Gen X grew up self sufficient and sturdy… took life on the chin. The last generation of feral children, as they say.

One thing that never gets mentioned is the Chicken Pox Parties.

He left out playing street hockey, kick ball, or baseball in the street. Everyone remember yelling "game off" when a car approached then "game on" when the coast was clear

Gen x had more common sense. We didn't need warning labels 😂🤣

I am 59 years old and was born in 1964 the last year of the Baby Boomers Gen X started in 1965. I grew up in the 70's and 80's and we had so much more freedom.We drank out of the Garden Hoses and rode our Bikes without Helmets or Pads. We did not wear seatbelts and rode in the back of Pick Up Trucks. We played outside and knew after Dinner you stayed outside to play until the Street Lights started coming on.

GenX took care of themselves, raised ourselves basically. We're a tough generation!!

My father got off work one day and came to pick me up from my grandparents house. He asked grandma where i was, she said outside helping grandpa with something. He walked out back to find me sitting on top of the house 13 meters up handing shingles to Grandpa. I was 3.

We weren't left on the street. We were escaping. It was freedom and fun, man.

Gen X…. Never a better time to have one’s childhood!! It was an amazing time to be alive & growing up!!

We also didn't have cup holders in cars. The kids were the cupholders because Dad needed someone to hold his beer.

I'm Gen X, born in 1967 and it really wasn't that bad. More playing outside and less TV.

I was born in '72, and pretty much from the time I was 9 or so I'd just tell mom I was going out on my bike and about the only rule I had to follow was be home by dinner. It was an utterly carefree time.

Born in 1967 here and can tell you that we never had any trouble with all of the "dangers" that people worry about now. We were raised to live our lives doing everything in this video and so much more. if we got hurt we learned not to do something that way again! We learned caution, we learned how to think for ourselves. We looked out for each other and learned from our own mistakes. Today's kids are wimps!

Born '67 here. Safety was first and foremost. Every bump, bruise or broken limb was a lesson. You either learned not to do that again or figured out another way to do it. It was also about freedom and figuring things out on you own. We pretty much raised our selves and life lessons came from experience. It was a fun time and we learned to be self-sufficient at a young age in the process.

Until the mid-late 70’s we only had 4 over the air channels: ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS (public broadcasting).

I'm squarely in the middle of GenX. We used to have bottle rocket wars, shooting bottle rockets, lobbing firecrackers & booming Roman Candles at each other. Such a blast! (pun intended lol)

Usually every parent in the neighborhood was allowed to discipline any child doing wrong and our parents were fine with that.

Gen x here... If y'all knew some of the things we did that parents didn't find out about... It truly is amazing we lived... We literally had our older brothers and sister or our friends had them and they taught us all kinds of stuff and we idolized them... 😂

I'm 56 yrs old. What was left out was the amount of phone numbers we had memorized. You had your home number memorized, your family phone numbers, girl/boyfriend number, and your parents work phone number memorized. How many phone numbers do you have memorized?

We have cooler technology today, but in every other way, life was much better in the 80s.

I was born in 1957, so I am considered a baby boomer. Growing up in the 60's and 70's was the best

I am gen X. I do remember there used to be a lot more trust in communities, but in the 1980s, there was a lot less "cultural diversity" in neighborhoods and most parents in the neighborhood had similar values, so it was less dangerous to run wild, at least until that Adam Walsh kid got taken. Then parents were more cautious and there was a lot of awareness to not go anywhere with strangers "even if they had candy." I do remember riding in the back of a pickup truck. It wasn't against the law then, but now it is. I think we have given up a lot of freedom and traded it for "safety" and honestly it hasn't all been a good trade. I would give anything to go back and live in that decade again.

