I’m about to sound like one of those people. I know it. The kind who corners you at a party to explain that everything was better when the cars had no airbags, and the milk came in glass.
I’ve heard myself starting to do it, and I’ve watched the younger person’s eyes do the polite thing. So let me get the disclaimer out of the way: I understand how this sounds. Really.
I raised my kids in the 1980s. Most afternoons, I had no idea where they were. They rode bikes with bare heads, rolled around the way-back of a station wagon with no belt to speak of, and came home when they got hungry. There was no app on my phone with a little dot showing me where they stood. There was no phone.
And here’s the part I’ve earned the right to say: they turned out wonderful. Not wonderful the way every parent says it about their own kid — I come from a generation that will tell you, flat out, over coffee, when their kid is a mess. We don’t varnish it. We compare notes about the ones who can’t hold a job and the ones who moved back home. So when I tell you mine are steady, capable, the kind of adults other people lean on, that’s a report, not a brag.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I think some of it came from exactly the things that would get a parent reported today.
I didn’t know where they were, and that was the point
They left after breakfast on a Saturday, and I’d see them when the sun was setting. In between was a whole world I had no access to — somebody’s backyard, the creek, the lot behind the grocery store, a bike ride to a part of town I would have worried about if I’d known.
I didn’t know. That was the arrangement, and everyone’s mother ran it the same way.
What I see now is that those empty hours were the whole education. With no adult standing there, they had to settle their own arguments, decide whether the older kids were trouble, and figure out how to get home when somebody’s plan fell apart. A hundred small calls a day, none of them run past me first.
Mine grew up with no one in charge of them for hours at a time, and they built the muscle you only build by using it. Now they’re the adults who handle the canceled flight and the flooded basement without calling me first. They had years of practice before they were twelve, back when there was no one to call.
They got hurt and learned they’d live through it
There were no helmets in sight. I want to be straight about what that meant: it meant scrapes that should’ve had stitches, a wrist that healed a little crooked, the time my son went over the handlebars and walked the bike home with his elbow open. I cleaned it at the kitchen sink, and he was back out the next morning.
I’m not recommending the open elbow. But there was something in the whole arrangement — the falling, the getting up, the discovering that a bad spill hurts like the end of the world and then, by dinner, doesn’t — that did something lasting.
I watch younger kids now who’ve been caught before every fall, and a lot of them reach adulthood having never once found out they could take a hit and be fine. So the first real setback — the breakup, the layoff, the bad grade — arrives feeling like proof the world is ending, because they’ve got nothing to measure it against.
My kids found out at seven that you bleed, you cry, and then you ride again.
More Bolde Stories
They got bored, and I didn’t fix it for them
There were long, shapeless weekends with nothing in them. No lesson, no screen to hand over, no mother who saw it as her job to keep them entertained.
I met “I’m bored” with a shrug and a closed door (and I know that sounds harsh, now, but it was very much of the times). Bored was their problem to solve, and they solved it — forts, a neighborhood game with rules they invented, a hole dug in the yard for no reason, a whole afternoon of something out of nothing.
I didn’t know I was doing them a favor. I just didn’t think entertaining them was my job. But that empty time is where a kid learns to start something on their own, to follow their own curiosity instead of waiting to be handed the next thing.
Mine learned to run their own engine, because no one was going to run it for them. The children I see now never have to — scheduled to the minute, or holding a screen that won’t let a dull moment sit. They’re never bored, which sounds like a kindness until you watch the grown version: the ones who can’t sit with themselves, who need a plan and a person and a notification before the day feels like it’s moving.
I’m not saying we should go back to no seatbelts
Let me just be clear: We got lucky. Not every kid in my neighborhood made it to forty, and I know which places, corners, and houses I’d have lost sleep over if I’d been watching. The car seats, the helmets, the smoke detectors — that wasn’t overprotection, that was us learning.
I buckle my grandchildren in. I’d never argue otherwise.
But protecting a kid’s body and managing a kid’s every move are two different things, and somewhere along the way, they got fused into one. You can strap a child in and still let them out of your sight. You can make the car safe and still let the afternoon be theirs.
What I worry about isn’t the safety gear. It’s the watching — the dot on the map, the text to confirm, the hand that reaches in before the kid has even wobbled.
A child who is never out of sight learns, deep down, that the world is too dangerous to face without a grown-up nearby. And that child becomes an adult who keeps looking for the grown-up.
The best thing I ever did for my kids was not know where they were.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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