Shoot! When I was four went to the back door of the local Krispy Kreme to beg for a donut. More than once. I was escorted home once.
Lesson: Do not live inside municipalities (or HOAs). Doesn’t matter if the state is red or blue.
When I was 8 my mom would send me to the store to pick up cigarattes.
Any longer, and the state would have castrated him and put him on puberty blockers.
Aha! An outright enemy of the state!
When I was six years old (1968), I got my first bicycle and I was cycling through the neighborhood on my own in no time at all. In fact, my father would often give me a couple of quarters and send me to the mom and pop convenience store a few blocks away to get him cigarettes. With the change, I was allowed to get a paper sack of penny candy.
Imagine that today!
I remember playing Little League baseball a few years later. I'd ride my bike to practice and to games by myself. My father would show up for a game maybe two or three times total. Decades later, in the 1990s, when my own kids played Little League, I'd drop them off at practice and come back to pick them up later. The parents sitting in lawn chairs with coolers to watch the practice thought I was a very bad Dad!
That was when helicopter parenting was taking over.
I was a free-range kid. I would go all over the place, alone or with friends, and there was never a problem, no one ever called the cops. It’s sad that kids don’t have that option any more.
“You just can’t raise kids like that anymore—it isn’t safe,” said the cops.
++++++++++++
Hey thanks, cops. I was wondering how not to raise kids like that!
My gramp traveled all over the NYC subway system alone when he was nine just to see where they went.
Canton GA
(Do gooders from different latitude invasion)
I roamed neighborhood at 7
It is safer for cops to go after these people than the carjackers in the cities. Path of least resistance.
I remember walking home from school one afternoon. I took a detour to walk through a wooded area and lo and behold, there was a full 6-pack of beer sitting there on the ground!
So I did the obvious thing, I picked it up and walked the rest of the way home with it.
Hey mom, look what I found! LOL!
I got to drink some if it, and I guess the parents did too.
When I was 7, I disappeared at daylight and only came home when I was hungry. My mother was concerned I’d get snake bit cause my playground was a 500 acre swamp.
Listen
Has zero
to do with a cookie
In the 1st paragraph it says “home schooled”.
Teachers union and gub mint types dnn likethat
Whenever you see a lone police officer. call 911 and report it, it’s not safe for them to be alone.
“He responded that he would promptly go home “if you would just leave me alone,”
Man it must have burned those cops that they couldn’t steamroll a seven yr old.
At that age I was riding through the mountains on my horse. As long as I got home before dark, it was OK.
In a time that is long gone, in a land that seems infinitely far away, I used to walk to school. .7 mile. I used to walk places. I picked up the groceries. Visited friends. Rode my bike.
That time is never coming back, and it’s impossible to go back to that place.
It’s a different world now. The trust that held us together as a society is gone. Now there’s crime and kidnapping. And the streets are impossible to cross, when you’re a little kid.
It really was like that. It isn’t any more. If the politicians were serious about keeping us safe by throwing the criminals in jail for a long time, I wouldn’t be posting this.
I grew up in the ‘90’s, and although my mom was a little overprotective (some of that was because I’m female) you can bet that by 8 or 9 I was cycling around the neighborhood and to the local grocery store (5 blocks away). Summers were spent outside until I was in my teens - I didn’t have a lot of friends.
Then high school came, I started dating, and I was never home as long as I had a ride or got my license.
Both my boomer parents were allowed to wander in Manhattan with no chaperone, as young teens. Would they have let me do the same? No. They wouldn’t let me do it now!