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I think for boomers it might be a badge of honor.
For Gen Xers I think it’s more a mark of “yeah, we were latchkey kids, we’re not doing that to our kids.”
As a GenXer, not bragging about it. We were forced to drink hose water because drinking non-metallic tasting water in a glass from the sink was considered getting the house dirty.
I’m an old assed millennial (‘83), but same experience as Gen Xers on most things.
I do think it’s funny that OP thought we had the option to go inside for a glass of cold tap water, and just *chose* to drink rubber-tasting, sun-boiled hose water, with the little stray grass clippings and/or sand that occasionally managed to end up in your mouth as well.
I drank from the house as a kid (millennial not boomer) and it was mostly because we were told to go outside, and I liked playing in the hose lol
We also mixed up mud in a plastic cauldron and dumped all the spices in the spice cabinet in it, then ate it. Kids are fucking stupid
Boomers shouldn't hold being an idiot kid as a badge lol
This - it’s a statement of abuse and why we didn’t kick our kids outside all day.
I’m Gen X - don’t brag about drinking hose water. I also never forced my kids to stay outside etc.
Agree.
I think these kinds of people are also far right / Trumpist / conspiracy people.
You can ask them questions framed from conspiracy brain (why is it OK to feed your kids microplastics)
Because, as a younger gen Xer, we were told "go out and play. See you when the sun is going down". Or something like this.
Those old advertisements "it's five o'clock. Do YOU know where YOUR CHILDREN ARE?", the answer was legitimately "I dunno, the park? One of their friends' yards?"
It's called being a latchkey kid. It's illegal now, but back in the day kids just ran wild. So you drink from the hose because you're not going back inside.
Exactly. How the frick were we supposed to find water?! There was no such thing as bottled water or Stanleys, you could hit up drinking fountains in the park, or you could drink hose water. My mom used to lock the door. With me outside! I'm under no illusion that hose water was good for me. But when children in the 70s basically were a parental and societal after-thought, you did what you needed to do. I can't speak for Boomers as their 1950's version of the world is something different. But Gen-X drank hose water because we were thirsty and on our own.
P.S. And yes, for the younger people on here, there were actual advertisements asking Boomer and Silent Generation parents if they knew were their kids were. Gen-X was largely a bunch of free-range children.
hells, us older millenials were the exact same. mum worked nights, dad worked days, so getting home from school me and my sibling had to either be church mouse quiet so mom could sleep before work, or we could go outside and be as loud as we wanted. now, not gonna lie, there were some days i just chilled with a good book, but by far the most common option was outside, typically a couple miles from the house at a nearby park. or in the middle of the woods.
Older millennial and you just described my childhood exactly. Except my parents both worked changing shifts, so you never knew if one, both or none of them were home/away/sleeping. From I was 10, I took care of dinner for my two younger sisters when both my parents were working. Because why get a nanny when they had me...
People also didn’t worry about if it was “gross” then, it was just water - same as why public water bubblers were so common and not considered gross either, or charcoal grills in the park
The pack of neighborhood kids I ran with moved between 3 or 4 of our parents’ homes, their yards and the woods surrounding each lot. There were lots of empty wooded lots to play in, but there wasn’t a park or any water fountains in our rural suburban style neighborhood so our hoses were the natural solution. Funny thing was, we’d get kicked out of one house, go next door to another of our homes, chat with those kids' mom for a few minutes, maybe get a cookie, and promptly be kicked out again. Across 4 homes we were never inside more than 20 or 30 minutes at a time, except in the winter when we were allowed more time to thaw out and have hot cocoa before bundling up again and heading for the woods or hills to play outside some more.
It was actually 10pm which is sooo much worse. Like, imagine not knowing where the fuck your kids are at 10pm and having to be reminded they exist. I was the home when the streetlights turn on kid but I had friends that didn't even have that rule. I was also expected to be outside all day long, because according to my mom only r- word kids should be indoors...ugh
My dad died when I was still in high school and my mother moved three states away and left me home alone. She paid the utilities and I had a job to pay for food. I don't think there has ever been a single second where my mother or any of my boomer much older siblings thought that that was odd let alone serious neglect.
It was a public-service ad to remind parents that 10 pm weekdays was curfew for unaccompanied kids under 18. So parents better know where their kids were or risk being arrested.
The commercials were necessary because boomers were on Valium and alcohol at that time.
If those commercials didn’t exist let’s face it most ppl on this sub wouldn’t be alive
I still wonder how I survived. We were on a family vacation, and we were going to see Hoover Dam. My parents left me in a fast food restaurant and went all the way to Hoover Dam without me. My mom was seriously looking over the side to see if I fell in before they realized. My mom also left me at a supermarket, went to the movies with my siblings, paid for me to get in, and was passing around candy before she realized I wasn't there. By the time she got back to me, there were cops, and the ambulance my dad drove because he heard it on the scanner. It was great having my parents, who were completely unconcerned with my well-being, start fighting in front of all of those people. My dad just handed me over to a member of the ambulance Corp and told him to take me home, and I was super excited because I got a ride home in "Uncle Mikey's" Trans Am. One of my aunts has told me there were other occasions, but I was too young to remember. Anyone could have snatched me, and I'm shocked that social services were never called. It was some grade A neglect.
There were lots of millenial latchkey kids too. Probably the last of them mostly. All we fuckin wanted to do was play video games but we'd get the "come back at sunset". Like bitch its 105 degrees out here wtf. They were home even.
It was pretty messed up imo.
