By Eleanor Kazdan, October 29, 2020 — And to think there were no cell phones or anything. When I was four years old, my parents moved to a new house, my mother told me to go to the corner store to buy something. I was only four and a half! I got lost. I remember very clearly standing on the corner and crying. I didn’t remember where my new house was, and my mother sent me out to buy food. Who would ever do that? You’d rather jump off a cliff than do something like that now than send your four-year-old out to the corner store. You’d barely even send a ten-year-old to do that now, I mean it’s crazy. Different era.
We did it at age five, we walked to school by ourselves. Nobody thought about it. “Go to school, bye-bye!” We did come back for lunch. There was only one mother in the whole school who worked and everybody went home for lunch. Except there were maybe two kids in the whole school who stayed for lunch, and they were considered very, very you know, oddball because their mothers worked and they couldn’t go home for lunch.