We’d grab our bikes and ride across town. If they saw our bikes were gone they knew we’d be back later.

After the abduction and murder of two local girls, this wasn’t so accepted anymore. Kids were still out and about, but you’d get grilled about where you go, who you’re with, where are you coming home. You were supposed to be at someone’s house, mum would call and make sure that’s where you were. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bega_schoolgirl_murders

I don’t see any kids out around town anymore now though. Just the ones that walk from the bus stop to their house after school. That might just say more about todays youth culture though.

I'm GenX, my entire childhood was dangerous.

Play on the streets unsupervised have knives, playing on building sites and similar and that was about at a guess 6 or 7. We also played in the local park and generally got up to mischief.

Our school playground didn't have a rubber ground. Or mulch. Or wood chips. No. We had gravel. Like little rocks gravel. And a swing set. A big one. Recess for us was jumping as far as we could into gravel.

We also had wooden monkey bars that gave you splinters. We tried to skip bars, and if we were lucky, land on the gravel. If we weren't lucky, we would fall into a hornet's nest. Hornets loved those old wooden playgrounds.

But perhaps the greatest piece of school yard entertainment was the steel merry go round. We'd have one of us try to hang off of it horizontally with 3 or 4 of us sping it. Lose your grip and fall off? Where would you land? You guessed it. Face first into the gravel.

That thing would get hot enough in the summer to fry an egg, but as much as we enjoyed eating our breakfast that way, we lost it before the end of 8th grade. A kid from a neighboring school crawled under theirs and tried to grab the axel while it was turning. It ripped his hand clean off. But still, those were the days.

Stuck a housekey into an electrical outlet to pretend I was driving a car. Not sure how I didn't die, honestly.

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

Play on the roof 🤷‍♂️

Go to school

Too many to count, but I’ll leave you with one of the least dangerous: woods porn.

GenX - here's a few:

Lawn darts. Unsupervised play over 1/4 mile from home at age 8. Unsupervised play over 1/2 mile from home at age 10 with a BB gun. BB guns as paintball weapons. (no eyes were put out). Riding a bicycle to school on a highway shoulder from grade 7-9. Latchkey kid. Going fishing with a neighbor (retired man) as an adolescent for 2-2 summers. (Ps. We fished and talked.)

Got vaccinated.

That’s a joke. The real answer is almost everything. I was practically feral and lived next to a swamp in Louisiana. RFK Jr. is 100% wrong about disease prevention but there’s no vaccine for snapping turtles.

Driving a tractor by myself, when I was a tween. I was driving a tractor before I could reach the clutch, I had to get off the seat and stand to use it, not that there's much gear-shifting driving a tractor through a field. I had a dirtbike out at the farm as well. Built a little fort in the woods.

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.

As a 7 year-old in rural Manitoba I went cross country skiing on an old rail road track in town. I got to the edge of town and just kept going. I always knew where I was and just enjoyed exploring. I eventually got to some cross roads that I recognized as being close to a friends house, so I just headed to my friends house. I ended up going about 7-10km on this ski trip. My parents ended up getting a surprise phone call from my friends mom tell them where I was 😆

A lot of LSD

Make pipe bombs. It was dangerous then, too.

I used the internet without an ad blocker.

Bike helmets didn’t get common until 6th grade or so. Same with face guards and mouth guards in anything but football.

We also had a diving board with a full size car spring. A gymnast pal could do double flips off it.

Don't ask any Gen-Xer or older. Surviving dangerous stuff was a minute-to-minute activity for us.

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.

Ate fried veal brain all the time: it's sooo good! Since the CJD outbreaks that's something we learned not to do.

Walk and ride my bike alone to school from about the age of six.

Walking to school alone.

I have a scar just under my jawline from when I almost speared myself in the neck while jumping into a copse of trees amid a hail of paintball fire. I crashed through a big broad leaf to see a branch snapped off right under it, the breakage accidentally a sharp point. I should have speared myself right through the brain but I twisted and grazed myself.

built a sledding track that required some tricky drifting at the end to avoid going onto the major highway the semi-trucks use.

How Gen-X do we wanna be here? You should see my sacro-illiac injury or the gnarly plate in my arm. Or hear how I dislocated my shoulder or bent the back of all my cervical vertebrae when I fell onto the concrete.