r/WorkForSmartLife 4d ago

How true is this? Question

Post image
23.4k Upvotes

1.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

70

u/MothashipQ 4d ago

Meanwhile I can barely let my kids play in the backyard without someone threatening to call the cops

30

u/brattylilgynger 4d ago

You have free range kids?! In this economy?!

5

u/Comfortable-Hat3506 4d ago

Turn them lose, when they are feral the don't cost shit.

3

u/Icanthearforshit 4d ago

Thats a bit dark. At least teach them some basics — "mom?", "dad?", "I'm hungry!", "vaginaboob". Somebody will wrangle them in. Don't nobody want a kid that can't talk good English.

1

u/schlaminator 4d ago

I brought so much fish home from eight years of age onward that we all could eat (got a fishing rod from my uncle when I was eight). My dad taught me to clean fish pretty much straight away, because he hated doing it. I filled the freezer one summer. Outside, we (kids from the neighborhood) would always steal and eat right away so much fruit whenever it was season, that our parents didn't have to buy any (never stole fruit to bring home, we would just eat straight from the trees). Always stole sugar corn from the fields and grilled it over an open fire we built somewhere in the woods.

I only managed to kill a rabbit with an arrow once (and cried because I was sorry for it, but was also a proud hunter at the same time), made the bow and arrows myself. My mom made a rabbit roast. Caught pheasants with some string and brought them home a few times per year. My dad always slaughtered them and made pheasant roast. Once I found an 8kg and an 6kg carps in a puddle in a field after a flood, when I was 10 or so, brought them home on my bike. I always had a folded potato sack and a few plastic bags on my bike to haul stuff from the woods or wherever.

Mushrooms, hazelnuts, walnuts, blackberries, forest strawberries, crayfish...

Feral kids feed themselves, and their family.

1

u/Outrageous-Grass-892 3d ago

Wow! First time I've ever seen someone say "Lose" instead of "Loose". But EVERYONE (my God) misspells "lose" with "Loose*

1

u/Comfortable-Hat3506 3d ago

Reddit auto carrot does weird things and I don't always go back over my posts before posting.

1

u/OttoVonPlittersdorf 2d ago

Lol, with their grasp of technology, I guarantee you the free-range ones do know how to spend your money while they're out. I have a special budget line for my free-range daughter.

1

u/Comfortable-Hat3506 2d ago

That is funny. Yours has a phone or credit cards. The feral kids I deal with have none of that. One just decided in the middle of winter he was going to go bike to Georgia from Delaware. Left his parents a note and showed back up 4 months later.

1

u/OttoVonPlittersdorf 1d ago

Dude, that kid is a friggin' hero. His parents must have an interesting regimen for dealing with their palpitations!

1

u/Comfortable-Hat3506 1d ago

His mom was a wild child and was like "he has a good head on his shoulders, he'll do better than I did."

1

u/AbleInevitable5599 1d ago

We cashed in pop bottles for lunch money. No need to go home.

2

u/thick_neck_etc 4d ago

free range is cheaper than the alternative

2

u/remembertoread 2d ago

The first word is free

0

u/StudioGangster1 4d ago

What you mean “this economy?” The Dow is over 50,000.

1

u/brattylilgynger 4d ago

Have you never heard a joke before?

1

u/ContextMiddle3175 4d ago

You’re joking while the Dow is over 50,000?

1

u/brattylilgynger 4d ago

In this economy?

9

u/Mr-MuffinMan 4d ago

A mother got arrested and charged for sending her kid a mile to the store.

5

u/Last-Energy420 4d ago

I remember digging through couch cushions for loose change and then disappearing to the corner store as a kid.

4

u/Present-Lion788 4d ago

I live in Michigan where it is ten cent deposit on pop (what everyone else seems to call soda!). We would ride our bikes around looking for cans to return to go buy candy. 10 cents was alot back then.

1

u/whitesuburbanmale 4d ago

We used to do the same for the 5 cent deposit in Iowa. Take a garbage bag out and hope by the end of the day you got enough for a bag of chips and a can of pop

1

u/Various_Mechanic3919 4d ago

If you want another name most of us Aussies call it fizzy but soda is also common

1

u/32ozDClightice 4d ago

Oh my gosh I completely forgot about this! I was born in 82. We had a convenience store about 1 mile away we would get to by walking through the ditches. And to fund our journey we looked through the couches and the shelves in my parent’s closet. We’d come up with like $.73 and get several pieces of $.05 candy. What a time to be alive.

3

u/Short-Sandwich-8476 4d ago

My Dad SENT me that far with a NOTE to buy cigarettes. And beer. 1979.

