I grew up in the early 50’s where we had virtually no protection. I have never broken a bone and have no big scars, and am pretty healthy. We made our first skate boards with a 2×4 and metal skate wheels and rode them down a rather steep hill in the neighborhood. No one died or even got more that a little road rash.

Ahhh, I had a Huffy Sweet Thunder back in 1978. I LOVED that bike!! I grew up on a street with all boys, one had the boys Huffy Thunder, and I wanted one..so one day mom and dad came home with the Sweet Thunder for me!! ) I rode it until I got upgraded to a Schwinn 10 speed boys Varsity when I was 13.

On our bikes we jumped curbs, pulled wagons on a string attached to our bikes. We jumped ramps made of wood. We played crash up derby with our big wheels.

We played outside until it was pitch dark, past the time the street lights came on..and our parents didn’t care! Ice cream trucks didn’t come out until it was dark back then..LOL

We had the Star Wars figures with the little swords and guns. All toys were small back then. And the mentioned Jarts, in which no one ever got impaled. We all had roller skates, we played with baseballs, bats, mitts in any piece of land we could find, not the little league total safety stuff, and NO helmets for anything.

Oh yea, and dare I mention, we were able to play TAG, or duck duck goose, etc….with contact?! There is a “no touch, no tolerance” rule nowadays. So Sad. What a bunch of antisocial, sociopath nation we are all making!! And an obese one too. No Exercise!!

Ah, and in the winter, my friends and I would clamp on to the old chrome car bumpers driving down the streets and slide behind them…and when they turned a corner, we would let go and slide into the curbs….such fun!!!

I had a school playground accident when I was 9 years old. We didn’t have mulch or any soft material on our playground, we had cement and pea pebbles. We did have the old merry go round until someone got hurt, then they took it out. We had the metal pipe type monkey bars, for some dumb reason we called on the boys and the other the girls, and a couple dome shaped ones. We had 4 sets of swings, and a couple sets of teeter tawters. Then came the one that I had my accident on: We had 2 big slides, to me, it seemed like they were 12 foot tall or more. My friends and I were playing “train” with a jump rope…and I wanted to be the “caboose”…well, when I got to the top, the others started going down, and I was pulled off from the top, onto the hard packed ground. I got hurt pretty bad, broken arm, and 8 stitches under my nose, and my face got all messed up. The hospital (my poor parents) thought I was abused by them, LOL…I can laugh now, but boy was my mom mad at the time, haha

We climbed trees, any tree we could get in to. One friend had one of those swings that you can still get from Little Tikes, it’s like a disk on a long string, and you attach it to a tall branch of a tree. Wow, that was fun. We would get her parents picnic table, and stack the seats, climb up onto them, and get on the swing, and try to go as high as we could!! I think sometimes we even got on a branch and get on it and swing from that, we were fearless!

We had snowball fights at school and at home, we played cops and robbers with toy guns with no orange tips, oh yea, and when I got to driving age, we did donuts in the high school parking lot … fun!!! We didn’t have school security back then, or metal dectectors either. We used to yell “JALOPY!!” to crappy cars that drove by, hahahaha or some kids threw snowballs at cars going by. ***GASP***

Well, I am a proud parent to a 13 yr old and a 4 yr old. I am proud to say that I kept some of my old fisher price little people toys from when I was little, or got some on Ebay. I have my old wooden puzzles, and a few other things that I used to love to play with growing up, my son even plays with some of my left over matchbox cars in which he has a ton added to them. It at least gives them something to use their IMAGINATION on. Yes, they do have the electronics stuff too, we have the Wii, my 13 yr old has to be with the times too. But, my 4 yr old. He has pedal tractors, he has bikes, big wheel, and any possible manual mode of transportation a kid could have, and plays with them all and uses his imagination while at it. What’s funny, he has no little friends to play with on our street, but he manages to crash into his other toys sitting around, hahaha And he plays with my old toys and guess what…he doesn’t even put them in his mouth, why? because I tell him not to. We play ball, he does have a bike helmet, it’s a local law, but in the yard, I don’t make him wear it. I have toy guns for him too, and I play with them with him. He’s got kid sized real tools, and we made him a work bench with a real metal vise. He has not managed to pinch his fingers yet, because I taught him not to. He hammers scrap pieces of wood, or clamps them to the vise and saws on it.
In winter time, we have snowball fights with each other too. Now, nowadays I think I would freak if my daughter did half of what I did, such as the car thing..but otherwise,

No, I’m not trying to raise my kids to be pussies…that’s for sure. I want them to live life and have fun while at it!! I want them to experience the fun that I had growing up! ;o) Or as close as possible.

I am a parent and pretty much unless my son comes to me screaming and crying, I figure he hasn’t been hurt too bad. My dad was always of the opinion that unless there is blood, it can’t be too bad. Granted both my brother and I have broken bones without blood, so that adage isn’t always true.

I just want to add that everything has become overly cautious and overprotected, not just children and their toys. Bags of charcoal HAVE the warning on them that it is dangerous to burn inside. Apparently Americans are not only stupid but completely lack in common sense since that is what most of these “warnings” are.

@Yamon: Imagine the carnage when everything is electrically silent…

@Byzantium: The world needs perfectionists to fix the bones of the kids who are banging themselves up.

@Wyn: I read “breadsacks” as “breadsticks” and wondered how soggy bread was going to give you any traction.

