Tim Blair

I didn't own a bicycle helmet until I was in my mid-20s, and I bicycled often to work and school, and just for fun as a kid. I was a pretty tame kid, but had quite a few spills (no head injuries, as far as I know.) But now I think it would be stupid for my kids to ride around without helmets.

Bicycle helmets? What are those? :)

And then there were the many, many hours of skating at roller-rinks on waxed floors. No helmet, no knee pads, no elbow pads. The managers would throw you out if you tried anything too wacky, but otherwise your bones were at the mercy of your skating skills. Great fun.

My kids are too young for this to be an issue, but I anticipate the following problem:

My kids will want to do something similar to plenty of things I did as a kid which was acceptable at the time. (Such as climbing very tall trees.)

However, this activity will now be considered by society as too risky and unacceptable.

I will be forced to choose between being either forbidding my kid to participate in said activity or be branded by society as an irresponsible parent. Sometimes society will have a point, and sometimes society will be overreacting.

I'm planning on playing it by ear...

I'm in my early fifties, I never saw or heard of a bicycle helmet when I was a kid. If they did exist, I am sure wearing one would have made a kid less safe (due to the the fight after the accusation of being a pussy).

I also don't remember any kids in the neighborhood being seriously injured in biking accidents (although I did intentionally run down my younger sister one day).

It's a wonder any adult who grew up prior to the 1990s has both eyes, all limbs, etc. But here we are. I think this is indicative of the overall trend within society to completely remove all aspects of fun and spontaneity, and therefore learning by doing, from childhood.

Case in point: while planning a company picnic, we had developed several games that the children could play while the adults were drinking and eating barbecue. One person asked if we would get some small trinkets for the kids who won the game, as prizes. Horrified looks all round: the kids certainly shouldn't be rewarded for winning the game. There were to be no winners or losers- it was just for fun. I sarcastically wondered aloud if the costs of winning and losing may prove a valuable lesson for children, but they didn't get it.

Perhaps it's a little off topic, but the fact remains that adult busybodies will always attempt to bureaucritize any unpleasantness out of childhood. Kids don't find out consequences for doing stupid things, so they grow up and do really stupid things.

Wearing a bike helmet is, it seems to me, a very small deal; I wear one now (though I never did one I was 10) and don't notice it 98% of the time. So I'm not especially concerned about that.

Where I notice it is:

1) A sense that I would be irresponsible in the extreme to let my kids out of my sight for one second or the child-snatchers will snatch him, compared to being allowed to roam freely as a child all over town.

2) Playground equipment that has been dumbed down to the point of being no fun. Teeter-totters (aka seesaws) are wrapped in rubber at all points and are allowed to bounce approximately two degrees in either direction off parallel to the ground. Climbing is considerably restricted as well.

You don't see kids today firing marbles deep into tree trunks from cannons made from pipe and hefty fireworks. Light and back off a safe distance, was our rule.

On the fourth of July, we'd light ladyfinger firecrackers and stick them in the crevices of tree trunks to amplify the pop when they exploded. My daughter isn't allowed to light a match, let alone a firecracker.

Tackle football...on iceskates. No where else was a cross-body block so effective.

As a child I bicycled everywhere, including across busy city streets. But the idea of wearing anything weighty, heat-causing, and clammy like a plastic helmet and kneepads and things like that would have induced me to give up the bike rather than subject myself to such torture. Also we roamed all over our neighborhood, and even farther, but we had been taught to avoid weird neighbors (everyone knew who the Weird Neighbor was), as well as to not approach strangers in cars and so on. I suppose disasters did happen but never to me.

Also, our family car, a '63 Chevy station wagon, had no seat belts -- they were optional then -- as well as a rusted-out floor that you could see the road through. My grandmother's '63 Plymouth Valiant was a stick shift and she used to turn it off and coast down the mountain roads where she lived in the summer. It didn't have seat belts either. And lest I forget -- we used to play with cap guns, which had (fairly) harmless explosives in them. But my parents refused to buy me a chemistry set, but that was probably because they were slightly more expensive.

When I was a child, maybe 12, we would get up on weekends and ride our bikes 10 miles each way on main roads to an abandon limestone quarry to dive off the cliffs. No helmits, no adults, no life vests, no cell phones. We'd pass by the no trespassing signs and through the hole in the fence without even a passing thought about getting hurt or illegally being on someone elses property. Our parents, not even knowing where the quarry was, would just tell us to be careful and to be home for dinner.

Things have changed alot here in the States: now kids rarely have the opportunity to be out of sight of a parent long enough to have any of that type fun.

I think there is another cause that brought on this change in addition to parents just being over protective because of the stories they read in the msm: Liability law suits have gotten way out of hand. I expect if anyone was to even get some bruises at an abandon quarry the courts would run the land owner bankrupt. Even when your child has someone over to spend the night the liability issue is there and the risk if little Johnny gets hurt while in your care could financially destroy a family.

There's some indication that children encased in protective armour may actually act in a more risky manner than they normally would because they feel safe.

It's called risk compensation.

BACKGROUND: The intent of protective equipment (PE) in sports and leisure activities is to reduce injuries. However, some postulate that any safety measure prompts riskier behaviour, a phenomenon known as ‘risk homeostasis’ or ‘risk compensation.’

I also grew up in the era of little or no safety features on bicycles, cars, or much of anything else for that matter. I recall that when Ford came out with seatbelts in the 1950s some dealerships used razor blades to cut them out; the implication was that the public might come to believe that driving a Ford with seatbelts meant they were unsafe.

Later, when I entered the Air Force and started flight training (considered then to be very dangerous) I was introduced to safety equipment of all kinds: helmets, seatbelts, parachutes, oxygen masks, and the like. Some of the really old time civilian fliers, even in the early '60s, regarded things like oxygen at higher altitudes to be for sissies. Still, in my personal life, much of any safety considerations, beyond seatbelts, was not even a consideration. Safety goggles while working with power tools? Who needs them. Ear plugs working around operating jet engines? What's that you say?

If I had a bicycle these days I probably would be disinclined to wear a helmet, even though my bicycle cop wears one every day he's on his bike. Of course, he has the occasion to ride down flights of stairs and take some cross-country rides to catch perps. Having been hit in the face enough times, I finally chose to wear eye protection while operating power tools, even lawn mowers. It's a matter of realizing that even seemingly innocuous undertakings can result in some serious injuries. It doesn't happen all that often, but if it does, the results can be catastrophic.

I wish I would have done more to protect my hearing several decades ago. I might not have this constant ringing in my ears now if I had.

Isn't it better for children to make small mistakes and learn from them, than to not know consequences and grow up to commit very large mistakes?
Besides, I chafe at the notion that the police can ticket parents for their child not wearing a bicycle helmet. Social engineering at its most granular.
I'd like to say that most of these small lessons are "victimless", but now with the lawyer lexicon of "shared costs", everyone wants to control your actions. Blech!

I was driving about 40mph (~65km/h) with my buddy inthe passenger seat. We switched places. He stayed on the inside of the car, I went over the roof. Dumbest thing...

My oldest just got his drivers license. If he EVER...!

From the big perspective, letting kids have more freedom ("protecting them less") will result in kids that are more comfortable moving around in the world. But it will also mean more injuries and death and no parent wants that to happen to their kids. And given the choice between the big picture "good for society" and the immediate "don't let anything happen to my kids", the latter almost always wins.

crusader and i used to ride on the hood or the trunk of tree hugging sister's ford fairlane while she barrelled down dirt roads and tried to throw us off. that was fun. especially when she turned on the windshield wipers.

as was riding big wheels down the steep, winding road we lived on...amazing how much those plastic wheels would slide while trying to avoid oncoming traffic.

I lived by a lake when I was growing up. Playing on thin ice and swimming to the opposite side were just a couple of the water-based activities my parents gave up lecturing me about. I rode my bike without any brakes all one summer and had an unhealthy attraction for bridges, train tracks, powerlines and anything that could be weaponized. We always had a pack of smokes hidden in our tree-fort too (just in case we escaped accidental death).

Now my daughter complains because I make her wear hockey pads when she plays video games.... if she only knew what she was putting me through.

I was good kid properly exposed to a helluva lot of dangerous things, and the result is generally good judgment today. There were many casualties, but I turned out fine.