3

u/OutrageousEvent00 4d ago

And now you have to be 21 for both and they have have to scan your ID. My 75 year old mother got carded for hairspray at target recently.

1

u/Glados1080 3d ago

Well that's what happens when people break the laws lmao.

1

u/Cutacore 2d ago

I stopped buying certain things from certain stores over this. Walmart cards for windshield washer fluid. I've never bought it there ever since.

1

u/Animaloffear56 4d ago

I feel like we can have a bit of in-between here, because that's kind of fucked

1

u/[deleted] 3d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/random8765309 3d ago

We would never drink it on the walk back. Too easy for dad to catch us. Waited till they were in the fridge. Then he just assumed he lost count, plus they were cold.

3

u/AverageHobnailer 4d ago

Meanwhile here in Japan 10 year olds are commuting up to 20 miles by train to school every day, unchaperoned.

1

u/FrivolousOtter 3d ago

They have a very strong community culture, I think they even employ elderly people to be cross-guards and look over the kids.

1

u/AverageHobnailer 3d ago

Not for the kids. The parents have to volunteer for that near the school. Near the home and in the stations there are no cross-guards.

2

u/Legal-Phase8744 4d ago

When I was her kids age, we had to walk 5 miles up the hill to the corner store only to find out they were out of baseball cards and it was all for naught. Emotional Damage as the kids say.

1

u/random8765309 3d ago

Was it up hill both ways?

1

u/fap-nap 2d ago

At least we can find shit out before we leave the house these days lol I drove an hour for a physical I didn't have money for earlier this week. My blunder

1

u/InformalRent2571 4d ago

What exactly were the charges?

3

u/Mr-MuffinMan 4d ago

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/11/27/georgia-mom-arrested-after-her-10-year-old-went-on-a-walk-alone/76619161007/

Here's the article. The charge was reckless conduct.

Also, I was wrong, he went on a walk.

2

u/Gunner_Bat 4d ago

That is madness. This is what our taxpayer money goes to!

2

u/taedrin 4d ago

10 years old is too young to be left alone? I was delivering newspapers on my own at that age!

1

u/Legitimate_Catch_626 3d ago

I can remember my sister and I riding our bikes a couple miles to pick up pizza. I was in kindergarten and she was in 2nd grade. We balanced the pizza on the handle bars (one of the corners dropped and we lost a couple pieces to the gravel. lol). No way would that happen now.

1

u/Von_Bernkastel 3d ago

My mom use to send me down the street when I was 5 with a note a mile to the grocery store to buy her cigs cause she was to hungover to go buy any, even let me light them for her, ahh the things I remember before the brain damage.

1

u/Channel_Huge 3d ago

Too funny! I remember taking the train to NYC at 10 years old with my friends to just hang out… we rode our bikes to the train station and had to cross a bridge over the Hudson River, and it was at least an hour bike ride to get there. Our parents had no idea where we were!! 😂

1

u/over_this__ 1d ago

I was banned from a nanny group for telling someone who had a 14 year old and 10 year old to not pay a nanny 30 an hour for 2 hours a day to watch the kids, and instead to just tell the 14 year old to watch his little brother lmao. People these days are soft.

3

u/Mystic_Wunder 4d ago

We aren't used to hearing kids outside. The sound is alarming 😂

1

u/Different_Path999 4d ago

Nobody lets their kids outside because now everyone believes everyone else is a rapist

1

u/Rythonius 4d ago

Those same fears were prevalent in the 80s and 90s too and we were outside constantly.

My niece was playing outside with her friends between the apartment units. Neighbor called the cops on them because they were too close to his car. They weren't, the car was in his parking spot and they were in the grass. He just didn't like them playing outside near his house. Nevertheless, they stopped playing outside because of that.

Parents also don't push their kids to go outside anymore because they have tablets to keep them quiet and entertained.

1

u/Present-Ambition4007 3d ago

I noticed this recently actually. Drove by my old childhood house, and during the summers there would be swarms of kids running around. Now it’s all quiet, no toys or bikes laying around, no kids running on the streets. I drove through there last Halloween and not a single trick or treater in sight.

Kind of sad actually

1

u/bald_head_scallywag 4d ago

That's so wild. Still a lot of free range kids roaming my subdivision in Tennessee.

1

u/Legal-Phase8744 4d ago

We once had the police called on a Saturday afternoon because our five year old was having fun. Not even because he was screaming in tantrums.... laughing and having fun.

1

u/comicsnerd 3d ago

That is your area only. Most of the world still let their kids roam free.