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The Gen X Summer Activities That Only Made Us Stronger
How Slip ’N Slides, rusty playground equipment and dubious bike ramps taught us to test our limits
The Gen X fountain of youth, now with urgent care.
Ryan Snook
By the time my brother, Mark, and I came home for dinner, we looked like two boys assembled from scabs, lake water and expired dares.
It was a summer day in the late 1970s in northern Michigan, which meant nobody had seen us since breakfast. We jumped into murky waters, pedaled beyond any reasonable map and built scrap-wood bike ramps, because every boy in America had absorbed motorcycle daredevils through the national bloodstream.
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For Gen X, summer outdoors was part road trip, part survival exercise and part accidental contribution to American culture. “Outdoor, self-directed adventures, by kids unaccompanied by adults, were part of normal childhood almost everywhere until recent decades,” says Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College. Kids, he says, “learn to deal with minor risks and injuries” and “gain a sense of agency” that way.
Which raises the question: Were our most dangerous summer games teaching us something useful? Let’s revisit the classics.
Slip ’N Slides
Who doesn’t love hurling themselves stomach-first across wet plastic? The Slip ’N Slide was less a toy than a dare with a sprinkler attachment. You got one running start, one belly flop, and one prayer that the lawn didn’t contain rocks, a sprinkler head or a forgotten Matchbox car.
You can still buy them, which means the next generation can also learn that even a wet tarp has limits. For kids, the classic version usually worked as advertised. For nostalgic teenagers and adults, it could go badly. The slide was designed for smaller bodies, and larger ones didn’t always glide to the end. Sometimes they stopped abruptly, which is bad news when your neck is the braking system.
The real Gen X upgrade was finding a plastic tarp, adding dish soap and creating the world’s worst backyard water park. This taught commitment, surface inspection and the importance of knowing whether a thing was built for the body you actually had. That lesson is even more useful in middle age, when every summer activity begins with the same question: Should I still do this, or should I just remember doing this?
This is what happens when you remember the fun but forget the surface temperature.
Ryan Snook
Rusty playground equipment
The playground equipment of the ’70s and ’80s seemed designed by people who believed childhood character should be tested in real time, preferably on vertical metal. In July, the slide didn’t so much deliver you to the bottom as sear the back of your legs on the way there. The merry-go-round spun until somebody achieved low-altitude flight. Monkey bars hovered over asphalt, daring you to find out whether your palms had calluses or a confidence problem.
Tim Gill, author of No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society, doesn’t argue that every skull-rattling playground feature deserves a comeback. But some of them pushed kids to “figure out how the world around them works,” forcing tiny calculations all afternoon. How high could you climb before fear became information? How fast could the merry-go-round spin before the kid in tube socks became airborne? Could you make it across the monkey bars, or would you drop halfway through and pretend that was the plan? Safer equipment solved a real problem, but it also made playgrounds less demanding.
Swimming holes
Dr. Linda Quan, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Seattle Children’s Hospital who has spent more than four decades researching drowning prevention, says the public pool was doing more than we realized. “Swimming in the crowded, chaotic swimming pool environment forces us to learn how to maneuver around, over, under others,” she says, “all key swim skills.”
In other words, the chlorinated, overcrowded, whistle-patrolled rectangle we considered the boring option was safer, and actually useful. Which explains why we preferred the quarry.
Every town had forbidden water: a quarry, a pond behind someone’s property, a creek bend where the current did something interesting and the bottom was anybody’s guess. The quarry had a special appeal. It looked less like a place to swim than a place where a stolen car might eventually be found. There was no lifeguard, no rescue equipment, no clear view of what was beneath you, and usually one rope swing tied to a branch by a kid nobody had seen since middle school.
Today, we know better. Our kids have pools, swim lessons and lifeguards. The community pool taught us how to move through water when other people were in the way. The quarry taught us that “I’ve jumped here before” is not the same as knowing what’s under you.
The ramp is plywood. The confidence is vintage. The landing is a conversation with your orthopedist.
Ryan Snook
Homemade bike ramps
Every neighborhood had a kid with a sheet of plywood, a cinder block and a working theory about aerodynamics. The ramp was never level. The landing zone was always optimistic. The engineering review consisted of one older kid saying “looks good” before stepping well out of the way.
This was the era of Evel Knievel and early video games, so our understanding of flight was dangerously influenced by men in capes and plumbers named Mario who could hang in the air long enough to reconsider. A homemade ramp quickly corrected those misunderstandings. It forced kids to make real calculations before the driveway issued its own report. How fast was fast enough? How high was too high? Was the landing grass, pavement or somebody’s mom’s rosebush?
Ellen Beate Hansen Sandseter, a professor at Queen Maud University College of Early Childhood Education in Trondheim, Norway, studies risky play. She says children usually explore risk “in a progressive way,” gradually building competence and learning how to handle it.
