What the Hell Is Age-Appropriate Anyway?
Salisbury steak to fine dining; the Hallmark holiday bonanza; the new gym manager, who asks if you've checked with your doctor.
"Sorry, I left my permission slip at home. Shall I make a call now, or is it OK to bring it next time?"
There's no such thing as age-appropriate behavior. It's something others impose on those willing to accept it.
Who decided? Who benefits?
Swanson's, 1953. The company miscalculated Thanksgiving and ended up with 260 tons of leftover, frozen turkey in 10 refrigerated railcars—cars that had to keep moving to stay cold, so the turkeys spent weeks shuttling between Nebraska and the East Coast while the Swanson's C-suite suits panicked. The TV dinner was the ticket to your kitchen table—food your grandmother would have refused to recognize. Decades later, it would come back in a senior portion, calling to you from the freezer aisle.
Hallmark, 1920s. They didn't invent Mother's Day—Anna Jarvis did, as a liturgical service to honor her own mother—but by the early 1920s, Hallmark and the florists had moved in, and Jarvis spent the rest of her life organizing boycotts and threatening lawsuits trying to take her holiday back. She lost. Now there's a card waiting on every endcap in America.
Flexner, 1910. The Flexner Report—funded by Carnegie and Rockefeller, written by a schoolteacher who wasn't a doctor—was used to close half the medical schools in the country, including most of the ones that trained women and Black physicians. By the count documented in the AMA Journal of Ethics, at least 672 chiropractors were arrested and jailed in the decades that followed for practicing medicine without a license, one of them twelve times. That's the document that trained four generations of gym managers to ask if you've checked with your doctor and ad agencies to encourage you to ask your doctor for a drug you probably didn't need.
None of them asked you. None of them asked me. But here's the part no one mentioned.
We were free-range kids.
We left the house after breakfast and came home when the streetlights came on. We rode bikes to places our parents had never been. We traveled in packs and knocked on doors instead of texting. We lived for snow days and spent them sledding, our dogs in tow. We built forts out of whatever was lying around, with no instructions and no adults improving our technique. We got lost on purpose because lost was where the good stuff happened.
Nobody optimized our days. Nobody tracked our steps. Nobody asked us to justify our time. If our homework was done, we were golden.
That feeling is still available....
We were free-range kids. We are free-range retirees.