My kids will be properly trained in all the Western arts, including reasonable and judicious use of motorized vehicles, firearms, cards, dice and liquor (only one at a time, thank you). To shelter children from "dangerous" things is to ensure that your children's introduction to them will be unsupervised.

Want to know what happens to sheltered kids when they hit the real world? Take a look at binge drinking experiences for college students. Poor kids, it's their first time on their own in their whole lives and they just lose control because they've never exercised it. They are like domesticated animals released into the wild.

I am 73, and remember my grandfather describing firing toy cannons, (yes, toy CANNONS) for 4th of July...but did he let us have sparklers? and I worry when my grandkids have them now.........it is the nature of being an elder.......

I wonder where we'll be in 30 years at the rate we are going.

I think I spent 6 hours (sleeping) per day in my room and another 3 hours eating and watching tv in the house as a child and now my kids with tv's, numerous computer games and the internet probably spend 12-15 hours indoors.

Now days more and more people work from home, like myself, so I wonder how all this will progress. Seems like we're evolving to stay within the safety zones of our homes and maybe 30 years from now we'll only leave a couple times a year on holiday or to go through the local drive-through for dinner out.

Speaking of tool safety, I was in construction for 20 years and decided to retire due to safety issues. Not my safety but it got to the point my workers couldn't even do a simple task within the bounds of OSHA regulations. It got to the point that it took them half of each day to set up safety cables, put on the body harnesses, hard hats, goggles, gloves, ear protection, respirators, elbow pads, knee pads, lombard supports, SPF 15 etc etc. By the time they were done that they had to have a safety tool box meeting and then it was break time.

I roamed everywhere as a kid (having been properly warned to scream and run if somebody I didn't know tried to entice me into a car). No one I knew ever wore helmets or pads when biking or skating (did they even have those things back then?).

I raised my kids the same way I was raised, but now my daughter won't let her children walk two blocks to school by themselves, and my son's wife homeschools, so their kids don't even get out of the house half the time. I blame the MSM.

I'm in my mid-20s, and I remember "street luging" on skateboards down a really steep street where there was no way to know whether or not cars were coming until a turn was made, and by that point it would take a desperate turn (and fall) to avoid the car. I also remember trying a trick on my bike with one foot on the frame and the other on the handlebars, with no hands. And neither of these things were without a helmet! It's actually illegal now (at least in California) for people under 18 to ride a bike without a helmet, which has made it so it's not just the nerdy kids who wear them. Another side benefit is that it's forced the manufacturers to make them not quite so dorky-looking.

We had our fascination with petrol phase. It lasted about two weeks and culminated in a 5 kilometer trip down a storm drain to test out our flame throwers and medieval torches. Things were going cool until we tipped over a 20 litre jerry can of super which proceeded to burn profusely requiring a 5 km retreat in pitch blackness choking on fumes all the way. Thus endeth the petrol fascination and the lesson.

Oh boy, I can think of several but here are the highlights.

Seat-belt laws suck!! We loved to ride in the back of our neighbor's pick-up truck. There'd probably be about 20-25 kids stuffed back there. We could also stuff about 9-10 people in a Vega (plus 2 or 3 in the trunk if we were sneaking into the drive-in).

There was a free-way off-ramp near our home that was fairly deserted especially right after school. So we would put a spotter at the top of the hill and the bottom, then we would ride skateboards, go-carts and shopping carts down the ramp. No brakes. You stopped when you ran out of speed or crashed into something soft. Rolling down a hill in a tire is overrated. That was more dizzying than fun- IMHO.

We would jump on the backs of laundry trucks, mail trucks etc. and sneak rides down the street or as far as we could go. As all things in life, it was easier getting on than off.

Fireworks!!! Everybody had fireworks and there were no major injuries. My fave- we were in our teens and setting off fireworks. My brother was trying to launch a rocket, it had too short a fuse or something. He dropped it and it launched. Not up but to the side-- straight across the street into the bushes under the windows of our neighbors. It was hysterical- the sparkles, the reds, blues, greens as the rocket went thru every colorful phase whistling all the way. My brother hosed down the bushes afterwards, no harm done.

I find it best not to actually WATCH the kids play-- just be within screaming distance if something goes wrong. I did stop my nephews (age 8-9) and their friends one time. They had set up an old board and apple crate as a ramp and were jumping their bikes over it. I didn't mind the jumps, but each boy had to lie down with their head beside the crate (under the ramp). Uh, no bikes to the head please but I allowed them to continue jumping. They survived.

"Please discuss, parents: are you more safety-inclined than were your parents?" Yes, absolutely.

"And what insane risks did you take as kids that would now induce rage and fear if repeated by your children?" Oh, God, where to begin? The Chicago of my day had many ways that a kid could kill or maim himself; and my parents just let us run around and try them all.

We kids would climb onto the roofs of local the local factory that manufactured washing-machine parts, and play in the dumpster filled with tailings and other associated sharp metal objects.

We'd sneak into the streetcar barns nearby, and playing while the streetcars zoomed in and out. Later, the streetcars were replaced with garbage trucks - more aromatic, but no less dangerous.

We'd cut across the Chicago and Northwestern railroad tracks, to save having to walk all the way to a viaduct. It was considered a lark to dodge an express train.

We'd play on the ice on Lake Michigan in the winter. I broke through once and avoided drowning by pure luck.

We played with fire - burning leaves in the autumn, or trash in the alley in the summer. Of course, we'd toss in a few aerosol cans to add zest to the proceedings.

We would ride our bikes everywhere, even on the shoulders of expressways. One drunk driver could have wiped us all out. Helmets? Those were for football.

And of course we had fireworks: M-80s, cherry bombs, strings of zebras and ladyfingers, sparklers, bottle rockets, all guaranteed to render one blind or dismembered if handled incorrectly.

But most dangerous of all were the nuns in our grammar school: cross them, and they'd hand you your lunch. There were 50 boys in my grammar school class; our teacher had to rule by fear, or none of us would have learned a thing. She taught us all how to read, write, and reckon, so I guess she was doing something right.

Would I let my kids do any of that stuff? Hell no. Am I glad I did it? Of course. Maybe that's why my boys went into the Marines - they wanted to do some of the stuff I did when I was growing up.

When I was a kid we did stuff that would cause heart failure in any responsible parent of today. We rode our bikes dangerously, flirting with traffic and disobeying most of the rules. We played in areas (such as flooded creekbeds) that would be considered too hazardous today. We played games (such as "see how close you can come to hitting me with that dart without actually hitting me") that were stupidly dangerous. Still, no one in our crowd ever got serious hurt. My brother broke his arm, but he just fell out of a tree - climbing trees was, in those days, completely normal kid behavior for both sexes.

By junior high, I was free to ride my bike anywhere I had the muscle to take myself. I rode all over town - often more than ten miles from home, sometimes nearly twenty - and was sometimes gone for six or eight hours at a stretch.

I even had a friend who liked blowing things up. He would often make bombs and we would go out in the woods and set them off (safely, I guess, since no one was ever hurt). He eventually moved up to a full-scale pipe bomb, which we set off underground in the storm drains, so no one would be hurt by shrapnel. The only fallout from that was that I was a little hard of hearing for a few hours.

I think that kids who never do any dangerous stuff don't develop the instincts for staying safe. We blew things up, true, but we took elaborate safety precautions. We rode our bikes like crazy, but we became very good at it. We played hardball at a young age, but also developed the reflexes to keep a line drive from putting a dent in our skulls.

I feel sorry for today's youth. Imagine this same conversation twenty years from now: Dude! Once, I played my Nintendo, during a freaking thunderstorm, man! There was, like, lightening outside and everything!

I also grew up in the days when we rode our bikes everywhere, sans helmet or protective gear. We would have beat up any kid who wore a helmet or kneepads. One of my best memories is riding up on the back window deck of our old chevy coupe. Or seating 9 kids in the back seat, triple high on each other's laps. And what was a seat belt? Nobody got killed as far as I can remember, but sudden stops or sharp swerves caused a toppling dominoes effect that left kids scattered everywhere in the back seat. Great fun for the driver and passengers and I would do it all again.

