[forgottenpaswrd]

Am I the only one that looking at what the kids are doing in the pictures consider it totally normal?

In Spain we used to do way more dangerous things than those.

And it was risky, one of our friends died in the river jumping over a slippery stone and hitting his neck with a stone while falling backwards. I have to say he was pretty nuts and was in constant danger everywhere.

Another friend is in wheelchair after jumping badly from a big 20 meters high rock to the Mediterranean sea. We all jumped the rock. It was funny, but you need to know what you are doing.

But those are two cases over hundreds of people I knew well over my life.

We learned to do bunny hops and do jumps and go downhill. Skiing over rocks outside official circuit.

You leaned early on how to manage risks and how to say no when your friends want you into doing stupid things(or you are not skilled enough for the task). I really appreciate those memories(and continue doing risky things like BASE jumping).

I have to say that my friends doing risky things now that we are adults never had significant problems. They became experts managing risk and some of them even teach it.

So in my opinion total freedom has its drawbacks and is not a pie in the Sky, but it is worth it.

[madaxe_again]

Yeah, times have changed.

I went to school in the UK, Germany, Hong Kong, Chicago - mostly boarding school in the UK.

When I was a kid (5-13), our principal form of entertainment was "go outside, do whatever". This usually entailed building fortresses out of junk, which usually involved deep excavations, traps that could actually kill (sash weights suspended in a tree, with tripwires, anyone?), and construction high up fir trees with "found" supplies. We used to go boating (on this neat lake full of totally lethal floating islands of rotted vegetation), unattended, and nobody thought anything of us taking a pile of unexploded mortars from the school fireworks show and sticking them in a bonfire. 7 year olds. Smart enough to know to run like hell and lie behind a dip in the land.

People got hurt all the time, with everything from broken bones to cuts and grazes to the occasional airgun pellet in an unfortunate place. The school matron was a very busy woman.

Once a year, the school had an organised "paddock war", in which everyone would arm themselves with whatever they could lay their hands on (cricket bats, improvised clubs, slingshots, etc.), and go beat each other senseless. Not sure this is quite the same picture, but it was a very effective way to get the pent-up aggression of 250 7-13 year old boys out in a single sitting, and not something that would happen today.

The headmaster, an old submarine captain, used to take a group of the older (10+) boys out on a ramble into the woods, always to a new spot, and would then just either leave us there, with our task being to get all of us back unscathed, or play hunter-killer games. Retrospectively I have a feeling he was actually sneaking off to have a drink in the woods, but it was a great experience.

Every single person with whom I played at that school is an entrepreneur. Every single one takes risks, wins, loses, and while their weltanschauungs vary hugely, from liberal to authoritarian to conservative to socialist, there's a common thread of willingness to try anything - that anything can be done - so long as one is willing to attempt it.

The same school is now co-ed (no bad thing, but has been used as the "reason" for change) and has done away with the outdoor play, having replaced it with a sterile, monitored, playground.

And we wonder why people are increasingly sheltered and closeted, with increasingly small worlds, with increasingly small sets of symbols with which to associate, and increasingly small ranges of thought.

We took away childhood and replaced it with a life of infantilism.

[watwut]

"Every single person with whom I played at that school is an entrepreneur. "

That one is more about you and your selection of friends. Your whole generation is not composed of entrepreneurs although they all played freely.

[ars]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

Humans are moving even stronger toward the K. People used to have many more children than they do now, and infant mortality was worse.

On top of that (for the child) taking a risk was worth it - if you didn't do really well, you did really badly.

These days things are more "even", a basic level of survival can be had easily, there is no reason to take big risks. The rewards for risk taking are more in terms of luxury than basic life.

[mathattack]

I recall climbing up our 2 story middle school's roof to look for tennis balls that we accidentally hit up there. I can't imagine that happening today. Same with climbing up our house's drain pipe to let ourselves in the 2nd floor window. And the list keeps growing.

[zhte415]

I love the memory of 'recalling' balls. Mainly footballs. Terraced by terraced houses, it was not unusual to scale a 10 foot brick wall (leg-up from friends) - getting back was the hard part.

Exiting the school gates to walk up the road (because the particular wall was unscalable, or there were dogs) was uncomfortable: "Ding-dong [at the front door of the neighbouring house]. Please Sir, may we have our ball back?" where a usually polite person would visit their back garden to return a football'.

And climbing on the roof of a Victorian structure where sand-brick was weathered sufficiently over a century of school children climbing up it to provide nice pockets and footholds.

Is this seriously not the case today? I'm only in my 30s...