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Comment by mafribe | Hacker News Reader

The article makes a testable statement: "Think about your own 10 best memories of childhood, and chances are most of them involve free play outdoors [...] How many of them took place with a grown-up around?"

Yup, that is correct for me. And I was a bookish, introverted child. Still unsupervised exploration of forrests, abandoned factories, houses under construction, rivers, caves, tunnels ... was awesome.

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Same here. I think my favorite unsupervised childhood memory was the time when (I was about ~10 years old) the day after a big rainstorm, that turned a nearby creek into more or less a river, we took a couple of inflatable rafts and went for a little boat ride. We ended up miles and miles away from any of our parents' houses and once it started to get dark, we hopped out of the stream, went and knocked on some random person's door and asked to use the phone.

Our parents weren't thrilled at having to pick us up, but we had a great time.

I did this exact same thing as a teenager when our creek turned into a torrent, but because I had thoroughly explored the forest as a free-range kid, I knew where the creek would take us, so we arranged to have someone meet us at a faraway bridge with a car.

Ours was more spur of the moment and done without our parent's permission. We spent hours on the boats, and none of us had traced this particular creek that far (and the water was moving at a nice clip).

Same thing here, and I was one of those kids who got regularly taunted by playmates for being a bookworm.

I recall we were also pretty cavalier about getting messy - dirty water, actual dirt, clay, even animal poop. I wonder whether exposure to all that stuff has any benefits for the immune system later.

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