Growing up in Bulgaria (I was born 1976) I caught the last years of "communism" (there was never such thing really), but I caught a lot of good time as a kid.

A lot of the classic bulgarian kid movies were about kids roaming the streets of the city, village, forest, etc. For example the whole family goes to a tourist resort, beach, and then you see kids of different ages going together somewhere.

One of my favourite shows as a kid was Verano Azul (spanish - Blue Summer) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verano_azul) - it was very popular on Bulgaria, and it also reflected the kind of play we used to have in there.

One of my other popular shows (Blake's 7, we did not had Star Trek back then) - was also very popular - outside we would play as characters from the show - like Zen, Oracle, Blake and other characters from the show. Sometimes few, othertimes dozen, and few times we were like 40-50 kids gathered from group ages from 1st to 8 or 9th grade playing together (bullying was all the time there I guess, I've never noticed it seriously - it wasn't an open concept, neither taboo - more like unknown thing - that just happens and you deal with it. It's different now that you know it, and have a child on your own, and live in USA - like me).

As kids, often we would go to the nearest construction site (usually high-rise building in construction) and do stupid things. It was the norm to fight with sticks - plastic or wood, throw stones, rocks at each other - and almost everyday come with blood here and there (no big deal, I survived).

My biggest adventure by far was, when me and my one year older cousin (he was 6 or 7 then) took the road to walk from one city (Chernomoretz, Bulgaria) to another (Burgas) - here is the route on google maps - http://goo.gl/EfRMsK - It's 26km - and we walked, took some bus, did a lot of stupid things (bent signs, ate stuff that we should not do). But overall had pretty good time. We started off like 8:00-9:00AM in the morning, and showed up at my grandparents apartment somewhere in afternoon. It was all because I thought we need an important plastic truck which was there.

Then with my other grandma we went couple of times to her village in the summer, and there I would roam the village, river, forest ( http://goo.gl/8HyhbQ ) - and come back late at night, sometimes 10:00pm, sometimes 2:00am - and I was 2nd or 3rd grade.

I guess she was afraid, but one thing she knew, or kind of expected it - is that other people if told that I'm lost would look for me, scorn me if they had to.

In short: I had respect of everyone bigger than me, and everyone else too. The situation in USA currently is that the first time you open your mouth against some kid to scorn him, and you might end up in prison. And that might be the right thing to do... But it's very unhelpful, since the kids no longer respect you.

It's quite different now with our son (soon to be 6) - he grows much faster than me emotionally, intellectually - he asks things that I would've asked much later in my kids' life. On top of that he's supposed to start his real life working much older than me (if he's willing to finish uni/ etc.)

Got the "Dangerous book for Boys" and would seen read it to him. I have to learn some american stuff after all (for example I do only understand the rules of soccer and basketball) :)