A growing awareness of bullying and abuse have made many fear this rite of passage, but others say the positives outweigh the risks
Man when I was a kid I would take off on my bike with a backpack full of knives and lighters to go over to my friends house to blow things up and generally be destructive little boys.
My mom wouldn’t even know where I had gone or when I was going to get back most of the time. She just had a rule that I had to call her before sun down and tell her where I was or ask permission to sleep wherever I was.
I’m not saying it was better back then, but it was a super different world we grew up in.
Man, if I ever have a kid… I might just reconcile with my weird and conservative cult like parents just to send my kid down there for a week or two in the summer when they’re young, to experience living in rural America and to be locked outside from sun up to sun down with only a hose and a sandwich for lunch.
Pick up a stick, jump on the trampoline, and use your brain to imagine a fantasy world, instead of plugging into Arcane on Netflix for hours on end.
I hated it as a kid but as an adult now that plays a lot of video games and generally sits on my ass I am more and more appreciative of my mother’s insistence that I get outside.
She still let us play video games but much less than other kids at the time.
We basically had infinite forest to explore and we often would set up tree houses or other forts for days or hours. I remember a buddy came over one time and we just spent an entire day making booby traps for our secret base. We hid spike traps under false floors and all sorts of stuff lol.
Really it’s a miracle we only got as hurt as often as we did. We did so many stupid things for entertainment.
