My! What big eyes you have! (or: Are you blind!?)

We had teams, too.

It was usually in the big gardens behind the houses in the town center .... with having me the advantage to know all the holes in the fences, "secrets" .... since I was the only one living exactly there.



Became disturbing for the teacher at primary school.
So we went to the football field, one team in the left corner, the other in the right corner.
However cried, got a point. We lost 2:0

Twenty years ago we didn't have the Internet, which seems to have germinated thousands upon thousands of more sexual perverts.

You have to watch your kids all the time, until they're "street wise" and then perhaps they'll be better able to take care of themselves out on the streets.

I hear you, roger. It seems we've lost of lot of the freedoms that we were allowed as children.

I was usually outside by 9:00 am in the summertime . There would be 20 - 30 other kids outside as well. Most families in our neighborhood had at least four kids and they tended to be approx. the same ages. Some of the more prolific Catholic families had 10 or more, but four was the average. This meant there were at least four different groups hanging out in the same general area. The youngest ones would pester the oldest ones and the middle ones would try to escape to be by themselves.

At noontime, we would grab a quick lunch at home and then head back outside for the carpools to the municipal pool. There, we would meet up with the kids from other neighborhoods and hang out in much larger groups. The carpools would return at 5:00 to bring us home.

After dinner, the groups would gather for a neighborhood game of kick-the-can, hide-and-seek, or some other inclusive game. The middle kids still tried to escape because they were too old to be watching over the little kids and also didn't want to be watched over by their older siblings.

Eventually, we would wander back inside (in age appropriate groups) and get ready for bed. Basically, we were home for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and sleep.

JBP that sounds like our town. I grew up in Wayne, PA in the '60s. We spent the entire day outside on our bikes or at the creek or where ever we got to! I remember not being allowed inside until 6pm when it was time for me to set the table.

We had peashooter wars, made tree houses, formed secret clubs, wrote with lemon juice to make "invisible ink", put on shows for our parents, pretended to be zoro, rode our bikes out to the valley forge militart academy parking lots and crawled thru the storm drains, split a bottle of annie green spring apple wine between about 15 kids, played kick the can and, later, truth or dare.

My mom had a bell to call us home. They had no idea of what we were up to.

A cluster of stay-at-home parents seems to be the main ingredient in your neighborhood's success, boomer. That's pretty rare these days.

I can't do the phone thing (and nobody in the neighborhood seems really comfortable with email) so how we usually do it is that sozlet sees someone out, goes and asks if they can play, then runs back and tells me that the answer was yes or no, and if yes she runs back (walking never seems to happen in these situations) and I keep an eye on her until she gets there. Or if someone comes over and asks her to play, just I keep an eye on her until she gets there. I don't actually escort her though.

"Within visual range" is her main limitation.

I recall being down at the creek one day when we found a half started wombat hole. It was back away from the actual water but the soil was fine compacted sand and easy to dig. Over the course of several days we enlarged and deepened that hole into a tunnel about the length of a 13 year old boy. Then we hollowed out a "cave" at the end of the tunnel big enough for two boys and some comics. After instituting some candles we drilled a hole using a stick in the roof of the cave to let a little more air in cause it got a bit stuffy.

Never once did we think about the danger of collapse.

I would ground my kids forever if they did stupid things like that.

<Shakes head> How did I ever survive my childhood.

Hah! My mother had a police whistle. You could hear it all around the block and everyone knew what it meant. She would blow the whistle from the front porch and everyone would announce the it was time for the P-kids to go home for dinner. Most of the other kids would leave then too because our dinnertime coincided with everyone else's.

We found the whistle buried in a drawer a few years ago when my siblings and I gathered to clean out her house. My brother announced that the only thing he wanted to keep of hers was the whistle.


Sorry for the side trip, Boomer. Wistful memories and all that...

Oh I know, the stuff I did...!

I know we've talked about this whole issue on A2K before, it's one I find fascinating. But one of the big things that I think is lost with all of the structured and organized and supervised activities that are now de rigeur is the benefits of kids taking chances that a parent wouldn't -- and shouldn't! -- condone. It's awfully hard to take my gratitude about the fact that my parents let me run wild in the Mississippi river basin and that I took the catwalk across the river (narrow plank, several hundred feet up) and apply that to raising sozlet, though. <shudder> (They didn't know about it until I mentioned it as an adult -- and then they were properly horrified.)

