Ask Lemmy

Born in the late 80s, making me a 90s kid.

My siblings, neighbors, and I would play in the woods behind our neighborhood. There were trails and a creek that flowed through it. My older brothers and their friends would build bridges over the water (which vandals would destroy, so they rebuilt several times.) My parents allowed me to go play there as long as I didn't go alone. There was evidence of past generations playing in the same place, like platforms from old tree houses that had mostly fallen apart and strings along the tree line from old cup+string "phones" that kids in the past used to communicate. I'd also pick wild blueberries and climb trees. My siblings would fish and just chill.

We were among the last families to give their kids such freedom. One of our neighbor families had early "helicopter parents," so the kids lived very different childhoods from us. I remember other parents talking about that family, almost always disparagingly about how the kids were always stuck at home and were being raised on video games. It was like most adults saw adventuring outdoors with other kids as a typical way to spend childhood. I learned to navigate on my own, walking and bike riding around town without any way to contact my parents for hours on end. It was normal, it was expected, it was even seen as important for a child's budding independence.

Some kids would use payphones to make prank calls. There was one trail behind a park where somebody left a bunch of porn magazines, because it seems every town had a random "porn mag" patch somewhere. It was the first time I saw adult content, and I remember us kids treating it like it was funny.

I spent a lot of my childhood outdoors. My first kiss was on a nature trail in my home town. There was even a tire swing that the boy pushed me on, before we walked to the edge of the inlet for that first kiss moment.

When indoors, I played NES and SNES games. My family also played board games and my siblings and I made up our own creative games to play together. Car rides were great, too, with plenty of time to stare out the window and let my mind wander. At one point my mom bought a van and it came with a heavy-ass TV for the back, but my parents got rid of it. It only played VHS tapes and although at first I thought it would've been so cool to have a TV in the vehicle, I look back on it now and am glad that we didn't keep it. Even when we drove for 25 hours to get to Florida, I didn't miss having a screen. I brought books, a portable CD player, and toys, then spent most of the time gazing outside anyway. I remember seeing the full moon in the sky and thinking about how cool it was that it was always there, no matter where I went...

Thanks for the walk down memory lane. I often think about the shitty parts of my childhood, so it's nice to remember the parts that didn't suck. I'm really glad I got to enjoy the outdoors as much as I did, without being treated like a delinquent for having a childhood that mirrored all the generations of children that came before me.