Gen X Today: Latchkey to Life360

00:00:00 Dwayne: Hey everyone, welcome back to whatever I’m doin.
00:00:06 Heather: And I’m Heather.
00:00:06 Dwayne: And together we’re sharing our Gen X experience. We’d love to invite you along for the ride. Last week we talked about our pet peeves, rants and raves.
00:00:13 Heather: And the downfall of society as we know it.
00:00:16 Dwayne: And this week we’re going to lighten things up a little bit and talk about our childhoods and where Gen X may have gone off the rails. But before we get into that, we’d like to remind you to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you’d like to support the show, there’s plenty of info on our website. You’ll find links to all that stuff in the show notes.
00:00:35 Heather: So for our parents negligent, or are we completely unhinged? Because back then it was be home when the street lights come on. But now we want our kids to share their location with us all the time.
00:00:49 Dwayne: Back then, it was bike helmet. What bike helmet? Now kids are out with a bike helmet, knee pads, GPS trackers.
00:00:56 Heather: And then we used to have dinner with a TV tray and watch Wheel of Fortune. Now it’s an organic bento box with a motivational quote.
00:01:06 Dwayne: So we’re our parents negligent, or are we completely unhinged? We were the most unsupervised generation in modern history, and we became some of the most watchful parents. How did that happen? Let’s take a let’s take a look back here.
00:01:24 Heather: All right. When you were a kid, what was the furthest you traveled alone and how old were you?
00:01:30 Dwayne: Okay. So tell you a little bit about my childhood. First, I was a I was raised by a single mom from the age of three to twelve. So those are some very formative years. And when I was a really young child and when I was five years old, my mom started working. So I had a lot of time at home alone and a lot of time wandering the neighborhoods. When I was a kid, it seemed like it was, you know, forever in miles and miles, because we would go off into the woods and explore and play with our friends and be gone all day. And when I say I’m as a kid, I was like six, seven, eight years old.
00:02:09 Heather: And you lived in the holler.
00:02:11 Dwayne: I lived in the hollers of West Virginia. It’s not like we were, uh, you know, in downtown New York City or somewhere. But I was gone all the time. And it was sometimes, I mean, we all of us kids in the neighborhood, we knew to keep our ears open for apparent yelling. But it was sometimes, you know, when I go back and look at the maps, it was about a mile or so radius away from the house that we could easily safely go wander in and out of other kids homes. Uh, we were, you know, always over there eating, playing, doing whatever, just, you know, raising hell as as much as kids could then. But I was really young, I would say, you know, six or seven when I was six, seven.
00:02:53 Heather: six, seven.
00:02:54 Dwayne: Six or seven years old when I first started wandering about on my own. What about you?
00:03:01 Heather: So I grew up in the middle of Nebraska. Nowhere. Small town. Not. Not as small as yours? No, but.
00:03:08 Dwayne: Very few were as small as mine.
00:03:10 Heather: Small town. Nonetheless, I had about, I don’t know, it was about a two mile radius where I would go hang out. A whole bunch of kids lived on my block. We would go in and out of each other’s house, ride the bikes up and down the street. But I had a friend that lived, oh, probably a half a mile from my house, and I’d walk to her house. She’d walk to my house, we’d walk to the mall. We’d walk to the park. It was about a two mile radius.
00:03:39 Dwayne: Yeah.
00:03:40 Heather: Easily. At any given day, the only thing we had is, you know, we would we would have to phone in. Right? Make a phone call. Tell me where you’re at.
00:03:49 Dwayne: Uh, see, I never even had that. But that was mainly because my mom was at work a lot of the days.
00:03:55 Heather: Oh yeah, I called my mom at work all the time.
00:03:57 Dwayne: Now, in all fairness, it’s not like I was left totally on my own. We did live near my grandparents and, you know, they were always if something bad happened, I knew I could always go to them. It’s not like I had to go to my mom’s job for anything, but I was just we were just thinking the other day we were talking about, um, bakeries in the US. And that led me to remember that my grandmother used to give me like a dollar and would send me down to there was a bakery outlet that was about a mile and a half from our house, and she would send me down there on my own to go get a loaf of bread and a cherry pie. And, and, you know, bring the change back. Of course. But I was eight years old, maybe nine walk in. This was along a main road to a main, uh, wasn’t a main highway, but it was a two lane asphalt road, wasn’t Backwoods holler. Nothing. It was one of the main roads through town. They had to go about a mile, mile and a half down to to get there.
00:05:00 Heather: Yeah, we had a little B and B market that was probably six blocks from our place that, yeah, we would get a note, go down to B and B market, get what I need, bring it back.
00:05:12 Dwayne: Uh, every, every now and then my aunt who lived next to my grandmother there, she was paralyzed, but she smoked like a freight train. And she would give me a ten dollar bill and send me along with that dollar for the, uh, the bread and the cherry pie from the Betsy Ross Bakery to go on over to the Go Mart and pick up a carton of Marlboros for her. Here’s an eight year old walking through town carrying back a carton of Marlboro.
00:05:36 Heather: No big deal.
00:05:36 Dwayne: No big deal? Yep.
00:05:38 Heather: Just what was what it was.
00:05:40 Dwayne: It was a very, very different era.
00:05:43 Heather: Yeah. I hate that our little B and B market eventually closed and eventually was torn down. And now there’s a house in its spot.
00:05:54 Dwayne: Were you a latchkey kid?
00:05:56 Heather: I was, me and my sister. We were home alone all the time. We walked to school by ourselves. We walked home by ourselves, man. We cooked food by ourselves.
00:06:07 Dwayne: Absolutely.
00:06:08 Heather: We were really good at making microwave fudge.
00:06:11 Dwayne: Mhm. I was I was really good at making soups and grilled cheese sandwiches by the grilled cheese.
