Does 15 still count as a child? I think it does, and driving 300+ miles to have sex with someone I met on the internet is still probably the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done.

I’m a Gen X’er… Not sure if the Lemmy’s word limit on posts would allow me to list it all.

So here are a few:

Drank from the garden hose? Check

Rode in a car without seat belts? As a toddler? As a baby? Check

Rode my bike all over town with no helmet? Had an accident that put me in a coma for 48hrs because of not wearing a helmet? Check

Harvested tobacco on my grandparents farm? Check (Anyone who has done this by hand, working with those stakes knows the risks.)

I started skydiving in the early 90’s. My mother was absolutely appalled and constantly berated me about how “dangerous” it is to jump out of an airplane.

The truth of the matter was I was far safer in free fall than I was during most of my adolescence.

Are you asking about things that weren’t considered dangerous when I was a kid, but are now? I always thought that was largely a cliche? Pretty much everything that I did as a child that is, or could be, considered dangerous today was considered dangerous then, too.

One thing that does come to mind: I don’t think the general public back then was as aware of the danger of second hand smoke. So, exposing kids to cigarette smoke (by smoking indoors, in cars, or even going to public places with smoking sections) didn’t seem to be considered risky or dangerous.

Otherwise, pretty much everything I did as a kid that would be considered dangerous today would also have been considered dangerous back then in the days when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and the wheel had only recently been invented. That includes activities sanctioned by adults, like riding in the bed of a pickup truck, and those which weren’t, like mixing random chemicals together to see what happens.

Walking to school alone.

rode on the trunk of my dad’s sw with several other children.

Run around in the woods with a good stick.

With some friends, I built an “unguided SAM launcher” using some wood, a lot of aluminum foil, some metal rods, and a bunch of model rockets, and we tried to shoot down stunt kites we were flying near it.

We’d have probably gotten DHS called on us if we did it nowadays lol

I’m GenX, my entire childhood was dangerous.

Surfing

Occasionally we would walk the mile home from elementary school. We’d sometimes stop to play in the creek along the way. We made sure not to do that one in spring though because there was a flash flood one year while a schoolmate was playing down there and drowned him.

go to school in America

Not really a young child, but in my late teens my parents told me I had no curfew.

Their only rule was, lock the front door when you get back, and let one of them know I was home, even really late.

I would leave at 8pm in my truck, drive to pick up my friends, then hit various late night stops like Dairy Queen, Subway, Denny’s, etc. My friends and I would spend like an hour or two at each place, chilling, playing cards, eating snacks, chatting, and then go hit the next place.

Often we would all find some random parking lot and just chill there chatting and listening to music. I would frequently get back at 2-3am.

Many gen-Z kids don’t even drive. My spouse’s youngest sister is 20 and doesn’t have a drivers license. She hardly hangs out with her friends in person at all, same with most of them. They all just game together on Discord. I was a pretty mild mannered kid when I was that age, but they make me seem like a wild west bandit lol.

Also sleepovers apparently aren’t a thing any more?? A ton of parents are totally against them. I guess I kind of get it. Idk, I used to have sleepovers all the time with my friends. Pretty much everybody’s birthday party was a sleepover from age 13-17. I remember staying up super late, playing GameCube/XBox, playing truth or dare, and stuffing ourselves with candy and soda, super fun memories.

Before the age of 20: Made gunpowder and made our own enormous firecrackers/hand grenades, played with matches, climbed to the very top of very tall trees, whittled with knives all day long, cutting into high pressure car tyres with knives, made “bazookas” with firework rockets and shot them after other kids on the street, made petrol powered go-carts and raced them on public streets, disappeared out to play all day and came home for dinner, swam in lakes, climbed rocks with sheer drops into the bay, disturbed enormous ant-nests and got bitten all over (I’m sorry ants, that was a shit thing to do), dipped our fingers in melted wax, placed small stones on train tracks and waited for them to get pulverised, played a crazy game that involved throwing knives into the ground right next to bare feet, chopped firewood with sharp axes, burnt large holes in the carpet in my room (turned out a piece of tin foil was not sufficient insulation for burning sparker powder), did a lot of sleeping outside, threw each other into forests of nettles for fun, crawled through drain pipes running under the road, skateboarded down hills on country side roads, built our own skateboard ramp out of doors and nails that were sticking out ready to impale us, walked on thin ice because we liked the cracking it caused, did night time hikes through swamps, wild water rafting, sprayed burning gasoline out of bicycle pumps, played with aerosol cans and lighters, flew gliders age 15, got drunk a lot from 15 onwards (not at the same time as flying), took down the school computers with a homegrown “virus” (that’s being generous, a few scripts that modified autoexec.bat to make all the school’s computers print “teachers are dumb” instead of booting; it still caused them to call in “the experts”, got into fights and ended up going to A&E after being hit in the head with an iron rod, raided countless pear and apple plantations, played with magnifying glasses in the sharp sun and lit up a great deal of forest floors, rode cars down old train tracks, shot guns, shot air rifles, shot bows, shot cross bows, shot sling shots, maced each other, built large swings that threw us over a cliff side and four-five meter drops into water, played around inside a nuclear-protected naval bunker and accidentally activated the emergency lock down alarm, tipped over an army truck after being let out to to “do a bit of terrain driving” by our staff sergeant, set up and blew up 600 kg of TNT to demonstrate the effect of a MRLS cluster bomb in front of the Danish Queen (fun story, it blew her hat off from the pressure wave), fells asleep behind the wheel after a full day of firefighting training and ended up putting my army jeep into a field, made friends with a Soviet diplomat who tried to pump my brother and I for information about our dad’s job as a military attaché (unfortunately the colonel got sent home to Russia after being made persona non grata) - though he did teach us how to ski in the process, set up our own 380V electrics for a enormous LAN party we organised and electrocuted myself, dialled into a lot of weird BBSes to exchange all sorts of pirated software with anonymous network users, war-dialled various remote systems and tried to hack our way into them, drove all over Europe in various wrecks (accidentally smuggled weed over several international borders, which was especially frustrating as I didn’t touch the stuff and didn’t even know it had been brought), did magic mushrooms and had amazing times and dreadful bad trips (fuck MAO inhibitors), went exploring in a fenced off zone that carried nuclear warning signs (Paldiski, not long after the wall came down), detonated gas canisters of all shapes and sizes, etc etc

It was a fun childhood, to be honest, and I’m grateful for it.

Not so much as a child, but as a teenager. Once I could drive I didn’t quite have the same level of supervision and was really really able to have a lot more freedom. I’m pretty cautious person in general, but had a friend that was definitely not and was obsessed with college parties in high school.

We lived about an hour and a half from a college town so every now and then my friend wanted to drive up there and check out the parties. To be honest, there really weren’t a lot of parties going on. However, she did remember the house that had a party that she had gone to previously, so we would just show up at this house every now and then and hang out with the guys that lived there (party or no party).

Here we are 16 or 17-year-old girls showing up to these random college guys’ house. Thankfully, nothing ever happened, but it certainly would’ve been easy for something to happen.

• Walk around town with a pellet gun
• walk home from school alone
• catch fish from the creek and eat them, after cooking on a fire in the field-- started with a magnifying glass.
• build a tree fort in the forest 20-30 feet up
• walk on the barely frozen creek
• read books