My brothers used to pile snow up at the side of the house and we would jump off the porch roof into it. They also made an ice slide from the back balcony so we could skate down it directly into the back yard rink the momentum achieved dumping one into a snow bank on the other side. Then there was ski-ing across a small creek. The idea was that you would get up enough speed so that you could jump the creek bank. The problem then was how to get back to the other side. Needless to say our parents knew very little of what was going on except for the ice slide!

I grew up on a farm in Wisconsin in the 1980s. Let me catalogue some of our favorite activities which will surely be verbotten to my daughter:

--Horseback riding
--Cow riding
--Cockfighting
--Shotgunning
--Indoor shotgunning
--Riflery
--Dry ice bomb making
--Hatchet throwing
--Goat wrestling
--Snapping turtle baiting
--Crossbowmanship
--Zip line-manship
--Bottle rocketry
--Rocketry
--Leech husbandry

to name a few.

These are just a few that I remember...

"Bottle Rocket Fights", which really involved any sort of fireworks we could get our hands on. They are legal here in Missouri for a few weeks each year. We'd split into two teams and simply launch fireworks at each other. Eye protection? Well, if you wore glasses then I guess you had some. The goal was to light the other side's stash off. Usually this involved a covert mission behind enemy lines. A carefully-tossed spark-spewing item usually did the trick. Chaos would ensue.

Once I tied my sister to a tree and launched bottle rockets at her. She got mad. I may have been punished for that one.

We would build ramps for our bicycles to jump. The only time I can remember wearing protective equipment was when undertaking particularly dangerous jumps. I would put on a football helmet and shoulder pads and launch myself, usually breaking something either on the bike or on my body.

Two words: Lawn Darts. Possibly the first banned toy I can remember and one that we played quite often (usually just to see how far we could toss a dart and whether they would stick in asphalt, concrete, tree trunks, etc...) I distinctly remember sharpening one.

Assorted homemade "cannons", which were really small shotguns that used a firecracker as a charge and shot a variety of items such as tacks, small nails, BB's, and rocks.

Pyrotechic displays involving a whole host of nasty stuff including aerosol paint, gasoline, kerosine, paint thinner. Whatever. We would light a pile of these things and run. I'm quite sure that wasn't safe or environmentally sound.

Well, you get the idea. :D

This reminds me of the Simpsons episode that was on last night. Marge made Bart put on all his safety gear before riding his skateboard and the next scene shows him getting beaten up for looking like a dork.

I think anybody over the age of say, 25, has similiar stories of doing crazy shite. We would ride down the corragated (sp) roof of a barn on a rug into a pile of hay, or innertube down an irrigation ditch with leaches in it. My brother set a wheat field on fire. I don't remember it, but apparently when I was three, I wandered off to the park where a cop found me and brought me home. Mom says I was STANDING next to him - not strapped in.

I don't have kids, but if my nephews were seen doing something crazy, I'd usually just mutter a "be careful and watch out for cars." A slight different standard for my niece, though. But not much. :)

Okay, here goes:
1. Standing on seat, no hands, downhill circa 1970. Ouch
2. Skating on thin ice. Cold, wet.
3. Grabbing bumpers on passing cars for free rides on bikes, or long distance skating in winter. Luckily not killed, just grounded
4. Various brainless Evel Knievel manuevers
5. "Roof surfing", drunk, Interstate 5 near San Diego 1982. Launched into pavement. Also ouch with complimentary DWI and threatened Courts Martial.
6. Marriage. 1988
Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Right?

Here is what you do when the protective police go after you and tell YOU how to raise and protect your own child.

Go out into the desert of forest away from all the lefties and let them climb, shoot, set on non safe and sane fireworks, ride in the back of trucks, drive on dry lake beds, eat sugary/fat laden food and get dirty to their heart's content.

25-30 years ago you only wore protective gear on a bike if you were doing BMX. Nobody wore helmets skating. If riding a motorcycle, we put helmets and boots on because it was common sense, not because it had to be a damned law!

My daughter is much more cautious than I ever was because of all these weird messages that tell a kid that it's cool to to a hip-hop thug; a vacuous, drugged ex-playboy model or a violent basketball player but not cool to ride in a car without a seatbelt.

Damn! I tell people that I taught my 10 year old how to shoot a .22 and they look at me like I'm the parent from hell. Meanwhile, their kids are hiring hookers and steeling cars daily in video games.

I was born in 1947 and by 1967 should have:
-drowned once
-died from a head injury after experimenting with riding the hood of a '32 Ford down a snowy slope and hitting a tree
-been paralyzed from a horse accident
-blown myself and a couple of friends up while melting together potassium nitrate and sugar for rocket fuel
-been neutered by a kick in the hemingways from a bull calf I was injecting with penicillin
-been murdered by a motorcycle guy with whose girlfriend I was nearly caught necking
And this is only the stuff I'm not ashamed to admit to, even to myself.
Consequently, I was always the nervous one about our daughter when we were raising her.

Person: When I have a son, will you be his role model?

Tragically, I'm young enough that I'm missing most of those good stories, although I do remember a bare fisted brawl in a drainage ditch, and "entertaining" my boss' granddaughter when I was working at an airfield at 16.

I didn't have a bad youth, come to think of it.

well, since the exceedingly lovely njsue mentioned explosives...we used to wrap the firecrackers in playdoh, to create shrapnel that would wipe out large units of army men. and we'd take many, many m-80s and recreate pearl harbor with model ships in a nearby swamp.

and i also remember one time getting exceedingly drunk (not hard to do, considering that i was probably all of 11) at the house of one of my older brother's friends who worked at the schaefer beer plant. anyhow, they 'knew' that one could make a rocket if one took a 12oz bottle (such as the conviently just-emptied schaefer bottles we had lying about) and fill it with gasoline, stopper the top with a chlorine tablet (from their swimming pool), turn it upside down and ignite. based on the ensuing explosion i can only imagine that this fellow went on to work at morton thiokol...

"are you more safety-inclined than were your parents?"

Well I couldn't imagine doing what my dad did some thirty something years ago, I'd be locked up for sure. It was magpie season and my sister got pecked on top of the head a beauty, blood pissing out. Next thing I know, I've been volunteered to walk down the road wearing a hat stuffed with newspaper. All the neighbours are leaning on their fences watching me as I casually stroll along some distance from our house. Then there's a single loud bang. Dad's shot the maggie dead with his .303 as its swooped down towards me. All the neighbours are cheering and clapping. Do it now and see what the response is!

Greg Taylor: how do you wrestle a goat?

When it comes to raising my kids in a safe environment, I generally use my parents as a template. For instance, I'll occasionally let the kids sit in my lap to steer the car, but no shifting, and I'll always have my non-beer-holding hand ready in case they jerk the wheel into oncoming traffic.

In the woods near our house we tied a rope to a tall tree and swung on it out over a stream. No, no loop to stick a foot in, no safety net; just hold on and swing, egged on by other dare-devil, wreckless kids. Besides the risk of the branch (or the rope) breaking, if you didn't keep you wits about you, on the return swing you would slam into the tree. The local geek kid did. And, yes, the branch did eventually break, with my brother at full swing over the stream. He simply landed on the other side. I don't think my mother ever knew about the swing, she certainly didn't know about it breaking.

Not only did we climb any tree tall enough to be a challenge, my father helped build the tree fort. Not content with a fort, we made it a two story job by using the roof more than we used the interior. Must have been about twenty-five feet off the ground.

Basketball, outdoors, on a concrete surface, on roller-skates, anyone?

By today's lights we might have been stupid but we weren't wimps.

Lofty,
I love it! Your dad sent you out as bait!

Annalucia,
My friends had goats. I used to wrestle with them by grabing thier horns and trying to push them backwards in a sort of reverse tug-o-war. Some goats like the game. Others get pissed a rear up and charge.

It was my revenge on all the goats who butted me in the ass while I wasn't looking.

1. Hitching rides behind vehicles on icy streets by grabbing bumper, squatting down (wouldn't want the driver to see us, would we?) and sliding on our boots. Watch those man hole covers!
2. Ice/snowball fights - with rocks in the center for added distance.
3. Two cars driving in adjoining lanes while drivers match speed, then change passengers while cars still moving.
4. Sneaking beer into high school.
5. Shopping cart drags!

Annalucia: you first insult the goat, and then wait for him to defend his honor.

