We did all kinds of things when I was a kid that the “helicopter parents” of today would find horrifying. We built ramps to jump our bikes (inspired by Evel Knievel), had bottle rocket fights around 4th of July (everyone survived), and horror of horrors, stayed out all day without our parents knowing exactly where we were (no cell phones).
I live in Denver now, but grew up in Illinois. When I lived in Illinois our parents used to take us every now and then to Six Flags over Mid-America near St. Louis. This was back when it was clean and new and more like a “Disneyland for the rest of us” than the run-down adrenaline junkie parks that those places have since become. Back then, there was a ride called “Adventures on the Mississippi.” It was obviously inspired by Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise, and it similarly involved guided boats that carried a couple dozen people or so and wound their way around the river, encountering various “challenges” and “dangers.” The climax of the ride involved a fort with cannons firing at your boat, complete with big splashes when the “cannonballs” hit the water (driven by underwater air compressors, I believe).
Well, once back home after one of our visits, a couple of my friends and I suddenly realized we had a large stand of woods behind our subdivision, and lo and behold, it had a stream (actually, a small creek) running through it. We also realized that one friend had a small plastic boat, I had a cap gun (one of the revolvers that used the round plastic caps, not the paper ones), and another had a bow and some arrows. You can probably see where this is going....
Well, to make a long story short, we used what we had to set up our own version of “Adventures on the Mississippi”, and charged the little kids in the neighborhood one dollar each to experience it. We rigged the plastic boat up by tying fishing line to it and attaching pulleys to several trees so that it could be pulled along the “river” (creek) invisibly while the little kids rode it one at a time. Unfortunately, we were a little short on cannons, so another of my friends would hide near the creek and throw big rocks in ahead of the boat to simulate cannon fire.
There was also a walking tour portion to the “experience”, which involved coming across a Bigfoot track on the trail, and encountering a real live Indian in a tree with a bow and arrows. The plan for that scene was that whoever was playing tour guide would see the Indian and, using the cap gun, dispatch the Indian before he could do the tour group any harm. Whoever played the Indian would then pretend to die and slump down on the tree branch they were perched on. It worked great except for that one time that I fired at the Indian, and my friend, instead of playing dead in the tree ended up doing a little too good a job of acting and fell out of the tree about 10 or 12 feet to the ground. He fell in tall grass, so I couldn’t see him, but....the show must go on!, so we continued on while I hoped that he was still alive. Turned out he was fine, relatively speaking.
Kids today just don’t have the imagination that we did, and if they tried to do anything remotely like what I’ve described above the authorities would probably show up and take the kids away. No kid I knew ever wore a helmet for anything other than playing football, and we all survived. We rode our bikes for miles (again, without helmets) and we all survived. Sure, we got banged up sometimes, but it was all part of growing up, and our freedom to imagine and dream, and then to sometimes face the painful consequences of our choices, built character.
By treating kids today like fragile little snowflakes, they are becoming precisely that.