00:06:17 Heather: Yes.
00:06:18 Dwayne: I remember being taught how to cook on our gas stove that I had to light with a match at the age of seven.
00:06:24 Heather: Yeah.
00:06:25 Dwayne: And yeah, learning to cook from there. I was, you know, truly a latchkey kid. I was home at about three thirty every day from school. I had my own key to the to the house would let myself in. Mom didn’t get off work until five, so that meant she wasn’t home till about five, twenty five thirty. Somewhere like that. And those were my favorite two hours of the day.
00:06:47 Heather: Yeah. Go home, get a snack, watch some Brady Bunch and Addams Family, The Munsters, Gilligan’s Island.
00:06:55 Dwayne: I Dream of.
00:06:55 Heather: Jeannie, the good ones.
00:06:56 Dwayne: All the good ones. Uh, Mr. Cartoon came on in in our area. It was a a local, uh, produced cartoon show. Uh, the weatherman, uh, Jules Hoffman would dress up in, uh, he had a striped outfit that he wore, and he had a guy in a big fuzzy costume. His name was beeper. He carried around a horn and beeped at things all the time. Uh, and there was always kids that were on there. I always wanted to go be on their show, but it was all the way down in Huntington, which was hours away at the time, uh, to be on this. And they played cartoons and in between of it there, he had little, uh, you know, uh, helpful hints for kids to be safe and be respectful and be smart and just words of encouragement. And they always had birthday kids on there that they would celebrate their birthdays. Uh, but that was just a, you know, one of the half hour blocks and then it was on to your reruns. Hell, I, for a long time, I even got home in time to watch General Hospital. like the last. The last fifteen minutes or so. I saw Luke and Laura’s wedding.
00:07:50 Speaker 3: Oh, no.
00:07:52 Heather: No. I always watched The Munsters, Addams Family, Brady Bunch. I think Scooby Doo came on always. I mean, all the good stuff did that while we were doing homework, having snack. Usually we were left with a list of stuff that had to be done, chores, whatever.
00:08:10 Dwayne: Yeah. There was, there was a lot of that, especially in my, my younger days there. Uh, after, after I turned twelve, my mom got married and I never had the latchkey experience after that. The man that she married, he was already retired. Uh, he was older. And I came home and he was waiting there for me with chores and work and jobs to do as soon as I got home.
00:08:32 Heather: Yeah. When I got to about thirteen or so, my grandma lived with us. So the house wasn’t ever empty then. But before that, in the summertime especially, we were just all over the place During the school year. We would go out after we got home from school, but it wasn’t like we were like little terrors running the neighborhood or anything.
00:08:57 Dwayne: No, but we were always outside.
00:08:58 Heather: Yeah, we did go outside a lot.
00:09:01 Dwayne: A lot.
00:09:02 Heather: Or just, you know, go hung out at somebody else’s house. Yeah. Eat their snacks.
00:09:07 Dwayne: Eat their snacks. Yeah. What was the most dangerous thing you did that your parents never found out about?
00:09:17 Heather: I don’t know, as if I did anything dangerous, per se.
00:09:21 Dwayne: We did lots of stupid things. Boys will be boys, though. There were lots of matches.
00:09:28 Heather: Oh, yeah.
00:09:28 Dwayne: And and fire playing that was going on.
00:09:31 Heather: We would play army in in the back. Um, we had a set of trees behind our house and we would play army with the neighbor kids. But um.
00:09:39 Dwayne: There was a lot of tree climbing and jumping and swinging from grapevines. We had grape vines that grew in the woods, and we would swing on those. And have, you know, contests to see who could jump and swing the furthest.
00:09:50 Heather: Yeah, I, I didn’t do any of that. I guess I wasn’t a danger kid.
00:09:56 Dwayne: Yeah.
00:09:56 Heather: That’s what we did was not call our moms and tell them where we were at.
00:10:01 Dwayne: And then there was the bicycles constantly on the bicycles. And we lived in a very hilly area. So there were there were lots of places to make ramps and jumps. And, you know, to us it felt like we were jumping, you know, the Grand Canyon or the snake River Canyon at any one time, we were probably going, you know, a whole two feet through the air, but it seemed like it.
00:10:20 Heather: Didn’t do any jumping with my, my bike. We did play in the street in the middle of the streets a lot, a lot.
00:10:25 Dwayne: A lot, yes.
00:10:26 Heather: But we were also on side roads.
00:10:27 Dwayne: So we also had someone always yelling car, car! Yeah, we’d be out there.
00:10:32 Heather: Playing dodge.
00:10:33 Dwayne: Ball or whatever, and or basketball or anything in the streets or kickball and yeah, in the street. Never damaging anyone’s car is always making sure we stayed out of the way and if a car came, someone yelled car! And everyone ran off to the side of the road and.
00:10:47 Heather: one of my friends had a pool. So the summertime we were like, always in her pool.
00:10:52 Dwayne: Oh, must be nice.
00:10:54 Heather: It wasn’t a big pool. It wasn’t like in-ground. It was above ground pool, but we were always in it.
00:10:59 Dwayne: We did have a lake. And, uh, after I turned about eleven or twelve, we were always at that lake.
00:11:05 Heather: Yeah. Um, I’m not a lake water girl. Sorry. Gross.
00:11:14 Dwayne: So tell me this. What did discipline look like in your house?
00:11:19 Heather: Oh, my mom yelled a lot. Um. And yes, we did get spanked.
00:11:25 Dwayne: Mhm. And you lived to tell?
00:11:27 Heather: I lived to tell because my mom at one point, um, gave up spanking because she realized it didn’t work. Once I started laughing.
