Adults Are Sharing The “Fun” Childhood Things That’d Totally Shock Gen Alpha

Recently, we shared responses from Redditor @clumsypandaaaa asking, “What’s something people did for fun that would totally confuse younger generations today?” The BuzzFeed Community’s reaction to the post was truly significant. Many offered their own stories about favorite childhood activities that aren’t so popular today. So here are another 17 bygone kid activities:

Responses have been edited for length and clarity

1.“Every kid had a bicycle. A group of us would head out in the morning, and we’d be gone until suppertime. Our parents had no idea where we were! Sometimes, we would ride out to an old bridge that was 12 miles away. Sometimes we’d park our bikes and go wandering around in the woods. Or we’d climb over the fence and play inside the empty swimming pool when it was the off-season. Of course, we didn’t have cell phones back then!”

—Anonymous, 65, Central North Carolina

2.“Curb ball: throw a tennis or rubber ball against the steps or the curb. We lived on a dead-end street of 20 townhouses (rowhouses). If you cleared or hit the house on the opposite side of the street, it was a homerun.”

—Anonymous

3.“My parents dropped me and my cousin off at the beach at ages 9 and 11 with a fanny pack of money. We’d play all day on the boardwalk, beach swings, the pier, ocean swim, lie out, visit the arcade, buy food, eat snow cones, and have a complete blast. Picked us up at sunset!”

—Anonymous, 55, Texas

4.“Back in the early 1960s, as kids, we would walk along roads to collect glass beverage bottles and then walk to the local grocery store for the deposit money. For a regular soda bottle, it was 3 cents, and a large bottle was 5 cents. A popsicle was just 5 to 7 cents. It was a great incentive to pick up and cash in on what some people threw away. And yes, we did this without needing adult supervision.”

—Anonymous, Southern California

5.“Out for a Sunday ride with the parents, and the only amusement was to count telephone poles!”

—Anonymous, 68, New Jersey

6.“When you went over to a friend’s house, you wouldn’t knock on the door or ring the bell. Instead, you would stand at the door and call their name in a sing-song way until they came out.”

—Anonymous

7.“We would play stickball in the middle of the street using sewers for bases, a broom handle for a bat, and a Spalding or Pensie Pinkie for a ball.”

—Anonymous, 77, Colorado (formerly Brooklyn, NY)

8.“The fact that we got left alone so much is something that would confuse kids today. I remember being in 4th grade and riding my bike all around the city. I would just have to be home before dark. But in the summer, that can be close to 10 p.m. And we still did not have to go inside. Just check in, and then run back outside to collect lightning bugs, play tag, jump on the trampoline, or camp out. My mom just made sure there was food in the house, but there would be days when I did not even see her. She would leave notes written on an envelope saying, ‘Heat up this for dinner,’ or ‘Make sure your little brothers got a bath,’ or ‘Put the clothes in the dryer,’ or some other chore.”

“She worked a lot as a single mother in the ’80s. And on her days off, we would sometimes go do something, but there were also times she would go out with her friends to the bar. She married my stepdad when I was 14, but we were mostly independent by that point. It wasn’t until my daughter was born that we started doing ‘family’ stuff.”

—Anonymous, 49, Texas

9.“Camp out overnight for two or three days just to buy concert tickets, then camp out overnight so you could be the first into the show.”

—Anonymous, 58, Austin

10.“We made up a game we called bean bean. Basically, it was the home base version of hide-and-seek, but the person who’s seeking has a football to ‘bean’ (aka hit) you as you run to the base for safety. This was played after the sun went down, so you could hide in the bushes by the surrounding homes. The base was usually a telephone pole.”

—Anonymous, 68, Hawaii

11.“I grew up in a California beach town. If we were at home on a nice day, parents would encourage kids to go to the beach BY THEMSELVES! I recall spending so much time at the beach, starting when I was 10 years old and without parental supervision. Riding waves, talking to strangers, climbing boulders, poking jellyfish… not wearing sunscreen. So much danger all around!! It was a blast.”

—Anonymous, 46, Portland

12.“I went to a Montessori school when I was in elementary, and my school principal would send me to the 7-Eleven around the corner to buy her a pack of cigarettes. The guy in the store didn’t seem to think anything of it, and neither did the principal. I was about seven years old.”

—Anonymous

13.“We played cork ball. We’d take a cork from a bottle of champagne (or whatever) and wrap it over and over again with a white cloth-like tape. There was always a lot of this type of tape around back then for some reason. Then we would get a stick like a broomstick (or whatever we could find) and play baseball. Our fields were gravel lots. Bases were circles scratched in the dirt. Those cork ‘balls’ could really fly.”

—Anonymous, 77, Rhode Island

14.“Friends and I would go door to door, asking for old clothes to play dress up. I still remember the chiffon gown that I wore most often!”

—Anonymous, 62, California

15.“At the mature age of 10 or 11, I was trusted to explore deeply wooded 400 acres of land for fun with nothing but a portable CB radio (which did not work well around the taller trees) and maybe a machete and some water. Kinda crazy in hindsight.”

—Anonymous, United States

16.“Every time I hang out with my younger friends, I have this nostalgia for sitting by the ditch in front of my house below a lamp post, just talking until our moms yelled us to go back. We would also throw stuff at the lamp for fun. I get the weirdest looks because it is apparently ‘really boring’ now.”

—Anonymous, 30, Republic of Panama

17.Finally, “Play ‘statues’ whenever a car would drive by. We would pose in various ways on the lawn, hoping to be noticed by those passing by. So silly but so fun. We would laugh and laugh.”

—Anonymous, 34, South Carolina

Have a childhood activity of your own that kids today would be so baffled by? Let us know in the comments or anonymous form below!