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Someone asked if 80s kids really 'roamed freely.' After 40,000 answers, the truth is clear.

There is definitely some rose-colored nostalgia in these responses, though.

Photo credit: Canva, @othingstodo_com/X

Were 80s childhoods really as feral as they sound?

Ah, the nostalgia of an 80s childhood. If you've ever watched "The Goonies" or "Stranger Things," you've seen how kids of all ages were largely left to their own devices most of the time, parents playing a background role if any role at all. Children went on unsupervised outdoor adventures for hours upon hours, getting into just enough trouble to learn some lessons but not enough to die (usually).

But is that really what childhood in the 80s was like? Were parents really that hands-off? Did kids really roam around freely like the movies and stereotypes portray? Were people really not worried about what the kids were up to when no one knew where they were and no one had cell phones to check in?

Someone asked that very question and the overwhelming response pointed to a clear answer.

Yes, 80s kids really did have childhoods that are hard to imagine now

"Did parents in the 80s really allow their kids to roam freely, or is that just a portrayal seen in movies?" X user OThingstodo asked. Here are the top responses:

"Really. And it was awesome."

"Facts. We are the generation who raised ourselves. There really was a commercial that came on each night asking parents if they knew where their children were. We survived off hose water & anything we perceived as food. (Berries, fruit trees, etc) We were not allowed to sit inside.. if we tried, we'd get loaded down with chores. We truly were the feral generation.. we took no guts, no glory to new heights & feared absolutely nothing. It was amazing times that still, to this day, bring forth a rush of nostalgia at the smallest memory."

"This is so true. And Sometimes we just got to cook our own TV dinners. And our parents did not constantly have to engage us or make sure we weren’t bored."

"Allowed? We were not allowed in the house during the day. We had bikes and friends. There was 3 rules 1: don't get hurt 2: don't be brought home by the police 3: see that light? If it's on you're late and grounded."

"In the summer it was get home when the streetlights come on. Raised on hose water & neglect. It was glorious."

"I used to roam the sewer drains around town with my friends. Just a handful of us and some flashlights."

"Yep. We rode our bikes all over the place exploring reality. We also had unlicensed lemonade stands, and after we sold out, we’d ride up to the store alone to buy snacks alone. We had our own house keys, we stayed home alone after school, and we cooked for ourselves. No one freaked out about it either."

"We left the house after school and they wouldn’t see us until the street lights came on. Didn’t ask us where we had been or what we did either. We were raised on hose water and neglect in the 70’s and 80’s."

"Well into the 90s. They told us to be home for dinner by ___ or before nightfall. They didn't have a clue where we were or really any way of finding out. This was just the norm. ... then cell phones."

"It’s true. Realize that back then, there weren’t cell phones, video games, 24 hour kids TV, etc. You wanted to be with your friends & that was outside, even in winter. Your bike was your prized possession & while there were bad elements then too, it wasn’t like now. Sad."

That last point, "while there were bad elements then too, it wasn't like now" sentiment came up a lot in the responses. Let's dive into that a bit.

It's easy to look at the past through rose-colored glasses

For the most part, everything people said about those 80s childhoods is true, except this: The world was not safer back then. There weren't fewer "bad elements" and there wasn't less crime.

Around the year 2015, articles started coming out about how children were statistically safer than they'd ever been.

In fact, statistically, the 80s were less safe than now by pretty much every measure. Looking at violent rime statistics from 1960 onward shows that the 80s had significantly higher violent crime rates than we've seen in the 2000s. The idea that Gen X childhoods were carefree with nothing to fear is simply wrong. We just weren't aware of everything there was to fear.

Social media and 24-hour cable news networks put scary things in front of our faces all day every day, giving us a skewed perception of reality. And that's not just conjecture—according to Pew Research, Americans tend to think crime is rising even when it's going down. "In 23 of 27 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993, at least 60% of U.S. adults have said there is more crime nationally than there was the year before, despite the downward trend in crime rates during most of that period."

The folks remembering their free-range childhoods as blissful and safe seem to have forgotten that we started our days pouring milk from cartons that had pictures of missing children on them. A few high-profile abductions and murders of children caused a bit of a missing children panic in the U.S, leading President Reagan to sign the Missing Children Act in 1982 and the Missing Children's Assistance Act in 1984, which founded the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

But "high-profile" in the 80s meant a spot on the nightly national news and a headline in a newspaper. Most crimes were only reported locally, there as no "going viral online" and it was easy to avoid scary news if you wanted to. We live in a totally different world today, but not in the way people think. We're safer by nearly every measure, from car accidents to infectious disease to violent crime. But we feel less safe, which directly affects how we parent our children.