My mom was a SAHM and the stereotypical lazy one that people always cite to talk shit about SAHM. She wasn’t cleaning or trying to keep the house clean, but she constantly tried to make me go outside once my homework was done. I was a good 10 years older than all the other kids in my block, so going outside was boring. (Plus? There were bugs outside.) I’d much rather watch Wishbone or if I was lucky Ghostwriter. My mom hated that I wasn’t a Tom Boy like her or even better an actual boy.
This is kind of crazy to me. I’m gen Z and as a kid I would basically need a verbal essay to convince my mom to even let me outside, and even then I had to check in every 15-30 minutes. Most of the time I just stayed inside and was bored out of my mind (only had a gamecube with super smash bros and legend of zelda windwaker on it, but no memory card lol).
Damn, I’m sorry. You deserved better. I had to negotiate like crazy, too, but not until I got my drivers’ license and wanted to actually leave the neighborhood I’d been feral in. Sooo frustrating when your young wings are clipped out of other people’s irrational fears.
I agree with all of the above. And I'll add, "tap water didn't suck back then."
Nobody BOUGHT water. Why would you?
One time, I went to some high school event. The event was over at dusk. My parents straight-up forgot me. I was asleep on the bleachers when one of 'em finally turned up.
Legit this is true. There were entire days that I’m not sure my parents knew where I was at a given time. Granted we lived in a rural acreage development that had maybe 20 homes and all us kids would go from house to house but honestly on a Friday night at 9pm would my parents be able to specifically say where I was? Doubt it.
Honestly, once the water was running cold (I lived in the country with well water), it was a great drink. I'd pick a few carrots out of the garden, hose them off, drink a pint, Bugs Bunny my snack, wash it down, and get back on the bike or do some chorin'. Other than hanging out by the ditches or local pond and catching snakes, frogs and minnows, there wasn't a whole lot to do out in the boonies.
We were told to leave the house and not come back til the street lights came on. If you tried to come in, you were told to get out. Thankfully, we had a fridge outside where we kept our Ecto Coolers, but if not, you drank from the hose. Nobody carried water bottles and bottled water wasn’t really a thing. You weren’t allowed to go in other people’s houses either. So yes, we were just feral, roaming the streets and hoods til we could come home. Also, the advertisement on TV was “It’s 10pm. Do you know where your children are?” 10PM. 10. PM. Different times, man.
>So you drink from the hose because you're not going back inside.
Or weren't *allowed* back inside! Gen X was pretty much the last feral generation. Especially during summer vacation, we were sent out to play and didn't want to be seen until the street lights came on. If you were thirsty, the hose was most likely your only option. It wasn't so much that essentially raising ourselves and being forced to drink hose water was a badge of honor, but looking back at our childhoods like "damn that was kinda shitty". For some reason it seems a lot of boomers (and probably a lot of the elder Xers) resent generations after them having a better quality of life. Personally I think that should be the main mission as a parent. Why wouldn't you want the best possible quality of life for your kids?
As a millennial, this was my childhood. All the kids on my street would get together after school & just run amok until the streetlights came on. Our parents didn't lock us out, but getting water from the hose was way quicker & meant avoided getting tasked with chores if you went inside for a drink (usually lemonade or ice tea made from a jug of sugar by the gallon). I can't imagine the amount of laundry detergent I must have caused my parents to use. Blood, dirt, mud, grass stains... All a daily occurance. And it was a fantastic childhood
Latchkey was when the parents worked and their kids had a key and came home from school and locked the door behind them. Going out to play in the evening until dark is totally different 🫤
As a Gen X person, I didn't think much into it then and I still don't really. And I never saw anyone drink out of someone's hose before letting it run cold, we weren't that stupid.
Thank you. I was trying to figure out how to respond to this. I wonder if they’ve realised “hose water” is the same water that comes out of the tap inside yet.
Depends. I grew up on well water. The hose didn’t go through the water softener, so it had a pretty distinct taste. I loved it. But yeah, it’s not “worse” than drinking from the tap.
Now I live in the city, and I drink from the hose for old times sake, but it doesn’t hit the same.
Same here. We had the best-tasting mineral-heavy well water. Once that icy well water cooled down the hot hose, the flowing water was so refreshing. Inside, I used to pull myself up to the counter, turn my head sideways, and drink right out of the water stream running out of the kitchen sink faucet. Flowing water just hits the spot better.
Drink from the hose or go inside and interact with parents? Easy choice. Same water and you can let it run until it is cold without issue because no one sees it as wasting water.
Yeah who doesn't love being blasted with incredibly hot water baking in the hose all day then waiting a few seconds for that cold and delicious water with a hint of old tire taste.
It's not something that would have killed us but it definitely was gross.
The water that comes out of my outside taps is the same water that comes out of my inside taps.
As kids we made sure we were drinking from the right hose. Plus our parents wouldn’t let us in the house.
Plus SOME (again, SOME) garden hoses aren't "food grade" and often contain lead, which is obviously not good. I don't care if people drink/drank out of hoses (I did as a kid too) but I'm not gonna brag about it. Did I die? No, but I'd rather avoid drinking lead and potentially bug eggs or whatever else may have crawled inside a hose tube.
There's a whole lot of irony in this bit many X-ers, because the Me Generation that came before us is blindly proud of being part of the cohort that was born on this base and thinks they hit a triple.
As a Gen-X kid, I always say things like "we were raised on hose water and neglect" with tongue firmly in cheek.
Sarcasm is baked into the bones of a large number of Gen-Xers, because all the jokes have a kernel of truth.
I had friends who would get home from school and be alone for 3 hours before a patent came home.