Regards,

Actually, the amusing part of this is, so many of you seem to believe doing stupid and dangerous things is "cool". I have a sneaking suspicion we won't see many posts from the kids who killed themselves.

I don't like to play the heavy, but thanks to those sorts of beliefs I'm blind in one eye and have pretty significant facial scarring. Wasn't my doing; some high-school student in chem lab thought it'd be "cool" to play with HF in a sealed glass (not Pyrex, glass) container. I just walked in at the wrong time.

I'm not looking for sympathy. In some ways it was a very valuable, but rather expensive, learning experience: "shit happens". And I'm doing extremely well in life, so I don't have any complaints. I'm just pointing out the flip side of "wow, we used to do all sorts of stupid shit every day and never got a scratch so it must be a good thing and everyone these days is just too nannyish".

I was also in a pretty serious bike accident as a child. I would've been far better off if I were wearing a helmet (I had a severe concussion and was unconscious for a day), but helmets weren't "cool" so I didn't have one. Maybe I'm just unlucky or clumsy or something, but these days I don't ride without a helmet. It can't hurt.

Safety precautions such as bike helmets are funny that way: they're utterly unnecessary... until you need them. And, people doing stupid things really do get hurt and killed, and sometimes hurt other people too.

As for the padded jungle gyms and such? In the US, that's mainly a response to the legal liability issues. Anybody running a playground can get their asses sued off by some kid's parents when the kid repeatedly jumps off the 10-foot-high tower onto the top of his head. Padding and such is almost certainly excessive, but the only certain long-term fix is to address the legal stuff.

Actually, this phenomenon is easy to understand--at least in the US. We've become a society where in many cases both parents work, so the kids are being left to the mercies of everyone else (more or less). Anyone who provides a service like a playground is expected to be parents-in-proxy, so to speak, and they're increasingly being held responsible for the kids' behavior and safety. Increased padding, lack of high places to jump from, barbed-wire fences, etc... it's all about avoiding that little three-letter word. I'd guess it's a natural evolution of things in a capitalist society.

There's a flip side to that too. I doubt many folks here are "The Simpsons" comic book readers, but in one issue the local mob (and Krusty) was runninng a somewhat "unsafe" day care center. Prolly doesn't take much imagination to guess what that would be like :) Then there was Marge's response, which was to make the most utterly bland and namby-pamby day care on the planet.

I suspect the media are mostly responsible for the whole "my kid's gonna get abducted" madness, but I haven't seriously looked at the statistics. It gets a little weird because there are some gray-area issues which are being counted as "abductions", like one of the separated parents running off with the child; that's a relatively new phenomenon and including this sort of crap makes comparisons difficult.

Okay. I'd love to hear a goat insult.

Oh wait. Got one.

"You are the love slave of the Mujahideen."

We were military brats-RAF- raised on the island of Cyprus. All the adults were sailing freaks and every weekend they would go off to their regattas and leave all the little kids alone on the beaches. As soon as they sailed off we would swim past the concertina wire to the forbidden Turkish part of the beach and start picking through the cool stuff in the bunkers. This was until the soldiers caught us and started firing into the air. Of course they loved children and never would have hurt any of us, and it was all good fun. We also used to enjoy looking for WWII debris that used to wash up after a storm, and the minesweepers were frequent visitors to our shores.
Oh yes right, bike helmets? never wore one myself.
But I understand that my sister never lets my nieces leave the driveway without theirs. It seems a funny thing.

Sailing, jumping bikes (learning to abandon said bike and let it go over the cliff if you missed the turn), climbing trees, tackle football with no protective gear (into the twenties), building tree forts with defective/rotten lumber, bottle rocket wars (aim, light....fire), tennis ball cannons (lack of steel beer cans puts a cramp in that), BB guns, practicing throwing knives, archery, mucho firecrackers, cleaning showers with straight Muriatic Acid (good for that WMD training), using extremely defective city equipment in a manner not proscribed by the manufacturer in order to get the job done/have fun...

I may have forgotten a few things after some hits to the head.

Okay. I'd love to hear a goat insult.

"billy-gruff, you are so ugly osama made you wear a burqa..."

I started wearing a helmet voluntarily after getting in a bike accident at the age of fourteen. I didn't hit my head but had plenty of time to think about it while I was sailing through the air.

The safety device that drives me bonkers is the passenger-side airbag. Most places, it's illegal to turn off, so they tell you to not put children in the front seat. Guess what? The guideline for "children" is often set at 100 pounds, which some "children" don't cross until the age of fourteen or fifteen (what can I say, my family had some late bloomers.) Try telling a fifteen-year-old boy not to sit in the front seat because the "safety devices" could kill him.

Sometimes the guideline is height - also not the best. I have an eighteen-year-old niece who will never get above 4'10". Should I tell her that she always needs to ride in the back?

The comment about playground equipment is all too true - but it doesn't matter how innocuous it is. I almost broke my neck on a low set of monkey bars - I ended up excused from speaking for the rest of the day because of the lurid (but not all that painful) bruise on my throat...

"Actually, the amusing part of this is, so many of you seem to believe doing stupid and dangerous things is "cool". I have a sneaking suspicion we won't see many posts from the kids who killed themselves."

Actually, we were all killed as children. Fortunately Hell didn't want us, so we came back.

"I don't like to play the heavy, but thanks to those sorts of beliefs I'm blind in one eye and have pretty significant facial scarring. Wasn't my doing; some high-school student in chem lab thought it'd be "cool" to play with HF in a sealed glass (not Pyrex, glass) container. I just walked in at the wrong time."

Actually, I get the feeling that you do like to play the heavy, as post-dated revenge against the students who scarred you for life.

"I'm not looking for sympathy."

You have it anyway. I'm sorry your sense of humor was fatally injured. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go sneak some off-season firecrackers to some local teens and entice a couple of the neighborhood toddlers to play in traffic. A malicious spirit's work is never done, I swear.

"Actually, this phenomenon is easy to understand--at least in the US. We've become a society where in many cases both parents work, so the kids are being left to the mercies of everyone else (more or less). Anyone who provides a service like a playground is expected to be parents-in-proxy, so to speak, and they're increasingly being held responsible for the kids' behavior and safety."

I don't agree at all. As a lot of people have said here, kids 10 years ago or more went out to play and didn't ofter come home for 6 or 7 hours. One might come home for a quick sandwich, but it was off to adventure again. What I heard was "Be home before dark" or "be home by ..."

My mother didn't work.

The problem is the litigant society we live in. They don't even let adults do what they want anymore. I was at the beach walking on some rocks I used to walk on as a kid and was told to get off because people had slipped and fallen.

A co-worker was upset that he could take his baby into some kind of industrial show. I told him that it was because we are a litigant society that takes no resposibility for their own actions. He looked uncomfortable and then told me that he and his wife were suing the hotel that they stayed at because they had set the child on a wooden pull out computer tray and it collapsed. He seemed to think it was justified. I wanted to say: "Well there you go then."

It's not because the parents work. It's because of all the "namby-pamby" parents who sue. I broke my arm in 4 places riding a GT skateboard. Did my parent sue? Nope. My dad called be a dumbass and I had to sit out baseball season.

My daughter broke her arm falling from monkey bars. There was not much padding. Did I sue? Hell no. She was doing a gymnastic dismount like a ditz and fell. She shouldn't have been, but I did the same thing and at least understood.

Do you get the concept of personal accountablity?

Remember those ropes in school gyms? The ones that went all the way to the very high gym ceiling? There was always at least one boy that could climb to the very top on the one that didn't have knots. The school I teach in doesn't have them anymore, obviously.

I read or heard something a while ago that really went with this subject. The person brought up the death of the pick-up game. Kids no longer wander their neighborhoods playing whatever. The reason being that parents today start them on soccer and T-ball by the time they are potty trained. (Has anyone witnessed 4 year olds playing soccer? Not only is it expensive, it's utterly ridiculous to watch - my opinion anyway.) There are a lot of lessons from a simple backyard stickball/whiffleball/kickball/whatever game that kids learn by themselves without the interference of adults, that a whole generation of kids are no longer learning.

Organized sports are organized by adults. Backyard kickball games are organized by kids. Big difference.

Fair go Andrea, he does kinda have a point.