There was indeed magic in our blissful ignorance

There's something to be said for being unaware of every bad thing that's happening in the world. We may have been less safe in the 80s in actuality, but not knowing that had its perks.

The question is, can we put the genie back in the bottle? Is it possible to give kids an 80s-style childhood in the age of ubiquitous screens and parents being arrested for letting their tweens walk less than a mile from home by themselves?

Societal expectations of what kids can and should do have changed drastically, as have levels of anxiety and fear in general. Parenting styles have shifted toward more involvement and greater attachment, which isn't bad in and of itself but can be taken to an extreme. The neglectful parenting style of the past wasn't ideal and neither is the overprotective style the pendulum swung to.

If we could somehow find a way to give kids the joy of unstructured outdoor exploration of the 80s and the stronger parent-child connections of the present, we might just hit the sweet spot of raising healthy kids. Perhaps the next generation of parents will figure it out.

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One artist's quest to capture her travels led to these stunning portraits of wild women.

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Nature Valley

Amanda Sandlin is only 27, but she's lived in a van, on a ship, and on both ends of the world.

And not in a clichéd, "quit your job and pursue your dreams" sort of way. In fact, through hard work and determination, she's found a way to make adventuring her job. You could almost call adventuring her family's business.

Photo by Kris Holbrook, used with permission.

“I grew up on cruise ships,” she explains, where her mom taught arts and crafts and ballroom dancing. Beginning after first grade, she was homeschooled — or, rather, “shipschooled” half the year, and homeschooled on a farm in Pennsylvania for the remaining time.

“It’s pretty bizarre,” she laughs, looking back on how unusual her upbringing was.

Amanda's unconventional start in life led her to develop a courageous spirit — one that would take her to places that most only dream of.

"It’s so easy for me to be moving," she says. Though she returned to the mainland for high school and college, it took only a few months in the traditional work world for Amanda to realize that she belonged back out on an adventure.

This time, she turned to the outdoors, reading about and watching people who went climbing, biking, surfing. “I grew up traveling but I never really did much outdoors stuff,” she says. "I started thinking, 'I would love that kind of life.’”

Photo by Gianni S. Visciano, used with permission.

Finally, she decided to stop longing for it and start living it. "I packed up my car and my cat, and I drove to San Francisco."

Throwing caution to the wind, Amanda chased her desires wherever they led her — all the way around the world.

But not before getting a writing job at a company whose employees worked remotely, allowing her to travel and climb wherever she chose. When she tired of weekends in Yosemite and Lake Tahoe, she took off for New Zealand.

After a year, she returned to the States, but her adventures were far from over.

“That’s when I was like, you know, I’m single, I don’t feel like anywhere is home to me, so why don’t I just build out a van and travel until I find the place that feels good?”

Photo by Amanda Sandlin, used with permission.

In her van, affectionately named Penny, Amanda looped her way all over North America.

"I started in Florida and went up the east coast to Maine. Then I drove out to Colorado, up through Oregon and Washington to British Columbia, and I stayed there for a while," she remembers. "I drove down to southern California, up through New Mexico, and then made a loop back to Colorado."

She decided to settle in Denver, where she lives now with her rescue dog, Dewey.

Though she's no longer traveling full-time, Amanda is by no means back on the beaten path.

While out on the road, her work shifted gradually from writing into design and now, she's a full-time freelance artist.

Photo by Amanda Sandlin, used with permission.

"It happened pretty naturally," she says. As her work assignments became more and more visual, she started teaching herself graphic design and creating projects of her own on the side.

Image via Amanda Sandlin.

She began posting her projects online, and people started seeking her out for commissioned work. "That's how I got my freelance clients," she says. "They came to me."

Soon after, she left her remote job to live off her art alone.

In her art, Amanda strives to capture the spirit of adventurousness — her own, and that of women like her.

Image via Amanda Sandlin.

“I’m really inspired by the women who are willing to venture into the wilderness, whether that’s mountains and forests or weeding through the difficult stuff you’re doing on the inside,” she says. That exploration inspires the portraits she draws of wild women.

Image via Amanda Sandlin.

“I draw a lot of women with their hair blowing in the wind. I think I like that motion of the hair,” she says.

“You know when you’re walking outside, on a ferry or something, and your hair keeps blowing and you keep trying to put it back, bobby pin it, put it in a ponytail, but it keeps blowing in your face, and finally there’s that moment where you just let it go?" she asks.

"It’s like a complete release, and that, to me, is the type of feeling that I aim to capture in my artwork.”

