Why did parents in a major city let their 8 year old children roam around on their own all day?

Why did parents in a major city let their 8 year old children roam around on their own all day?

You kids will never understand what freedom was like back then.

When the street lights came on that meant time to go home. They had it on a an episode.
Man those where the days baseball in the street, stealing bikes to meet you p.o, backyard boxing at the corner house.

When exactly? Cities started becoming unsafe in the mid to late 1960s. Craig Bartlett's childhood was in the middle of some of the most dangerous times to live in a US city

if you walk through much of chicago in broad daylight you're going to get fucked up, especially if you're white.

What kinda shit city do you live in?

>Toronto
>late 90s early 2000s
>late spring to early autumn
>after dinner would either go to the park/playground and have fun or go the library or Indigo/chapters and read for hours on end
>if we had money we would go the arcade (not knowing that these were the final days of the arcade)
>when I was older at 14 (around 2003) myself and the anime club in our high school found out that Ryerson University had an anime club on friday nights from 7pm to midnight
>we would go downtown on a friday night, eat pizza, smoke weed and watch the newest anime.
>never was in the slightest danger, parents were cool as long as I told them where I was going and when I would be back
>this was when only adults had cell phones

Toronto is a lot different than seattle, chicago, and NYC (the places hey arnolds city is based on).

Though these days not so much, toronto quickly becoming a shithole

Isn't Seattle supposed to be one the nicest and safest cities in America?

Not for locals. Locals know where to avoid.

Never trust a big city

Personal Moto "Bigger the City bigger the Rats."

Just stay out of the south side. It's not that hard.

So they were never safe...

it's very hipster/millennial and has trendy areas with overpriced restaurants and tiny studio apartments for $2,000 a month.

Rest of the city is a pit full of homeless

people used to tell their kids to fuck off and go play outside and had no idea what the fuck they where doing

>This thread only fueling me with nostaliga of the good old days

Eh, I live in Seattle. It's very nice, pretty safe, but it's basically impossible to navigate, all the real estate is crazy fucking expensive, you can't do anything because everything is three times the amount of money in your bank account, and I couldn't imagine being a kid in this city. I mean, the downtown area is basically an apple store and a whole foods mashed together and all of the buildings that aren't reeking of piss (as cities should) are glittering with sterile white 21st century McArchitecture.


Denver is nice but it's basically a refugee camp for homeless people.

New Orleans is pretty cool but has a noticeably unique culture unto itself.

Tampa Bay is probably the nicest city in America but that's because nobody actually LIVES in Tampa-- the second the lights go out the city turns into this surreal twilight zone lookin' place.

Portland has all this hype about being a hipster haven but it really is just a few blocks of office buildings and a Walmart parking lot. And the minimum wage hasn't yet met the price of housing, so there's a significant poverty gap.

Nashville writhes with a rich industrial and almost colonial history but doesn't really resemble Hey Arnold's depiction of a big city at all.

The funny thing about Hey Arnold is that the city it could most easily take place in in the 21st century is probably Austin, Texas, which is SUPER walkable and SWIMMING with delightful independent shops with beautiful signage and a rich culture.

>delightful independent shops with beautiful signage and a rich culture.
Sound like the happy few live there.

>Things suburban white people ask

Daycare hadn't been invented yet.

Parents didnt gave a fuck.
Just "dont do drugs and please dont get pregnant"

Some city communities were actually close where everyone knew everybody. If you pulled some shit then you're parents would find out before you got home and you'd get your ass whooped the second you stepped inside.

>Nashville
>no public transportation
>feelsbad

God i miss the Eighties.

I see state-enforced helicopter parenting as a major cause of the SJW phenomenon and the desire for totalitarian control over others.

but the 80s and their satanist witch hunt helped contribute to the nanny state

They are 9+ & 13 you dumb chode choker.

Kids these days can look up just about anything on the internet and communicate with people across the world in seamless conversation.

But can they roam the city freely and safe?

>if you walk through much of chicago in broad daylight you're going to get fucked up, especially if you're white.

nuh uh because racism = privilege + time x speed of light

t. suburban white person

>a rich culture.
A rich culture composed primarily of hipsters and/or batshit insane people, yes.
It's nice, but it's not the promised land. Some of the shops make you wonder where the fuck these people come from. It IS probably the safest large city I've ever been in, and the food's good.
>t. person who was born and raised in Austin

Didn't your mayor recently propose a massive transit infrastructure bill? it made news in my area (DC area)

that and the Reagan Revolution brought back the crazy religious right.

As someone who grew up in a similar setting; it was normal for us to just float around the streets doing stupid shit. You could say it was unsafe but as long as there was a single parent on the block who had a window you could feel safe.

I don't really watch the news but when I have in the last week, all I've seen is news of her scandal. She's a democrat mayor in a republican state, so I imagine the local media is running with the scandal story front page.

Glass walls still make a cage, user.

