To think our parents were all negligent?

[hooveringhamabeads]

(Lighthearted)

By today’s standards at least?

Inspired by some of the threads I’ve read this week, about 7 year olds playing out alone, or a baby being left for 5 mins while the Mum goes to the shop, I’ve been thinking about my own childhood and some of the (perfectly normal for then) stuff that happened. For context, I was born in the early 80s.

As babies, car seats weren’t a thing, so we’d be put in the carrycot on the back seat. My DM says that if we were asleep when we got to town, she’d leave us in the car, lock it and go and do her shopping.

We had a Subaru van with no seats in the back, and my brother and I would sit in the back, each on a wheel arch, and we’d love it because we’d get flung around the back as we were travelling along, which we found hilarious.

If we were on holiday at Butlins my parents would use the ‘baby listening service’ while they went out of an evening, which consisted of one person patrolling the massive site and putting their ear to the relevant doors to see if anyone was crying. What they did if there was I have no idea as no one had mobiles then.

My friend who’s DCs are now 24 and 28 used to leave her kids alone when holidaying abroad when they went out at night. But they’d leave a shoe in the door so that the kids weren’t shut in if there was a fire .

It’s a miracle we all survived

Redneck - I actually think both you and OP have a point. There has to be a happy medium between negligence of 1980s and current overprotection. I think it’s hard to find a balance especially as lots of people are so risk averse nowadays. People who want to give more freedom worry about being reposted to the authorities for it.

I was born in the 70s.

We always had seatbelts and when my youngest brother was born, my parents had a 4th seatbelt fitted in the back seat so each of the 4 kids had one. We were never left in the car without an adult, never rode in the boot, and never left at home without supervision (parental or babysitter).

We did walk or take the bus to school together once the eldest was about 7 (about 1.5 miles), we played in the school grounds next door to our house with Mum watching us from the window, and I had my first job delivering prescriptions by bike after school when I was in grade 5.

Times are very different!

When I was a child I remember seeing a woman leave a baby in a pram outside a shop on a busy road. People were stopping and looking in the pram and touching the baby. I remember thinking someone could just wander up and take or hurt the baby. A minute later she came rushing out looking aghast.. and retrieved her handbag from underneath the pram. It was obvious where her priorities lay.

"The past is a different country" (I think it's the opening line og LP Hratley's The Go Between) is every apt about this. I too shudder to think of the dangers I encountered. I grew up in the 70's and 70's and kids were free range - my mother was considered a lot stricter than my pals -as we had proper dinner times and had to go in early for a set bedtime.

When I was three I was sent to fetch my brother who was 7 in for his tea. He was playing on local waste ground and ran away with his mates. I caught up with them and they threw me in a big patch of tall nettles. I continued the pursuit and fell and cut my hand on glass - and then I was in trouble as I needed stitches! I was 3!!!! We all knew to avoid local "flashers" and creeps. the safety protocol was to knock on any door and tell the adult you were scared if you thought someone was following you.

When I was 6 we moved to a new build house. They were building phase2 across from us an dthat was the kids playground my 3 year old sister used to play out there on her own and went missing one day and was found in the cement mixer. The workmen had a white and red bender tent and brazier and if you brought a mug and a some sugar they's make you a tea and have a chat - you could even bring a sausage to cook. I didn't like it (I did enough babysitting my younger siblings)but a favourite past time of girls was to knock on a door of a recent mum and take the baby in their high pram for a walk - new born babies. It really beggar's belief looking back.

I’m not actually seriously suggesting they were negligent, they were just going with the social norms of the time. And the result was that we had the sort of freedom as kids that would be pretty unheard of now in this culture, apart from in cases of negligence. Of course the risks were there but parents weren’t scare-mongered into micro managing our lives because of them. Children are seen a lot less in open spaces now, and activities tend to be organised rather than just being left to it. I think it’s sad, but agree there is a happy medium.

I was born in 1971. I remember no seat belts, we had an estate car and would fight over who got to ride in the boot! I remember going to my gran's funeral with 3 kids crammed in the boot. We lived in a new town, there were about 20 kids in our street and we would play huge games of hide & seek and bike races that took us all over town, coming home for dinner or bed. We would go to the country park alone for hours and climb cliffs, play on stones in the river and come home filthy! It was great! My children have no desire to go out and mess about somewhere random and I would probably be nervous till they came home. Dd is 15 and she will now go off to friends' houses on her own but the younger two don't yet we live in small friendly town where everyone knows everyone and they would probably be fine.

Apologies for all my typo's

child of the 80s. My parents would never have left us alone in a hotel... we discussed it recently and they didn't agree at the time that it was safe enough. I remember having a car seat and then a booster seat.
Wandering though... my best pal and I had bikes and I think from the age of 6/7 we were given free reign of the town. We had to be back by a certain time....often when the street lamps came on. Glorious summers with a picnic and going where you liked.

I was only born in 1996 and I think things have gone too far nowadays. From age 4 I was allowed to play out in my street (cul-de-sac of 25 houses off the main road) with loads of other kids, we wandered in and out of each others houses and gardens and picked up snacks and drinks from other people's fridges from about age 8 I was allowed to roam the village (30,000 people and about 8 square miles) with my little sister (age 5) and two best friends (age 7 and 9) and we would go out at 9am, come back for lunch about 12, then stay out until the street lights came on. Then usually have an impromptu sleepover afterwards. We used to make dens in the field near the canal and had a brilliant childhood outside - within my house was a different matter. I loved it. I hope I can give my daughter similar amounts of freedom. I don't know whether things genuinely are less safe now or we just hear about things more due to constant portable media.