Image via Amanda Sandlin

Perhaps most interesting about Amanda is the fact that she doesn't think of herself as brave.

In fact, she thinks that anyone, really, could do what she does. Adventuring, she says, is not necessarily packing up a van named Penny and heading out on the road. "The wilderness is the internal and the external and being OK with not being OK."

The satisfaction that she has gotten from being free to be outdoors, on adventures, to climb across the country and capturing art in nature, is well worth the struggle required to make her lifestyle work. And, she says, she hopes that others are inspired to find ways to pursue their own adventures, too.

"It's scary to make a change, or to chase after what you want," she says. "But it's never, it's rarely easy. It's never going to feel only good. But it's a challenge, and that's what makes you grow."

Heroes

13 gorgeous photos of wild Florida that show why it's worth saving.

'I think if everyone would spend just a little bit of time experiencing our natural spaces, they would fall in love with them the way I have, and we’d have an unstoppable force for their protection.'

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Nature Valley

"Half the time I’m making my best pictures, I’m waist-deep in water," says Floridian photographer Carlton Ward.

While that might sound strange for the average photographer, it makes sense given Ward's speciality, which is wilderness conservation.

Carlton Ward in his element. Photo via Upworthy.

Ward spends most of his time making his way through the lush Everglades of the Florida Wildlife Corridor in order to capture its majesty on camera in as many ways as possible.

And the corridor is no small territory. Its nearly 16 million acres are home to thousands of different species, including over 40 endangered or threatened animals, such as the whooping crane, the Florida panther, and the west Indian manatee.

Together with members of his conservation team, Ward has crossed 1,000 miles of it — twice.

Obviously Ward's not afraid to get his feet wet to save wild Florida from encroaching land developments.

Ward paddling through the glades. Photo via Upworthy.

According to Ward, 100,000 acres of land are given over to housing growth every year, which means pretty soon there won't be any room left for the wildlife living in the corridor.

But it's not just about the flora and fauna — the encroachment also threatens local residents' drinking water.

"The Everglades watershed provides water for 9 million people," Ward explains. "So this is our water tower. This is absolutely essential for humans to survive on this peninsula."

In order to further protect the corridor and all who rely on it, he created the Florida Wildlife Corridor organization.

Image via iStock.

FWC utilizes science and unforgettable imagery to raise awareness around the corridor's plight and to get people to realize why it needs to be saved.

Perhaps the most amazing aspect of Florida's wild territories is that they're mostly connected throughout the state. FWC is working tirelessly not only to protect that natural network, but restore it. They have a goal of conserving 10% of it every year so that 300,000 acres are saved by 2020.

Ward's photos have already inspired a network of devoted followers. Now he's rallying them to get out in the wild and share their own experiences.

"I think if everyone would spend just a little bit of time experiencing our natural spaces, they would fall in love with them the way I have, and we’d have an unstoppable force for their protection," Ward says.

He asks them to share their Florida photos under #KeepFLWild to help highlight the conservation mission.

And they're obliging.

A son took a photo of his father at Suwannee State Park.

Someone else captured a great egret on a branch.

Just take a look at Ward's incredible shots, and you'll understand why he's inspiring so many people to venture out into the glades.

Here's a 100-year-old long-leaf pine standing against the clouds:

And a couple of spoonbills taking flight.

These are marsh islands at sunset.

A scaly Florida resident makes an appearance.

This Ogeechee tupelo tree sits near the Florida-Georgia border.

Ogeechee Tupelo - one of my favorite landscape photos, shot on the Suwannee River near the Georgia Florida border on day 96 of the 2012 @fl_wildcorridor expedition from Everglades National Park to the Okefenokee Swamp. It was drizzling this day. A four second long exposure on a tripod soaked in the even light and vibrancy of the emergent spring leaves. A polarizing filter, partially turned, cut through sheen of the water to reveal the surreal orange of the shallow white sandbar glowing through tannin stained swamp water while retaining the reflection of the tree on the surface. Our original expedition route would have had us hiking the final week through the Pinkook Swamp but a 30,000-acre wildfire there pushed us further west to paddle upstream on the Suwannee. It was so shallow we had to drag our boats at times but the scenery was some of the most beautiful of the whole Expedition and this photograph became my most collected print. I heard the river water was 16 feet higher the next year. From the perspective of my current project, the Okefenokee is excellent panther habitat. Hopefully a breeding population can establish there someday. Please share. #suwannee #tupelo #hope #okefenokee #floridawild #keepFLWild #landscape #river

A post shared by Carlton Ward Jr (@carltonward) on

Finally, meet the elusive ghost orchid, which only blooms in the wild in Florida.

