foyer of my local donut shop.
The Gong Show was like America's Got Talent but when someone was bad they hit a big gong and laugh them off the stage.
With Chuck Barris!
latchkey kid in the 70s, walked home alone from school in the 3rd grade and waited for my parents to get home from work. I could make myself something to eat if I was hungry , parents told me to make sure to turn the stove off as to not burn the place down.
💙 older millennial here, a LOT of these things were still around in my childhood. Vivid memories of my sister coming in from playing absolutely covered in blood because she tried to take her bike over a ramp the neighborhood boys had set up extra tall, at the bottom of a hill for the extra speed boost. She got cleaned up and bandaided and sent back out. My brothers and their friends playing airsoft tag (airsoft is like BB guns) - get shot, you're out. We'd spend all day outside, just... digging holes and stuff. That part I remember fondly.
airasoft was awesome, but most of the time, other players were aholes...early gen millennial here too ;)
Things changed gradually, but it was around the mid 90s when things really started to get safety crazy. I'm sure in certain regions people may have grown up in an older way, but generally speaking most of this was on its way out by then. The cell phone becoming something everyone owned, even kids, totally destroyed this way of life.
Oh yes, dirt. Fond memories. Of going to the little creek and building dams from mud, rocks and twigs...
We had "firecrackers" that were called M-80's.
They were a quarter stick of dynamite and would blow sewer caps 10 ft in the air!
In Australia we called those bad boys 'Thunders' and let them off at 3am in the storm water tunnels that ran underneath my mates parents neighbourhood - and it would echo throughout the whole suburb for a good 15 seconds - good times :)
@@John.anon. Oh y'all were begging for it!
Glad you survived your parents wrath lol!
Ah man! The m-80's. Might lose a few fingers messin with those. lol
We loved the M-80s but most of us had enough brain cells in our head to not be too careless with them. No one wanted to end up losing fingers.
M-80s were pretty potent yes, but they were nowhere close to anything like "a quarter stick of dynamite". That was an urban legend, and I've personally heard multiple different versions with different figures given. None of them were true.
I was born in 1964 the last year of the Baby Boomers. I grew up in the 60's and 70's and 80's. The last few Years of the Baby Boomers and Early Gen x ers faced the same dangers. I drank out of the Garden Hose as well. I went on the Roof and played with the Slip and slide and the Water Sprinklers. I rode my Bikes without Knee Pads or Helmets and jumped Ramps.
Also born in 64. Remember those 10ft bike flags, one of the neighbor kids threw one of those about 100 yards and it stuck in my leg. I was hit between the eyes with a bb, and was pushed off a 30 ft bridge. Crazy stuff 💙
3 years older than you. Graduated in '79 so we did the same things. My younger sister is your age. It was a fun time. 😂
'63 here. We're what's known as Generation Jones which is more or less a subsection of the Baby Boom generation. Technically, we're Boomers, but our experiences during our formative years for the most part are more in line with those associated with GenX.
1980 here and I've encountered most, if not all, of the stuff in the video, and done much much worse...
Lawn darts…don’t forget the lawn darts!
Look at him freakin' out so weird about the TV antenna! God how cute that kid is ! 🥰
2:45 Who’s idea?! Everybody’s! Literally everybody’s. If ya had an antenna, you went on the roof.
And always send the youngest he's the lightest and won't fall through the roof.
It was an unwritten rule that dad stays by the TV and kid goes onto roof. I always argued my brother was taller, and lost to i was younger.
I guess I was lucky. We had a control inside that would spin the antenna. We always went outside when dad was going to make it turn!
I was born in 1971. In the 70's the cars had a hug space above the trunk in the back window, this was my play area when I was riding with my mom on errands. When she slammed on the brakes I would fly over the back seats, bounce off of the back of the front seats into the floor, then I'd climb back into the back window and we continued on. That must have happened dozens of times. These stories go on and on.
My son grew up in the 70s he was an active boy. I used to tell him the only thing holding him together was stiches and scar tissue.😅
They didn't even mention the shenanigans us farm kids got up to -
Climbing up the side of a grain elevator when we went to town to visit the grandparents, using retired farm equipment as our jungle gyms, dodging crazy livestock, wandering miles from home on our horses, bicycles or dirtbikes and our parents had no clue where we were, Dad letting us take the .22 out solo to plink at gophers or the occasional coyote, learning to drive as soon as we could both see over the steering wheel and reach the pedals (often even before!) because Dad needed the help....
To this day, I'm still surprised my brothers, cousins and I all made it past puberty!
The blue haze was everywhere: home, in the car (windows up), school, church, shopping, hospital...everywhere.
We used to have bottle rocket wars when I was a kid. That's a fire cracker on a thin stick. You stuck the end of the stick in a pop bottle, then aim it at your opponent, as they would aim at you , you ran out of the way and aimed right back.
No helmets while riding skate boards or bikes. Many of the boys would go to the woods fish, catching box turtles for pets, grabbing crawdads, or even go frogging.
Also road in the back of pick ups on the freeway. My dad smoked, but I also grew up in the Rust Belt were all the factories were located. Every winter you would go out for a breath of fresh air and get a breath of stinky chemicals. Always drank from the hose.
I'm sure Gen X, which seems to be rarely spoken of, had lots of vitamin D, we used baby oil to sunbath. Sure there were bumps, and bruises, and we learned not to be so dam sensitive to verbal language, but it made us stronger people emotionally.
Born in 1946...learned to rollerskate on a brick sidewalk, jumped on a pogo stick, tried to go down a metal sliding board on a sled..was really hard to get the sled up the steps! Didn't worry about cuts and scrapes, taught ourselves to swim, and lived life to the fullest!! The 70's were tame, compared to the 50' and 60's! Still bike, skate, and jump on my great-grandsons pogo stick!❤
Gen X raised themselves we didn't have people watching us because we were on our own. If we got hurt, you better luck it up. We still had playgrounds with concrete so if we fell oh well. We had rock fights and did a bunch of scrap we weren't supposed to. We would be miles away from where we were supposed to be. You had parents to watch you, we had each other.
When I was 6 I used to go to the store for my grandfather and buy his cigarettes and beer with a note from him. 😂. That’s crazy!
I was 10 years old in 1985. I remember my grandma and grandpa sending me to the corner store 3 blocks away from their place to buy cigarettes for grandma and beer for grandpa. They would give me a note signed by one of them, the money to pay for the items, and a little extra to buy myself some candy, soda, or another snack. The person at the store would always let me buy their cigarettes and beer, with no questions asked.
Same but we didn't have any stores that allowed the alcohol
This video makes me miss growing up in the 70's and 80's. Children today don't get to enjoy the freedoms we had as kids. Playing outside until the street lights came on. Technology has imprisoned kids to inside. Willing prisoners ignorant to the joy lying just outside the door.
@smokabis5015 I know. When my friend got the 1st Nintendo I was over his house every second. We were together. I'd watch him blow into the cartridge when it was acting up.
Also going to a video game. (An arcade or a corner store), when you wanted to play next you'd put a quarter on the screen between the play portion and the screen
I have nothing with the younger adults. I know times change, but I can tell you this: It was always an adventure in the Gen-X era. I have so many memories that I treasure. I believe being a Gen-X and also understanding Gen-y and Gen-Z has helped me know your perspectives on things now; I don't criticize you all just wish we all were taught to deal with things in a better way.
I still have scars on my shins from the bear claw pedals that I had on my 10 speed bike!