The End of the Free-Range, Device-Free ‘Stand By Me’ Childhood.

What my dad would tell me any time I left the house: "Be good. Or don't get caught."

I blame the end of free range childhood on the 80’s “missing children” milk cartons. I just rewatched Flight of the Navigator and realized that the entire premise doesn’t work anymore.

This went for seeing movies as well. How were your parents going to know what movies you saw? They had to work. You had a bike. Movies galore. It wasn't possible for most people to be a helicopter parent in the 1970s, and into the 1980s. Not unless you'd literally lock your kid in the house (which wouldn't work anyway) or unless you had a stay-at-home parent who was with them all of the time. In the 1990s parents started coordinating with each other to get kids where they "needed" to be, 24/7. Everything structured. Eventually, technology allowed kids to be communicated with while they weren't at home. That's the biggest thing that some people miss: before pagers and cell phones were common, once a kid left home, as a parent you had to rely on your teaching and training of them to get them home. Their fear of punishment in some cases. You had to raise your kids to act smart (or fail to do that) because they needed to navigate the world on a day-by-day basis without you. We would have checklists. "Go to grandma's then X, then Y, then Z. If ABC, then LMNOP. The bus is 35¢ so here's a quarter and two nickels. If you miss the 30, the 31 is fine, it's just slower, either 30 or 31." It was good training for being independent because you were literally being trained on the right way to do thing, and the patterns would get reinforced over time. We were Leif Ericson. Kids that came after us, many times experienced the world inside of a car.

“It’s 9pm do you know where your children are?” Nostalgia for the generation that had to be reminded by the TV that they had kids completely negates any concern for smart phones.

Man, I miss the good old days of discovering a corpse and getting a knife pulled on you by a gang versus playing Roblox with my friends

I guarantee you that old fogies in 1959 were saying that these young whippersnappers are watching too much tv and disconnected from reality.

Classic NYT “20 years too late” commentary headline

\>Could such a movie be made today about early 21st century childhood? Yes. \>What would it be like? Kids on some other kind of adventure, just with smart phones. \>What would the personalities be? Probably not much different from the personalities of the kids in Stand by Be. \>How about settings? Interactions, emotions, tropes? Could be anything from kids on a camping trip in the woods, to running around in a city, pretty much anything you can imagine. As always with this weird ass generational relativity "le KIDS these days amirite" concepts, things haven't changed nearly as much as we think they have, and no generation is special. There are still kids that live in rural shitholes and hang out in the woods and smoke ciagrettes and get into trouble. There are still kids that don't come home until 9pm and their parents don't know where they are. These kinds of posts imply that 90% of children live in Suburbia and if they're not at school then they're just at home playing video games and shitposting on Reddit. That's not true, though. What people don't understand is that it is not your circumstances that created that childlike feeling of wonder and adventure. It's *being a child* that creates that feeling of wonder and adventure.

Thank you for sharing. Read the full article [for free here](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/22/opinion/stand-by-me-stephen-king-rob-reiner-screen-time.html?unlocked_article_code=1.VFA.iqzx.ZtZ4DAiniBhX&smid=re-nytopinion), even without a Times subscription.

I work in cell phone sales, it’s not glamorous, I don’t like it, but I see some terrifying shit. Preschool aged children with their own phone lines, pretty much every young child with a tablet. They can’t function without a screen. My son, I try to be conscious on it. He likes to use my camera, and I will very rarely play a YouTube song (he has 1 Danny Go and a couple Monster Truck videos he likes, and even that gives me pause sometimes with how he behaves afterwards), and we will video all his grandparents every couple nights. Beyond that, tv time is supposedly less harmful than small screen, so he can earn 15 minute increments of Paw Patrol/Elmo/Thomas or we’ll have the odd family movie night by making his bed or behaving (up to 90 minutes in a day) I don’t say that to toot my own horn, but to point out how terrifying it is that this seemingly isn’t the norm. Kids don’t get out and play because they’re sedated by screens. Schools presume that they need to be on tablets to “learn” them…when the point of tablets is they’re idiot proof. It is VERY tempting to let the screen babysit, and that only becomes more true when you can hand a device to the child instead of it being on the family tv. That’s how you create addiction, exposure to p********** and violence, and just generally exposure to inappropriate content. I don’t know that the world today is set up for the (excuse the username, it’s an unrelated joke) free range society of the 80’s. That died with stranger danger. It’s all but illegal at this point to have children roaming unsupervised (not that I agree with that, but neighborhood snoops would call the police on an unaccompanied group of children on the train tracks nowadays) But…play with your kids. Take them to the park. Do whatever you can to keep them off the small screens, those things are poison, especially for small minds.

Weren’t the kids in Stand By Me going to look at the dead body of a missing kid? Doesn’t see like device free childhood worked out for that kid.

It's funny, when I was growing up in the mid 2000s there were definitely some parents who leaned towards one or the other here in Puerto Rico. Pure latch key kids vs kids with stay at home moms.

I think the nature of Nostalgia has always been "my thing is better than your thing" which is always followed by opinions such as "tv is bad", "rock and roll is not music", "iPad is bad", EDM is not music", "video games are bad", "Kpop is not music". In reality the generation who grew up with the star wars prequels adore them because they grew up with them, not because it's better or worse.

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So I'm assuming that I'm the only person that saw the great flick Riddle of Fire?

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