Back in the 60s, i was a Free-Range kid. On on a nice non-school day, I would go out after breakfast on my bike, and be gone all day, without any money, a watch, ID, cell phone (didn’t exist back then), anything, and I’d be gone all day. The only rule was to be home by 5 pm.

Nobody knew where I was, who I was speaking to, or anything. If i bumped into friends, I’d hang out for a while, but if I needed to know the time, I’d ask some stranger. If I was thirsty, I’d knock on a random door and ask for a glass of water. Once, I stopped at the end of a driveway to watch some guy doing woodworking in his open garage. He saw me watching and this stranger invited me into garage, and showed me his tools, and what he was building. Turned out he was a decent guy, and I probably reminded him of his grandson, but what if he wasn’t? My primary fear was running into the Robolotto boys, but as long as I didn’t see one of them, I was happy.

This was routine for years, and it was the same for my friends. I started doing this when I was about 7 years old.

I’m an Australian, as a 16 ur old I’d slong my gun over mu shoulder and rodee my trail bike up the range to hunt for pet food. Drape a gutted dead roo over the back of my motobike and bring it jwome, meat for the dogs and skin it. No one batted an eyelid or said anything.

Now I’d be labeled a terrorist, have police helicopters chase me down and be in jail for decades.

Freedom.

I see a lot of similar stories here about wandering free and living like feral kids but I want to second making homemade Explosives from hobby shop Rocket engines.

My grandfather was building a deck on his house and had a bunch of lumber piled up for it. I had the genius idea that I could use it to make “roller coaster” tracks down the steep hill behind their house. Then I had my brother climb into our wagon to test it out. He was about 1/3 of the way down the hill when I realized that he was heading for the tree line with no way to stop… so I ended up sprinting after him and flipping the whole thing over.

Some friends and I used to soak a tennis ball in lighter fluid, light it on fire, and play “hacky sack” with it. I’m completely shocked none of us ended up with any bad burns.

Edit: to be fair I do have plenty of burns but they are all from baking or getting baked, not from playing with fire.

• 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

When I was a kid I was told that if I professed my love for Jesus publicly that I would be ridiculed and possibly physically harmed. I grew up in suburban America

Pretty sure people still believe that and are teaching that to their kids today.

lol

Holy shit man, so much. So so so much. Honestly I’m surprised I survived childhood.

We used to free climb cliffs. One of my step brothers took a pretty bad fall, about 60 feet down. He cartwheeled and banged against the cliff face, then landed in a sitting position. His right arm was torn open from armpit to elbow, and the bones were sticking out. Compound break. We had to walk him though about 2 miles of desert to get back to civilization and get help. He survived with no other major injuries, but that was a close one.

I used to go camping out in the desert by myself as a kid. From like 10 to 14 years old. I’d take a bow and arrows with me and just stay out there for a few days with my parents thinking I was spending a few days at a friends house. So much shit could’ve gone wrong, and sometimes it almost did.

Then there’s the normal kid shit like playing with fire and chemicals, almost blowing ourselves up or burning everything else down.

People wonder why I never had kids and all I can do is think about all the shit I got up to as a kid. I don’t need that kind of stress.

Created flashpowder from 70% Potassium Perchlorate, and 30% 400-Mesh German Dark Alumium powder then subsequently blew shit (mostly earth) up. I also set a lot of stuff on fire. I created Molotov Cocktails out of gasoline and styrofoam and threw them at a block wall of a barn-ruin in the back yard. I also remember creating a Napthalene charge(think cardboard paper-towel roll stuffed with ground up mothballs sitting atop of some Black powder) that was suppose to create a big fireball and though I had no black powder prepared, I did have some excess flash powder I needed to get rid of so I used that. -For the briefest, loudest moment my buddies and I lit up the night sky.

–It was dangerous back then but it was before 9/11 and a visit from the feds was highly unlikely. Afterwards it became much harder to acquire German Dark 400 Mesh Aluminium Powder and today I would wholeheartedly expect a visit from an Alphabet agency. I did scald my face when nickel(bottle)-rocket fuel (made of carmelized sugar and potassium nitrate) ignited in my face as I was melting it together.

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.

Dangerous then and especially now, but my oldest brother lit off a firework in our backyard, right near or around when school was getting out. We lived a couple blocks away from an elementary school. It was loud enough that the school thought someone was shooting.

This was mid-late 2000s. I imagine if he did it today, the police would have absolutely arrested him without a second thought.

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.

Drank tap water.

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.