00:11:36 Dwayne: I, I remember the last spanking I ever got from my mother. I was eleven years old by that time. I was about two inches taller than her. Yeah, I don’t remember what I did or what I said, but it was deserving of a spanking. And she grabbed my wrist and swatted me across the bottom. And I turned around and looked at her and said, are you finished? She slapped me in the face and said, now I am. And that was the last time she ever did that.
00:12:05 Heather: I don’t remember how old I was, but I was fairly young, maybe seven ish or so. I just remember my mom spanking me and I started laughing. And the harder she spanked me, the more I laughed at her. And that was the last time. I guess I like spanks, I don’t know.
00:12:29 Dwayne: Were we given all that freedom because our parents trusted us, or did they just have no idea what all was going on?
00:12:36 Heather: Oh, I’m sure they had some idea. They had to. I mean, okay, my mom was a lab tech, and then she became a cop so she could pop up at anywhere in town.
00:12:45 Speaker 4: Anywhere in town. Yeah.
00:12:47 Heather: So it’s not like she. She always seemed to know what was going on.
00:12:51 Dwayne: That was my.
00:12:52 Heather: My.
00:12:52 Dwayne: Mom. That was my experience. Psychic or something.
00:12:54 Heather: She always knew what was going on.
00:12:55 Dwayne: The parents? Yeah. You know, us kids always congregated in. Parents always thought the parents were always congregating as well. Yeah. And you would hear them laughing and joking. I remember specifically hearing them talking about stories about what us crazy kids were doing or had done at so and so’s house, and then just laughing and carrying on about it. It was all about allowing us to grow up, I think, and kind of experience the same kind of childhood that they had had, and we don’t really see that anymore.
00:13:24 Heather: No, we don’t at all.
00:13:26 Dwayne: Mhm.
00:13:26 Heather: The childhood we had is non-existent.
00:13:29 Dwayne: It is sadly non-existent. I and I’m not here to blame technology. And because kids have iPhones and everything every day.
00:13:37 Heather: I mean, some of it, I think, is that.
00:13:39 Dwayne: When I was a kid, when I was a teenager, especially video games and YouTube video game consoles were.
00:13:43 Heather: Out.
00:13:44 Dwayne: Already. And yeah, you know, I could I spend an entire Sunday sitting in front of the TV playing, uh, video games and watching cartoons. I could have, but I honestly didn’t enjoy that.
00:13:57 Heather: Yeah, I got.
00:13:58 Dwayne: Bored.
00:13:58 Heather: After a while.
00:13:59 Dwayne: Exactly.
00:14:00 Heather: So I was like, oh, let’s go do something else.
00:14:02 Dwayne: Of course, back then too, our games weren’t designed to be addictive like today’s are. There’s a little bit of that.
00:14:08 Heather: Yeah, there is that.
00:14:10 Dwayne: But today, you know, we I don’t know, we’ve already mentioned the phones, uh, and the addiction thing there, but I know that parents kind of use their phones as kind of a leash for their kids as well. I’ve heard parents, you know, encourage giving their kids a phone at the age of eight or nine years old because they were going to use that phone then as a, as a means to be able to keep up with them and track them, and so that the kid could reach them at any time of the day. My only problem with that is if I can reach back to Mommy and Daddy at any time of the day, when am I ever going to figure something out on my own?
00:14:45 Heather: Right. Or, you know, parents gave kids laptops and stuff as littles to get them to shut up, to.
00:14:52 Dwayne: Get them to shut up. Yeah. Here’s your entertainment device. I’m going to watch on the big screen over here. I’m going to watch the horror and murder films serial killers while you play. It’s almost like Candy crush.
00:15:03 Heather: You know, boomers were the me generation and then Gen X, and then it’s like this generation we’ve raised. It’s like we’ve become we’ve become the boomers, the me generation again.
00:15:15 Dwayne: In some ways, but we were given so much freedom as kids and they even talked about it. You know, when we were younger, I remember, you know, being referred to as a latchkey kid. Yeah. When I was a kid and it felt like, you know, or sounded like at that time that that might be something somewhat derogatory, a little bit of a way. And I know too, as a as a kid, I really enjoyed my freedom and my free time.
00:15:38 Heather: I enjoyed my quiet.
00:15:39 Dwayne: Time, but I. There was also this little bit of in the background that, wow, my parents are really terrible parents because they’re never here.
00:15:46 Heather: Never here.
00:15:47 Dwayne: When I need them. Yeah. You know, there’s. And kids are going along for that. And I think our generation kind of overcompensated for that kind of. We, we were presented though, especially by my teens and, and your, you know, uh, or late middle school or elementary school era there, we were presented a lot with stranger danger and dare and all.
00:16:10 Heather: These, there was huge.
00:16:11 Dwayne: Everything, everything outside the walls of your house is potentially bad. And something bad could happen to you.
00:16:18 Heather: Potentially kill you.
00:16:19 Dwayne: And it really, I think it kind of messed our generation up in a way that we as a generation kind of hovered over our kids a lot. Yeah. And you and I both had kids when we were fairly young, and I’m happy to say that none of our kids were really raised with really super strict, um, over watching leashes on them. Now, I’m sure the older girls might.
00:16:46 Heather: Might say different.
00:16:47 Dwayne: They might say different because I was aware of the dangers of the internet by the time they had access to the internet and made sure to put a lot of controls and things on there. Uh, but I, it wasn’t so much to, to track them and, you know, constantly have a leash on them all the time. It was just more of a, hey, don’t go here because I know this part is bad, right?
00:17:10 Heather: There are bad things on the internet.
00:17:11 Dwayne: And it was a, it was a very different world than what I ever grew up and had access to, and we wanted.
00:17:16 Heather: I never had a computer until I was in my twenties.
