Coming of age

From another essay in The Free Press series, "Things Worth Remembering." I do remember a time when my parents didn't really care what I was doing so long as I turned up for meals. I also remember the time in my adolescence when our parents were perfectly willing to let a bunch of us high-school-age guys take the train down to Chicago without any adults going along. We wandered around the Loop, took the "El" to the Science and Industry Museum, visited some bookstores, and returned by train that evening. About Stand by Me and times already gone before the movie was made:

Three adolescent boys are gathered in a ramshackle tree house—the kind you might have built yourself as a kid, if you were born before 1990, using scrap wood and a bucket of nails; the kind that would get you an unpleasant visit from your homeowners association were your own kids to attempt the same thing today.

This, the opening scene of Rob Reiner’s film Stand by Me, is the first indication that this story takes place in a very different time; the second, in case you missed the first, is that the boys are smoking cigarettes, playing cards, and listening to Bobby Day on a transistor radio. But this is only the setup for a punch line that arrives moments later, as another boy bursts into the tree house with a breathless question that will alter the trajectory of the rest of their lives:

“You guys want to go see a dead body?”

The answer, obviously, is yes. ....

This was a world in which it was still possible for a group of kids on the cusp of 13 to simply disappear for a period of 36 hours, during which their parents were not just unaware of but also not even curious as to their whereabouts, and if they got into trouble somewhere along the way, they would simply have to get themselves out of it. More than that: The act of extricating yourself from a mess of your own making was understood to be valuable, even essential, fueled by an unspoken consensus that growing up is a thing kids could only truly do in moments when they were on their own, out of adult view. Your upbringing was your parents’ responsibility, sure, but your coming-of-age? This was none of their business. You knew it, and so did they. ....

In hindsight, 1959 was the beginning of the end for this boundless, archetypal American adolescence. If it had been set just a decade later, this same story might have come to an abrupt conclusion after the boys’ parents were reminded of their existence by one of those by then standard public service announcements on the evening news: “It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?!” Ten years after that, the kidnappings of Etan Patz and Adam Walsh ushered in an era of skyrocketing anxiety over the safety of children and with it, far less freedom for wanderlust-afflicted preteens. ....

Meanwhile, this year, a poll from the Institute for Family Studies revealed that a majority of 14-year-olds aren’t allowed to leave the street where they live without adult supervision. .... (more)

Kat Rosenfield, "A Time Capsule of Free-Range Childhood," The Free Press, August 14, 2026.