The metal bike pedals were even more dangerous when you were going down a steep hill to the beach barefoot or with flip flops on! We used to bail off in the yard at the bottom of the hill & walk over to the beach. My neighborhood growing up was full of dangers & we were still out all day in the summer. Being 2 miles out of the main towns meant that we had wild critters nearby at all times. In Northeastern Minnesota, we have bears, wolves, coyotes, moose, white tail deer, foxes, beavers, fishers, etc & the lakes have various fish - not to mention boats. We don't really have insects that will hurt us & the snakes are Garter Snakes, so they won't hurt you. We also had multiple lakes & multiple water filled mine pits that are 300+ feet deep in places, there's a railroad track that runs through the neighborhood & trains came through every hour. We had sand pits & the water processing building by the lake had a muddy pit next to it that we called "Ice Cream Land" because the mud looked like chocolate ice cream - it was gross. We crossed the tracks at multiple places other than the road to take short cuts - you could walk through a neighbor's yard, cross the tracks, walk through another yard to get down to the lake boat landing & literally walk through the shallow water to the beach faster than taking the roads. We also explored empty pits that weren't water filled, walked down the tracks & over the highway bridge to the next town. There were empty & water filled pits & lakes on all but one side of the neighborhood. Winter was just as fun & we were outside then too regardless of the temperature. Our community skating rink was in our yard (the house was a school before my great grandparents bought it) & the sledding hill was next to my grandparents yard. Lots of fun all winter long!

Generation X is people born between 1965-1980, so we grew up in the 70s and 80s

Gen Xer. We would leave the house in the morning and we had to be home when the street lights came on. I feel sorry for kids today. They'll never know that kind of freedom. 😊

When I was 9-11, the neighborhood boys would borrow every trash can from every neighbor on the street line them up and jump them with huge ramps we built in our garage. And all the parents would come out and watch. The neighborhood record was 17 trash cans which my friend and I both jumped. We had no idea what a bicycle helmet was. We had BB wars, drank out of garden hoses and even the creek. We even bought enough bottle rockets to last all summer and used plastic baseball bats with the end cut off to launch them at each other (And don't forget the Roman candles). To avoid sunburn, we spent as much time in the sun in the spring to get a nice dark tan and then we didn't have to worry about it all summer. The skin cancer explosion correlates to the chemicals in sun-block when it became widely used

Corporal punishment was different back then. People would be jailed today for things that were "normal" back then.

we didn't know it was dangerous, it was a great time to be a kid. we stayed outside. jumping our bikes, no helmet, stealing smokes from our parents. playing guns in the woods. you find your friends by where all the bikes were. what a time to be alive, sucks you gotta get old 😁 i had to come home when the street lights came on. if i wasnt, i got the belt.born 1974.

I grew up in the 70’s and this video only gets it about half right. It exaggerates the danger and the lack of parental supervision. Parents did care where you were. Often it was whose house are you going to be at? And then those parents would keep an eye on all the kids, just not hovering like parents do now.

In High School, it was common to see several pickup trucks parked in the school parking lot, with a rifle rack in the back window and anywhere from 1 - 3 rifles in the rack. The guns & trucks were often unlocked and if the weather was warm, the windows might be down, too! (And these were often driven to school by the students! Never had a school shooting.)

Growing up without any security cameras and tracking devices was a blessing. We could convert the entire house into a giant play fort during the summer days, jump off the roof, walk to an ice cream shop for lunch with stolen change, have the house put back to normal before mom came home and then go roam the streets with friends until dark.

My brother and I and the other kids in the neighborhood used to have races with as many kids as possible crammed into a shopping cart in the empty parking lot of the store. It was a real adventure with one kid pushing 3 or 4 in the cart and the cart's wheels forever spinning and braking during the race. Most of us kids wiped out at least twice and went home happily sporting a couple of bruises and scrapes.

When it comes to sun, the idea was to burn once at the beginning of the season to start a "base" and form there you'd mostly just tan

I was born in 1984. I drank out of hoses, rode bikes without pads and helmets, was gone all day. It was good times. Pretty sure I still have scars from those metal pedals

I was born in 1955, my daughter in 1989. She loved climbing the huge evergreen tree that was at least 14 feet tall in our backyard. One day she fell out of the tree, when she was about 6 feet up. She made a dent in the ground where she landed. Our dog came and got me and I took her to the ER. She was fine. She wanted to get back in the tree as soon as she got home. I didn't let her. She was back in it the next day.

