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A comment on Apollo 14 50th anniversary images find Alan Shepard's ball and how far he hit it. Parent comment

Re:Apollo 14 50th anniversary images find Alan Shepard's bal... by dmurray on Friday February 05, 2021 @05:17AM (#26034783)
It was originally a book, or actually a series of books, written and set in the 1930s. Great reading as a child, but to have such permissive parents - they barely make an appearance while their kids as young as 7 spend days at a time boating and camping - seemed as fanciful to me as Harry Potter. I wonder if it was really like that in the 30s.
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Re:Apollo 14 50th anniversary images find Alan Shepard's bal... by pjc50 on Friday February 05, 2021 @09:10AM (#26036458)
Apart from the magic, Harry Potter is just the well-worn genre of "school stories" and the social structure of the school is basically that of a select British private school, complete with boarders and "houses" and so on. It really was like that in the 30s (see Roald Dahl's Boy, for another example, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalky_%26_Co.).

I think Swallows and Amazons is a little stretched from what would have been normal levels of parental contact, but not beyond what a reader of the time would have considered normal or reasonable.

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Re:Apollo 14 50th anniversary images find Alan Shepard's bal... by ghaff on Friday February 05, 2021 @09:39AM (#26036734)
Or pretty much any of Enid Blyton's books. As you say, probably an exaggerated view of childhood independence in upper middle class(?) England (and certainly there are American examples as well although boarding school is a less prominent feature), but not something wildly fantastical to many readers.
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Re:Apollo 14 50th anniversary images find Alan Shepard's bal... by simonh on Friday February 05, 2021 @04:41PM (#26041581)
There are always older children around though, I think there was a much higher expectation that older children would take responsibility for the younger ones back then. S&A is adventure fiction so maybe a little exaggerated, but not outrageously so.
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