Before the Internet Raised Us: A Childhood That Required Sunlight

I grew up in a time when you were allowed to play outdoors all day. Not supervised. Not tracked. Not tethered to a device that let your parents know your exact location at all times. You just went outside. And you stayed there until someone called you in for dinner or the streetlights came on. Bathroom breaks? Glad you asked. Nope, all outdoors.

We explored on our bicycles. Rural routes. Ditches. Empty barns that probably should have been condemned but made for excellent hideouts. We rode under spraying crop dusters, which I do not recommend but absolutely happened more than once. Might explain my intermittent tick while talking. We ran away from home at least once a week, always knowing exactly what time dinner was and making sure we got back before we missed it.

You came inside only when your parents wanted to make sure you ate or they needed to go to bed. That was it. The rest of the day belonged to you.

No internet. No cell phones. No lols, bffs, or fomo. Just Pong and GI Joe if you were lucky. Marlin Perkins and Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and the wonderful world of Disney every magical Sunday night. No ESPN. No streaming on demand. No binge-watching an entire season in a weekend because there were no seasons to binge. You watched what was on or you did not watch anything at all.

Life was simpler. I know that sounds old. I know it sounds like the kind of thing someone

says right before they start complaining about kids these days. But there was a difference. A real one. Not better, necessarily. Just different.

We had playgrounds that were part safe zone, part death trap. Swings that went high enough to make you question your choices when you let go at the top. Merry-go-rounds that spun fast enough to throw you clear across the playground if you tried to jump off while it was moving. Metal slides that turned into griddles in the summer sun. You learned physics the hard way. Gravity did not care about your feelings.

We drank water from the garden hose. Not because it tasted good. Because it was there and you were thirsty and nobody thought twice about it. But gotta say it did not taste good; it tasted great.

Baseball still had stirrups. Actual stirrups. The kind that made you look like you meant business even if you could not hit a curveball to save your life. Sports highlights came once a week during Wide World of Sports. You did not get to watch your team's game on replay. You did not get instant highlights on your phone. You got one shot at seeing it live or you waited until Saturday afternoon to catch the recap and hope they covered your team.

Iconic voices broadcasting games. Keith Jackson, Curt Gowdy and of course Vin Scully. Voices that made you feel like you were part of something bigger, even if you were just sitting in your living room in your pajamas. The Raiders and the Cowboys were still relevant. Still mattered. Still felt like they could win it all every single year. Now you know I am old. Cowboys and Raiders, good? Yes it was a thing back in the day.

Getting grounded meant something back then. It did not mean losing access to your tablet or phone. It meant being cut off from life itself. Stay in your room. No friends. No going outside. No riding your bike. No exploring. Just you, your room, and whatever books you could find to keep from going completely insane.

Listening to teenage girls talk on the phone while you sat there too shy to say anything that might incriminate you. I was ahead of my time in that regard. Bashful. Quiet. Careful. Watching what I said around the opposite sex because I had already learned that one wrong word could end you. You would think I would have learned to keep my mouth shut with women as I got older. But no. Turns out some lessons do not stick no matter how early you learn them.

We were outside because that is where life happened. You made up games. You built forts. You rode your bike until your legs hurt and then you kept going because there was nothing else to do and nowhere else to be. You got into trouble. You got out of trouble. You learned how to navigate the world without a GPS telling you where to go or a parent texting to check in every twenty minutes.

Nobody worried about screen time because there were no screens to worry about. Nobody talked about social media destroying childhood because social media did not exist. You just had the world in front of you and the understanding that you needed to be home by a certain time or there would be hell to pay.

It was not perfect. It was not some golden age where everything was better and kids were tougher and life made more sense. But it was real. Tangible. You could feel it. The dirt under your fingernails. The sting of a scraped knee. The way your lungs burned after racing your friend down the street on your bike.

You learned resilience because you had to. You learned independence because nobody was coming to save you from a boring afternoon. You learned how to entertain yourself, how to make something out of nothing, how to turn a ditch and a stick into an entire afternoon's worth of adventure.

I do not know if kids today are missing out or if we are just nostalgic for something that was not as good as we remember it being. Maybe both. Maybe neither.

But I do know this. Growing up outside, untethered, unsupervised, with nothing but time and curiosity and a bike that barely worked, it taught me things I still carry with me. How to explore. How to take risks. Grit development. And the knowledge of how to come home when it mattered and disappear when it did not. How to Get Outside. How to explore life downstream. (more on this later).

And maybe that is the point. Not that it was better. But that it was ours. A childhood that required sunlight. A world that made you show up in person if you wanted to be part of it.

I am grateful I got to live it. Even if I still have not learned to keep my mouth shut around women.

Thanks for reading.