Rub dirt on it and walk it off. Oh and wash your hands with GASOLINE after changing the oil in the car.

totally agree.. pretty much sums up my childhood with the exception of no attempted kidnapping. :-)

Shit I'd head out in the the morning and spend all day working the docks. I was 8. I'm 60 now.

I'd come home at dinner, my dad required it and because he worked from 4am to 4pm 5 days a week he wanted to see us for rhe meal time. We were poor as dirt even as hard as he worked.

I jumped out of a car once after hitching when I was 14 to get away from some perve. Younahd to be street smart, fight at the drop of a hat and never cry no matter what the bastards did to you. You always responded with all fight you could muster even if you bushwhacked the fucker the way he did you. I once took out this boys knee with a bat. He was 17 I was 13. He would beat me up merciless and because I would not cry he wouldn't stop. So I took his knee with my Louisville slugger #28. I loved that bat but my dad took it and sawed it into 20 pieces. Plus I worked all summer to pay my dad back for the hospital bill.

But he knew why I'd done it and never punished me. That kid crossed rhe road if he saw me after that, mostly because I heard my dad tell his dad that so much as a scowl toward me he would come down there and beat them both. Kids dad probably ordered it. My dad was an animal when it came to family and injustice. He's a guy who's lived in a basement of an apartment building when he was a kid. Lived behind the furnace because of alcoholic parents. We grew up pretty tough

A woman was driving around my neighborhood when I was about 5 or 6 years old. I was in a suburb of Portland OR playing outside in the front yard with my brother. My mom was around but eyes weren’t on me for a moment when the woman in the car rolled up to my street and beckoned me to come to her car. And of course I did! She rolled the window down and told me her dog was missing and she needed help finding it. She then asked me if I would get in the car and help her look? As I was thinking about it my large asian neighbor named Chad came running down his driveway yelling at the woman to “get the fuck out of here!!” and “what the hell do you think you are doing!” He grabs me and pulls me away from the car and the woman in the car speeds off. I was confused and scared and my mom was so freaked out (she came running when she heard commotion). She grounded me for like a week as a 5-6 year old.

Kidnapping is real folks!

Yup, I was raised pretty much that way... in a small rural mountain town, very remote by today's standards, small population, and I was what I call a "free range kid." I learned independence and how to navigate life pretty early on, and I'm a better man for it.

Probably written by someone over 42.

we did not get keys to the house because we never locked the door except when on vacation. not rural, but 20 min drive into Chicago. and this was during the '80s.

at least one kidnapping attempt and know 15 different ways to remove blood stains

Where'd y'all grow up, Gotham City?

Military brat here. Can attest to no coddling.

I was outside all damn day, built forts in the woods, played war with BB guns, road dirt bikes like speeder bikes through the trails. I can't complain.

No way that's a millennial's post. Not nearly enough grammatical errors. Good job using "they built different" and misspelling "their instead of they're" but still, no way anyone under 30 wrote this.

Yup. Just had this chat with the step-kids.

"If you can move it, it ain't broken"

The kidnapping thing was probably a poke at a stranger offering you a ride home or candy/ice cream...we just said no and wslked away (or had a posse of neighborhood kid with us anyway). We didn't have our faces buried in our phones while walking alone with headphones on. We knew our surroundings and the local creepers.

Dude yes! I would cook dinner at 7. I had friends over for dinner they almost fainted when I gave my five year old a potato peeler. She said it was dangerous 😒. What is wrong with parents today?

Jarts were very popular.

DAMN STRAIGHT!!

..."did you tear your clothes?"

..."no"...

..."don't worry then, the skin will grow back"...

...."it will feel good when it stops hurting"....

Do I detect a tone of Envy in this little blurb? Yeah I'm one of those people and I'm damn proud of it! Damn proud

Poor snowflake,

Rebel without a clue.

Maybe so, but that generation also crafted all the legislation and raised the next generation of pussies.

The real generation was the generation before this one, who lived like this but also had the sense to raise their children to also live like this.

I grew up in remote rural Alaska and this pretty much sums up childhood. We had an outhouse, no running water, no electricity. We had to be sure to keep an eye out for moose, bears and wolves. There were copious amounts of fishing and if you didn't kill it and drag it home, it was beans, rice and canned salted bacon for dinner. My first pocket knife was at 7, my first shotgun at 9, and an over-under rifle at 11. I was definitely a part of the get your ass beat crowd and never once had a "time out."

That sounds about right. lol.

I was talking to a neighbor (who I now work with) who has known me since I was 5 and I grew up with his kids. He was recalling all the good ol times when all us lil ones were growing up. We'd be gone all day and wouldn't appear again until supper. We'd play in the forest, swim in the lake, go fishing, ride our bikes to the next town over, and build forts everywhere. He was telling me how we would all reappear at supper time, all covered in dirt and talking non-stop about what we did all day. It was great to grow up the carefree and wild way. Taught us independence and freedom.

We were latch key kids. We were left to feed ourselves and so on.

It made many of us very independent.

We rode bikes without helmets. Sometimes we'd wipe out. Scabs were a badge of honor. As long as nothing got broken, we got back up and kept riding.

I bet at least 3 of us in here have shot a squirrel or a bird with a bb gun, and that squirrel or bird landed on a transformer that blew the power out for a block.

Dem overtime 19 hr days were a real biotch

LOL, kind of true- I'm 64 and when I was a child, my brothers would take off and we'd see them right before dark. As the only girl, I'd sometimes stay out and play but I really preferred reading.

Also, I did avoid a kidnapping attempt. When I was 7 yo, I was riding my bicycle and a man pulled over. He asked me to get into his car to help him find his puppy. He had the door open. Luckily for me, this happened in right in front of our house. Back then we never really heard about children being taken but this guy gave me a hinky feeling so I ran towards the house and he took off.

If we had a homework question, my parents would say, "Look it up." I can't remember them ever sitting down to do homework with me.

Heaven help us if we didn't use our manners! In 4th grade, we spent a 6 week period having etiquette lessons. Enid Haupt's The Seventeen Book of Etiquette was required reading.

You're not old enough for a gun. Make your own weapons and use them. Bow and Arrow, slingshot - when you show me you got good aim we'll talk.

Show us how badly many of us have failed as parents. Many convinced that it is more important to be their kids BFF than the parent.

So the kids never faced a real challenge, never learned to lose a game, and never had the opportunity to learn from their mistakes

Now these losers are parents

My dad taught me the motto” if you can still breathe and it hurts, you’ll live”! It unbelievably was correct. Mind over matter. You younguns, and I’m only 40 have not a clue what to do when the power goes out. Antifa please! We are not worried about what whinny little skinny jeans is gonna do to us. We will use ole skinny jeans as shields. And down here in the south you might want to watch out for our conservative children. We taugh them to shoot by age 5 and they know how to run trot lines and skin animals.

Amen.

That generation raised the generation they so despise.