Im Gen X and remember doing all of that. On Halloween, we would wait until it got dark out before we went trick or treating! 😀

I was born in 73 and growing up in the 70’s-80’s was awesome. My brother and friends went camping at our swimming hole at the ages of 6-7 all alone. We started our own fires and cooked our own dinner.

Born at the end of 79 so technically Gen X, growing up in the 80's were also a bit like the 70s and did many of those things, though Lawn Darts were not a thing by then, I will say this about cars though, those cars could take a pounding unlike cars today which aren't as tank-like.

GenX 1968. Was anyone else a Latch-key kid?

10:00. When I was 7 years old in 1980, my grandmother would send me to the corner convenient store with $2.00 and a signed note. The note basically said that her grandson (me) was authorized to buy 2 packs of cigarettes and a candy/chocolate bar of his choice--hahaha. Oh how times have changed!!

My parents had a 1959 Plymouth station wagon. You would hope in the back and there was a mattress incase us kids got tired on a long trip. It was also used to slid on when dad would take those hard left and right turns. You would go slamming into one side or the other. Short stops and sudden acceleration would cause you to slide forward or backward pretty violently. If the back seat was put down, you would have longer way to slide. On thing they did not mention was the hot coil cigarette lighter: Push it in and when it popped out the coil was red hot.

Anywhere I go, the best people were born in the 60's.

I'm gen-x,born in 1966. The world was much safer as far as Crime goes. To us the 70s and 80s wasn't a dangerous time. It was just the real world. What younger generation sees as dangers, we saw as challenges. We learned from it and had fun doing so.

I was born in the '70's. We had a freedom that children nowadays will never know which is kind of sad. In the summer mom would give us a decent breakfast and then tell us to go play. She didn't want to see us until dinnertime. If we were thirsty there's the hose outside!😅

Born in 67 so I was a kid in 70s and teen in the 80s I want to go back for just one weekend lets say 1986, Our bikes were our freedom we would be gone all day fishing or just out riding and exploring. The old man used to send us to the store for his smokes all the time no note ever needed. How did we get it so wrong raising our kids and we turned them to be afraid of their shadows I am talking to us, Gen-Xers out there

Oh yeah, I got up on the roof many times to turn the antenna. Then we got a rotary antenna system. You would have a control box on top of the TV with a dial to turn. It would activate a motor on the antenna to point it at broadcasting towers in different directions. Oh yeah, everybody drank from the garden hose. If you didn't have a pool in you backyard, then the lawn sprinkler would keep you cool. Oh yeah, I would go to the corner store to buy cigarettes for my grandfather. The elderly couple who ran the store knew all their customers by name and they knew that it was okay. Nowadays, they be heavily fined and probably lose their retail sales license.

I'm a gen xer (born in 1970) and I remember riding in my dad's truck. standing on the seat behind his right shoulder while he was driving lol

The spirit of Gen X still lives on in the rural south.

Technically GEN X’ers began January 1st 1965 and ended December 31st 1979. We did stuff that would make the helicopter parents today faint.

I'm a boomer, born in the 1950s, and we thought Gen Xers were coddled. I grew up in Manhattan, and one of our fun activities was to put on old-fashioned roller skates, and then grab the bumper of a bus or truck and take a ride. incredibly dangerous! However, there was a great neighborhood feel. In good weather the street was our playground. We would take trash barrels and block off one end of the street so that we could play street hockey. We had no umpires, so most of our time was taken up in arguing about whether something was out of bounds or not. Most of the brownstones on the block were run as rooming houses, and the landladies would sit on their stoops and keep an eye on everybody.