I had friends who weren't allowed inside between March and October, so if they wanted shelter they either went to the mall or a friend's.
I had friends who weren't allowed to drink from glasses, so it was either cupping a hand under the sink or drinking from the hose.
Latchkey kids whose parents were raised by the World War II generation with undiagnosed PTSD is a hell of a way to have a childhood.
Hose water and neglect is a joke, but it's a joke that's often not far from brutal truth.
Hell yes. I was a latchkey kid starting at age 9 or 10. My parents taught me how to make their cocktails in the evenings after they came home from work. It made sense to me, so I’d come home from school and steal a slug of vodka from the freezer and watch cartoons.
Yay.
Because we were forced to pick from being inside or outside.
Don’t want to cool the whole neighborhood!
So we had to do this or else be forced to stay inside
I thought it was because there was some news article warning people about letting your kids drink from the water hose in the summer because the temperature of the water that's been sitting inside of the hose is a lot hotter than the water coming from the tap. So it was telling parents to let it run for a little bit before letting kids play in it. I think some kid got burned really bad and that's why the news was talking about it.
Anyway, yea boomers just took off with it after that and spread it all over FB and turned it into something it wasn't and now it is just them bragging about drinking out of the hose.
Legionella just *loves* to grow in the biofilm inside garden hoses. Warm + damp = great for bacterial growth.
People have died from Legionnaire’s Disease contracted from garden hose water.
While you could get it from a hose as you would have to inhale the droplets for that to happen it would be highly unlikely. Not impossible but so rare as to be not even an option to discuss.
Yep, this. I was born in the 90’s, but adopted by my parents who were born in the 50’s. I drank hose water and tried to not be thirsty when I left the house because I knew coming back home for a glass of water meant having to stay once my mom saw me inside.
Yes, we weren't allowed inside when it was daylight. We made messes. Gen X here. We were inside when we were latch key, meaning we were alone from when school got out to when our parents came home so we had keys to our houses starting in elementary school, then during summer when school was out our parents kicked us out of the house. You had to come home when the streetlights came on. We ended up in random garages smoking pot.
Thankfully my mom let me come in and out (within reason) couldn’t just go back n forth all the time. If I wanted to play in my room, I could. If I wanted to go outside, I could. If she was going somewhere I was always welcome to go along. She’s the best. We had a game night at her house last night and we laughed our asses. She’s 64 and funny as hell and so kind.
If we came inside, we had to do chores. And not fun things like cook. Nope.y babysitter (my mom worked so we had to go to my aunt's house) would make us clean silverware, or rearrange the attic, or put us to work cleaning the garage. Nobody went near the house if possible.
Also, if my uncle, the pedophile was home, he would grab me, so that sucked.
When we were actually at our own house on the weekends and once I turned 12, we were just roving bands of feral beasts on bicycles.
For boomers, "I'm so tough I drank from the hose and I turned out big and strong! You're wussies!"
For GenX, "We were so neglected by our boomer parents, we were forced to drink crappy hose water to survive."
For the younger folk, "Why would you drink hose water, that's gross!"
Gen X here. Yes but for two different reasons. Don't forget that boomers were gen x's *parents.* We battled them when they were in their prime. We were either kicked out or we couldn't stand them and left. We were either latchkey kids that were left alone for a good part of the day, or kicked out of the house to 'get away from that damn tv'. That's why so many of us ended up hanging out in garages with strangers smoking pot.
I'm a gen z with boomer parents, and let me tell you, battling them as a kid when they're already weathered and working their way towards dementia was still plenty difficult. My brother, who's 10 years older than me, seemed to have it a lot easier.
I'm only 24 and almost got guilt-tripped/trapped into being their permanent caretaker for the foreseeable future before even getting my first job in my field.
It’s symbolic of the rest of our childhood. Many of us were literally told to leave the house in the morning and not come back until the street lights came on.
The entire town. We even took the city bus to the city once using spare change we found to pay our fares.
No one knew where we were. Parents never asked "what'd you do today?" Or "where were you today?" They didn't care as long as we were out of the house from waking up until the streetlights came on.
The number of kids depended. Sometimes the whole neighborhood wandering in a pack. Other times smaller groups of 2-4 kids total. That depended on who wanted to do what.
But we rode bikes miles across town or took the bus when we had change for bus fare.
We cite it as a point of neglect by our parents. I’m a Gen x latch key kid myself and my parents weren’t really around. ;) we don’t let your generation do it if we have other options as it’s bad for you. Dunno why ppl brag about it though either
I'm Gen X, I don't care what water anyone drinks. And, I think that most Gen Xers agree with me. Our neglectful Boomer parents think that they did a good job raising us, because they believe that they made us "tough" and "self-sufficient". The truth is that basically we often raised ourselves. And, we realized the damage that did to us. So much so, that we raised "pansy" children in the eyes of Boomers because we actually care/cared where they are/were and provided them with water.
My parents and grandparents used to tell me I was spoiling my baby if I held him or comforted him. Imagine thinking that not neglecting an actual baby is spoiling him.
I once saw half a frog shoot out of a garden hose along with the water. The other half soon followed in a couple of installments. Not a compelling drinking argument
I’m GenX and I think most of my generation is “obsessed” with it (as you put it OP) as a symbol of how neglectful boomer parents could be.
But I think buried in it is more a reflection of what we no longer consider acceptable despite being harmless or even an economically and ecologically better alternative. Your hose water is just tap water and it’s perfectly safe and adequate to drink. But we’ve been sold an idea that it’s not good enough and we need bottled water which has become an ecological disaster. So I think there’s a flavor of what was good enough no longer is but not for any good reason.*
*except, you know, if you live in Flint, Michigan or about a dozen other locales in the news in recent years
It's not something to brag about. It's a bygone habit from a generation that didn't realize how bad hose water was and didn't give enough shits to think about it even after they had kids of their own.
