Apparently most of us should start feeling happier soon 
BBC Radio 4 - Uncharted with Hannah Fry - When are you the happiest in life?
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Don’t buy such research at all, it’s impossible to remove bias from the situation the world was in when you were a particular age, as it’s only retrospectively looking back, so nah, we’ll keep going down, more depressed as the world’s more shit.
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I know my parents said the same, but i think we were the last “free” kids. How many kids of 10 or so these days throw some sandwiches in a rucksack at 8am and disappear on their bikes until it gets dark over summer, unless its just kids round here but you never see that, kids all playing impromptu games of football/cricket over the school fields, being little Herbert’s in the street. The difference in their lives to what i experienced is quite sad really. Im glad i grew up when i did, but then Im 49 and the same ss my parents 
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Our kids did pretty much that but we lived in a village in Dorset countryside surrounded by fields. We told them they couldn’t cross the A30 to the north but anything else was fair game.
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We’ve said similar on here a few times and to friends. No tracking us with phones. Although most of the places we played footy or cricket like the school field and locked up by 2M steel fences now.
Used to just disappear off on the bike and return when I was bored or hungry.
And had the benefit of playing games on my ZX Spectrum over winter 
No league tables at school as such, got reports but job prospects weren’t that great anyway.
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We didn’t even have a landline until the early 80s, it was only when I moved to Oz that my parents got one.
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From the age of 13, I spent all school holidays and weekends from Easter to end of summer holidays at the riding stables we rode at. It meant my mum didn’t have to pay, as I worked for it. I slept in a caravan on the yard. Just an old, little caravan that housed up to two comfortably. I understand safe guarding and insurance means that sort of thing is very unlikely today but I learnt so many valuable lessons there.
The funniest and maybe most useful was when I was about 15 or so. Me and my mate were taking some horses back to the field with two of the young women who worked there (~18-19 yrs old). They were talking about their equally disappointing and all too quick evenings with their boyfriends, the night before. Then one goes “Boys, when your older and with your girlfriends. Remember! Take your time, patience really is a virtue.”
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If we’re sharing childhood nostalgia, I grew up in Jersey. It was a cracking place to be a child. We lived near a place called La Rocque on the South East corner of the island, overlooking the sea.
Out of my bedroom window I could see Seymour tower, built on some rocks a mile and a half offshore in 1756 to repel the French. (It worked really well because they are still repellant nearly 300 years later etc etc)
At high tide it was just a speck out to sea. But at low tide, if you were brave, you could walk the whole way out to it over the rocks that gave La Rocque its name:
You had to get your timing right because Jersey has a big tidal range, and it is super easy to get cut off on the rocks by the incoming tide. Happens every year to at least a few grockles, and so they built these to take shelter on and await rescue… platforms of shame.
Once a bunch of horse riders went out there and got stuck. The horses panicked and wouldn’t go back across gullies that were filling up with water. In the end the riders persuaded them to climb the steps of Seymour tower, onto the raised middle tier that sits above the high water mark and surronds the tower itself. But then no-one could get them to go down again. Cue a complicated rescue of several horses from an inaccessible stone tower over a mile offshore. I think they had to use a boat with a crane. My Dad worked for the local paper, and I reckon that story paid for our school shoes one year at the very least.
It was an amazing playground to have as a kid, I spent hours unsupervised out there on the rocks. It’s frankly astonishing that I didn’t drown but there you go.
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Remember guys - I grew up in the late 50s and 60s when TV barely existed (2 channels and intermissions), computing was big iron IBM stuff, nuclear power was the new energy, global heating was stick a jumper on and load some more coal on the fire.
You just played outside all the time if the weather was OK; if it was pissing down you stayed in and either read comics or books or if lucky play board games with someone else.
BUT - the NHS worked; education systems worked; and there was plenty of work around for adults.
I nearly became a £10 Kiwi but Mum refused to leave Wales. Hey ho.
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I remember when Belle and Sebastian was a tv programme and not a soundbite from High Fidelity 
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There’s definitely an odour in here 
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Sorry about that 
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Why are you terrified of sharks and other aquatic life then?
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I grew up in a small town in North Yorkshire and even the “busy” roads weren’t particularly busy and there seemed to be more emphasis on road safety in the 70s and scaring kids about roads (Green Cross Code Man, Tufty Club).
I was walking to school and walking/cycling to my friends houses from 7 or 8 and by the time I was 8 or 9 we were roaming around on farm land and disused quarries and generally getting up to no good.
I get the impression now that if a 7 year old was found walking the streets by themselves that there’d be a visit from Social Services 
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My first ever record was the Tufty Road Safety album
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How negligent is that. Looks like very treacherous terrain, let alone the tide issue.
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we played in the street from a very young age, I remember the “odd kid” that joined my junior school at 7 and he lived on my street but we’d never seen him. After then he was allowed out but it was seen as weird that a 6 year old didn’t play in the street all day. We’d play football in the street, Curby, race our bikes up and down, run.
Even when I was early teens getting into hockey for the first time, I’d have room to set up a goal with an old bit of ply leant against the curb and play 1 on 1 on my Bauers with a school friend. If a car came we’d move out the way, then go again. Now my mums street its nose to tail parking or lowered curbs and you never see a kid playing!
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still got a few days to go, but feels particularly apt here today.
Managed 1000m in the pool, L arm only, no tumbles, took half an hour 
take me round the back and put me out of my misery 
had planned a 50*50m off 50s set, but that’s going to have to wait. Possibly forever.
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If it’s any consolation, I broke my collarbone and 3 fingers in a cycle commuting accident 3 days after my 50th birthday.
I’d never broken a bone until that point. I fear it was the beginning of the end
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