I spent the summer I was 7 on the beach with no supervision other than 12 and a 13 year old cousins who never cared where I was. I didn’t surf, but I leaped from rock to rock on jetties and swam amongst the jellyfish and sunburned to blisters. Nights we had fires sometimes. Was this a good thing or a bad thing? I can’t say. We survived.When I was 9 kids played unsupervised on the city streets. The youngest boy in the next apartment was hospitalized with burns from a warning flare he tried to play with – it was maybe 10 at night. The police were harsh speaking to his parents, asking what he was even doing out at that hour. It was 1951. His parents didn’t understand why the police were angry with them.
Americans