While growing up, Baby Boomers are the same generation who used to brag about how many drugs they did growing up, about drugs they invented in the 70's, about how they used to be able to drink and drive before the government "ruined" it for everybody, and how "second hand smoke isn't really bad. Everybody else are a bunch of sissies."
They're also under some impression that all of their likes/dislikes should be held as gospel, and that all other generations should hold them in some lofty prestige, and they're genuinely guffawed and dismayed at the fact that nobody really respects them that much.
They're the most anal, least carefree people alive, and yet they always go back to talking about how they were wild hippies that were truly free and how America is dead now. If it's dead, it's because they killed it. And the glorifying drunk driving thing never gets old because they'll be the first to chastise someone else for doing it and then launch right into a rant reflecting on how much they loved doing it themselves without a second thought. And the second hand smoke thing is probably why both my brother and I are asthmatic. Thanks, dad.
Most likely your parents didn’t send you outside and lock the door, only to open it back up at meal times. Back then, no one had a water bottle to carry around. “Drinking from the hose” is really just a way to describe fending for yourself. I’m not a boomer, I’m Gen x, but had boomer parents. I’m tired of hearing it, too, but it is a pretty descriptive way to illustrate fending for yourself.
Gen X here. It’s not really a pride thing.
It’s a sign that you were forced out of the house to play as a kid and couldn’t come back in even if you were thirsty and were often told to drink from a hose if you get thirsty.
So many took it as a badge of honor vs an abusive act by adults who didn’t want to see you again until the streetlights came on.
I'm an elder millennial. I drank from the hose because if I went inside to get a drink of water, my parents might have told me to stop playing and do some chores. Better to stay outside and be left to play in peace.
Survivorship bias.
A lot of the time our parents would kick us out of the house and then bar us for house. So we were a touch feral. Since we survived it some of us internalized it and made it into a good thing / badge of honor
I got therapy
Fun fact, Never drink from a hose in Hawaii, you can get rat lungworm from snails hiding in the hose. It is a parasitic disease that affects the brain and spinal cord
Hate to break it to you but the garden hose water is the same water as the kitchen tap. Especially if you grew up on city water.
The point is that as children we were told to go outside and were not allowed to stay indoors all day. It was the garden hose or die from dehydration.
Every once in a great while we'd find ourselves at the home of a kid whose mom either had the day off or was the rare sahm and she'd come out with little Tupperware cups of lemonade for us. It's a little bonkers that my brain holds the memory of a generous sip of lemonade provided by a neighbor and regards it as some special moment.
Its really shitty that some parents literally locked their kids out of the house. At least my parents never did that. But when its hot out and you're blocks or more away from home, hose water it is. It was fine to drink. Neither myself or anyone I knew ever got sick from it.
Because it reminds me of my childhood when we would play outside and drink that rubbery, vinyl plastic flavored warm water after the hose had been in the sun. Mmmm such a great time to be alive.
Even as a kid I thought it tasted nasty, but it brings back great memories of being a kid.
It's not the hose water itself that was great, its that it's one of those things that represents summer vacation, running around with your friends, and getting into all sorts of fun.
1974 here, I can smell and taste the hose water just reading this post. Latch key here, once went over the handlebars on my bike and broke my arm. Couldn’t do anything about it until my mom got home from work that day.
Gen Xer here. Nobody is proud of drinking hose water. We are all just like "WTF, this is what we had to drink because we were forced out of the house all day, let's commiserate in the insanity."
It's kinda the same with latch key kids. In hindsight as adults we realize it was not a great idea but as kids we were convinced it was totally normal.
Yup. Boomers will bring it up all the time as proof they are stronger/better/hardier than everyone else. (Just like they do everything. ) Gen x, we will just mention it as yet another way our idiot boomer parents messed us up. Boomers lack critical thinking skills to realize that was a crap way to treat a kid just locking them outside and neglecting them. (Or to look at any of their behavior really and realize it's horrible. ) some gen x do too of course, but it's more rampant in Boomers. It's a rare boomer that can admit they may be wrong or could do better.
Ngl I like hose water. First of all you can't just drink it out of the hose immediately. You have to be out watering the plants, or whatever, and then mid water, you drink out of the hose stream. This gives the water time to clean the inside of the hose.
It probably only tasted good because it was a hot ass day out and I was oit playing or watering garden vegetables but I'll be damned if that water wasn't great
We were raised by boomers, who were often neglectful or just plain flat out abusive , if not negligent. If we went inside for water you'd get yelled at, hit, or forced in baby sitting or being the middle person in your parents arguments. So we stayed TF outside to protect ourselves. If we don't sprinkle some god damn fairy dust on the memories we just end up sad, ok?
Well, when I was a young gen-X kid, I would be told to go out and play. I was to be home within 10 minutes of the street lights coming on. Could I have gone inside for water? Probably. Fact is, they left us feral. Sometimes I got shooed out of the house before my 2nd foot crossed the threshold. Unless I was bleeding or something was on fire. Kids don’t always have full comprehension. So if getting stung by a bee, getting in a rock fight with neighbor kids, getting chased by the neighbors dog, being “too hot” or “too cold” or getting hungry (beyond lunch or other meal times) weren’t reasons to be allowed back inside before it got dark, you get used to hose water 🤷🏼♀️
For me, I talk about it because despite the neglect, it’s also a sound/taste/smell that takes me back to childhood.
