the times

Times change, obviously. Things go in and out of fashion, bad habits are discovered to be robustly harmful, taboos are dropped or acquired, stereotypes evolve. So it's not in any way surprising that some of the shit that featured commonly in your childhood are completely unknown to the next generations. It's as unrealistic to expect acceptable norms to stay the same as it is to expect fashion to stay the same. But sometimes I find out that things I thought of as being completely normal are nowadays considered extremely dangerous or inappropriate.

I know some of the shit I did is dangerous. When there were to many kids for the number of seats available on our admittedly severely overcrowded bus, my fellow school bus riders and I would instead crowd into the seatless 'emergency exit' space or sit in the aisles. Obviously this is a dangerous situation just waiting to happen and we were all very fortunate we weren't hurt.

I also gather that wandering an enormous, endless sprawling forest unaccompanied at a time when cell phones were very uncommon and unreliable even if you were rich enough to have one. My parent's area is fairly rural and partially protected as a state park, so the surrounding area is extremely dense with woods. There weren't terribly many well-marked trails and it went for miles in every direction, so it was possible to get really lost if you're like me and have no sense of direction and lose your bearings. But my parents let me play tehre whenever I wanted, even though it was full of rusting cars and old metal drums and poison ivy and lyme disease-bearing ticks. This is how I found out I am unusually unreactive to poison ivy: because I spent forever wandering through it and I never once came down with a rash. I'm sure I am allergic to it (that's what the rash is, an allergic reaction), just that I haven't had the requisite exposure. Also, fun fact--you can get poison ivy rashes in your lungs if you burn it. The oil on the leaves responsible for the reaction is vaporized and you breathe it in through the smoke.

But one thing I found out recently was considered really 'dangerous' until it was no longer necessary was the practice of bringing healthy children to play with children afflicted with common one-time childhood illnesses (the kind you typically get only once, like chicken pox or measles) in order to expose them to it and get it over with as soon as possible. Apparently this is extremely bad, but I remember clearly how happy all the parents were when my brother and then later I had it on our respective birthday parties because it meant all the guests who hadn't already gotten it were going to come down with it and they could just get it over with.

I guess it makes sense but I had no idea this was so strongly discouraged until recently.