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

I know this is a lighthearted thread but overall there has been a definite shift from common sense and personal responsibility to solving potential hazards with health and safety legislation. Sometimes for good, but we have generations who seem to have lost the basics e.g. of cooking and cleaning. I admit to rolling my eyes with the obsession for nuking your house with industrial strength antibacterial chemicals and bleach while extolling the virtues of pesticide free organic veg whilst chomping down on ready meals stuffed with additives and E numbers (then having a meltdown on social media when you find a caterpillar in your salad)🙄. I do not in any way diminish the horror of childhood accidents but as a child free house I am a bit miffed that I can no longer have roller blinds that - you know - can go up and down with a cord - or own and deploy a weedkiller that actually works 🙁 Dont get me started on driving 20mph in non residential areas largely because people could not be trusted not to wander into roads whilst texting. 😡

Yes definitely benign neglect I'd call it. My mother didn't always pick us up from school when I was aged 5, so I trailed home, a good 20 minute walk with brother aged 7 and another female friend aged 6, we walked alongside a main road, crossed over a railway line on a bridge and then on to a bit of common land before hitting the home run of our network of streets. During the holidays we played out pretty much all day unsupervised around ponds and a common close to our home, to be honest it was quite an idyllic childhood in some ways. Oh and just for good measure when my parents couldn't raise us from our beds for midnight mass on Christmas Eve they would just go and leave us unattended in the house we were primary school age if I remember rightly definitely wouldn't get away with that today, but I was a child of the sixties, anything went back then

Oh and I also remember neither of them ever picked me up from Brownies which ended around early evening so it was dark in the winter, a twenty minute walk home, the neglect it's all coming back to me in dribs and drabs hey ho I'm still here!

I remember going to the corner shop to purchase Grandad's cigars for him, primary school age - asking for "5 Hamlet" and being allowed to spend the change on sweets.

My Brother & I walked to school every day just the 2 of us. He was P1 I was P4. It was probably a 20/30 minute walk.

I also remember kneeling on the back seat of the car looking out the back window waving to other drivers & the cheers when someone waved back

In the youngest of three so I was always squashed into the footwell behind the drivers seat when going in a car, that's the mid 80's.

I at 13 would get the train to the next city over (maybe 20 miles) to go shopping and I would be out all day, no mobiles Somy parents wouldn't know if I was ok until I diddnt turn up back home at dinner time.

In comparison, Dsd isn't allowed to be put on the train by us at one stop, and picked up by her mother one stop later from the platform as it's 'not safe', she's 16.

There's a huge amount of space between letting 6 year olds walk home from school (normal when I was little) and leaving your kids alone whilst you go on holiday abroad (negligent even then).

My mum was of the leave them to get on with it/come home when you're hungry school of parenting. It was certainly not negligence.

I was born 1960, we used to roam all over, a right ragtag and bobtail gang.
There would be about 8 of us, some would have to bring their younger siblings, so there could be one or two toddlers, sometimes even a baby carried on the hip.
Even with a baby in tow we would STILL be out all day, knocking on farmhouse doors for a drink of water, feeding the babies blackberries.
Sitting all day on the beach, burnt to a crisp and walking home, the sand shredding the skin from our feet, with pockets full of dead starfish and crabs.
I too knew children who died in house fires (lots of open fires and chip pans in those days).
Then there was the boy who lost his arm climbing up a pylon, the one horrendously scarred from an exploding abandoned car, the kids who suffocated in dumped fridges...ah, the good old days

I was born in the 60's, not so long after the war it was seen as perfectly safe to be out all day at a young age as there was no bombs dropping.

The whole town would know each other and watch out for each others children, everyone would make sure that the children knew who to avoid.

I remember so many things that have been mentioned already, but we survived and thrived, something that today's children don't seem to be able to do.

Parents in the 2050's will look at our car seats, the cars themselves (only 5 star NCAP? lolz) and ways of doing just about everything about think exactly the same.

Times move on, things get better, safer, more advanced etc

UseditUpandWoreitOut

But even today with all the cotton wool things still happen, they maybe different things but there are still deaths and accidents.

It sounds horrific but I have to say I think these days lots of children are either far to bubble wrapped or borderline feral. I see both on a daily basis.