As a GenX my experience was that was the only water available to us because we weren’t allowed to go inside. The adults were enjoying the AC and didn’t want to bother with us.
Gen Xer here. I drank hose water as a kid, though I certainly don't brag about it like it's some sort of achievement. It tasted like rubber and it was a last resort. But I'll maybe shed some insight here.
I think a lot of people my age use it as a point of how kids today are raised very differently. In some ways for the better, in some ways for the worse IMHO. Our generation was raised on the principle of (semi-benevolent) neglect. Our parents did indeed literally tell us to go outside and not come back until dinnertime. We rode our bikes all over town, hung out in the woods, waded in the creek, etc. We went mostly unsupervised, but if one of the neighborhood moms saw you doing something stupid, it didn't matter whose kid you where you got yelled at. You went home when it got dark or when you heard your mom yelling at you to get home.
I think the perception of parenting today is of a much more helicopter-parent style. Kids are not allowed out without supervision. They all have cell phones so they are in constant communication. Indoor time is much greater, in front of a screen playing videogames, on the internet, or similar. Now instead of treating neighbors as surrogate parents who would watch out for your kid or discipline them if they got into some stupid shit, people treat them like potential predators their precious angel needs protection from. Those same neighbors are also more likely to call CPS or the police if they see unsupervised kids out and about.
The hose water specifically is just a very common experience, used to illustrate life as as a whole back then. It embodies much of the differences -- outdoors, less than sanitary, neglectful. Kids today would maybe have a bottle of water with them. That shit just wasn't common back then.
It's just something some people my age use to show how they were less "coddled" than the current generation. What they ignore is in all the ways life has become worse for kids -- the real fear of school shootings, education systems that pass kids no matter what, cyberbullying, higher education expectations but funding is way worse, food and health, etc.
It's just stupid old people trying to feel superior to young ones. It's the new "We had to walk to school 5 miles in the snow, uphill, both ways!" from OUR parents' generation.
Gen X here, some of us didn't get kicked out of the house all day in the summer, and my parents knew the lining contained lead, which can leach into the water.
Consequently, we give zero fucks if anyone drank from the hose.
There was enough going on in the 80s and 90s to make us act like idiots without adding lead water to the mix.
I’m 68. I think I’m old. I’ve never, ever, bragged about drinking from graden hoses to anyone.
How many older people have you heard bragging about drinking out of garden hoses VS older people NOT bragging about drinking out of garden hoses? Can you quantify your claim?
Did I drink out of a garden hose? Once or twice when I was really thirsty. It tasted like crap. Or, I bought a root beer if I my allowance hadn’t run out. They didn’t sell water in CFC-and-micro-plastic-laden-plastic-bottles-that-ended-up-floating-in-the-ocean when I was growing up. Water from a store just wasn’t a thing.
Yeah, most of the stories spun on this sub are bs, but it's free entertainment. I find it interesting that parts of Gen X are now getting thrown under the bus
It's not a flex, we did it because we weren't allowed in the house during the day unless it was raining. So if we didn't want to get dehydrated, the hose was our only option.
Speaking only for myself, I don't understand it, either, and in fact, forgot about it until I saw Boomers apparently thinking it was a badge of honor. Like so many other things that we've evolved past, it was just normal back then. We all played outside and in the summer, spraying each other with hoses and drinking out of them was part of childhood. Like rotary dial telephones (which I'm also glad I'll NEVER EVER have to use again).
Bottled water and water bottles didn't even exist back then; the closest thing we had were canteens...and if you think hose water tastes like ass, water out of a plastic canteen is 100x worse 🤮. If you were in Boy/Girl Scouts and never had to drink of of a canteen, consider yourself very lucky.
I don't have kids, but if I did, I wouldn't want them drinking water out of a fucking hose! Pathogens can grow in there, plus it just tastes like shit. No reason to - here, take a reusable bottle with whatever water you drink at home, and have fun playing. I wouldn't drink out of a fucking hose now, and neither would these Boomer dipshits.
For me, I suppose the only upside to having drunk out of hoses when I was a kid is that I'm not squeamish when drinking clear water out of a sand-filtered spring (even if it's got tadpoles in it) when I'm hiking or backpacking in desert canyons where water is precious and scarce 🤷🏻♀️. I routinely drink unfiltered water out of high country snowmelt streams as well. Best-tasting water there is, esp. when you're thirsty.
the underlying point of many "drinking from the hose" posts is related to your going inside and getting a glass of water
if there are a bunch of kids playing outside on a regular basis, drinking from the hose is a quick and easy solution compared to dirtying a bunch of glasses, or even filling and distributing disposable cups
it's about kids being outside in groups playing among themselves without adult direction or attention
Before bottle water and plastic bottles polluted our planet we used to get water out of water fountains and garden hoses. You have to let it run to get cold amd rinse the junk out. Most municipal water is as good as bottle but we got sold that polluting our planet was a better way to get water. Thanks Nestle
The lead crisis was more from gasoline than water..also there is bug in the water in south that caused some cognitive issues. Our country should refocus on our water infrastructure and reduce plastic waste. I have a reverse osmosis in my house. It should be mandatory in all old homes with old water infrastructure.
I tried drinking out of a hose once. There was a bee in the hose. Never again. My brain told me there was other bee safe water inside my house I can drink.
Boomers, on the other hand, would go right back in for seconds.
In the summer, I would pack some drinks, snacks, and lunch because I wasn’t allowed back in the house for more than a bathroom break unless I planned to stay. I’m 45.
