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Notes -
Warren Buffet had a paper route when he was 13. A little older but not much. That involves picking up a heavy stack of papers, walking around your neighborhood for like an hour alone, an about once a month you were the collection arm of the newspaper company. I too had a paper route around the same age. There’s actually a lot of billies whose first job was a paper route.
Around the same age (late elementary school) my memories were watching Independence Day on HBO every morning, then walking to the local ballpark to meet friends and play baseball everyday during the summer. Like Sandlot though often without a full 9.
The interesting thing about Buffet is his dad was a congressmen so he had to have some money but he still had a paper route. The family I guess wanted to instill work ethic and values. I also think there is a bit of wanting independence as a kid and getting to walk around the neighborhood for an hour and have your own money. Potentially we were also extremely bored back then. No phone to doomscroll on for an hour so you needed to find things to do.
My gut says the nanny state on children takes more than one generation to establish. I did things independently as a kid therefore I will never think a 10 year old doing things is child abuse. But my kids may raise children in a nanny state because they will only have my stories doing things as a kid and not personal experience.
This is one reason to consider living in a lower-middle class immigrant community. I think Miami still has some areas like this where you can be in that culture but still 15 minutes to civilization. And the immigrants tended to be higher quality ones than ones who walked across a border in S Florida.
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