00:17:20 Dwayne: Right. And we certainly, I mean, you may have had a computer when I was younger. I may have had one, but it’s not like it was connected to anything else. Right. Uh, I.
00:17:28 Heather: Didn’t have one in a home until I was in my twenties.
00:17:31 Dwayne: There wasn’t this world of information, uh, and world of disinformation and bad information all over the place, either as a child. It was if I wanted to look something up when I was a kid, it was go to the library and use the encyclopedia. That was the authoritative source dictionary out. Exactly. And today two, though, and I did we did see this more with our generation raising kids, where we got into things like play dates, a play date. When I first heard that term, I was probably in my late twenties by that time. And I’m like, what on earth are we scheduling time for the kids to get together and play for? Yeah. Playtime is.
00:18:11 Heather: For.
00:18:11 Dwayne: A child is anytime. That’s not school time, right?
00:18:13 Heather: But now, now we’re scheduling time.
00:18:15 Dwayne: But we schedule all these things for them. We enroll them in travel team sports where it’s, you know, that team, it takes up all of their time as well. And a lot of the family’s money.
00:18:28 Heather: Yeah. And the family’s time.
00:18:43 Heather: Yeah. I was glad none of our kids were really into sports so much. Because I saw so many families spending so much money on just the equipment, the travel teams, the exhausting weekends, everybody talking about how many games they had this weekend. I’m like.
00:19:02 Dwayne: I was.
00:19:03 Heather: Just talking with.
00:19:05 Dwayne: A guy at work there about a week or two ago. And he. He’s a grown adult who’s in his mid thirties. He plays soccer on a local team here, but they have to travel to go play soccer. His wife also plays soccer and she has to travel. His games are like. On Saturdays. His wife’s games are on Sundays and their daughter’s games are on Fridays because his daughter is also enrolled in soccer. So now every Friday evening to Sunday evening for like he was talking, it was like a sixteen week period there that they have nothing but travel soccer going on for months, constantly.
00:19:44 Heather: Constant going, going, going and not I mean, I get sports are fun.
00:19:50 Dwayne: But damn.
00:19:51 Heather: But that’s a lot.
00:19:52 Dwayne: That is a lot.
00:19:53 Heather: That’s a lot.
00:19:54 Dwayne: That is a lot.
00:19:55 Heather: And I’m sorry. I also think parents use sports and clubs for kids and pushing their kids into clubs to keep them busy and keep make them tired.
00:20:10 Dwayne: Well, and there’s also the status and the status. Yes, it’s fitting in.
00:20:14 Heather: Everything in the United States is revolves around sports.
00:20:20 Dwayne: A lot.
00:20:20 Heather: Of.
00:20:21 Dwayne: Things revolve around sports. A lot of folks see that professional sports might be a way out for my child, and they try to push them into that.
00:20:30 Heather: Uh, but, you know, a lot of kids end up resenting their parents because of that, because they don’t want to, and they’re only doing this sport because their parents want them to.
00:20:39 Dwayne: Or if, uh, you know, heaven forbid, all it takes is one injury, right, as a teenager to ruin your life because, you know, and then loss for so many years, you have been planning to be that. And the kid has no other alternative or thinks they don’t. Right? Yeah.
00:20:56 Heather: But that’s a whole nother issue.
00:20:58 Dwayne: That’s a whole nother episode. I think a thing too, is as kids, we often felt we were bored. Uh, yeah. And so we would go out and seek fun things to do. And sometimes those fun things to do weren’t exactly the safest. Like we were kind of talking about before. Maybe we’re afraid to let our kids be bored or we’ve just.
00:21:16 Heather: Get lost.
00:21:16 Dwayne: Or get lost.
00:21:17 Heather: I guess we took for granted. I mean, I grew up in a small town, so it was like everybody knew everybody, and it wasn’t that difficult to get around places to walk. I mean, I grew up on a north south grid, so it was super.
00:21:32 Dwayne: It was super easy. Where you lived from? Yeah.
00:21:34 Heather: We did let our kids go out.
00:21:36 Dwayne: I remember as a seven year old being turned loose in heck’s department store, heck’s department store was kind of like a Walmart that we had. And they were all over in central West Virginia at that time in the seventies and 80s. It wasn’t huge by any standards, but it wasn’t a small store either. It had a lot of different departments. So as a kid, I wanted to go in and go right to the toy section, right? My mom had zero desire to wander the two toy toy aisles for an hour, so she would go to the clothing section.
00:22:06 Speaker 4: Oh yeah.
00:22:06 Dwayne: And we, you know, she would turn me loose and I would go over there and I didn’t destroy things. I didn’t have to take anything out of packaging. I wasn’t being destructive with things. I would just look at the things and maybe touch, you know, they had testy buttons and things on them and stand there and dream about all the toys and things that I felt that I could have. But it wasn’t a thing where she was, you know, had to hover over me, had to make sure that I had a toy before we left the store. Either. She never did that, and we didn’t have the money for that. Uh, she would go in and, you know, was looking for clothes for work or maybe a gift for someone or shopping with some money that someone had given her for an extra job here and there.
00:22:43 Speaker 4: Right.
00:22:43 Heather: But yeah, we’d go to the mall and I’d go my own way and my mom would do her thing.
00:22:48 Speaker 4: And yeah, yeah.
00:22:51 Dwayne: As a teen, I was never with my parents at the mall. Heaven forbid. I wouldn’t want to be seen with them.
00:22:55 Heather: No, no, they’d come find me when they’re ready.
00:22:58 Speaker 4: Yeah, well.
00:22:59 Dwayne: We’ll meet around the food court about this time.
00:23:01 Speaker 4: Right.
00:23:01 Heather: And you were expected to be there at that time.