Thanks to Ward's talent and spirit, what makes wild Florida precious is crystal clear. He might very well be what saves it.

As long as other adventurers keep following in his footsteps, that is. After all, the Everglades may be his natural habitat, but he's only one man. More will have to step off the beaten path to keep Florida's wildlands safe.

"There’s a wild side to Florida that’s hiding in plain sight," Ward says. Sometimes you just have to get a little messy to find it.

Ward getting down into the glades with his assistant. Photo via Upworthy.

See more of Ward's amazing work here:

He goes to extreme lengths to get these stunning photos. And the results are helping to save hundreds of species.

Posted by Upworthy on Thursday, August 24, 2017

Corrections 8/30/2017: The post misstated the amount of land given over to housing growth each year. The correct number is 100,000 acres. It also misidentified a great egret as a whooping crane.

Family

The self-identified fat, queer hiker challenging what it means to be an outdoor person.

Jenny Bruso's foray into the great outdoors started in an unlikely way — she was just trying to impress her partner on one of their first dates.

It was 2012, and the pair took a hike through Portland's Forest Park. Bruso, who identifies as fat, femme, queer, and a former "indoor kid," was curious about the hobby her partner enjoyed and also wanted to seem outdoorsy and game for a good time. While her first hike was challenging, she says it opened up something inside her she couldn't ignore.

"Something kind of magical happened, and I found that there was this part of me that was very intrigued by it and enjoyed it, and I wanted to do more of it."

Still, Bruso was intimidated by the process, worried she didn't know what she was doing, how slow she was on the trail, or how hard she was breathing. But despite her anxieties, she kept going back.

Photo via Jenny Bruso, used with permission.

But as Bruso found herself hiking more and more, she noticed something missing on the trail — diversity.

She simply didn't encounter many people of color, with larger bodies, with disabilities, or anyone identifying as queer or gender-nonconforming. And she didn't find them in the outdoor social media accounts she followed either.

"I was just really sort of disappointed and bowled over at times how [outdoor social media accounts] were constantly featuring many thin, young, white people doing these extreme things but looking sort of effortless like they were airlifted in there," she says. "I was just kind of calling bullshit on it. This is so not what it's like for me out there."

Photo via Jenny Bruso, used with permission.

Hiking provided clarity and balance for Bruso. She wanted to connect with others who may have felt the same way, but didn't feel like they fit in with the online outdoor community. She started a blog, calling herself an "Unlikely Hiker." Before long, hikers of all stripes came forward and said, "Me too."

Bruso's "Unlikely Hikers" has now expanded into an Instagram account, Facebook page, and hashtag that other traditionally underrepresented hikers use to connect.

Anyone who may not fit the expected look or identity of a typically outdoorsy person, anyone who's found their place in nature, healed their body and mind on the trail, or really anyone who sees themselves as an Unlikely Hiker is welcome.  

Fans submit their stories and photos by tagging them #UnlikelyHiker on Instagram, and Bruso shares them with her nearly 20,000 followers.

From local treks or more epic journeys along the Pacific Crest Trail, Bruso's hashtag has helped draw together hikers of all abilities — along with  swimmers, climbers, and other outdoor (supposedly unlikely) adventurers.

The stories and photos are powerful, filled with moments of healing, survival, and peace found while getting back to nature. Unlikely Hikers is a celebration of community-building and persistence.

"I started hiking a few years ago after horseback riding in the Blue Ridge Mountains for the first time & realizing how much you can really miss out on if you're just sticking to the road on a roadtrip. The experiences & memories you gain exploring new places are so much more intimate while on the trail. Being queer, fat, & also battling chronic autoimmune conditions + chronic pain, I face quite a few challenges, but mother nature embraces us completely as we are. Following communities of other unlikely hikers has really been SO inspiring. I'm in the process of planning my first backpacking trip and couldn't be more excited to start my thru-hiking adventures!" -Aura / @adventurousaura • Tag #unlikelyhikers or #unlikelyhiker to be featured!

A post shared by Unlikely Hikers (@unlikelyhikers) on

Because everyone belongs in the great outdoors. That's what makes it so great.

It doesn't matter your skill or ability or size or what you look like: Nature is a place where anyone can find solace, peace, and a fresh perspective. It can be life-changing and awe-inspiring, and no one should have to miss out because they feel uncomfortable. If you're worried or intimidated about going on a hike, Bruso suggests facing your fear and getting out there anyway.

"Don't let the fear of what other people might be thinking stop you because what you might find out there is so much bigger than that, and you deserve it. We all deserve it."

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