As a kid, I used to ride a horse to school (in rural Queensland). One time the horse bolted, I got thrown and fell heavily. Probably lucky I didn't break my neck like Christopher Reeve, or my ribs. At the time it was painful, but we didn't take such things very seriously. Now I'd be more cautious.

Now, for another view: I was a good 90s mom and taught safety to my daughter without being repressive. I thought. Just recently my teen told me she might get a motorcycle for getting around Manhattan. I also found out she has been learning rock-climbing, once jumped into a corral of wild Andalusians and managed to ride one bareback, and admits to being Republican when in NY and LA. She took over the controls of a twin engine in the Bermuda Triangle, has driven her boyfriend's car at speeds that scared him, and wants to sky-dive (she was invited to do it in HA and I hid the information. Yes, I'm a mean mom). Oh, much, much more.

The point is that parents can't really take the wild child out of a child. They can try to teach them to look both ways crossing the street and not to dive into shallow water or to stick metal objects into electrical sockets or to run with scissors. But, T-type children will always find some outlet that prematurely ages their parents. At least, our baby wears helmets, and she doesn't do drugs or drink. She prefers other ways of dying... well, OK "living", if you ask her. BTW, she is a brilliant writer and painter and does quite well at 'civilized' dinner parties and formal functions.

For those of you who aren't yet parents, please know that most of who your kids are has less to do with your parenting and more to do with the genetic lottery, and then enjoy (or pray a lot).

I recall when I was five, and my folks were installing a pool, before it was plastered it was a lovely concrete bowl -- my three older brothers and me so we soaked a tennis ball in camping fuel (white gas) and lit and played soccer with it.

My Dad comes out and says, (a) if you are going to do that, no long pants and (b) I want this garden hose running so you can dowse each other if necessary. Sensible precautions both.

My Mom, having raised five kids with only two broken bones, three arrests, two totaled automobiles (same brother, and this included a 1965 Mustang Fastback), puts it best when she says that the trick is that "kids will get hurt, the trick is to make sure they don't get injured."

Sadly, I don't think I'll let Owen be the pyromaniac that I was.

My childhood was pretty tame but let's see:
Biking without a helmet was standard. I do wear one today.
Walking to school along the railroad tracks
Snowball fights on the school yard
Making fun of the only kid in Grade 6 with a moustache
Like I said, I was a tame sort of kid.

"When I were a lad", back in the 50's in Sydney, we used to swap gunpowder recipes. I seem to remember that some boys' magazines from earlier times even carried such recipes. My father certainly passed his expertise on to me.

Today such behaviour would have us locked up under anti-terrorism legislation; let alone the safety issues.

We did not have bike helmets. We threw rocks at each other and played a game called smear the queer where we broke someones nose. We played on railroad tracks....actually playing chicken with oncoming trains. My mother went and got the corn we kids shucked and threw at houses on halloween. We were also provided with the soap we used to "soap" houses and cars. Mom drew the line at eggs. I can't imagine giving my kids the tools to what is in effect, vandelism. Ah, the good ole days. I'd never allow my kids to do any of the above.

Up until I was about 13 years old, we lived in what would be termed today an inner city. Both my parents worked as did both parents of most of my friends. That meant we had a great deal of unsupervised time to have all sorts of 'fun'.

Most of what has been mentioned we did .. biking with no helmets, setting whatever looked interesting on fire, hitching rides in winter on the backs of delivery trucks when we had ice skates on, and climbing anything we could climb.

One activity we did, that I'd kill my kids had they ever attempted, was roof jumping. You need to have buildings that are at least 3 stories tall and close together (we considered 3 stories the minimum height). We liked to jump the roofs of the various factories, apartments, stores, and garages around town. Get on the roof of one, take a running jump, and land on the roof of the building next door.

One of the biggest challenges, for my group of friends, was to jump from a building of one height onto another that was lower in height. Why some of us were not killed I'll never understand. But, nobody ever was.

The worst that ever happened to any of us was being chased off the roofs by the cops. Oh, we also got lots of scrapes on the arms and legs in the summer. (Many roofs were covered with gravel and the gravel would tear the flesh.)

When I was 13, we moved to the suburbs (my parents were good workers and savers). I missed being able to do what the older teens did .. jump roofs that were spaced further apart. I remember thinking how cool it would be to jump as far as the older kids. The suburban kids didn't have the buildings we had in the city so I stopped jumping roofs after we moved.

When I became an adult I found out that many of my aunts and uncles had taken part in roof jumping as children. Seemed to be the thing to do. (There wasn't much else.)

I wonder if the city kids do this today? I assume they must. It's vary tempting, when you're a kid and on a roof, not to try and jump across to the next roof. I imagine that, laws being what they are today, the building owner would be responsible if anything were to happen.

Mr. Magoo,
How would you be more cautious? By insisting that all horses be on a lead rope attached to an adult? or that you'd never gallop? or that you'd not ride or allow your children to ride a horse.

People still jump despite what happened to Reeves thank God. I've seen jockeys get crushed and then mount up as soon as healed. I'm surprised the government didn't call for a ban on all horse sports. I'm really sick of the government telling me what is okay and safe for me to do.

I fell off a bolting horse and got a nasty concussion. So what? It comes with the territory.

Bob:
this is an amusing expression for an Australian.

"... while the adults were drinking and eating barbecue."

How do you eat a barbecue? (One brick at a time!)
Ahh, the wonders of the English language!

All of these stories are fun and a chance for the writers to use their stories on us that are probably past their use-by date with their friends. What you are forgetting is that by definition you are the survivors of these escapades. The unheard writers here are the kids who didn't survive.

My Mum and Dad let me do a lot of dangerous thing without protection too but I put it down to ignorance and unavailability of the correct procedures. As an example, playing football. Our coaches were either schoolteachers or somebody's dad. How many are hobbling around on dicky knees as a result of that? I know I am.

People used to have a lot more children, so losing a few was no big deal.

my apologies in advance

Between 14 and 16
- I sharpened a bamboo stake and attached it to the front of my bike in a modified version of jousting with the neighbours. Had to swerve to avoid jamming the damn thing into someone's head at speed.
- Rock bombardments where we'd be at the top of the cliff lobbing rocks at our neighbours below, who had to dance around avoiding them... of course one of them was distracted and copped one in the melon.
- Gathering all my toys at 15 and immolating them with petrol (the common phlame phase...)
(then at 18 there were the high-speed car chases, etc)

I had a wonderful childhood but i don't know how my neighbours survived it :) I know that my children will be learning martial arts from a young age to teach them self-discipline and the art of the consequence in a controlled environment (ie do something stupid, kaboom) where it won't hurt them as much.

Many things I did as a kid would get me prison time today, but EVERYBODY including the police knew who, what, and were. I made a high powered rifled (got a machinist's kid to rifle it for me)zip gun (when people figured out it was rifled we had to destroy it, no police were technically involved), explosives made from food preservatives, and proximity fuses (had help from an adult on this one), and we weren't even trying to "get away with it", we didn't have to.. Those IED builders in Iraq are pikers. I did have a bicycle helmet, but that was for Kayaking. No way one God's green earth am I going to allow my kids to do these things (I do not want them to do time for one thing).

Ah, remember the double-bunger firecracker? Someone told me (c. 1971) that five of them were equivalent to a stick of dynamite.

Growing up, there was always someone in my class with something broken, but we survived. Aged 2, I got a broken collarbone when our car rolled. Aged 8, I fell forward onto my hand, forcing my fingers back - it swelled up pretty nastily, though it turned out not to be broken (had it X-rayed).

But then again, my school classmate's younger brother was in a rugby scrum that collapsed. He's been in a wheelchair these last 22 years.

Plus my sister still has a scar on her chest from a toy dustpan (metal) that she fell on when was 2 years old.

She also once took my car out for a little unauthorised driving practice when she was 16 and I was away...well, she survived.

Case in point: while planning a company picnic, we had developed several games that the children could play while the adults were drinking and eating barbecue. One person asked if we would get some small trinkets for the kids who won the game, as prizes. Horrified looks all round: the kids certainly shouldn't be rewarded for winning the game.

Why stop there, let's eliminate winning and losing with adults too. The office would be a good place as any to start. How about the worst screw-up in the place and the star salesman get the same year-end bonus??