00:23:04 Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:23:04 Dwayne: And it was, you know, the food court, especially when we went to the mall, the food court areas were really big. Yeah. And there would be several hundred people in there and. Yeah, I’ll meet you there. Yeah. Never at this table or at malls were busy. They were busy and they were crowded. And they were.
00:23:19 Heather: All.
00:23:20 Dwayne: The time and spread out.
00:23:21 Heather: All the time. Not just at Christmas.
00:23:22 Dwayne: Not just at Christmas. Yeah, there was a lot of that. And today kids don’t get that experience. They don’t know. And I remember as a kid being turned loose, especially those first few times. And then when I would go looking for my mom, I couldn’t find her. Yeah. And that feeling.
00:23:39 Heather: Of panic.
00:23:39 Dwayne: That, well, it wasn’t really a panic. It was, oh no, what now? And I found I.
00:23:45 Heather: Kept searching.
00:23:45 Dwayne: As a as an eight year old. And you’re wandering the store and you figure out really quickly that there’s a central aisle. I can walk down and check every aisle that branches off of it instead of up and down and all around. And you figure things out quickly.
00:23:59 Heather: Figure things out. You’re like, oh, she’s not here. I’ll keep looking.
00:24:02 Dwayne: Right?
00:24:03 Heather: Instead of she’s over here.
00:24:05 Dwayne: Yeah. Instead of going running to the front of the store and I.
00:24:09 Speaker 5: Can’t find my mommy.
00:24:10 Dwayne: Yeah. Just look, find, troubleshoot, find your way out of it. I think we talked about some of this stuff last week.
00:24:15 Heather: Yeah.
00:24:17 Dwayne: We also, when I was a young parent, I remember we would always hear and be threatened with, you know, you can’t leave your children alone anymore. Someone will call CPS. Child Protective Services will come and take your child away. Did you hear that someone had their child taken away because they let them play in the street?
00:24:37 Heather: Right. I never, you know, I never heard about that as a kid or even as a teenager. That really wasn’t a thing still.
00:24:46 Dwayne: Well, we had stranger danger. We had unsolved mysteries.
00:24:49 Heather: Yeah. As we grew older, we’re like, oh, no, this whole world is out to get our children and take them away.
00:24:55 Dwayne: And we had, you know, the twenty four hour news cycle that had to be filled with something. So we would hear stories of a serial killer on the other side of the country or, you know, a kidnapping that happened in another country even. And, and start to think that, well, that could happen to my kid, too. So Gen X started really hovering as parents. and we had a. So much of that. For this we had to go looking just to see. Was anyone ever really, you know, did anyone ever really have their children taken from them for this? And it’s, it’s sad that so much of that is just anecdotal. There’s very little in the actual legal records of people having their children removed from them because they left them outside to play or because they were.
00:25:42 Heather: Or just let them outside, let them outside by themselves.
00:25:46 Dwayne: They. In twenty fourteen, there was a case in South Carolina where a woman who had, uh, who worked at a McDonald’s in North Augusta, South Carolina, her daughter spent most of the summer there with her playing on a laptop after their home was robbed and the laptop was stolen, the girl asked to be dropped at the park instead. She agreed, gave her a cell phone. On the third day, an adult asked where that girl, where her mother was, and she said, at work, that woman spent seventeen days in jail, temporarily lost custody of custody of her daughter, and faced up to ten years in prison on a felony child neglect charge. That is that’s.
00:26:28 Heather: Insane.
00:26:30 Dwayne: That is absolutely insane. If that would have happened to our parents. Oh my.
00:26:34 Heather: Goodness. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Because we would we would walk to the mall by ourselves all the time. We’d walk a mile and a half to the park. That was an everyday occurrence for us.
00:26:49 Dwayne: In December of twenty fourteen, police stopped ten year old Rafi and six year old Dvora about halfway through a one mile walk home in Silver Spring, Maryland, and drove them home after someone reported seeing a couple of kids out walking on the street by themselves. That opened a CPS investigation. In late February twenty fifteen, CPS found the parents responsible for unsubstantiated child neglect. Again, that was crazy. And that’s where a lady named Lenore Skenazy stepped in. She has been leading, uh, a an effort.
00:27:26 Heather: Called Free Range Kids.
00:27:28 Dwayne: That is, uh, honestly, I think it is a is a great thing. She, through groups of volunteers and other activists have been getting together and petitioning legal bodies in all fifty states to allow kids to get out and be free range kids again. Let them out. Let them play. Of course, it’s all based on, you know, the judgment of the parents and the judgment of the children, whether they’re capable of it or not. But without that fear of having someone step in and take your.
00:27:56 Heather: Child.
00:27:57 Dwayne: From you.
00:27:58 Heather: She was actually dubbed the America’s Worst Mom in two thousand and eight. She let her nine year old son ride the New York City subway line by himself. And that’s where she started the free range kids movement, because she got all this hate saying she was the worst mom ever. How could you do this to your child? They lived in New York City. The child was nine, and he was begging to be left at a store somewhere so he could find his way home.
00:28:32 Dwayne: The kid literally wanted to do it.
00:28:34 Heather: Yes, they had been talking. It wasn’t just like she just dropped him off. They had been talking months about it. So she’s like, okay, you know, they went to the original Macy’s stores and he had coins. If you need to call. He had a Metro card. He had a metro map. He knew exactly what stops to get off on. And there were like two. And she, she did her shopping. And then she walked out the door and he was out, you know, looking at toys or whatever. And he made his way home just fine.
00:29:09 Dwayne: You mentioned something there that just set off a core memory of mine. You said that he had a coin to call home, and I remember I always had to carry a dime. Yes. I always had to carry a dime.
00:29:21 Heather: We always carried change just in case we needed to call home.
