There’s a reason so many of us who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s still laugh when we hear the phrase “latchkey kid.”

We were the generation of “Go outside and play,” “Be home when the streetlights come on,” and “Figure it out.” We rode our bikes until we were halfway across town, played outside without a parent hovering nearby, walked to school, made our own lunches, babysat our siblings, and somehow managed to survive without a GPS tracker attached to our backpacks.

If we got bored, we didn’t have an app for that... we had a bat, a ball, a neighborhood full of kids and a remarkable ability to turn absolutely nothing into an afternoon-long adventure.

Looking back, it wasn’t that our parents didn’t care. They loved us, they just didn’t feel the need to referee every moment of our childhood. Chores were chores, mistakes were lessons and disappointment was something you learned to handle instead of something adults immediately tried to fix.

Read more from this article on how growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s seemed to make us more self-sufficient... ➡️ YourTango