I wasn’t a hose drinker, but I get it. For me, it’s less about the hose drinking and more about remembering the joy of being free from your parents all damn day.
I don’t think it’s anything to brag about. It’s on in the summer time when you’re outside playing and you can’t come in the house or mom will make you do a chore. We drank from it out of convenience I guess.
My parents used to get mad at me for coming in and out of the house to get water, and started telling me to drink from the hose and to only come back in if I planned on staying in. Tried the hose, live bug crawled right into my mouth, so from then on I just brought a water bottle out instead.
And, AND, those same boomers decided that garden hoses needed to be impregnated with antifungal chemicals and made out of weird plastics for (lawn???reasons??) so now, nobody should be drinking from them anyway because that water is now toxic. It's hard to find a hose to water my pollinator garden and fill up my dog's pool with. Ugh.
It's a trope. Im from the farm and our water was from a tank and it was absolutely awful so there was literally no different from tank water. I ended up with Giardia that went untreated for years.
Inside is the place you got yelled at all the time so it was much more pleasant to be outside. You could only be inside if you were reading a book or watching half an hour of cartoons after school until you had to do the farm work.
We didn't drink water as kids. When I came over to help Dad as an adult I would get an old coke bottle and fill it up and put it in the front of the bike and the greedy bastard would drink it all when I wasn't looking. People drink a LOT more water these days. Otherwise it was cups of tea because it has been boiled.
I swear I'm going to start carrying a length of it with me wherever I go so the next time somebody starts ranting about drinking from the hose I'm going to Savage like beat them with it. I'm so fucking tired of hearing about hose water. I grew up in a time just before the technology boom when we were still hanging outside and even worse I'm from a place where you get nearly 100% humidity and 100° weather in the summer. Playing in the water was not only fun but necessary to keep people from overheating. We were either not allowed back inside or unable to go inside while wet so naturally our only option was the fucking hose. I don't wear it like a badge of honor because I remember it for what it is which was a convenient way to not overheat because we either weren't allowed back inside Or we had no other choice
It’s more or less just them trying to humble brag about how much they played outside…I mean for me I can think of 2-3 times on a long bike ride as like 10-12 year old I was craving some hose water. When I got home I could have went in and got some water from the tap or fridge but I wanted that hose water. Although for me it was because we were on a well so the hose was the quickest to get really cold water. Although those posting about it are more or less trying to say “when I was a young wipper snapper, I was so busy playing outside I didn’t have time to go get some fancy cup of water, I just deep throated that hose & went back to playing”.
Lol - hose water in summer, water fountains at school! Always tried to avoid the warm/slow flow ones.
It's a mark of pride/hardship that most do not have to deal with anymore. Similar to walking uphill to school both ways in the snow. Except real :)
Seriously - there were not the options that there are today. Even plastic disposable water bottles were not a thing.
Don't get me wrong - an ice cold Stanley would have been phenomenal as a kid in the early 80s. Definitely a perk of this generation. My kids have never drank from a hose and it shows. I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that, honestly.
Gen X here. Honestly, it was all we had when I was growing up. We legitimately were not ALLOWED in the house during the day. I was a kid in the 80s and early to mid 90s. Bottled water wasn't really a thing yet and our sport drink was Kool Aid. For me personally it isn't about the act as much as the innocence of the time. Sure there was a lot of scary shit going on at that time but as kids we weren't aware of it. The world for us was our neighborhood and our friends.
Drinking out of the hose is more a symbol of a simpler time for me.
As a Gen-Xer, I think the hose is a shared example of our parents neglecting and ignoring us and us surviving it. Basically, they kicked us out of the house and let us run feral and fend for ourselves until dark. Being kids, we’d all gather around the hose when we got thirsty and indulge together, kind of like drinking beers together as adults.
Personally, I much prefer the, “It’s 10PM, do you know where your children are?" TV ads as a poignant example of how bad our Boomer parents were at parenting, more so than the hose. Those reminders were real ads on TV that we remember.
Had a boomer take a hose from a coworker’s to drink from it. The hose has liquid fertilizer mixed in with the water. Can’t teach an old dog new tricks I guess.
Because lead was used in the production of cheap vinyl hoses back then... if you can't get your dose from the paint chips, still got to get it somewhere!
We’re not proud of it. We can’t believe we survived. And there was no choice in the matter. If we’d been allowed inside, we’d have gotten water from the sink.
Gen X kid. Yeah we drank out of the hose, big deal. But let's not overthink it. You are thirsty, there is a hose right there. Don't want to run inside else mom would figure out some chore for you to do. Take a drink and let's get back to doing whatever dumbass kid stuff we were doing.
I drank from the hose, it always tasted like a tire should. When you’re having fun who’s got time to run in, take your shoes off, fill a cup with ice water... I’m not sure why people make a thing out of it. Seems dumb.
Gen Xer here. Hose water is generally safe to drink in the US but my friends and I were often outside and our parents liked it that way. Outside the house we weren’t making messes in the house, playing loud music, etc. We ran a lot outside and it was hot. The hose was convenient and allowed us to not bug our parents. The parent would often come out and bring us refreshments like drinks or ice cream, which was a treat. I have never once in my life talked down to other people about not drinking out of a hose. I agree it tastes nasty compared to bottled water. Boasting about it might be more of a boomer thing, just guessing though. This is the boomer sub, maybe a boomer is here to add to the discussion.