>Mayor tries to get some fucking basic mass transit going
>Sex scandal outta nowhere
It's the biggest thing by far that the city's missing and now it might not even happen, fucking hell.

Because it was the 1990s.

t. Londoner.

You have obviously never lived in Chicago.

It was a safier time back then, you could've even left your doors unlocked without being cautious if some apes or thugs would break in and out.

Kurt Cobain murked it up.

Prolly is filled with nuNirvanafags who do nothing except consume drugs and aren't employed.

Statistically right now is safer than when HA was on the air.

>Helga staring at Arnold

Cute touch

>anything on the internet
Where's the freedom in sitting on your ass all day at home?

Geez-us Christ.

While shut up in their room snug and safe from all external stimuli

Even places like NYC have a lot of places where you'll never be in real danger, at least in the daylight

Most of Manhattan is honestly safe to walk through during the day, including Harlem. Which is fucking insane compared to how things were 30 years ago, but 30 years is a long time for a city. Things get more sketchy at night though for sure, although honestly a lot of Manhattan is safe even during the night now. Not all of it, but a lot.

that is a straight up fucking lie

classic team politics getting in the way of the greater good.

You have a population more than 6 times my city and you don't have public transit, but our city does.

Granted, ours doesn't run on sundays and on saturdays a few routes are only hourly instead of half hourly. But It's there, and it works just fine on the days it operates. Hell, to encourage people to use it, saturdays the bus is free. That's some real bullshit, my man.

>le first world problems meme

Before 9-11

Before SJW , "inmigrants", and Steven Universe...

Before Obama

Idk, I grew up in a podunk southern town. Literally just some houses, a rinky dink general store with expired food, and 1 gas station. My parents let me wander around because white trash methheads surprisingly don't fuck with people outside of their drug circles. Meth addicts aside, the town wasn't big enough to have gangs.

>I get all my information about the world from Sup Forums

jesus christ when the fuck were you born?
>be me
>born 1991
>parents old as fuck, mom had me at 40 and dad at 44
>by the time I was 5, they kicked me out of the house and told me to be home by sundown
>never got diddled
>never got offered drugs
worst that ever happened is big kids would chase me down and kick my ass if I was too slow, which is why I started riding a bike more often
there were helicopter parents who would complain to my parents that I would cross their yard just to get around and complain that I was unsupervised but my bread and butter until the age of 11 was finding pick-up groups of kids

>YFW you realize that the crack epidemic and AIDS really WERE CIA plots to destroy inner city communitiees

"political correctness" and whining about it have been things for years

The US is just rediscovering the issues they had before they went through extreme post 9/11 national delusion

Amen brother, thanks for SHADILAY!!!

Feel free to live stream yourself from the middle of South Side Chicago to prove them wrong.

Shut the fuck up OP and post more of the best girl.

Yeah TO became a shithole cause wait for it, blacks and immigrants.

This. Any major city that isn't safe for tourists during daylight is a fucking shithole. Including Chi Town.

Central District and Rainer Beach in the late 80's-early 90's were pretty fucked up. Gang violence was pretty high.

Wait a sec. They're 8? I always thought they were 10-12. They don't even look 8.

...

Damn man, Cleveland has half the population and still manages to have 3 train lines and a bunch of buses

They're 9 (except Harold, who's 13.) In the new movie they're 10-11.

Metropolitan populations often mean more to mass transit than strict city populations.
Still, Cleveland and Nashville have roughly equal metro populations, so it's really not an excuse. In fact people in Nashville are very aware of the problem and regularly complain, but the city council is so ludicrously conservative and bought out by old wealth that they practically refuse to spend money on a transit line. And I don't mean conservative in the stupid Rep/Dem way, I mean conservative in the "this city has functioned without public transit for decades and therefore doesn't need it" way.

My life feels like a lie.

This was back during the days where you could let your kids outside and not have to worry about them being kidnapped and molested.

I wonder (((who))) was behind the change.

>Why do I think the world was exactly like it is now?
Why isn't it legal to murder millennials like you? You aren't people and you don't have souls.

I was ten-eleven and already walking through the entire area of my neighborhood (Harlem). You would innately know what to avoid and where NOT to go. During the summer I'd be out until 8:30 or 9PM at the latest. If a kid stepped to you, you fought back or got fucked up and after you cleaned yourself up, you went back outside and got laughed at or gained a new friend. Do kids today even go out and play or are they still browsing YouTube unsupervised? I doubt kids today could play Manhunt without a parent going apeshit and calling the police.

When I went to school in New York I had a teacher who openly said that he lets his kid ride the subway alone. It's a lot safer in the last 20 years to the point where I've seen little kids walking by themselves on Broadway carrying groceries.

Craig Bartlett claims that it doesn't take place in the NYC area but I distinctly remember Mr. Simmons mentioning Penn Station during a lesson at least once.

