rhulsey wrote:
Our house was on a hill, and and we had an oil drum we would position ourselves in and roll down the hill until we hit the fence, sometimes being airborn for a moment or two. Try that today and it'd be child abuse and off to jail parents would go!
Well, they have to catch you first.
Back then, what is now called "free-range parenting" was so much the norm that there wasn't even a word for it. Once you were old enough to do basic things like remember your home address, understand concepts like right from wrong, form friendships and have ties with the neighbors, and were habituated to basic safety like looking out for traffic and not running with sharp objects, you were pretty much good to go. Free-range play and adventuring was encouraged as basic training for socialization and later independence, with the added benefit of giving the parents a little breathing room. The very few who hovered and kept a restrictive, watchful rein on their kids were thought unusual, or even suspect. But it was a very different time, when the only real danger to kids was themselves; grownups - even strangers, if need be - could normally be relied on for help, and everyone knew the boogeyman was just a child's tale. It's unthinkable now, but at the age of eight I would sometimes even take the bus into town by myself, and no one would have seriously thought I was lost or derelict. But that wasn't my idea of fun; I much preferred my own two legs, and scouring the woods and windbreaks. Being one of five kids, naturally we often went off on separate rambles, so when it was time to eat, Mom's unique solution for calling in the herd was to go out and blow a coach's whistle loud and long. It was mortifying, but it worked because the sound carried no matter how far away you were in the neighborhood.
Naturally there were bumps, scrapes, and even the rare trip to emergency, but no one would have even dreamed of accusing the parent of abuse by neglect; that was just a part of childhood.
But all this changed once child abductions started increasing, which, IIRC, really started gaining steam around the 1980s. I thought it was a shame for the kids to have to now be so closely monitored, but there really wasn't anything else to be done about it. Even when allowing kids a measure of independence, parents walk a much finer line now than used to be.