The 1980s were a decade of neglect

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and I haven’t felt freedom or terror like it since.

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The hardest thing to convey to the children in my life about my childhood is the concept of unadulterated freedom. As people who have been scheduled and monitored down to the second for most of their lives, they truly cannot conceive of life outside of the panopticon of their own experience. When I was a child, a successful day was one where I saw my mother for two hours total, split evenly before and after she went to work.

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Helicopter parents were born in the 1980s, a direct response to their personal experience of being roundly ignored by their own parents. Children were not to be seen nor heard, and we were definitely not supposed to complain about any injuries sustained during the 15 hours a day we roamed the streets. We saved popsicle sticks from the Fat Frogs, Rocket Pops, and assorted ice cream purchased at the Good Humor truck to fix our sprained and broken digits, taping them to our misshapen fingers and toes with contraband masking tape snuck out of a kitchen drawer while someone’s mom watched Days of Our Lives in the living room. Mosquito bites were relieved by using our fingernail to press a cross shape into the swelling skin, bee stings were only an emergency if they caused our throats to swell so much we could no longer call out “Marco!” or “Polo!,” and the only antiseptic liquid used on cuts and scrapes was our own spit.

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“Do not run in and out of this house all day with your friends,” Mom said sternly. “I don’t want you in here ruining everything.” It was never clear to me what we might ruin or how we could ruin it since we had to ask her for permission to play with our own toys, but in Mom’s mind, any child left alone in a house for more than three minutes was looking for an excuse to rip couch cushions apart with their bare teeth.

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Staying outside all day meant we had to find ways to be resourceful about the lack of a toilet almost immediately, and the biggest daily grift was trying to weasel your way into a bathroom. Any bathroom. Stay-at-home moms everywhere lived by the same credo: No Child Left Inside. Sometimes someone would summon the courage to knock on a door and ask. The mom would answer and narrow her eyes suspiciously. “Number one or number two?” If it was number one, she’d just shake her head. “Outside,” she’d say, pointing into the distance. “Can’t have you kids running in here all day.” If it was number two, she asked the cruelest question of all: “Can’t you just hold it until you go home?” Even if your guts felt like a freshly wrung T-shirt, you instinctively knew that the answer was yes. It took a real psychopath to ask that question, and a real sociopath to say no.

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Wildness can exist indoors, but it’s not as fun. As latchkey kids, my brother and I had to entertain ourselves for hours before my mom got home from work, which generally resulted in some form of shoulder-high mayhem. The crowning example of this would be the creation of Spiderweb City, which we achieved by ransacking Mom’s yarn basket, tying a loose end to a piece of furniture, and running around the room looping the yarn to furniture, shelving, and window latches until the entire space looked like that parkour theft scene from Ocean’s Twelve. Once she was able to slice and hack her way inside, Mom was furious. I spent the cumulative equivalent of entire days pressing my nose into various corners of our apartment as punishment, but I was never grounded for anything I did outside of the house, where, for example, I routinely lit things on fire. Indoor creativity pushes the boundaries of parental patience far quicker than outdoor wildness.

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