15 Things I Did as a Free-Range Gen X Kid That Nobody Does Today

Childhood looks a lot different today than it did when I was a kid. And today's kids? They're arguably safer than we were in some ways and maybe a little less safe in others.

I just turned 59, so I was a child of the 70s and 80s. I'm Gen X, and we grew up with a free-range childhood. Which felt adventurous and fun as a kid, but it kind of makes me cringe as an adult when I realize some of the questionable choices kid-me made.

It's not that my parents were never around for my sisters and me. As parents of that time went, they were super involved in our lives. But we still had plenty of time to get into stuff, and lots of neighborhood friends with decidedly less supervision joined us.

And so, I got into stuff that would make today's parents (including me) a little on edge. These are some of the things I did during my 70s and 80s childhood that probably wouldn't fly today. 

If you've never tossed a heavy, pointy lawn dart across your yard with a tiny dog chasing it — well, have you even lived? Mature me is equally horrified and thrilled by the danger of it all, but somehow only minor injuries were ever sustained.

I was considered "mature for my age" (which is debatable), so adults felt okay giving me responsibility. Which is great and all, but although I was a "mature 12," I had all the common sense of a gnat (with all apologies to gnats that are chock-full of common sense). 

Nevertheless, I was responsible for keeping a two-year-old, a five-year-old (neither were related to me), a dog, and two cats alive from 8 AM to about 7 PM every weekday during the summer — plus a few late nights when the parents had date nights. That meant making breakfast, lunch, and dinner (surprising they'd want me to do that, given I set my hair on fire trying to put out a grease fire from some ground beef I was cooking about a week before I started this summer babysitting job) in a time before microwave meals were a thing. 

My go-to moves were playing hide and seek and never looking for the kids and reading Tintin comics aloud until they both fell asleep. And yet, somehow, miraculously, we all survived the summer. 

Ah the free-range childhood. Sadly, in most places, it's a thing of the past. But from the time I was about six, I was allowed to wander freely all around the neighborhood with little to no parental supervision.

And look, we were stupid kids. I was especially adept at trying things I'd never tried before and falling — a lot. I flipped over the handlebars of a bike when I went from really fast to stopped in one second by applying the handbrakes (whee!). I wetted down a particularly dangerous hairpin turn on our homemade skateboarding track and flew off my skateboard headfirst into bushes.

I climbed a very tall tree at the park — all the way to the top (which, to my young eyes, seemed like about 50 feet tall). I was doing great on the way down until I was about six feet off the ground and then — you guessed it — I fell. I flipped on my head doing a penny drop off the top of a park swing set. You get the idea.

And yet, out we'd go, day after day, a roaming pack of kids just doing kid stuff. 

I've been a little bit of a science nerd since I was a young kid. I love to learn how things work and to make cool stuff happen. So naturally, I had a chemistry set. And I was young (maybe 7) when I started playing with it.

It had real glass beakers and test tubes. It had a Bunsen burner. It had actual chemicals that were a) toxic and b) could explode if you mixed the wrong ones together. It came with matches and no eye protection!

It. Was. Heaven.

When my kids were small, I was equal parts dismayed and relieved that chemistry sets have changed a lot since the 1970s. Gone are the burners, the glass, and the chemicals that could do scary but super cool stuff. 

Related: 11 Dangerous Toys From the 70s We're Surprised We Survived

Our wall phone in the kitchen had the most gloriously long cord — you could practically travel all around the house talking on the phone and probably clothesline your sister. My favorite trick while talking on the phone was to stretch it out as long as it could go and then turn in circles while I wrapped myself up all the way to the wall. Try doing that with a cellphone.

Our house had a laundry chute that went down from the kitchen into the laundry basket in our creepy basement. And you can bet I went down it. It wasn't nearly as fun as it sounded.

I dunno — maybe kids with laundry chutes still do that? All I know was I did it during the times we were at home alone and unsupervised (sorry, Mom)!

Bike riding, skateboarding, sledding, jumping bikes... I did all the fun daredevil stuff available to 70s kids without a helmet, a knee pad, or a wrist guard. Yeah — I fell plenty of times. I got some epic road rash and bonked my noggin more than once. It's weird to think about that now because I never let my kids do any of that stuff without wearing all the protective gear. If I could've wrapped them in pillows, I would have. My mom was a far braver woman than I am.

My friends and I would call radio stations, request a song, and wait for it to come on so we could hit "record." So, every song on our many mix tapes was always missing at least the first bar or two to the intro because we never got it recording soon enough, and a ton of them had a DJ talking over at least part of the song. Still, we made do.

I did this from kindergarten onward, even crossing several roads along the way. In all weather.

I'd love to tell you it was five miles in the snow with bare feet uphill both ways, but alas, that was my father who had that hardship. 

If you have never packed as many people as humanly possible into a Honda Civic, then you haven't lived. Since only a few of us had cars, we rolled deep. We packed people on top of people on top of people. We had people in the trunk, on laps, laying across the floorboards, and wedged in. And honestly, it was probably a good thing we were wedged in so tight because we didn't wear seatbelts. And if the friend had a pickup truck? We just all piled in the bed instead.

It's probably a good thing my father is no longer with us, so he doesn't have to hear me make this confession (if you're reading in heaven, Dad, I'm sorry!) But a few of my friends had CB radios (they were a big thing back in the 70s), and we spent a lot of time talking to God knows who. At the age of like 8. Yikes!

I remember doing this from when I was really young. What can I say? It was a different time. 

Winter, spring, summer, fall. She just had to run in for a minute. NBD. 

All the time. Across bridges, through tunnels — whatever. We weren't totally stupid though — we'd lay our head on the rail before we did to see if it vibrated to let us know there was a train coming. 

I'd like to start by saying that this was totally against my mom's rules. But what she didn't know wouldn't hurt her (sorry again, Mom).  And to be fair, it never turned me on to actual cigarettes.

I promise I'm not glorifying all the dangerous stuff we did as kids. I look back now and recognize how wreckless (and downright dangerous) much of it was. But we were kids who were often left to our own devices. And in the absence of adult supervision, kids don't always make the best decisions — especially when they run in packs. 

But I survived. I never broke a bone, although I had to get stitches plenty of times. And I still have the scars today to prove it. 

We didn't have the internet to tell us all the scary or dangerous stuff in the world, and we didn't have phones that kept us occupied so much of our time. So we went outside and roamed until the lights came on, and it was time to go home. And it's led to many things, including a head injury or two and my love of the outdoors today. 

Do I wish my kids had the same type of childhood? Not necessarily — I'm glad their childhood was safer than mine, but I do sometimes feel sad that they didn't have the same opportunities for unstructured play that I had.