In a meeting today I ended by referencing the public service announcement (PSA) “It’s 10 PM: Do You Know Where Your Children Are?”. No one got the reference—except maybe by way of The Simpsons. Here’s the actual PSA I remember: For years this would air before the nightly news. It’s kind of wild to think that, 40 or 50 years ago, this was the moment parents were prompted to wonder where their kids actually were. There are plenty of memes about how feral kids were in that era, but what struck me today was how baffling the premise seemed to everyone in the meeting. The idea that children would simply disappear into the neighborhood until dark—and that a television station would have to remind parents to check on them—felt almost unimaginable. Oddly enough, many of the people in that meeting are probably the children of that very generation, which suggests there was a pretty strong reaction against the free-range childhood of the 1970s and 1980s. Did this PSA help usher in the helicopter parent who would begin to emerge in the 1990s? I found a pretty fun compilation of some of these from the 90s, featuring Cyndi Lauper, Andy Warhol, Grace Jones, and more. It’s almost like those celebrity READ posters from that decade, just stripped down to their most primitive and survivalist. MBS and I have talked about the enormous differences between our childhood and that of our kids on the Family Pictures Podcast (FPP). I think a mini-series documenting those differences could be a lot of fun. Family Pictures Podcast gets all sociological.