<I didn't tell stories about what I didn't until I heard a few from my parents: I've been a choir boy - especially re my mother. :wink: >

Yeah, my grandmother had such a bell, too. It was a hand bell which had once been used by a school teacher in a one-room school to call the kids in from recess or lunch. It was pretty damned effective, too, because if you missed the bell, you missed your meal.

As for having no idea what we were up to, i rather suspect she didn't care--but if you arrived home injured, or with the your clothing trashed, you were in trouble.

That's what I still remember vividly (and it WAS painful): the proper licking I got from my parents when I was injured.
(So my tactic was to get plastered by grandma at first, plus her support for the poor boy ...)

Well our bell has a bullet casing welded to the top to make the handle and supposedly it was a civil war bullet-yeah, yeah, yeah.

So back to the baby raising topic; have you ever heard of Dr. Mel Levine? He is a big advocate of non structured time. Dr. Levine believes that unless children engage in imaginative play they do not develop "brain storming" skills. He thinks it must be unsupervised play, the type that comes about from boredom.

Dr, Levine argues that the totally structured childhood creates children who do not grow up into independent adults. They are used to doing something every minute and having all of their time structured. They have no idea of what to do w/themselves when done w/college. They don't really have an interior persona.

My brother and I tease my children who are great examples of the internet age. Luckily, they had young childhoods outside in the scrub, before PCs and VCRs were around!

So, when they have downtime and are "bored" we say "I NEVER get bored because I have INNER RESOURCES" That annoys the **** out of them as we say it verrrry smugly-but it is true.

Those of us who dug the wombat cave or walked the pipe line over the quarry when they were high as a teenager and then suddenly realized what the heck they were doing half way out and froze and had to crawl back along the pipeline (whew, had to get that one off my chest. Possibly NOT good argument for independent play after all) ok wait....back on track. Those of us who did such childhood river basin climbing etc have emeories, imagination and the ability to amuse ourselves. Those with 100 % structured lives have no idea what to do w/themselves w/out being told.

so have I repeated myself enough? I really hate overstructured kids in case you can't tell. And I really hate those parents who are competing through their kids as if dragging the kid around to everything under the sun means they are the better parent.

My father's voice is in my head. He is saying, "plantress, you don't hate things you DISLIKE them. Please don't say hate all the time". Sorry, dad.

you know what? I have memories not emories

Totally with you on structure (and importance of the lack thereof).

Some kids came over recently, a bit older than my daughter, acquaintances rather than friends. I wasn't there but my husband remarked that they just didn't seem to know how to play. Their parents both work, they're in supervised situations from 7 AM to 5 PM or so every day and have their sports and such on weekends... They didn't really know what to do with themselves.

We have an enormous tree swing in the back yard and usually when we have kids over I just shoo 'em out in the back and let them do their thing. We have rules -- they can't leave the yard without letting me know, there are things they can't do with the tree swing. But it's a big yard, lots to do, and they play happily for hours with no interference from me.

seriously-what happened to playing house? Duck duck goose? Endless hands of war and spit? Old maid? Red rover? paying some dumb young kid a dime to poop on the mean old lady's front porch?

Nintendo?

Re: My! What big eyes you have! (or: Are you blind!?)

I don't have kids myself. But when I was about Mo's age, my mother "street-trained" me so I could walk to school. (The walk was about half a mile, crossing four streets on which cars would drive.) Once street-trained, my parents allowed me to roam freely within the range where my friends lived, which meant within about half a mile of our house.

The policy worked well for me and my sisters. Whether I would generalize it to where you live depends mainly on two things: the safety of your neighborhood, and the traffic on the street(s) that Mo would cross.

Nintendo was the beginning of the passive age we live in. Now, maybe rock em sock em robots or foose ball....

I was really a "street kid" .... but as far as I know from all of our nieces, nephews, godchildren etc, in kindergarten (at the age of four, 'street-going-licenses' are made (with have to be done for the bicycle licenses later).

(Both quite an experience in big towns like e.g. Dortmund. Which, however, makes our godson there well experienced in travelling with busses, trams and city trains ... at the age of eight. :wink: )

We just picked up [IThe Dangerous Book for Boys[/I] by Conn Iggulden as a birthday gift for one of my daughter's friends. It's full of all sorts of games, adventures, and amusement of yesteryear. I have a feeling it's a pretty good book for girls too.