Born in 1973, and I remember every one of these. It really was the absolute best time to grow up, even in a fairly large community. All the scars and memories are things I would not change for anything.

Born in 1960 - grew up climbing trees, riding bikes, playing football with my brothers, cousins and neighbor kids. We ran wild playing hide and seek and tag. We had a ball!!!

im a gen xer never heard of the kite thing.we use to shoot bottle rockets at each other lol fun times

The "dangers" no way. It was so fun. I miss the 80's so much.

At the age of 10 I would help my dad shovel the snow off the roof. I remember my mom coming home from the store and I was up on the roof. She screamed at my dad his response was to say "it's safe I tied her to the chimney" LOL He had tied a rope around my waste and the other end was tied to the chimney. That made it "safe". 🤣🤣🤣🤣. It's a miracle I'm still alive

I’m a Gen X’er. 47. Born at the end of 76. Kid in the 80’s. Teenager in the 90’s. Yep. This is all true.

Everything from our childhoods wanted to kill us. Lol. And the questionable parenting actually worked in our favor. We grew up self sufficient, reliable, hard working, and damn durable.

Not dangerous because we were not soft little babies. We actually played outside and used our bodies. Sure we got bruised but it made us a little smarter the next time and more resilient. We didn't have to go to a psychiatrist for every event and doctors did not prescribe pills for most kids, they were just expected to adjust and move on. And yet, we survived and invented a lot of what you rely on today.

Loved laying in the back window of our neighbors car when they took us places, plus there was speakers back there from the radio :D

From '65, I cruised the entire generation and saw everything

Boomer here, we had the Cuban Missile Crisis and John Kennedy, really missed😢😢❤

Born in 1969 here and it was great growing up in the ‘80s

Best memories of my life. The 80's were the best decade to grow up in.

Those old wooden ramps are the reason I am a woodworker today. A few 2x4s, a wide board, a hammer, and some nails result in a weekend of fun. When we discovered that the ramp, when placed right on the far side of a ditch, could mean some real air-time we were set for a whole summer.

I was born in 1982. If I had one wish, it would be to live forever during the 80s or 90s

No we didn't have it dangerous we had fun we just wasn't weak and timid like the young people these days This generation nowadays is softer than medicated cotton

We used to hook the hose on the top of our metal slide to cool it off and make a water slide.

All this stuff is 100% true - I did have to go on the roof to fit the antenna - it was strapped to the chimney! drinking from the garden hose is how you got water, we weren't allowed in the house: In the morning my mom would tell me to go outside and play and I wasn't allowed back in the house (maybe for lunch) until evening for diner. The commercial "It's 10 o'clock, do you know where your children are?" was made for kids from GenX. I was outside most of the time as a kid and never ever even thought about sunscreen or wearing a hat. My mom knew who my friends were and where I may be, bu I didn't have a pager or cell phone, and one always kept a few coins in your pocket to call home, and back then a quarter or two would get you quite a bit to eat or drink. I went everywhere on my bike. We had metal lawn sprinklers, lawn darts, clackers, tether ball, kite fights were fun, metal bike pedals were a hazard ! i had BB and pellet guns and we had "airsoft" style wars with them with NO gear. the only rules were not to shoot someone in the face or their groin. Firecrackers were so common around the 4th and we had fun lighting them up all over. or taking them apart to make a bigger improvised explosive - lol. Jax and Legos were a threat to life. Seat belts were seldom used ( I do recall when that became a LAW though), and riding in the back or pickups or a station wagon was common. Plastic lounge seats sucked and the locking mechanism did pinch ! Both my parents and grandparents smoked like chimneys, and no one cared about second hand smoke. Kids buying cigarettes for their parents ( and some abusing that) is WHY you have to present ID by law to buy them nowadays.

Clackers! 😂 Outside until the streetlight came on. Our home was the popular place. We had the slip and slide, water wiggle, the football, horseshoes and a big crabapple tree in our yard. Of coarse all 5 of us had a bike.