00:29:24 Dwayne: Because back then you could always find a payphone. Yeah. Drop that dime in there and call home.
00:29:29 Heather: You know, and she had talked to her son. It’s not like this was a sporadic moment. They had been talking about this for months, apparently. And he knew he could ask a stranger. He knew who to talk to if he needed help. I don’t see that as being a bad parent.
00:29:46 Dwayne: Not at all.
00:29:47 Heather: And we should teach our kids stuff like this.
00:29:49 Dwayne: In April of twenty fifteen, there was a man walking his dog. He called nine one one around five p m to report two unaccompanied children in a park. After the kids asked to pet his dog, the children were about a third of a mile from home, folks. That’s like one hundred and fifty yards. Yeah, maybe from their house when the police intercepted them. Police said the officer saw a homeless man eyeing the children. According to the family statement, the kids told police they knew where they lived and they wanted to call home. The cops told him to get in the car and said they’d drive them home. Instead, they held them almost three hours, then took them to the county crisis center.
00:30:29 Heather: See, that’s that right there.
00:30:31 Dwayne: The kids were due home by six. By eight. The parents were absolutely frantic and only did. Then did someone from CPS call to say that police had picked their kids up. They didn’t get their kids back till ten thirty that night and only after signing a safety plan. This one ended up with the CPS changed their their findings to ruled out. They. They weren’t neglecting them and the police were wrong and they are. Since I believe there is still a lawsuit ongoing.
00:31:02 Heather: Yeah. That’s ridiculous. You can’t even let your kids go to a park by themselves. And I get it. Anytime anybody sees a kid out by themselves, it’s, oh, no, oh, no, they’re by themselves. There must be something wrong. That’s not always the case, people.
00:31:17 Dwayne: The good thing is, in twenty eighteen, Utah passed their very the very first reasonable childhood Independence law kit.
00:31:26 Heather: Yeah, let’s just talk about that. In twenty eighteen, as of eighteen.
00:31:31 Dwayne: As of the summer of twenty twenty five, eleven states had followed. So that gave us twelve states. Now my understanding is in twenty twenty six we’ve had one more.
00:31:42 Heather: Join in April twenty twenty six. There’s there are now thirteen states, just thirteen states.
00:31:49 Dwayne: Of the fifty that have a law like this on the books. I did go to if you go to the American Bar Association website, there’s some really good information that’s there as well. And the There’s actually. The best one is a site called Let Grow, and we’ll include links to these in the show notes here for this week, because I feel this is such an important subject. We want to give you guys direct access to this. They have a state policy map there, and it lists out and shows every state in the union and where that state stands. Some states wouldn’t necessarily need a new law because the way the current laws exist on the books, it would they would not need to do anything. Um, it’s, you know, that cut and dry. There are other states though, where it is very cut and dry in a very negative way. And they absolutely need some laws like this. Nebraska is one of those states I went looking down that and the laws in Nebraska are written very strictly that, you know, anytime a child left alone or what have you, you can be charged with neglect.
00:32:50 Heather: Which is just crazy to think that there are laws that you can’t let your child be a child.
00:32:57 Dwayne: And honestly, I see that as, you know, stunting the growth of the children, right? That is neglect in itself. Not letting kids fail is setting kids up to fail.
00:33:07 Heather: Exactly. You can’t let them. They need that knowledge to figure out how to do this stuff because as adults, they don’t know. And I just think kids need to be kids.
00:33:18 Dwayne: Are we overprotecting them?
00:33:20 Heather: Yes, I think so.
00:33:23 Dwayne: I’m with you. I, I do know that we, we kind of need to, you know, we do need to protect our children maybe a little bit more so than what we were when we were kids. Again, as a child, there was a lot of things that we did that if I caught my kids doing, it would have probably resulted in a good spanking. But then again, had I been caught, there would have been a good spanking, right?
00:33:46 Heather: I mean, there’s again, there’s a fine line, a very fine line about where it’s kids being kids and just bad parenting.
00:33:58 Dwayne: Yeah, kids have a lot less independence today, so they’re a lot less likely to become well functioning independent adults.
00:34:05 Heather: Our kids had a fair amount of independence. I kind of feel bad that we didn’t give them more.
00:34:11 Dwayne: Yeah. Hindsight.
00:34:13 Heather: Hindsight twenty twenty. Yeah.
00:34:16 Dwayne: Kids today have a lot fewer chances to fail safely. Right? And I think that that might be leading to some of the anxiety problems and, you know, mental health issues that we say our kids are always experiencing this generation as well.
00:34:29 Heather: Well, you know, and then this generation, everybody is like Sue happy, you know, one small step and I’m gonna sue you.
00:34:36 Dwayne: There is that.
00:34:37 Heather: And, you know, that’s.
00:34:38 Dwayne: A lot, a lot of our fear comes from the news, social media, more so than the actual risk. We we think everyone is sue happy as well. But a lot of times when you sit down and talk to your neighbors, why would I sue your kid for for this? Or why would I try to sue?
00:34:53 Heather: The threat is always there. The threat that causes anxiety for people. But one thing I did just think about that I literally just read online and it was talking about Cornell seven stuff going on right now. And, um, the comment was someone needs to teach our kids. Yep.
00:35:12 Dwayne: Well, we sure do.
00:35:14 Heather: We as parents need to teach our own kids. Why are we expecting someone else to teach them?
00:35:21 Dwayne: Right?
00:35:22 Heather: It’s not the school’s responsibility. We are the parents. We need to teach them.
00:35:27 Dwayne: One thing that we need to consider, too, is that kids today face threats that we didn’t.
00:35:33 Heather: True. True.
00:35:34 Dwayne: Um, the interconnected world as it is today. Yeah. We do still see way too many incidents of To Catch a predator.