I and my mates from St Josephs built a billy cart along the specifications of Baron von Richtofens Fokker, without the tri-plane or synchronised machine guns. We would race it down Tooronga Village Car Park or High Street Hill. No-one seemed to mind, we got quite adept at swerving in and out of traffic.

When we werent playing chicken with billy carts we were building rafts, ala Huck Finn, made of old oil barrells and drift wood. The object was to raft up Gardners Creek, towards the Great Dividing Range some several hundred miles to the North.

When this got boring we would assemble a team to explore the storm water drain system under the Yarra river. The idea of being drowned in a flash flood never occurred to us.

Otherwise we would amuse our selves by picking fights with the Jordy boys down by Jordanville Station. Or trying to knock each other out with bouncers on a concrete matted pitch.

On holidays the idea was to try and swim INTO the Gunnamatta Beach rip, and then swim out of it thereby proving ourselves superior swimmers to Harold Holt. Otherwise you simply paddled to the far side of a Lake Tyers and lived in the boondocks for a couple of days like the Aborigines.

And dont get me started on going to Windy Hill on a Saturday arvo, or St Moritz and Bojangles on a Saturday night. If you didnt get into a few scraps you werent really trying.

I assumed that taking a few risks was what made life fun. Certainly Darwin assures us that this was the way to sort the men from the boys and thereby improve the breed.

I remember getting rides back from Cub Scouts in the back of a pickup truck, driven by one of the Scout leaders. Made the mistake of not holding on while standing at the back, just as the driver pulled up in front of my house. Flew a few feet, landed mouth first against the cab - still have a couple of very nicely chipped teeth as a result. No lawsuits, no complaints.

I have a toddler daughter, another kid on the way. I feel like such a hypocrite - can't even imagine what I'll be like when it comes time to talk about drugs and sex.

I'm a God fearing product of evolutionary survival.

Among the litany of spanking offenses survived.

Lighting rocket engines with matches...BB gun wars with glass aviator shades as eye protection...Bottle rocket RPGs...Sailing forty miles to the next island in an overloaded sunfish with a bottle of water between us...A-mature skateboard medical training setting various dislocated joints in drainage ditches...Disassembling bullets and shot shells for the explosive goodies and blowing up engine blocks...Arrows with explosive tips...Tin can mortars...50 ft cliff flops into surf...Hitching everywhere...Racing everything with wheels...Lizard genocide...Sword fights...Stick fights...Rock fights...fist fights...And happy go friggin' lucky to be alive.

I should have added that my sister survived, but not my car.

But it was all for the best. I got a new car and she finally settled down seriously to her HSC.

"Actually, the amusing part of this is, so many of you seem to believe doing stupid and dangerous things is "cool". I have a sneaking suspicion we won't see many posts from the kids who killed themselves."

I can tell you many nonamusing stories about people killed doing nothing. Children learn by doing, it is as simple as that. Taking risks teaches children "Judgement." Taking risks is a part of life and wrapping your child in cotton wool will not keep them out of harms way. "It usually results in a fanatic or psycho :-o)"

When I was a child, we would play on the railroad tracks and sometimes, we played chicken with the train.

The memories keep flooding back, as I read this thread...

There was a known pedophile in the neighbourhood, living in a house a few blocks away. Some of the older boys used to go by his place, lead him on and rob him - he couldn't complain to either the cops or their parents.

It was a tough neighbourhood, working class. There were biker clubhouses in the area, and a lively little drug trade among the parents and teenagers.

How do I even explain this today?

At about 14 years old I built a crossbow from a leaf off a Ford Cortina spring firing a sharpened steel bolt. The first time I used it, the bolt went straight through the 44-gallon drum I was using as a target and buried itself in the door of Uncle's truck. A couple of days later it disappeared, and I never found it again. We also used to fill the tar-paper bags that welding rods come in with oxy-acet mix - light the paper and throw ... quickly.

Full disclosure here folks, I was what I thought was a huge wimp. The most dangerous thing I ever did (besides getting in the car with my barfly parents) was rollerskating through the flat, flat streets of my Miami, Florida neighborhood. Back then there were no roller blades, we used the old-fashioned two-in-front, two-in-back wheeled type. You could either get the kind that attached to your shoes (you adjusted them with a key) or more-coveted were the kind that were attached to ankle-high white boots. (You could wear them and pretend you were an ice-skating star.) One day I was zipping along and fell right on my ass. I sprained my wrist -- they iced it for five hours or something which hurt even worse than the sprain -- and after that I retired my skates and retreated to my books. The endings of which I used to peek at in case they might be "too icky" for me. All of you sound like the bad, bad children I hid in my room to avoid.

Car surfing, usually while chemically enhanced.

I see I'm not the only one with a wacky childhood. I grew up in a "safe" area. By that I mean there were none of the wackos that we had to watch out for, just stupidity. There's too much to post on Tim's bandwidth so I'll continue on my own blog. Just a taste: Falling out of a sycamore tree at ten into a pine and bramble thicket (about 35 feet), ending up with just scratches; leaving home at dawn and being gone until dark (at age 5); catching and playing with snakes, including poisonous ones; china-berry and slingshot wars; riding dozens of miles every day on a bike with no fenders and poor brakes; hunting, trapping, fishing, and just plain traipsing through the local forests, beginning about age 5 and lasting until I joined the USAF. I did everything I could, enjoyed every minute of it, and never suffered a broken bone or serious injury. My parents said "God looks after fools and children, and you're both", but I had fun, and a lifetime of experiences by the time I was twenty. My children never even had the CHANCE to do much of what I took for granted.

Sliding down the kerbing during the wet season, using the coat of algae that grew like mad in all the rain was a bit of a hoot- you could get up a fair old lick of pace, but if you lost your balance you'd crack your head open on the concrete, and if no-one picked you up you'd drown. Stormwater drain kayaking was pretty intense as well.

Young bamboo was a wealthy source of both bows and arrows; also tom-thumb firecrackers, if unwound from the bundle are exactly .177 calibre, and can be lit and fired from an air-rifle at unsuspecting friends, geezers waiting for the bus and passing bicyclists. Magpie cricket was exciting as well.

In the 50's we rode bikes, roller skated and raced home-built go-carts without protective gear. Our playgrounds had (wooden) see-saws, jungle jims, merry-go-rounds, tire swings and high slides that we used to wax for greater speed. We had fireworks, BB guns, slingshots and all manner of toy gun. We built and used tree houses and rope swings over swimming holes. We played coed dodgeball in gym (only one rule - you couldn't aim at a girl above her waist). And these were the things our parents knew about (the crap we pulled down by the railroad tracks alone would have gotten us grounded for life).

We did not have seatbelts and we kids sat anywhere in the car we were told to sit (cars pretty much were tanks back then, didn't go as fast and there were fewer of them). Locking the house was no big deal. Leaving the kids in the car (sometimes with the motor running) while Mom ran into the store for milk was more normal than not. We were not taught to fear strangers (although we knew never to go anywhere with a stranger and never under any circumstances get in a car with a stranger). Playing down by the river or lake was not off limits. We could go anywhere around town and occasionally took the bus into the city. At age 11, I and some girlfriends rode the bus for an hour to the New York State Fairgrounds and attended the fair for the day by ourselves. I frequently traveled alone by plane and train to visit relatives.

We have no children so I can't speak from that POV, but I well understand the forces behind all the changes and sadly, aside from the whole protective gear thing, they're all negative. Two things for sure: Childhood is a whole lot more expensive than it used to be and kids today spend too much time in the house. Almost all our non-school daylight hours were spent outside, even in the winter (with a whole new set of hazards). We were the better for it I think.

(PS OT - One of the reasons I like coming here is because it always tomorrow.)

Three cousins on summer vacation, roaming the moutain woods of north central Pennsylvania, carrying a .22 single shot rifle. And a pocket full of ammo.

My kids are old enough that I wish they WOULD learn how to shoot.

N. O'Brain

-"Joyriding" (aka "temporarily stealing") in a Cessna 210 after drinking a cocktail or three, and them buzzing the local teen hangout at about 100 feet and 160 knots around midnight back when I was 17. The moon was so bright that it looked like dusk after my eyes adjusted to the darkness.
-Flying under the bridge at Kowliga, Al on Lake Martin. I ran some people out of a bass boat.
-Blew my best friend's TV antenna over with a Cessna 172. His mom cut off the peanut butter after that.
-Kicked up a rooster tail from the Lock Ness in a Phantom with the tail hook down.