As with previous posters I feel I must post my badges!
Skitched (that’s holding onto a moving car while on rollerblades/skates) on a van doing 40 and had to tuck and roll as it turned a sudden corner. Check.
Used a pile of scrap wood as a two man elevation device and received rusty nail in foot. Check.
Rode from West Texas to Ruidoso, New Mexico on the back dash of a car. Check.
Rode ON the couch in the back of the pickup to keep the COUCH from falling out. Check.
When it snowed mom got out the old breadsacks and rubber banded them over our shoes. We didn’t know ‘nonslip’. My son? He has these rubber galoshes that you could walk up a window with.

@Professor Statik – HellYeah Ninja Stars!

Also – Merry Go Rounds! Where have they taken them too? They’ve been uninstalled at every school ground I have found. We only ever saw ONE kid break a bone on ours growing up, and everyone knew it was because he was slow AND stupid. After all, that’s what the arched bars are for – locking your legs in so you can’t fall off in a crappy way when you’re not capable of jumping.

Fast forward to today. Now we have ‘traffic calming’ measures, like speed bumps, 20mph speed restrictions in built up areas and patronizing adverts about how if you hit a kid at 40mph there is an 80% chance of them dying but if you hit them at 30mph they have an 80% chance of living. It would be a 100% chance of living if they’d been taught how to cross the fucking road safely in the first place, rather than me having to drive around town as fast as a retard on downers just in case some shit-blister with negligent parents runs out in front of me to get more candy to stuff into their pudgy faces whilst playing Resident Evil 6.5 on their PS3.

All childern aught to know how to remove a splinter from their finger with a pen knife by age 7. Fact!

@Kirsten: The only bike injury I had was in my 20’s, and I went over the handlebars onto pavement at about 20-25 MPH. I broke my elbow, but my head never touched the ground thanks to the tuck and roll training of youth.

@yo sis: That sweet thunder was bad ass. I think there should be an all girl rock band named Sweet Thunder. I’d buy the album even if they sucked. And here’s a sweet Sweet Thunder pic for you.

@Professor Statik: Where did all the wood come from? And where did it go? Oh ninja stars. Did everyone have those things? Where the hell did we get those?

@Pablo: The green machine would’ve been referenced if I knew anyone who had one.

@Jaye: …but what am I so afraid of? I’m afraid that I’m not sure of [something something something]… I’ve added “No Blood, No Foul” to my “Heavy metal bands that I’d start had I Any Talent” list.

@n0ia: I want to say that our elementary school jungle gym was on concrete, but I don’t think that I can prove it.

@Erin: I didn’t actually listen directly. I just hacked into JOSHUA with my sweet haX0ring skills and downloaded the transcripts of your conversation. Then, I got the system to play tic-tac-toe with itself so that it couldn’t trace the call. Thanks for the material, and enjoy the BBQ!

I never wore a bicycle helmet, and continued the rebellion even after they passed a law in our state that required children under the age of 16 or something like that to wear helmets.

On one rare occasion that we actually had snow/ice one winter, I got an old rickety sled out, took it to a friends house, piled up some snow to create a ramp on one side of the road where a ditch was, started at the top of his driveway laying down on the sled face first, launched off the ramp and (mostly) cleared the ditch. It was awesome, but unfortunately the sled broke on the first launch, so we didn’t get another try.

Remember the playground equipment they used to have? The grid of metal that came out of the ground and created a small arch and went back into the ground? (I can provide a picture if necessary) I was walking across one and fell and busted my forehead open. I ended up not having to get stitches, but it was pretty close. Did I ever get on one again? You bet!

Some things you just have to experience to learn the lesson that’s waiting for you!

“Do as I say, not as I did”. Nostalgia has a way of romanticizing certain memories, making us believe that the only way we are still alive is by some form of divine intervention, or that we beat such unfathomable odds that our offspring are doomed to payback all that Karma…in blood.

If I ever have kids (unlikely), I already know the response I’ll give to “Dad, can we jump off the 3nd floor porch into the snow banks?”

“Sure…but only after I go first”.

Preach it, Jon. Get those kids out there and injuring themselves! it’s called LIFE.

I melted Barbie’s head in my easybake oven (that was a hand-me down from my sisters…the oven and the Barbie).

Whiffle Ball bats? When the boys picked on me, I just cracked them across the back of the knees with that innocuous piece of plastic—plastic stings my friends, STINGS!

Don’t even get me going on blowing up the fishies with m-80s and 1/4 sticks of explosive procured from somewhere…

Ahhh, the good ole days…I really miss ‘em.

Rode cousin’s bike with no brakes down hill into traffic? Check. Built own treehouse out of scrapwood we scrounged from dangerous empty lots? Check. Had toys that melted plastic goo with hot metal rods so we could make them into Creepy Crawlies, and discovered that MANY other things could be melted as well? Check. Wood burning kits that could be used to give Barbie ritual scars? Check.

Maybe “dangerous” toys and activities should be encouraged as a way of culling the herd. And if you take away all this stuff, kids will FIND a way to make innocuous toys dangerous. We turned Tinker Toys into cannons that actually shot stuff, and my beloved Grandpa taught me how to make stink bombs using common kitchen items.

We should probably do what my husband often suggests be done with unruly kids- seal them in a barrel full of soapy water with their head sticking out the top until they graduate from college.