1 Can we assume Mom does not know about Dad's trained monkey show?

2 Maybe they could help get back my precious?

3

Kids climb stuff.  It is the way of the kid.

Those kids ain't gonna get pushed around much.

4 Kids that young don't break, they bounce.

I can't tell you how I proved this. Just trust me.

5 Naturally it's the Dad who encourages this and videos it.  Dads parent differently than Moms; my ex-wife could never understand this.

6 Now where is the kitteh?

7 Dad is also teaching them capitalism.

8 Eh, my Mom never cared if I was up in a tree with a bunch of the other neighborhood kids. But yeah, Mom teaches, Dad trains. My father actually had these little sounds he would make that we were quickly conditioned to respond to like little automatons.

A quick "psht" was 'get out of my line of sight to the TV.'

9

Thought it was cute at first until I saw them climbing high enough to get seriously hurt if they fell.

More bad parenting.  Sigh. . .

10 Full of awesome.  Looks like dad is doing his part - can't be raising no wimps.

11 My maternal grandma had a big grapefruit tree in her back yard.

When mom started aborning children, grandma started pruning that tree, and training out the branches, so it'd be a "good climbing tree" by the time we were old enough.

It was a good climbing tree for sure and for certain too. Lots of fond memories scampering along up in that thing.

I miss grandma. She was all kinds of awesome.

12 So Spider-man did eventually have kids...good for him.

13 Is "bad parenting" teaching children to take risks or teaching children fear of risk?

I don't think this is bad parenting at all.

Some of you people have pretty low standards of risk, for Morons.

14 "A quick "psht" was 'get out of my line of sight to the TV.'"

That was my signal for run and get me a beer. And I was the good parent.

15 That's not very high for a kid that little to fall from. Come on. They don't weigh anything and they're made of rubber. And if a kid never gets a bump or the wind knocked out of them, they're not living much are they? I had much worse accidents than that growing up, and I'm fine.

::TWITCH::

Juuuust fine

16 I know just how those kids feel.

17 I think that's awesome!  Like others said, these kids weigh nothing.  They'd probably float down to the ground like feathers if they lost their grip.  And the floor is almost certainly carpeted.

Kids are resilient.  Also, there was candy to be claimed, and it was up there!

18 My Dad didn't mind when I figured out how to climb from a privacy fence onto our house roof. Of course, he was a roofing contractor and having a kid who was stupid fearless about heights paid off when I big enough to work for him. Before then, I broke my arm falling out of a tree house and another time my buddy put a 20d clean through the arch of his foot jumping down from same onto a board we had cleverly pounded said 20d into. The five sets of parents of our little terrorist gang were unanimous in expressing the thought that 'boys will be boys'. None banned us from that tree house or any other. My sister's upbringing was quite different - and very unlike lauraw's. Lauraw got the better deal, IMHO.

We had lawn darts too.

19 C'mon, think a minute. That's not the first time those tots have climbed for candy. Their falls are all behind them and took place a few feet off the ground. By the time they got far enough off the ground to actually fuck themselves up, they were proficient little climbers and unlikely to bust themselves up in pursuit of those Pops.

20 Lawn Jarts were the shizz. I think you can still get them on ebay.

brb

21 When the bad guy comes, those kids will shimmy up the wall, disappear into the vent, and chill like Newt until daddy Ripley comes home.

22 Those kids went seriously Spider-monkey.

23

We climbed the door jambs or whatever they're called all the time. Had to be barefoot, of course, so your sweaty feet would stick to the resin. When we got older we used to prop ourselves up there, back on one side and feet on the other, and read.  Hey, there were five kids in a tiny two-bedroom flat - you had to get out of the way somehow. And trees were vertical adventure. The cherry tree next to the garage was the ladder for many picnics/sunset gazings/water bomb ambushes on and from the garage roof.  Awesome childhood memories.

My husband was horrified when he saw me trying to teach the kids how to climb trees. Tsk.  He didn't grow up right.  He can't shuffle cards, roller skate or blow bubbles with gum, either.

24 Overprotective parenting is probably the norm now, but it used to be pretty rare. I remember kids who never got to do anything. I felt sorry for them.

25 "we did know our limitations. Like don't use an umbrella as a parachute" Some of us weren't so smart. I learned that one the hard way, only with a baloon on a stick.

26 I was thinking about this the other day: My parents never told me not to climb trees, even when I had a cast on my arm from falling out of one.

27 A while ago I knew a guy who was born and spent his young formative years in Cuba. In 2005 he and I were part of a group that did a cruise out of Fort Lauderdale to Cozumel. Part of the package was a day of touring in the Everglades. At the parking lot for one of the tourist traps there was a row of tall coconut palms. He went straight up one just like those two kids about 35 or 40 feet in the air and started throwing down ripe coconuts.

28

Having spent my formative years climbing trees, I too find this ability to be lacking in today's young'uns. Shit, I used to climb onto roofs all the time.

Modern moms have been conditioned not to let the kids outside for fear of them being abducted. This had led to childhood obesity and video-game injuries and a morbid lack of curiousity about the world outside. With overprotective moms everywhere (along with emasculated or absent dads), we have an uphill battle to fight to give these kids a wonderful childhood of freedom, exploration and self-confidence.

These kids are learning the valuable skill of being careful. Their Dad is to be applauded or bought a beer, or both. It's about time we started raising children the old-fashioned way, to be aware of their surroundings instead of just confining them indoors.

In my case, had anyone abducted me, I would've been returned to the house within the hour. Did I mention I could be a gigantic PIA when I wanted to be?

29 I'm sorry this post got bumped so soon. Some of these stories are bringing back great memories.

30 OK, this video is not about freedom- it's about a guy training his kids like chimps- but the stories you are sharing are all about the freedom we had as youngsters. Freedom comes with a price, yes?

Kids get hurt.When a kid breaks their arm on the Jungle Gym, now we shut down the whole playground so nobody can play there anymore. Does that seem right?

I know there's a line. I think we're over it, though.

When I used to climb trees as a wee one, there was no grass to cushion my fall. Italian-style city backyard: huge cherry trees growing in a square of soil, surrounded by concrete paving. And we were all up there in the boughs, all us little kids, 5, 6, 8 years old.
If you fell, well, you shouldn't have done that!
And we walked blocks away from where we were supposed to be, and it got late and dark, and we heard my mother's voice ringing out from our brick apartment building, and ran home for dinner. This was just life.

Later when we moved to the suburbs, a few little 12-yo. girlfriends and I took a sojourn one weekend morning and ended up pretty far from home, but it was still mid-morning when we saw the sign on this house about kittens for free. We knocked on the door and played with the kittens, but had no way to bring one home. The lady of the house called my mom, who was perplexed about how her kid had walked ALL THE WAY TO THERE while she was still bumbling around in her robe.

She drove out and got us and I got a kitten. There were no warnings, admonitions, or trouble of any kind, except that I would be caring for this cat, and not her.

By about the age of 14 I was starting to resent being 'mothered' when I got some minor injury. At that point it was clear to me that I was going to be taking care of these things myself in the future and not relying on outside help, because it grated so much.

Shit has changed. Kids don't appreciate freedom, they actually reject it, because they have never tasted it.

31 I was about five when I realized that the hole in the Ford's back window deck where a speaker used to be was just big enough for me to crawl through and get into the trunk. I recruited my little brother to go with me, and for several weeks we got away with crawling in there during night trips and screwing around. (When there are five kids in a '53 Ford, you can get away with a lot of shit.) Then one night we got caught. My dad pulled over, opened the trunk and got us out. "Boys, we don't play in the trunk," he said. That was the sum total of our punishment.