My oldest is 16 and will be soloing sometime before Christmas. I'm scared shitless!

I get up in the country, that entailed horses, motorbikes, ATVs and snowmobiles. I've broken bones, knocked out teeth, dislocated a shoulder and got more stiches and tetanus shots than I care to recount. I wouldn't change a single thing, I learned risk assessment and consequences the hard way.

If I ever have kids and live in the country I'll give them the same freedom but living in the city it's too dangerous to let children roam.

Let me clarify: three young kids, 10-12 YO, unsupervised.

"I was what I thought was a huge wimp"

Andrea, you may be the only one here that got tougher with age.

"All of you sound like the bad, bad children I hid in my room to avoid."

Now the trolls are hiding from you.

I am not able to tell everything about my childhood...will need to check the "statute of limitations" first.

Tim _ I hope you were using your isotoner seat cover and rmi-preventative wrist pad on your mouse arm when you posted that...

Got up to all sorts of hijinks similar to many posted above, but this example - in its 'normalcy' - illustrates everyday parental attitudes of the time:

1969 - I'm seven years old - I am given my first bicycle by my parents to ride to school. This is in Nth Queensland in a sugar cane farming community and my house is on the main road, as is the school, about 2 kilometres away. All through the crushing season there are massive cane trucks and molasses trucks thundering past at all hours, and the road isn't much more than a thin Andean goat track. So, what sort of bike do they give me to ride to school? A 'fixed wheeler'.

I'm not sure whether they exist anymore, but a fixed wheel has NO BRAKES AT ALL. The pedals are locked to the revolution of the wheels, so you cannot have a pedal brake, nor were there any hand brakes. The best I couuld do to halt my forward momentum was either slow down as I neared my destination and let friction and gravity do their work, or try to put backwards pressure on the pedals, which, if you had a good head of steam up, would merely result in you bobbing up and down on one leg on the pedal like some mad 3-stone marionette, but achieving little by way of actually slowing the thing down.

For all that, I came to no harm and got a much-coveted dragstar a couple of years later. With actual brakes.

However, I did lend the fixed wheeler to a classmate one lunch time, and omitted telling him it was one .. he came to a very nasty halt at Stewart's shop on the other end.

The Aborigines stole my brother's Dragstar. Bastards- I would have inherited it. An item that was big with Rockhampton hoodlum wanna-bes was called the "go-bike"; they would steal a lawnmover, remove the engine then cut down the frame of a (stolen0 bicycle, and weld the engine into the frame with a direct chain drive to the back wheel, no brakes. They would also weld extra fork legs on the front forks for that "chopper" look, then provoke the police into a street chase.
I raced 25hp powerboats from the age of 15 to 18, and my parents drove me to meeting towing the boat. I believe they had me heavily insured- I crashed one in the Brisbane to Caloundra in 1976, and had a propellor blade pierce my helmet and enter my head, which explains a lot.

Perth in the 50s and early 60s, was, well, interesting …

Homemade hill trolleys that braked courtesy of crashing into something (hopefully soft). If you came off, you quickly learnt that road-rashed buttocks HURT like hell.

Bombing tadpoles with penny bombs in the stormwater "dam", which was 20 feet deep, with steep sloping sides -- and I couldn't swim then.

Exploring the Rivervale rubbish tip, which was alongside the Swan River, past our waists in stinking clay sludge and industrial wastes. My mate would tow me there; he on his pushbike, me on borrowed rollerskates.

Homemade crossbows with sharpened 6" nails for arrowheads. Homemade cracker cannons and steel ball-bearings for ammo. Pulling the heads and powder out of .22 cartridges and pushing the case into a bar of hard soap to make low-powered soap "bullets", using them to knock doves off the clothesline, or raise interesting welts on my youngest brother's legs and bum. "Ging" (slingshot) "wars" using quandong nuts for ammo. My brother zigged when he should have zagged and copped one fair centre in the forehead, which saw him end-for-end, base over apex, down the sandhill we were trying to "conquer". Penny-rocket fights, launched from hollow lengths of bamboo held on the shoulder. Putting a drop of diesoline in the hollow skirt of an air rifle pellet in my mates old Daisy, just to get the extra "oomph" as the diesel ignited. We graduated to pushing the pellet down the barrel with a nail, and filling the gap behind with ever increasing amounts of diesel fuel. Quite spectacular at night … and a testament to the strength of Daisy airguns! Putting a sixpenny bomb under a Nestle powdered milk tin -- and making my then 4-year-old brother stand on it to see how high it would launch him.

Helmet? Nope. Pads? What were they? We wore shorts, summer and winter -- I didn't even know what jeans were until I was in my mid-teens. Sneakers? God, we went barefoot everywhere -- Mum made us wear shoes, but we'd have them off halfway to school. Some of the wimps wore leather sandals, but … We were lucky -- no-one of my acquaintance or vintage got seriously hurt or, even worse, killed.

My two daughters are adults now, but the older one did abseiling and scuba diving, while both did Duke Of Edinburgh outdoor ed. including kayaking, camping etc. They younger one took up archery with me and even went out to the rifle club to shoot a few times. What they've done OTHER than that -- I don't want to know, nor do I need to know.

Bolt bombs- you get a i/2 inch nut and two bolts, screw the first bolt loosely into the nut then scrape the heads off a box of matches into the nut, then screw the other bolt into the other side (carefully). Launch into the air onto bitumen- if they land just the right way (on the end of a bolt) they go off like a mortar round and fire the top bolt straight up in the air. All-bearing billycarts made out of scavenged timber and using old egine bearings for wheels- an unearthly clatter on the road, quicker than shit off a chrome shovel down a steep hill (no brakes) and as much traction as teflon sandshoes. How did we all survive? Only fatalities at my school were an idiot who tried shooting a fish with a speargun with a powerhead, which missed, hit a rock and was driven back through his head, and a boarder who got rat-arsed on the Midlander (train) going home to Emerald and fell out the back of the train having a piss, only to be run over by a coal train.

In the early '60s, I lived on the Missouri River north of Kansas City at Ft. Leavenworth. I was in 3rd grade (8-9 years old). We would go down to the river thru snake infested swamps and lash together whatever wood and logs we could find to make a raft. We would float down the river like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn for a few miles. For some reason, the freight trains going north traveled real slow thru his area, so we could run and jump on them for the ride back home.

In Grade 3 I killed a kid just for the pleasure of watching him die. You try that these days!

I grew up on a farm in the 1960's.

Trust me! I was either lucky, or good, not sure which.

My memory isn't perfect, but when I was young (~15 years ago) we were playing in a park, and we heard something and we looked to investigate, and someone our age on the road who wasn't wearing a helmet was (I think) bleeding from the head. We got someone living nearby to phone an amulance.

As far as I know, he lived. We found out later that he had jacknifed off his bike.

I was rather unimpressed by him not wearing a helmet.

Born in the UK in 1958. By 1966 I had broken my left arm twice, (the first time in 1961), had my left kneecap traumatically removed, had 13 stitches in my right arm...

Alan, my son appears to be following in my footsteps.
But he brought two pairs of scissors to me this morning - and walked both times, just to show he'd learned his lesson.

My kids keep asking me what to do because they are inside all day and not allowed to cross the road because of that army of paedophiles that waits around the corner (I haven't met them yet but my wife assures me that they're there). A friend who's a Federal policewoman told me that the ratio of kids getting killed or horribly maimed in car accidents to those getting taken by roving paedophiles is 10,000 to one. Are parents proportionately worried about their driving habits? Nope. My personal answers to this one are, no television, camping as often as possible and encouraging them to climb trees and finding like minded parents who like seeing kids using some initiative (there's some).

When I was a kid, (she said, putting her teeth in), my parents felt perfectly safe letting me go downtown by myself on the bus, alone. This was Chicago, Illinois, - the second-largest city in the US at the time - and I was five.

Also, at the age of five, I went to the movies with a couple of other kids my age and spent Saturday afternoons watching Hammer horror films and stuffing myself with boxes of buttered popcorn and Jordan almonds.