The first kid who rolled toward the ramp at half speed was doing research, whether he knew it or not. The kid who bailed completely was learning something, too. Sandseter says failures, and even choosing to withdraw, help children understand their limits.
The ramp taught a lesson that adulthood keeps repeating: Ambition is exciting, but before you launch yourself at anything, ask who built the ramp and why they’re standing so far away.
Drainage ditches and creek-walking
The drainage ditch was not a destination. It was a consequence of having nowhere better to be and enough time to get curious. Kids dropped into concrete channels and wandered creek beds for the same reason they did most things that summer: because nobody said they couldn’t.
What they found down there was broken glass, rusty cans, crawdads, leeches, mud of ambiguous origin and the occasional discovery that made the whole expedition feel like science. Shoes were optional, which was either brave or stupid, depending on what you stepped on.
Mariana Brussoni, a professor at the University of British Columbia whose research focuses on children’s unstructured outdoor play, recognizes what was actually happening. “Children are constantly observing, testing, questioning, making decisions, managing risks, adapting when things don’t go as planned,” she says. “The environment itself becomes the teacher.”
Forts and tree houses
Every fort began when somebody found scrap plywood and decided the neighborhood needed a headquarters. By afternoon, kids who weren’t allowed to use the stove were swinging hammers like licensed contractors. Inside, an adult heard the pounding, paused, and chose the ancient parenting strategy of letting the evidence explain itself later.
Building the thing was half the project. The rest was negotiation. Somebody wanted a second floor. Somebody wanted a trapdoor. Brussoni has a clinical name for what was happening inside that leaning structure: “executive function skills.” Child-led building requires kids to set a goal, figure out the steps, stay with the task and adapt when the plan starts wobbling. Those skills are built through practice, “just like any muscle or skill,” she says.
The finished fort usually leaned toward one neighbor’s yard and smelled like hot plywood. But it taught something durable. You made a plan, tested it, argued about it, watched part of it collapse and tried again. That is still useful in adulthood, where many plans arrive with bent nails and no instructions.
Some memories are safer in your head. Especially the ones that require climbing a tree after age 50.
Ryan Snook
Pickup-truck beds
The pickup-truck bed was an open-air transit system for children whose parents believed “hold on” was a safety protocol. You climbed in, found a corner and grabbed whatever was available: a wheel well, a toolbox, another kid’s jean jacket. Then the truck hit the road and the wind rearranged your face.
Seat belts existed, technically, but they were up front with the adults, the radio and the right to adjust the air-conditioning. Nobody wore a helmet, because helmets were for astronauts. The adults in the cab were having a separate, air-conditioned experience and trusted you to figure out the rest.
This was not child-led risky play in the purest sense. The challenge was imposed by an adult who needed to get six children to the lake and must have decided that a second trip would cost enough in gas to bankrupt the family. But the truck bed did teach something useful. You learned to read motion before it reached you. You watched for turns. You kept your center of gravity low. You understood that standing up was a good way to see the lake, and possibly the road, from several new angles.
Gen X learned a lot by holding on. Sometimes the lesson was independence. Sometimes it was situational awareness at 55 miles per hour.
BB guns, bottle rockets and backyard arms races
Every summer, the neighborhood ran an informal weapons program. It began with BB guns and slingshots, then escalated to bottle rockets fired sideways from fence posts because a vertical launch felt too NASA and insufficiently stupid. The program reached its natural conclusion when somebody discovered a Roman candle could be held like a musket if you were willing to let the night make several decisions about your future.
Gray argues that children are often more cautious than adults assume. They “rarely attempt activities that they aren’t prepared to handle,” he says, and they take responsibility because nobody is standing nearby to rescue them.
The backyard arms race taught useful adult skills. You learned that wind direction matters, fuses are shorter than advertised, and confidence is not a substitute for distance. Above all, you learned that “watch this” was the clearest evacuation order in the English language.
More Ways Gen X Tried to Injure Itself
Here are a few more summer hazards that deserve their own moment in the emergency-room sun. What did we miss?
Trampolines before nets: A backyard trampoline was where children learned that gravity had excellent comic timing and no interest in their landing strategy.
Abandoned cars, barns, sheds and empty lots: If a place had splintered wood, tetanus opportunities and at least one rabid raccoon, it became an impromptu clubhouse.
Skateboards before helmets and wrist guards: The board was made of wood, the wheels were made of betrayal, and every downhill ride ended with someone leaving their DNA on the sidewalk.
Homemade go-karts: Made out of wooden crates, lawnmower wheels, rope steering and zero brakes. They operated on gravity, optimism and tetanus-adjacent hardware.
Railroad track adventures: We flattened pennies, balanced on rails and learned that “No Trespassing” signs were mostly decorative if you were wearing Tough-skins.
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