Did kids in the 70s/80s/90s really roam freely like in*Stranger Things*, or is it a movie myth?
Damn, Gen Z is so fucked. The freedom we took for granted seems like some grand myth to them.
But to answer, yes, it was extremely common. Every kid over 8-9 wandered nearly anywhere without much restriction. I biked miles and miles away from my house when I was 10+. I also used to do shit like swim down an entire six-mile long river by myself with no flotation device or life jacket starting when I was 11-ish. No one cared.
In that sense, the world we inhabited in the 1980s and 1990s was a better, freer one. And I think we had a lot more fun.
Always strange to read about this. I live in rural Switzerland and apparently we’re still in the 80ies. Children walk to kindergarden alone when they are four year old, play in the woods unsupervised using pocket knives and are in the swimmingpool out of sight of their mothers at 5. Sometimes I see 2 year olds playing alone or with older children and their parents are nowhere to be seen. Slightly older children bike everywhere and go to the swimming pool alone. I’m not like that, I still want to know where my 6 year old is (although he walks to school & back alone) and this is very unusual and seen as helicopter parenting.
For being the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” America is actually quite a paranoid and fearful society. And it’s gotten so much worse in the past 15-20 years.