The worst thing I had to worry about was the odd creep who'd sit next to me in the darkness and attempt to feel my thigh. I knew how to deal with that (a quick, glancing blow to the jugular usually worked). And I could ride my bike anywhere. I could also go to restaurants by myself and pay by myself. And Mother never had to worry. Life was more innocent then.

Now, however, I'd never let my kid step more than fifteen feet away from me without a Rottweiller in tow. There are some deeply sick people out there, and they've ruined the simple pleasures of childhood as I knew them.

It has become a commonplace occurence now in the States for college kids to go on rampages after sporting events - tearing down the goalposts, vandalizing businesses and so forth. I don't recall this happening when I was in college. My university basketball team, the Marquette Warriors, won the national championship when I was a freshman and there were thousands of excited kids in the downtown streets celebrating that night, drinking, yelling, puking in gutters, but no vandalism and very little trouble of any sort. (And this is when the legal drinking age in Wisconsin was 18.)

Nowadays, it's become almost run-of-the-mill for UW Madison kids to rush out into the streets after a Badgers game and not only drink, yell, and puke in gutters, but break windows, fight, set cars on fire, battle with police and generally do their best to imitiate rioting British yobs. What has happened during the past 25 years?

Well, lots of things. But I have wondered if packs of mainly middle class students aren't more badly behaved now precisely because they were supervised to death as children. After a lifetime of being shunted around from one adult-run activity to another, when they finally find themselves unsupervised, they don't know how to handle their freedom and they behave like complete heathens.

When you're left to explore the world on your own, you learn about consequences the hard way i.e., trying to stand up on the handlebars of a friend's bike while she's headed down a steep hill is a bad idea, not just because Mom says no, but because you end up going tail over tin cup. Having to go to the ER and get gravel picked out of your face with a comb is a memorable experience and one that definately leads to greater caution in future.

Besides, I think of what a wonderful thing it was to roam around alone on my bike or with friends (the universal rule was you had to head home when the street lights came on) on a hot July day and I really pity anyone who never got to experience that sort of freedom as a child.

Being a kid can also be a health hazard for parents as well.

As a kid my dad used to build boats as a hobby. Growing up in the country I liked throwing things and decided to make a whopping big boomerang out of marine plywood I stole from my dad's workshop. The boomerand was 2 foot wide from end to end and would go a mile when I threw it. On one occasion I was about 100 metres from the house when I threw the boomerang in a direction away from the house. A gust of wind caught it, it came back way over my head and strait for the house. I cringed thinking it was going to take out a window, but I heard a loud f**k! in the distance. The boomerang took out my old man while he was walking from the house to a nearby shed and left a huge purple/black bruise on his shoulder and back. What were the chances of that!

Also did the usual exposive fettish thing, touch powder etc, being a chemistry geek. Once tried to set off 40kg mixture ammoniun nitrate and diesel once with a blackpowder primer. Luckily for me the primer wasn't strong enough to set it off. If only I could have got my hands on some mercury fulminate...

The neighbor hood kids and i used to contruct ramps with plywood, cinder blocks, old tires in the alleys behind our houses, or in the street and jump in to giant mud puddles after gathering up speed on our bikes. We ate gravel a few times and had to pull it out of our elbows and knees, but it was great. Somebody would probably call the cops if kids were doing that these days. No helmets, never owned a bike helmet in my life, or elbow or knee pads.

Jeez, this thread is bringing back memories...some supressed due to embarrassment...some probably missing due to severe blunt trauma to the head.

BB gun fights? Yup. Bottle rocket fights? Of course. Pipe bombs? You betcha. Skitching rides on the bumpers of cars in winter? Sure thing!

I also have fond memories of what we called "swamp hockey." There was a low spot in the woods not far from my house (now a housing development with a nitwit name like "Lake Lawn" or some such). Within the woods there was a stretch that always managed to flood just before freezing over. As soon as it did, we'd be out there slapping away at a puck and skating full tilt into trees, roots, rocks, stumps, and each other. I still have a scar on my forehead from that.

I also spent summers on my grandmother's farm helping my uncle and cousins make hay. Every once in a while, a snake would turn up in a bale. The only safety advice I got came from my cousin - "when the haywagon starts to tip over, remember to bail out on the side going up."

I don't know how any of us made it.

Habib "Bolt bombs- you get a i/2 inch nut and two bolts, screw the first bolt loosely into the nut then scrape the heads off a box of matches into the nut"

We made something similar but we used 1" bolts and nut but filled them with caps (from cap guns).Throw them up and run for your lives.

As we got older we had better availability to parts and went to pipe bombs: 2" diameter pipe about a foot long with screw caps on both ends. Drill an 1/8" inch hole in one end, fill it with ....[ Edited by management].... then take 100'+ of speaker wire, stick one end in the drilled hole and take the other end to an electrical outlet... plug it in and wait.

(WARNING: Do not do this at home we were 14 year old professionals)

Speaking of throwing something up and running for your lives....anyone remember "Lawn Darts". I think my parents bought us a set just before they left for vacation one year. couple pound giant darts (4" steel spike with 12" plastic fins) you throw up and they stick in the ground or whatever they hit when they land. The winner was the one who lived.

I remember being pinned down behind a piece of corrugated iron for a while by a friend with a slug gun.It taught me to duck.
Growing up in Botany,happy days.

Tej: Jesus H., I forgot all about "Lawn Darts." We had them too. My mother was so concerned that we'd poke our eyes out with pencils if we goofed around at the table while doing our homework, but she had no problem with us lobing Lawn Darts across the yard.

We're the lucky ones. I knew a kid whose jeans caught fire - and I mean, they really went up in flames - when he was lighting a fart. He was in a pediatric ICU for months. The family moved away about a year later and so I don't know if the kid sustained permanent damage (not that I would necessarily be privy to info like that if the family had stayed.)

Imagine going through life unable to father children or have a normal sex life because you set your pants on fire when you were 7 and dumb. Poor guy. I really have always felt bad for him.

My husband grew up near a glass factory in Huntington, WV. When clackers were all the rage, the factory churned them out. All the broken ones they put in a huge pile on the factory grounds and all the children would come play on an enormous mountain of broken glass.

Never wore bike helmet as a kid. Saw a kid killed riding to school, with blood coming out his ear from fracture scull. Didn't start me wearing a bike helmet.

Bike helmets are now required by law. I've been hit by two cars since I was thirty and the bike helmet has saved my life on both occaisions but not collar bone. My kid (due in April 05 - ANZAC Day actually) will be wearing a bike helmet.

We used to put a house brick on the trampoline and jump and avoid the brick.

Made a flying fox using thin rope from our Jacaranda tree. Luckily I landed flat on my back when it broke.

One of the reasons kids are getting fatter these days is that parents won't let them walk to school in case they get kidnapped or something. When they're more likely to be in a car crash on the way to school than abducted.

There was always freaks out there, and always will be. Let kids be kids. Like a mate of mine says about her son - a little pain never hurt anyone.

We used to climb as high as we could in the macrocarpa trees (they're shaped like low pyramids) and leap out. Usually we'd land softly in the branches below. Usually we dropped about 30 feet.

Great fun.

Hey Razor, I hope your Kid isn't being born wearing a helmet...
makes the eyes water a bit.

Let me see - some things we got up to included making chloride bombs (Chlorine and brake fluid in glass bottles), pulling the slug out of bullets to get the cordite to make pipe bombs, hunting pigs off horseback using long clubs when I was 8, hunting with my .22 that I got for my tenth birthday, towing our billy cart at 40mph with my brother in it with my motor bike (lots of skin lost when you fell off it), assorted "busters" off my horse (my neck is still no good from one fall), racing mates in their cars at night without lights (using moonlight).

Also played that game where you and a mate stand opposite each other without shoes on a wooden floor and see who can throw a knife into the floor closest to the others foot before one of you chicken out.

Somehow made it through childhood without any broken bones - lost a bit of skin though.

My neighborhood was bounded on 2 sides by a river and the third side by train tracks... of course the best place to play was the train tressel. I remember climbing under the tressle and using the space under the tracks (and 20 feet above the water) as a 'fort'. We would smash pennies on the train tracks all the time too. There was a rumor that a quarter would derail the train - so we only used pennies.

My father cut the seatbelts out of his cars... he hated the rattling noise they made.

Nobody wore a bike helmet... except