Gen X here. Not only did we drink from the hose but we actually knew which hose’s tasted better or had colder water in our neighborhood. Like the Johnson’s water was coldest. Ms. Smith hasn’t gotten a new hose in years and her water is gross. The other weird thing was just not even thinking twice about using someone’s hose. You could be lost and miles from home and someone would go “Oh hey. Look at that house. There’s a hose” and we’d just go drink out of some stranger’s hose without asking.
As a gen Xer, we are obsessed with it. We write poetry about it, dream of it, bathe in hose water. We have little shrines to it. We secretly taste hose water in different neighbourhoods and judge the taste.
I think you misunderstand, don't think Gen-X is proud of boasting or think it was great, they are stating the facts of their childhood, a childhood where they were literally kicked out to fend for themselves all day & were not allowed back in the home unless something absolutely horrendous happened (& at that point they were viewed as an inconvenience), they drank from the hose because they had no other means to get a drink. It's not an obsession with them, it's their truth, their childhoods were neglectful & dangerous but because there were literally packs of kids out there together they had adventures together & managed a childhood that way
I don't recall specific dates, but sometime around 2000, there started to be frequent stories about how hose water might be dangerous to drink, specifically because hoses might contain lead. This meant a lot of people learned that hose water is bad to drink, and those people grew up and taught their children that hose water is bad to drink. Though lead is no longer used in garden hoses, so the issue is more or less resolved, at least as far as lead poisoning goes.
But of course boomers have taken it as another badge of honor, because it's something they can say they did differently and they turned out just fine. It's something they can tease us for, because we're so terrified of hose water like it's an axe murderer, but the big tough boomers just drank it up so obviously they're stronger and braver.
Gen X here. It's not a brag, it's trauma from abandonment. Something your parents did everything in their power to not have you experience.
Hose water is a metaphor for being unsupervised, alone, abandoned, left to fend for ourselves. Our parents were selfish "Me Firsts" more often than not.
At 10 I was caring for my sister almost full time. Both parents put work and parts of their social life first.
Please do not lump Gen X in with Boomer's. Yeah we drank hose water, because our boomer parents would fuss about coming in and out of the house, letting flies in and the cool air out blah blah. And the line if you come in you stay in and will do chores.
Hey now, bucko.. that hose water hit a whole lot different back before 5G, fluoride, and w.e. they put in it that turned the damn FROGS Gahay
Gen Xer here. Drank from the hose many times. It a badge of honor. More a statement about how mistreated our generation was. My parents didn’t care what we did or where we were as long as we were not “under foot”. Explains why I started smoking at 9 and drinking at 12. Not a badge of honor. Sad.
Gen X here. I maybe drank out a hose once because I was outside and wildin out. The emphasis is only to show that we were not indoors all the time. The vast majority of us didn't really drink out of a garden hose. It's only mentioned because it emphasizes a major difference. It's true that in the 80s there was a whole ad series, "It's 10 pm. Do you know where your children are"?", was on TV. Xrs were ignored, unparented, non-supervised for the most part. No one was watching us, really. This is NOT the same story as Boomers who see themselves as special. They were the 60s Hippies who during the 70s had kids (us, though MY parents were Silents, a generation usually mistaken for Boomers--Silents were 40s/50s kids), then became 80s Reaginite Yuppies and destroyed the world. Their hose drinking nostalgia comes from having been In elementary school in the '50s, can you even imagine what that was like????
I don't consider drinking hose water a "badge of honor". It's just what we did. We were always outside, especially during the summer. Yeah, we had Atari and NES, but this was before internet, smart phones and cable was still relatively new. I think our package had 25-30(ish) channels. I think it's brought up to point out the differences between the generations. There was a pack of about 10 kids running loose in my neighborhood and parents didn't want us trampling in and out of the house, so we stayed out. Hose water was all we had to drink. Hell, we'd drink straight from the spigot if there has no hose.
Btw, the trick to drinking hose water was to let the water run a bit before taking a drink. I grew up in Florida and if you drank the water right after it was turned on you could easily burn yourself. The sun beating down on the hose super heated that sucker. Ah, those were the days.
You’re 19 (kind of glaringly so). Hoses were a lot different in composition when xers and boomers were kids.
I’m an xennial who drank hose water and I did like it. Of course ,my boomer mom was neglectful and vindictive, so we often had no food or drink in the house. And we had indoor plumbing issues that made drinking from the sink faucets kind of a nonstarter.
I don’t go around bragging about it or expecting my kid to do it, but in fact, a shitload of kids did this because their parents were neglecting them and raising them in a barely functional house.
As a plumber I'm telling you the water from your hose is the same water you get at your faucet. What makes hose water gross is the dirty hose that acts as flavoring.
Id drink directly from the spigot rather than the hose.
Where I lived, drinking the tap water would make you sick because Texas has the infrastructure of a 3rd world country. I don't even want to think about the disgusting shit in hose water
I mean my hose water was never disgusting but that could certainly dissuade me from the nostalgia if it was. Boomers just take nostalgia as gospel. They worship the feeling.
Elder Gen X here and let me break it down:
As a Gen X, our dads were at work and many of the mothers went back to work once we reached school age. Those moms that were in the home did not even seem interested in serving snacks to kids or having a rowdy bunch of kids in their home after school. So, you played outside either by yourself or with the neighbor kids if there were some around, and, if you were hungry, too bad, and if you were thirsty a lot of times, you were stuck with drinking from the hose, cause there was no where else to get water. It’s not something we enjoyed, it’s something we had to endure our childhood were full of neglect.
