How Did We Survive Childhood?

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Growing up, I remember our family of seven going places in one car. I remember the lap belts in the front seat. I remember five children packed into the back seat with no seatbelts at all. As the oldest of those five kids, I’m talking about the years before 1974, when I left home at eighteen.

I remember my mom holding my infant sister, Jeni, in the front seat while my dad drove. We never had baby car seats for any of us, so she probably held Jeff and Todd when they were babies too. It sounds horrifying now, but at the time it felt completely normal. Luckily for us, we were never in an accident that caused any harm.

Thinking about this sent me down a rabbit hole. I got curious about when seat belt laws came into effect in Ohio. I discovered that Ohio enacted its first mandatory seat belt law on May 6, 1986. At first, it only applied to front seat passengers, with full enforcement beginning after July 4 of that year. Children under four were required to be in a car seat or booster. Children and teens ages four through fifteen were required to wear seat belts in the back seat. Interestingly, Ohio still does not require adults sitting in the back seat to wear seat belts.

That last part was news to me. Anyone sitting in my back seat has to buckle up or we all get to listen to the relentless ding, ding, ding of the seat belt alarm. Highly annoying, but effective. It did make me wonder whether cars sold in Ohio have those alarms disconnected, or if people just ignore them.

This blog is a classic example of how my brain works. The original prompt for today was simple: “What seemed harmless to you as a kid that you now look back on in horror?” My answer was easy. No seatbelts for kids. But of course, I couldn’t stop there. I had to look up seat belt laws not just in Ohio, but also in California, where I lived from 1974 to 2023, and Minnesota, our home since 2023. For the record, both California and Minnesota require adult passengers in the back seat to wear seat belts.

Once I opened that door, more memories came flooding in.

There was trying to swing high enough on a swing set to flip over the top bar by wrapping the chains around it. I never quite made it, but I got pretty high. At my grandparents’ house, my brothers or cousins had to hold down the legs of the swing set so it wouldn’t tip over. Park swings felt luxurious because their legs were set in concrete.

There was walking to the bathroom at the drive in by myself as a little kid, barefoot on stones and small rocks. First, how did I never slice my feet open? Second, how was I not kidnapped?

And then there was leaving the house at age ten to walk into town to visit or play with other kids. It was probably a quarter mile, out in the countryside, walking along the road where maybe three or four cars passed by. There were no mobile phones. I don’t even remember if we had a house phone in that particular house. What I do remember is that it was important to be home when my mom said to be home. I also suspect that other adults in the community were quietly keeping an eye on me and all the other kids wandering around.

Looking back, it’s tempting to gasp at how reckless it all seems. But it was also a different time, shaped by different expectations, fewer safeguards, and a lot of trust. Some of what we did was genuinely dangerous. Some of it was survivorship bias at work. And some of it was simply childhood, lived with scraped knees, bare feet, and a freedom that feels almost unreal now.

I wouldn’t trade modern safety standards for nostalgia, but I’m grateful I lived long enough to look back and say, with equal parts disbelief and relief, “Well, that could have gone badly.”