00:35:42 Heather: Yeah. But then again, we should be teaching how to identify these kind of things.
00:35:48 Dwayne: We should be having those very hard discussions with our kids. We have to teach them. That is their world, right? We don’t seem to have a problem teaching them how to dive under a desk and what to do in an active shooter situation, right?
00:36:00 Heather: So why aren’t we teaching them how to identify a risk online that might harm us?
00:36:08 Dwayne: What’s one rule you feel we may have set because of our fears and not because of the kids actual risk.
00:36:14 Heather: Probably knowing where they were at at all times?
00:36:16 Dwayne: Yeah. And it wasn’t necessarily the risk wasn’t actually that huge.
00:36:21 Heather: We just needed to know where they were at. And I mean, my mom did the same thing. I mean, I had to call, I had to call. And I mean, I would get in trouble if we didn’t, you know, if my mom came home and I wasn’t home, she started calling friends houses. Where are you? And I would get I would get in trouble if I didn’t call home and say I’m at so and so’s house.
00:36:38 Dwayne: I was much more free range than that, really. Um, I there was a time that I was expected to be home. It wasn’t just when mom got home, it was later in the day. It was usually when the street lights come on. Yeah. Uh, we had to be home, but that’s not to mean that she wasn’t checking up or didn’t know where I was at. Uh, you know.
00:36:56 Heather: I think as I got older.
00:36:58 Dwayne: The neighborhood kids, especially if the sun was shining, there was no we’re all going to pile up in someone’s house. It was you kids need to get outside and have fun. And so we were always outside. So you could pretty well easily tell where any kid in the neighborhood was by the pile of bikes that was over there, or the kid just went rolling past you on a bicycle, because we were all always out on our bikes.
00:37:20 Heather: I had a weirder, you know, time growing up. My mom became a cop, so she was always out on the streets.
00:37:27 Dwayne: And she was always exposed to the dregs of humanity as well.
00:37:30 Heather: Yeah. You know, if she’s if she heard my name coming out of somebody, certain family names, family, families mouths, she’d be like, how do you know? So and so, you know, and most of the time it was like, I don’t know them. I know of them. everybody knew me. Because I’m your daughter, right? You know, and they would try and get out of stuff, obviously. But yeah, she always knew where I was at at all times. It wasn’t any secret. Like, I don’t know, she, she knew everything that went on.
00:38:07 Dwayne: What did you need as a kid that you didn’t get? And are you overcorrecting for it?
00:38:11 Heather: I mean, I don’t know.
00:38:13 Dwayne: I would say the biggest thing that I got and that I, I felt that I needed and that was, um, the family dinner that wasn’t really something. And it was honestly, it was because of the size of the place where we lived and everything. We very seldom had what you would consider the family dinner. Uh, and as our kids will attest, I was always a huge fan of we are all going to sit down together and eat.
00:38:38 Heather: And it never bothered me because we always sat down and ate together.
00:38:42 Dwayne: Well, there were times when I knew that they were kind of not having it.
00:38:44 Heather: When I, when I was growing up.
00:38:46 Dwayne: Right.
00:38:46 Heather: I, we always, We always ate dinner. That was that was just a thing.
00:38:51 Dwayne: Yeah, we there were there were too many people shoved into one small house for us. And there was just no place for people to sit down together and eat.
00:38:58 Heather: So yeah, we always sat down at the table and ate together. So that wasn’t.
00:39:02 Dwayne: Or where it was just me and my mom. I, I would normally eat alone because I was hungry before and I had the ability to make my food myself. And she didn’t want to come home and have to cook all the time.
00:39:13 Heather: Yeah.
00:39:14 Dwayne: So there were, there were plenty of days when I cooked supper for her. So yeah, we did a over overcorrect a little bit for that, but I’m kind of glad we did. Honestly. What did being left alone teach you that you’re glad you learned?
00:39:31 Heather: That I value my alone time.
00:39:33 Dwayne: I learned to accept that being bored isn’t a bad thing.
00:39:37 Heather: Yeah, being bored is not bad. I mean, I can always. That’s the thing that has never bothered me. I can always find something to do.
00:39:44 Dwayne: Exactly. I can get creative. That’s usually when my creativity sparks.
00:39:47 Heather: I start getting bored or tired of that old doom scrolling. I’m like, oh yeah, I should think of this or I should do that. So yeah, I think having my alone time and being bored, not so bad.
00:40:03 Dwayne: So for those who aren’t aware of our listeners and I, we may have touched on this in a couple of episodes before, but for new listeners especially, just know that Heather and I are located in Germany today, and we get to see things from a little bit different perspective and how a different culture handles some of these things. And we just noticed, you know, the independence that the children have here today is it’s amazing. It’s miles ahead of where how we let our kids move around.
00:40:34 Heather: Americans would literally lose their minds if they saw what we what we see on a daily basis.
00:40:39 Dwayne: Just a couple of months ago, I was riding a train. I had been I’d come in on on a on a flight into Frankfurt. And I had to take the trains back from Frankfurt here to our house. And on the last segment of the train, it was a small regional train, but there were probably three or four boys on there, the oldest of whom could not have been more than nine years old, who were traveling together, got themselves on the train, off the train, all at the right stops, all except for one who had to go down to the next stop and get off. Um, they were, you know, traveling together. They were polite, very respectful. They understood the assignment. This is just another way to get around. And they did it all by themselves. We see kids at playgrounds here, and the playgrounds here are still something else. The playgrounds here remind you of something out of the seventies and eighties.
00:41:26 Heather: Yeah. Like the the steel, um, slides.
00:41:29 Dwayne: Oh the jungle gyms. Yes. And it’s not to say that they’re unsafe, it’s just that they’re not designed as safety first. They’re designed as play first.
