I grew up playing Lego and climbing trees, I helped my parents with sawing, hammering and painting the house, rode bikes to wherever I wanted, climbed trees and the thick Hibiscus bush behind our house, and while I didn't break any bones, I had a couple of close calls. I used to collect snail-shells, and for a while, I actually kept a few live ones in a dry aquarium. At school, we played football on hard-caked dirt with stones sticking out, or a lethal version of catch which included leaping from one weather-worn slippery granite rock to another. And like Pupik's version, I used to offer my parents my own interpretation of "coffee", whose only resemblance to the real drink was a similar brown colour. The UNIX machine our dad had was solely his for typing his papers, and the arrival of a Windows 3.11 with a game on it wasn't enough to keep me from my Lego trains. And I was born in 1991.
On the other hand, I agree that this is getting rare. I grew up in a relatively green part of the city, and my parents were always the "make your own mistakes and learn" type. I was expected to find my own limits regarding sleep-time, height of trees, or, later in life, drinking. Aged 3 I was allowed to help my mom with her electric woodsaw, and I built my sister a sister-sized playground ship three years later - thinking about it now, it would've failed a safety-test even in Mozambique, with rusty nails, chicken-fence and splintered wood being the materials of choice. I was allowed to go out whenever I wanted at times when others had to ask for permission to stay out after 8pm, and walking alone was never forbidden.
However, when I look at some of my friends, or even my younger brother, I'm amazed. He's 10 now, in the 5th grade, and still can't help around the house, can't cook himself anything, and was only recently allowed to cross streets on his own (at his age, I was responsible for him and my sister, could cook Pasta and rice, knew my way around the city and was responsible for dishes and trash). I look at my classmates, and their incapacity amazes me sometimes - when they say "There's no food in the house", it usually means "there's nothing my mom prepared", even though the ingredients are mostly there. A washing-machine befuddles them, and the prospect of vacuuming the house or doing dishes scares them. The girls, some only a year away from army-service, don't walk the streets on their own, even though this area is perhaps the safest in the country, being a rather rich one.
Also, re-reading that post makes me sound unbelievably snotty.
