kids playing on streets in 70s and today's kids

Mon Aug 27, 2018

when i was a kid of the late 70s and early 80s,

in my suburban neighborhood, it consists of a lot of brand new houses, but the houses were all cookie cutter identical in many cases. there were 4 different layouts of the house and they repeated, at various costs

there were a lot of young families with children, and my family obviously had me.

the one thing i remember as a  kid, and i have photos from Polaroid and kodak film to prove it, was that a lot of kids would play on the streets.

you could look out the window on a summer day, for example, and you could see children on the streets, me among them.

or if you drove a car you had to drive slowly as kids would scramble away from the streets onto the side walk.

as a very young kid we liked to drive big wheels



as i and other kids grew older we bicycled on bicycles with training wheels at first. bicycles had much better range.

some kids had inflatable water pools in the front or water slides, or we would play around water sprinklers



there was a small local park we could walk to, and there was a small local library there and at one point it had classes but they moved the elementary school.

one girl had a fence and inside that fence was a fairly large pool that took up most of the space of her backyard. but mostly it was without fences.

today i have driven around many neighborhoods around the midwest and i almost never see kids playing like we did, me and my neighbors, back in the 70s and 80s

the best example i can think of is this charlie brown cartoon




in this picture you see the neighbor kids flying a kite together. i had similar experience with the neighborhood kids coming together.

i don't see that today

about a third of the kids were racially black where i grew up. it wasn't all good, there were fights. young boys fighting and punching and kicking other boys.

i remember the girls mostly hanging out with one another.


i suspect perhaps one reason is all the child abductions from the streets and playgrounds, making it somewhat dangerous.

several of my neighbors do have young children, and they play in the backyard, with trampolines and swimming pools and even basketball hoops in their backyard, surrounded by fairly tall fences

perhaps fences have come down in price?

what i did as a kid was leave my front door and ring the door bell of other neighbor kids and ask if mike is there or if arnold is there and you could see all of use in the front yard on a water slide, for example.

in 2018 though i almost never see kids out in front. now i know many families in my suburban neighborhood have kids, and i've seen them bounce up and down on trampolines surrounded by tall 8 foot wood fences.

what i don't see is say little boys and girls go from their home to other homes in kids, in the early afternoon, by themselves, like we did, and by we me and my peers back then. or walking by themselves to a nearby park.

one reason i had to, was one kid bill who family was well off had this thing called a console an atari 2600 which my parents said they couldn't afford. so i had to visit bill to play the atari 2600, which meant leaving my house and ringing the doorbell.

do kids in 2018 as i type this, in a neighborhood come together like this?



though to be fair about a third of the kids were black and there was a lot of fighting and threats to kick his ass so it wasn't all roses and ice cream. a lot of the black kids were already using pretty sexually explicit language so there's that. when a black boy said suck my dick i thought ewww gross.