00:41:39 Heather: Yeah. Let your kids be kids.
00:41:41 Dwayne: There is a, a, park that is, I don’t know, two blocks from our house here that has a great old, um, webbed jungle gym thing that I would love for the grandkids to be able to get on and climb around and hang around like monkeys. Like I know exactly how it’s designed to be played on because you would never find something like that in any of the playgrounds we have in the States.
00:42:03 Heather: That’s dangerous.
00:42:04 Dwayne: It’s way too dangerous. There are the springy rides and the merry go rounds.
00:42:09 Heather: Uh oh. We were just driving through, um, the next town over, just just last week, and we saw a kid, maybe five, walking on the main road by himself.
00:42:19 Dwayne: Every morning when I’m going to work, I pass by a couple of bus stops here. And in the States, you know, we put our children on separate school buses, uh, there, the safety yellow buses, and they have designated stops for that here. The children ride the public buses. They have a pass when they’re going to school. And every day on my way, there will be little groups of, you know, one or two or ten kids hanging out at the bus stop. Not an adult in sight. Where I do see the adults gathered up, you can tell where the groups of Americans live. Yes, you can see them.
00:42:50 Heather: The parents are always right there.
00:42:51 Dwayne: Walking through this town here each morning. Uh, just. It’s the way this one little girl who lives down the street from us, the way she times her exit. And I time mine. But every day when I’m backing out of the driveway. I have to stop and let her go past. But she’s out there by herself, and she knows that, you know, she has to watch for cars coming out and wait for the road to be clear or someone to wave her through. This girl is six or seven years old. She she she’s so short, she can’t be more than that.
00:43:20 Heather: Yeah. I mean, you see the little German kids riding their bikes everywhere. Everywhere, everywhere.
00:43:25 Dwayne: Oh, and there’s scooters. Oh my gosh.
00:43:27 Heather: Oh, they’re electric scooters up in the woods by themselves. Girls, you know, thirteen year old girls hanging out, just driving their scooters around the woods.
00:43:35 Dwayne: By themselves.
00:43:36 Heather: By themselves. No parents in sights.
00:43:38 Dwayne: I’ve seen them one at a time. I’ve seen them in little groups of three and four, a little hoodlum gang of thirteen year old girls.
00:43:44 Heather: I will say, you don’t typically see them by themselves. Usually there’s two or three together.
00:43:52 Dwayne: Usually, but not always.
00:43:53 Heather: But not always.
00:43:53 Dwayne: I’ve seen them come through up there, just one blazing through. But the fact is, going off to grandma’s house somewhere.
00:43:59 Heather: Yeah. The fact is they get to do this by themselves.
00:44:03 Dwayne: And I know that just talking with a number of different people around here that, you know, they would they would much rather that their child learn that independence and be given that independence than have to be handheld every way. And I’ve heard other Germans make remarks about how you can always easily tell where the Americans are at. Just check the bus stops, because you’ll have all these adults that are taking their kids to the bus.
00:44:25 Heather: And I don’t think even when we lived here in the early two thousand, our kids rode the city bus. Well, they had a special bus that they rode, but it was like an hour long bus ride that they had to take. I don’t think we took them to the bus stop. I think we made them walk by themselves. When we lived here before.
00:44:45 Dwayne: Yes.
00:44:45 Heather: Yeah, we sure did. Yeah. I mean, not like it was that far, but. Go to the bus stop.
00:44:51 Dwayne: Go to the bus stop. It’s not that hard. And I would highly suggest anyone. If you’re raising small kids, grant them a little bit independence. Try to give them that little bit. Let them walk to a friend’s house.
00:45:01 Heather: Start small.
00:45:02 Dwayne: Even if they have to call when they get there, that’s fine. Let them do it on their own. Just learn these little things that it is so crucial to be able to do things on your own.
00:45:10 Heather: All you have to do is walk the path together a couple times and be like, this is how you get there.
00:45:15 Dwayne: Let your kids be bored sometime without always rescuing them with something to do, or throwing an iPad in their face. Let them be bored. Let them go.
00:45:22 Heather: Figure out the blocks.
00:45:24 Dwayne: Let them go. Figure out how to build something or draw something or create something. It’s a great way to overcome that boredom. So before we shut out here today, I want to invite our listeners just one one question for you. What’s the most free range thing that your parents let you do? I’m really interested to see what we might get out of that.
00:45:45 Heather: And of course, we need to know what city you’re in to know if it’s a big city or not.
00:45:49 Dwayne: Yeah. The size of the town and the the population around you can always have a great big effect on that. Before we wrap all this up, I’d like to encourage everyone go take a look at our website. If you take a look at the show notes for this particular episode, you’ll find links to it there. And on our site we’ve got links to both Let Grow and Free Range kids. Both of these sites have a wealth of information to help protect you as parents, to help protect your kids, and to push this movement a little bit along. But that’s going to wrap it up for this week. Not to worry though. We’ve got plenty more next week and a whole lot more to discuss. I believe next week we’re talking about, uh, toys of choice.
00:46:31 Heather: Of Gen X.
00:46:32 Dwayne: All right. If you enjoyed this week’s episode, we invite you to subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen. We’re available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, all the other podcast outlets. You can even listen on your smart speaker. Just ask it to play the most recent episode of whatever the podcast. We also invite you to follow us on all the socials. We’re on Facebook and Instagram at whatever pod and show notes, guest information and sponsorship opportunities are on our website at whatever dot com. You can even leave us comments or a voice message. Some of our listeners have asked how they can support the show. So we’ve set up a link on the website. Just click on the support link to learn how you can keep us in ibuprofen to help relieve some of the aches and pains of growing older.
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00:47:29 Heather: Okay, bye.