GenX here! We were feral & Loved it!!! Good Times!!! Wish i could go back!

We used to grind up glass bottles with a couple of bricks. Then we would spread glue on the top few feet of our kite strings and dip them in the glass. That's how we did out kite fights. My neighbor's dad told us about that trick. We were also big into building model rockets. The black powder rocket engines we could buy were great, but the electric igniters were crap. My dad bought me about a hundred feet of fuse for a ceremonial cannon or something. We just cut off a few inches with our pocketknives and jammed it in. We then lit it with kitchen matches and ran. No adult was anywhere around us, ever, while we did all this.

I like watching these videos. Brings back memories. I remember everything from laying in the back window, bike pedals, ramps jumping over fences and even jumping off the roof with my bike. Think Super Dave and Evil Knievel were a bit inspiring for most of that.

'77 checking in! My parents were born in late 40's, raised in the 50's, married in late 60's. My sis is '72. We walked only so far UNTIL we got bikes for our birthday, then we went miles.

Riding in the back of a pickup truck was the best!! Growing up Gen X was a genuine fun experience

My shins are covered in scars from those bike pedals. Depending on the size we called them cat traps and bear traps. It was a great era when growing up. Me and my friends would drag a bed mattress out of the house and set it up below a tree, then proceed to jump from the tree and fall onto the mattress trying to imitate stunts from a stuntman series that was popular at the time. We also had an motorbike with no engine. We would light the tires on fire and ride it downhill and over a jump.

1965 Gen X. We had no fear, we figured things out for ourselves, we stood our ground, feral is one way to describe this generation and yes if you had an issue with us, we'd help you sort it out. I personally had 5 boomer generation military uncles that taught me how to defend myself, drive and shoot firearms by the age of 12. We are built to survive this chaotic world we currently live in. Get yourself a Gen X friend!

Born in 1970. We were never in danger. We had a BLAST! We had chores in the morning and out on our bikes for the day until it was time for dinner. It was so much fun growing up in the 70s and 80s. Kids today are overprotected. Parents need to lighten up. Most of us are grandparents now and enjoy the time with our grandchildren breaking our kids' overprotective rules. They didn't grow up like that - they have Gen X parents!

GenX here. Born 1971. Child of the 70s and teenager of the 80s.

I remember jumping our bikes off a culvert into the creek below - about a 10-12 foot drop. So dangerous but so much fun! Parents had no clue...they thought we were just out riding bikes!

My mom worked near the beach. She would take me and my brother to the beach, drop us off and then come down at lunch-where her and her coworkers would take a swim, have a beer and go back to the office, then come and pick us up at the end of the day. We were 8 and 10 when this started. We had keys to the house in kindergarten and walked home from school to an empty house. We really are lucky to be alive.😂

I remember sitting in the front seat of my dad’s car as a little kid and one day we were driving home from his sister Pauline’s house. The car in front of us stopped short at the traffic light. I wasn’t wearing a seat belt and hit the glove compartment cutting my lip open. It could have been worse. My dad was worried about what my mother would say.

Did every one of those, lol. Fire cracker fishing. Putting some rocks into an olive jar, add a firecracker and drop into a pond. Get a fish every time.

1967 here. My mother once told me I was lucky to have survived childhood as we lived in the mountains of Colorado. I was told to ALWAYS tell someone where I was going, and to ALWAYS have someone else with me, which I almost never did. I would climb the cliffs alone, hike the trails alone, explore all over my valley alone. Meanwhile, we had wolves, bears, cougars, and some moose all over the place. I would have been just one more mountain mystery if I'd disappeared, but I did find some cool places. I was ALSO home before dinner because I was more scared of my father than I was of gravity or of being eaten by a wild critter.

I was a latch key kid in '81, and we used to get told on the weekend, not to come back home during the day until the street lights came on. So, I'm definitely Gen X.

BB gun and firework fights, tackle football in the street, hurling lawn darts at each other, 'twas a magnificent childhood.

