My Parents Did It And We Turned Out Fine

/ January 17, 2018

people-2991882_1920I enjoy stories from parents and grandparents about various things they did in the past.

Much of the fun comes from threads that always include the phrase “but my parents did it and we turned out fine.” We’ve forgotten that many of the rules today are because of deaths in the past. Helmets, seat-belts, and condoms are all designed to save you from ruining your life.

Let’s throw together some weird crap our parents did/allowed that we’d never do today.

My mom put me outside, in the winter, in my stroller. – because fresh air cures everything.

My mom told me to put alcohol on my kid’s gums to help with teething.

I would have been camping in a tent by the time I was two months old.

We would play with snakes, eat a sandwich, play in the dirt and wash our hands tomorrow.

My dad handed me a fucking hatchet at five years old and taught me how to make kindling. This is because he almost cut his thumb off, making kindling.

Yep, my sister and I managed to survive the neglectful, dirt flavored, fun-as-fuck childhood, but we were lucky.

Instead of being thankful of the rules that keep us safe, people mock the history…..a lot of people died to put these rules in place, respect that.

PS this started out as a story about ham.

My Parents Did It And We Turned Out Fine
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45 thoughts on “My Parents Did It And We Turned Out Fine”

  1. There is a theory that the reason for more Asthma, food allergies, and auto-immune diseases in the past some number of decades is that kids are kept too clean – not enough of eating dirt, kissing dogs (playing with snakes probably counts too), and all that stuff. The idea seems to be that the immune system sort of gets bored and can’t tell the real bad stuff from the OK stuff.

    I was pretty much a free-range kid of the, “Where did you go? Out. What did you do? Nothing.” type.

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  2. Momma used to let us play in the rain during the heat of the summer. lighting was just noise and nothing to be afraid of. I’m thinking she was seriously thinking about the life insurance on us boys when we were being naughty lil’ hooligans.

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  3. My parents let us play all over the neighborhood with all the other neighborhood kids all day in summer. We had a tree house my dad built and it had wooden monkey bars (splinters). The parks nearby had a roller slide (easy to catch fingers in) and merry-go-rounds that we made go as fast as possible before jumping on and not being able to stay on our feet the whole time, sometimes almost flew as the merry-go-round sped up, next time someone gave it a push. We had swings that we tried to flip over the top bar too. We were allowed to eat peanut butter and bring it for lunch at school but we had to stay away from allergic kids.

    We didn’t have a shot for the chicken-pox and mom used rubbing alcohol on our scrapes and wounds, I believe they just use soap and water now and have gentle cleansers. We also went in these high and long zipl lines at camp grounds and fell off and it wasn’t a big deal, we survived. Our coats also had coat strings and no one I can remember caught their coat string and choked. We played outside in -25 degree weather and in JR high the private school I was at made us stay outside even at -30 C. That’s F’ing freezing. I could go on & im Only 32!

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  4. I grew up being ‘protected’ from everything. My mother never let me go outside in fear of she would never see ‘us’ again. When I see how families were brought up as you were, I see they live life far better than those who are in fear of everything. Today, people will not go anywhere because they fear everything.They should live in third world countries where they live they way you said all the time, and many still survive today.

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  5. I’d love to know the ham story too. I agree, but also find myself letting more go as a parent than I thought I would [not safety]. But we go into parenting with a lot of ideals we can’t live up to…at least I can’t anyways.

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  6. I was play outside all day kind of kid. I washed my hands only if I could see the dirt on them. I also rode my sled off the neighbor’s garage roof after a big snow. My parents watched from inside our house.

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  7. Same here. I’d get home after school let myself in the house with the key in the secret spot under my dad’s workbench and I’d be deep in the forest playing with neighborhood friends until it got dark or my mom called us for dinner. I remember epic mud fights and being covered in mud and eating as many wild guavas as we could possibly eat. It was awesome.

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  8. My neighbor and I did all kinds of crazy stuff. We both survived without any broken bones. Lots of scrapes and forehead “eggs”, though. We’d spend hours making plastic car models and then blow them up with firecrackers and cherry bombs. Once took a set of pub darts and laid on the lawn and threw the darts up in the air to see how close we could get to our bodies. I got him in the arm so I lost but it was hilarious!

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  11. Not quite sure what I like more, your post or all the comments from readers talking about their childhoods! 😂 Either way it was a good read! What’s with the ham? You’ve got me intrigued!

    Liked by 2 people

  12. I’m ALWAYS saying this!!! “But it was like that back in my day and we’re fine.” THERE IS A REASON THINGS HAVE CHANGED. Bad things have happened to people to make these changes happen and just people a select few were alright doesn’t mean things shouldn’t have been changed. Makes me so annoyed.

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  13. I miss those days! I think things are just too stringent nowa days. Of course, you have to be more cautious than in the 80’s because of the over population of terrible people but in general, I miss the days when kids road around in little bike gangs, and played in the stream and came back home caked in dirt every night of the summer.

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  14. When I sit around friends and we talk about the early days of our life, we talk of it like we were given some kind of special powers to overcome all adversities. This makes us feel the struggle today is not as enduring as it used to be.

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  16. Pingback: Ya, You Have Ham In Your Beard | Skinny and Single

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