I grew up in the 60s - my parents were not negligent, they were training us to be independent beings, build our self confidence, and to think for ourselves so that we could cope with life. Personally I thing wrapping your children up in cotton wool and not allowing them to do anything alone is far more negligent. I hate the phrase ‘you can’t be too careful’ - you most certainly can

Ha ha... I love to look back at these things and compare the different ways we were brought up in the 70s to the way I bring my kids up now.

I was driven to school with a car load full of kids, about six piled the back seat and one/two sharing the front seat. There were no seat belts anywhere. My parents apparently drove across America with my sister on the back shelf in a carrycot.

My mother always used to leave us for ages in the car when she went shopping. It was terribly boring and we'd often have a big row which could end up with one of us stropping off to go and find her.

When we went on holidays to France it was during the period of exchange controls when you could only take a limited amount of money out of the country. So my mother would load up the back of the car with tinned food and then put us on sleeping bags on top of it and we'd sleep there while they drove through the night.

Like lots of others on here we always went off to play somewhere around the area and only come home when hungry, and at one point we discovered a dilapidated house to explore. The floors were falling through upstairs and sometimes we'd find a rough sleeper or two there. It was very exciting and I remember my mother didn't want us to go, but never really stopped us.

Those were the days!

Apparently my parents used to go out in the evening, relying on our retired neighbor to pop in every hour or so to check if I was still ok. That would have been in the very early eighties.

I was slightly taken aback when my mum told me this, but actually it's not that different to parents being in the garden or downstairs in a larger house. Baby monitors weren't really a thing in Germany at that time.

I was born in the early 70s. We used to sit in the boot in my mum's estate car and fought over who got to sit there. No seat belts on the back seats either. I remember going away with my grandparents on a road trip and sleeping across the back seat.

This thread. What s blast from the past! I was born in the 70s. Have experienced nearly all of these examples.

I remember one time where we were coming back from the pub (dad having been drinking but still driving) and bring squashed in the the footwell of the front passenger seat as there was no space in the back my uncle who was sat in the seat kept burning my face by accident with the tip of his cigarette

I also used to walk home from school from about age 7 - about a 20 minute walk alongside and crossing some fairly busy roads - and play with friends in the woods and streets for hours on end.

Am now a confident and adventurous person and definitely think being allowed to take some risks helped me with that.

And when I was 15 I took a male friend on a family holiday in France and my parents booked a family room with two double beds - they slept in one and my friend and I slept in another. I always wonder what she was thinking then!

One of my friends' parents used to leave her home alone for the weekend at 11/12- this was early 00s!

I grew up in the country too on a 500 acre farm, and we could have been quite literally anywhere, with 4 of us my mum had no hope of knowing where a lot of the time. We’d be doing stuff like quad biking (we’d go for miles across the moors), horse riding, making dens on high, unstable hay ricks, flinging ourselves down the steep lanes in go karts made out old prams with no brakes. It was great fun...we’d just come back when we were hungry

Yeah me too. And we found some old ropes and set up an abseiling station at an overgrown quarry. It's how I learned about pulleys.My own kids (aND 10& 12 ) go off denmaking etc at the same quarry about a mile away with their friends now.
I remember in the news in the 70s some kids in a nearby village making a rope swing across a river and someone falling in and drownin when the river was really high.But a few weeks later kids were back there again

Different world now! But not better. No wonder so many teens and young adults experience anxiety nowadays they are brought up wrapped in cotton wool and not allowed to experience anything negative.Losing at sports day, skinned knees from non rubberised playground ,neighbour shouting at them, scary teacher ,not being invited to a party, slapped bum for being cheeky.

Think a combination of society and infrastructural changes as well as role of women and health and safety makes it seem thus.

We weren’t left at home alone though, ever that I can recall

But I was allowed to have a cherry b at Xmas which was smashing

I used to sit on my mum's knee in the front seat sometimes-imagine being caught for that now!!

I was born in 1958.
I walked to school on my own from aged five. It was a journey of about a mile through town across several roads.
No seat belts of course.
From about age 5 to about 13 we played in the fields nearby as we lived on the edge of town and would disappear all day
My parents went on holiday when I was 13 and left us at home. My grandparents lived in the next street but still .

I went on a school trip to Castleton in Y8 (then called second year). We went in some kind of transit van, all the tents and luggage were loaded in and the kids climbed on top wherever they could fit .

I remember the baby listening service board at Butlins.

Didn't people just parent in the way that was normal at the time?

Historians will probably look back in shock at some of the ways we raise our children today.

Child of the 90’s and we didn’t have car seats, I also remember DM (often) leaving us locked in the car while she went to do her shopping for what felt like forever. Once I took the handbrake off

We would be running round the whole of the town, making dens in the woods and just coming home for tea. I live on the coast as well and spent many unsupervised hours on the beach with the tide coming in!

I’ll never forget being in Greece with my DF (split family) and while him and DSis had a siesta I went out and went to the park/shop on my own In Greece?!

I was at my favourite childhood caravan park the other day with DP and we were walking round saying how terrified we would be to let the DC have the freedom I had as a child (to just run riot and do whatever I pleased whenever I pleased across the whole camp site) and we didn’t even have mobile phones back then!

Yet those are some of my most pleasant memories so is the reward for my DC greater than the risk in the end

Forgotten about sitting on my dad’s knee and doing the steering in the car! Only on lanes though, not main roads. We each had our own car by about the age of 10 to practice driving around the fields in (freebies or very cheap ones that had failed their MOTs).