Seattle was not NEARLY as expensive back in the 90s when Hey Arnold took place. But it wasn't exactly cheap either. I would have liked to visit during the very early 90s especially, ... except... ya know, all that Garage Band noise made it an unpleasant place to be.

I would imagine shady shit happened back then, but wasn't as publicly announced on TV. I was born in 87 so the whole idea of not being able to run around outside to wherever I wanted is strange to me.

I could imagine that everything on the media tells parents to not let your kids do anything because it might scar then for life when in reality they need to learn otherwise they are going to be hurt far worse in the future. It's like the middle School that said that for the Valentine's day dance, the children are not allowed the decline an invitation. If someone tells another that they want to go to the dance, they HAVE to accept. The whole modern child raising thought process is fucked to the point where the next generation is simply not going to be able to handle anything at all.

There's a book called "Free Range Kids" by a mom named Lenore Skenazy that was really popular a few years ago. I've only read interviews with the author but she cites a bunch of studies and statistics that show that Missing Person Reports and violent crimes against children have dropped significantly in the last two decades, but parents are more restrictive than ever when it comes to raising their kids. She makes the case that media sensationalism is behind most of the helicopter parenting and children aren't necessarily safer just because their family is constantly monitoring them.

It gets even worse when you realise that the vast majority of child molesters and kidnappers target children they know personally, such as nephews/nieces or friends of the family. It's like trying to solve a problem by focusing on the wrong things. Instead of teaching kids to be independent and to use their judgment to avoid walking into dangerous situations, modern parents try to shield them from all risk entirely on the off chance that something dramatic happens to them. It's an understandable fear but it also leads to all sorts of kids who grow up to have anxiety disorders when they get older. They never learned to be responsible for themselves because parents assume that all children are stupid.

>tfw i've walked all of Manhattan and through the South Bronx at night
get on my level, anons

If you did that in the 1980s you'd be dead, kiddo.

there are plenty of Penn Stations (pic related is Baltimore), it doesn't necessarily have to be in NYC

I mean I've been to NYC and the city in Hey Arnold looks really fucking similar to Brooklyn.

If I remember correctly from a podcast, Craig B said that Hey Arnold's city is based on a mix of Brooklyn, Portland and Seattle. It's not in Brooklyn, but it takes some inspiration from Brooklyn.

>Be me
>Living in rural Minnesota
>School and daycare are within walking distance
>Pedophile lives in an old beat up trailer between them
>People know about him but don't do anything since he was put there by the police for parole
>Has a giant metal fence with wooden cartoon deer decorations on it that we ride past every day on the way to school
And yes he did drive a beat up white van

There was also the time some guy with a knife got arrested in the woods by the daycare

Haha, yeah they can. Wouldn’t it be wild if they were talking to you now but you didn’t know? Haha how weird would that be lol

Dude I went to Chicago a few years back and outside of taking the train all we did was walk the city is crowded as fuck during the day not much is gonna happen.

>immigrants and political correctness weren't things in the 90s
They were you just weren't arguing about it on the internet at that time.

It was always funny to me, that in TV you always heard kids getting punished by being grounded, when my parents punished me and my siblings by forcing us to play outside

>police assigned a pedophile to live between a school and daycare
Bullshit. That's either a massive oversight or they have a twisted sense of justice.

same thing happened in my country once.
Another story was that a pedophile who got out of prison was given a job as a janitor at an elementary school.
Or another story, that a pedophile, who didn't yet commit any crimes, went to the police himself and said they should lock him up because he was afraid he might attack some kids eventually. They told him that they can't do anything as he hasn't done anything yet, so he was let go. A year later he raped a boy.

The justice system and governments are completely flawed.

>Or another story, that a pedophile, who didn't yet commit any crimes, went to the police himself and said they should lock him up because he was afraid he might attack some kids eventually. They told him that they can't do anything as he hasn't done anything yet, so he was let go.
why not just go to a therapist...

Maybe he already went to one, or maybe he didn't know that was an option, or maybe he wanted to be in prison but not in an asylum

I walked it at 2 am as a tiny female tourist. Fight me.

I knew women were the ones posting that stupid "fight me" pretentious garbage

Oh man, It's going to be interesting to see how my kid turns out if by some god given miracle i manage to reproduce.
I was pretty much a shut in growing up. I wasn't allowed to leave the house alone, or even go to other kids houses. They couldn't come over either. However, my parents were all for buying me any new video game or whatever came out to entertain myself.

The US experienced a major crime epidemic from the late 60s to the early 90s, crime rates started to fall off from the mid-90s onward.

Yeah I'm north of Seattle and most people I know my age are either still living with parents or renting with like 6 other strangers. I have half a mind to go live in a trialer park in Marysville, unless those are 1k a month as well

>pic related

Honestly a good portion of the Bronx is safe at night, obviously around the colleges like Fordham and Manhattan college (although that's Riverdale at that point). Tbh most of nyc is harmless as long as you know where you need to go