Back in the day, parents thought nothing about letting their kids do very strange things.
Ah, the good old days, when parents turned a blind eye to things like seat belts and lion cubs.
A look through the archives reveals a series of stunning images, likely to confuse and confound newer generations of parents who slap helmets on tykes riding bikes with training wheels and put their kids on vegan diets as toddlers.
Footage from 1938 shows a little boy in New York sitting on the ground. Surrounded by alligators. Then he walks among the reptiles, holding an adult's hand.
In film from 1934, a small boy is shown in a cage of lions. He pats a cub on the head and then gets tackled by it. In the end, he gets an ice cream cone. Big fun!
Two small sisters are helping their mother in a 1950 newsreel. Mom is a knife-thrower and the girls, ages 5 and 2, dutifully stand while she catapults blades that land just shy of their little heads.
Images from a 1950s-looking family shows a mom behind the wheel of a large automobile, with her young daughter slipping over the front seat to join her brother in the back, No seat belts. No car seats. No problem!
Not one disaster is shown in these films. No one loses an eye. No one gets bitten. But it does induce wonder at how our parents and grandparents ever made it to adulthood.
