It's hard not to notice how different things are today for us as parents than they were for our own parents. I mean, some of the stuff we were allowed to do as kids is cause for calling child protective services nowadays. Am I right or am I absolutely right?
I don't even have to think about it very long and hard to come up with a list of things that parents can no longer do without risking arrest.
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Here are ten things our parents let us do that would get them arrested today:
1. Car seats, qué car seats? I can pretty much guarantee that I was never put in a car seat. Neither was my younger brother who is eight years younger than I am.
2. Pick up truck fun. I used to ride in the back of pick up trucks as often as anyone would let me. I loved it. The best was there were other kids riding in the back with me too so that we could laugh and play.
3. No helmets. I never owned a helmet growing up. I didn't have one for riding my bike or my roller skates and I didn't even wear one when I rode on the back of a motorcycle a few times.
4. Seat belts were totally optional. That all changed when it became a law that you had to buckle up, but I wasn't raised wearing a seat belt.
5. Drinking just a little. At big family gatherings and parties no one thought it was a big deal if the niños had a sip or two of beer. The little boys were actually encouraged to have a sip of cerveza.
6. Lighting cigarettes. Not only did parents smoke around their kids, they sometimes asked their kids to light the cigarettes for them. I used to light my mom's on the kitchen stove and to get it going, I would have to take a puff. I burned my hair that way once.
7. Carrying knives. Kids had knives when I was growing up. Not big machetes or anything, but like those small folding ones that you can carve things with and it wasn't the littlest of the kids who had them, but the bigger boys totally did.
8. Playing with guns that looked like actual guns. When I was growing up, toy guns looked like real guns and kids ran around playing with them in public. Yeah, that's a pretty dangerous thing to do in the present day. It can get your kid kicked out of school, arrested or even shot at by police.
9. Playing outside unsupervised. My friends and I would play outside unsupervised all the time. We would walk to the store alone, we would go play in the park alone. One mom was recently arrested for letting her 9-year-old daughter play in the park alone.
10. Wearing house keys like jewelry. Remember latchkey kids? Kids that wore their house keys around their neck basically announcing to the world, "When I get home, there is nobody there to let me in and take care of me, that's why I've got this key around my neck, so I can do it myself."
Image via Corbis Images