Those can opener chains were sharp AF. We got so many cuts making them 😂

My cousin fell off the roof. His dad told him to repair something up there, but I don't think it was a TV antenna. The original Slip and Slide was just a plastic sheet. It had no side rails or any way to direct a body down it. Also, some people used rocks at the 4 corners to keep it on the ground. Tanning? What about the chrome mirrors they use to use? In Canada, it wasn't until the mid 1990's that they started to clamp down on all the smoking by blocking smoking in restaurants. When I was a kid, my Dad had a 1964 Buick Wildcat and my "Special Seat" was the rear seat arm rest. Don't get me started on fireworks! LOL! Lots of good memories there! I forgot about a lot of those things, like the folding beach chairs.

There were actually cigarette vending machines in restaurants in the 1970s & 1980s & nobody paid attention to who was putting quarters in them. My mom literally still put her arm out when I was driving as an adult 😂 carseats & seatbelts were not mandatory until the later 1980s. My parents had a booster seat that just sat over the back of the seat without anything really securing it. They also had a bassinet that went on the floor in the back seat - it was over the hump in the middle - nothing to secure the baby at all. I remember the bench seat was big enough that my siblings could ride laying down. I actually remember riding in the back of a truck many times - including driving the 35 mile or so trip to the county fair every year for my friend's birthday. Her parents didn't have a vehicle big enough for the 8 of us to fit in, so we laid down in the bed if the truck.

I moved the antenna on our trailer house I don't know how many times as a kid lol.

Born in 1967, one of my best memories is when I climbed to the top of a 30-40 foot tall Norway Spruce. It was taller than our 2 story apartment building. I was about 6 or 7. The top was swaying and bending under my weight, but the view of the city was amazing!

We could bike to the movie theater, leave our bikes out unlocked, get out of the movie, get on our bikes, and head home. Society has turned children into a bunch of neurotic wimps.

Hey guys, I watch a lot of your videos, and I love them, and I just happen to be generation X. Born in 71 and graduated in 89 and we had the best childhood, and knowing the world we have today versus the world we grew up in, there’s no question about it. I am so grateful that I had the childhood I did.

I was born in 69, so basically I'm 54 almost 55 and I have to disagree with them saying "pickup truck weren't as common back then as they are now", where I grew up there were way more trucks in town than today. I feel like trucks and cars were pretty equal. The rest of the video brought back amazing memories and you 2 are ADORABLE ‼️❤🤗

They’re not kidding about being exposed to the sun. We went motorbike riding in the woods (forest) in tank tops. I burnt, blistered, peeled, then burnt again, blistered again and was just starting to peel for the second time. When riding in the high desert, we’re king sleeves, they also prevent lots of cuts from tree branches, but we bled, burnt and rode on.

Boomer here. We grew up with parents from the depression. We learned to make do and be creative to get things we wanted

I'm Gen X no one I knew was ever hurt. There was always a group pointing out what wasn't safe. Like in the classroom and 9 year Olds are using a jig.saw with no less than 5 kids holding the board.

Born 1965 here. Seems most are starting rhat way 😜 Not many mention dodge ball or scatterball as I remember it. The sting of getting hit on the side of your face. 😮 🔴 Also our capguns with a few grain of gunpowder it each cap. Your ears would ring after you smashed whole roll with a brick.

At 3:15. Ach, those pulled all the way up striped socks! All us boys wore those. To this day I still pull my socks all the way up - keeps the shins nice and warm :)

A lot of people forget that we had the Boy Scouts where at a very young age we were taking survival courses, helping make us more self sufficient and self reliant.

1957 Boomer here. Not just USA. British born USA bred. Remember clearly running around Liverpool with my cousins playing on RR tracks & riding bikes down blind hills. Back home in FL we used to chase the mosquito trucks on our bikes & ride right in that poison gas. We went to the beach ALONE and swam in the Gulf of Mexico all day. Fun stuff