I was born in 75. Regularly left in my pram outside shops while Mum did the shopping, as another poster said I was dispatched to the shops or post office from around 6 or 7. At 9 my friend and I walked on our own with no adults (oh the horrors!) three miles each way to primary school regardless of the weather.
We're made of sterner stuff.
I have had children aged 8 / 9 ish sniffing ant powder off the drive this summer as they thought it was cocaine, and they are chucked out first thing and forgotten about until well after dark..... that is unless you tell them off in which case their Mummy will be straight over for a moan.

On the other hand I work with children who's parents won't let them walk any distance as it's not fair - by distance I mean a couple of miles not a marathon. Won't allow them to cook, or experience new challenges. The children want to but parents are often traumatised at the thought so prevent it.

Haven't read all the thread yet but from memory I was a latch key kid not long after i started secondary school.

I also remember going to buy Mums cigarettes.

I was a latch key kid from 9. I do think we were too young. But there was literally no childcare and my mum needed the money.

Oh, yes. No seatbelts. DM used to drive drunk with me rolling about in the backseat. Latchkey kid from 7. Weekends and summer holidays we neighbourhood kids were all out as a pack and didn’t see home from dawn until dusk. Friend’s dad - also drunk - used to put one kid under each arm, roll up in a duvet then we’d all gambol down the stairs as one. What larks, Pip!

(I’m not saying any of this was good, by the way!)

Mind you we did have plenty of government information films highlighting dangers.
Sadly the next generation of children will die of obesity related things.

"Mind you we did have plenty of government information films high lighting dangers" The one that certainly stayed in my mind, in the event of Russia, dropping a nuclear bomb, simply climb under the table, excellent advice we all had good sturdy wooden tables back in the day, no flimsy MDF. So clearly that measure would have protected us against the ensuing fall out although they didn't elaborate too much about the aftermath if I remember rightly.

Those Duck and Cover films are hilarious

Actually I was thinking about this the other day. I grew up between two places as we had a caravan we went to every weekend and holidays.

At home I wasn't allowed out of the street. My Mum had loat my sibling and was very protective. At the caravan however we knew two other families, one who fostered so there was always loads of us. At least ten plus. We could go anywhere as long as someone kept hold of the littlest ones who were 3 or 4 and no one was left behind .The oldest would have been 8 or 9 at the time. Literally anywhere on the acres of farmland on the caravan site ,swimming in the lake ,to the pool on the next site to swim, climbing trees,playing in old concrete tubes and broken tractors.

They build a soft and adventure play and the builders let us help as we were regulars and play on the frame which wasn't even finished (pull ourselves up on the wooden climbing ramp with the rope and then jump from where the slide was going to be.

The only time my Mum was scared was when I wasn't with the others because we had fell out and I was playing with a Dutch little girl whose parents invited me to go with them as long as my Mum knew but I forgot to tell them.

I feel sorry that my children did not have that experience but at the same time I would have a heart attack if they did half of what we did .

Apart from freedom we had a respect for adults.If you stepped out of line adult strangers would tell you off and if they knew you tell your parents who would tell you off again.
Other adults looked out for kids more,if a child was on their own crying with so adult insight someone would talk to you,see if you were OK or walk you home.Rare nowadays.
We had friends that we played with,we didn't have phones(not even landlines until I was teen)so just headed of to see people when we felt like it.
We also didn't have this 'my children would never eat that' cause that was all there was and we were hungry.Food was quite a bit less exciting then.

I'm glad my parents were 'negligent' and I'm proud to be too. Car safety is a whole other ball game but most rules about children having to be constantly supervised are ludicrous and creating very needy, fearful adults with no coping strategies or ability to use their own instincts.

That’s it you think today’s standards are good when I see larger middle class mums getting hit by their children

Told to fuck off

Told that they won’t do x y or z I am glad I am from a carribean background and largey how you raise a child has not changed in my culture so no my parents were not negligible but I think many of today’s parents are

They fail to give their children the boundaries and rules they need to thrive

And don’t get me started of AP parents

zeeboo

Amen

I was once told I was cruel for making my children to go bed at 7 she is fucking 3

7pm bedtime for a 3 year old? why is that cruel? that's the time our 3 year old goes (starts getting ready around 6:30-6:45) otherwise he is too tired.