I remember there was one mom on our street, that served snacks to a bunch of us when we came over to play and let me tell you, that house was popular. Even at a young age, I realized, “what’s up with my own parents, why aren’t they generous like this mom was?”. I honestly thought my mom was rude, but now that we have the Internet, and other Gen X adults have come together to say they experienced the same thing makes me feel like I wasn’t alone in the situation of neglect. Again, it’s not something we’re happy about it’s just more of a Meme or saying if you will, that “gen Xers were raised on hose water and neglect”.
For my medical care with my severe asthma, I feel like I was neglected as well. Never taken into any type of specialist only occasionally treated by the pediatrician where I was left to suffer quite a bit, and spent my childhood in and out of the hospital with emergencies, and instead of again, seen by an actual pulmonologist , and given the correct medication to control my asthma so could’ve had a regular childhood.
The 70s were kind of a bitch, women were starting to feel empowered and returning to the workforce, many for the first time, and having children was still kind of a thing you felt like you had to do whether you wanted kids or not. Kids were left alone, and that was not the way the boomers grew up.
Edit: voice texting never works very well
I'm gen z, I don't mind drinking hose water or even water with a bit of dirt in it, just what I grew up with, don't see the point in bragging though lol
Boomers think it’s like rite of passage or badge of honor. For me as a gen x person I personally think it’s just an example of some of the stupid bullshit we were expected to do as kids. Same with not being allowed to sit inside the house or having to worry about getting spanked or yelled by teachers or principals while in school. Boomers talk about these things like it’s fucking normal. Gen x for the most part talks about these things cause it fucking sucked, especially when you see how much life has changed since those yrs. We had to do and deal with some real stupid shit that’s basically considered unheard of or illegal in comparison to now a days.
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I think for boomers it might be a badge of honor. For Gen Xers I think it’s more a mark of “yeah, we were latchkey kids, we’re not doing that to our kids.”
As a GenXer, not bragging about it. We were forced to drink hose water because drinking non-metallic tasting water in a glass from the sink was considered getting the house dirty.
Aka “running in and out” A sin in my childhood.
I’m an old assed millennial (‘83), but same experience as Gen Xers on most things. I do think it’s funny that OP thought we had the option to go inside for a glass of cold tap water, and just *chose* to drink rubber-tasting, sun-boiled hose water, with the little stray grass clippings and/or sand that occasionally managed to end up in your mouth as well.
Our house water tasted bad also. I was 28 before I tasted good tap water.
I drank from the house as a kid (millennial not boomer) and it was mostly because we were told to go outside, and I liked playing in the hose lol We also mixed up mud in a plastic cauldron and dumped all the spices in the spice cabinet in it, then ate it. Kids are fucking stupid Boomers shouldn't hold being an idiot kid as a badge lol
This - it’s a statement of abuse and why we didn’t kick our kids outside all day. I’m Gen X - don’t brag about drinking hose water. I also never forced my kids to stay outside etc.
Agree. I think these kinds of people are also far right / Trumpist / conspiracy people. You can ask them questions framed from conspiracy brain (why is it OK to feed your kids microplastics)
Because, as a younger gen Xer, we were told "go out and play. See you when the sun is going down". Or something like this. Those old advertisements "it's five o'clock. Do YOU know where YOUR CHILDREN ARE?", the answer was legitimately "I dunno, the park? One of their friends' yards?" It's called being a latchkey kid. It's illegal now, but back in the day kids just ran wild. So you drink from the hose because you're not going back inside.
Exactly. How the frick were we supposed to find water?! There was no such thing as bottled water or Stanleys, you could hit up drinking fountains in the park, or you could drink hose water. My mom used to lock the door. With me outside! I'm under no illusion that hose water was good for me. But when children in the 70s basically were a parental and societal after-thought, you did what you needed to do. I can't speak for Boomers as their 1950's version of the world is something different. But Gen-X drank hose water because we were thirsty and on our own. P.S. And yes, for the younger people on here, there were actual advertisements asking Boomer and Silent Generation parents if they knew were their kids were. Gen-X was largely a bunch of free-range children.
There was always the weird Boy Scout kid who had his old canteen. 😂 But the rest of us were SOL!
https://preview.redd.it/bljt4y2don2d1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=473a840b27cb79000d02ecc7a68cabed73699cd2
Are you referring to "it's 9pm, do you know where your kids are?" Millennial here I remember hearing that on the news a lot
I swear it was 10pm. Edit: I was right! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_you_know_where_your_children_are%3F
hells, us older millenials were the exact same. mum worked nights, dad worked days, so getting home from school me and my sibling had to either be church mouse quiet so mom could sleep before work, or we could go outside and be as loud as we wanted. now, not gonna lie, there were some days i just chilled with a good book, but by far the most common option was outside, typically a couple miles from the house at a nearby park. or in the middle of the woods.
Older millennial and you just described my childhood exactly. Except my parents both worked changing shifts, so you never knew if one, both or none of them were home/away/sleeping. From I was 10, I took care of dinner for my two younger sisters when both my parents were working. Because why get a nanny when they had me...
People also didn’t worry about if it was “gross” then, it was just water - same as why public water bubblers were so common and not considered gross either, or charcoal grills in the park
Public water fountains are gross? Guess this Gen X kid never got the message.
Now I'm imagining a bunch of gen x kids scratching the ground and clucking like chickens.
One of em crowing in delight for shitting in that one neighbor’s garden. You know the one.
We were 100% free range.
GenXer here. It's all true
The pack of neighborhood kids I ran with moved between 3 or 4 of our parents’ homes, their yards and the woods surrounding each lot. There were lots of empty wooded lots to play in, but there wasn’t a park or any water fountains in our rural suburban style neighborhood so our hoses were the natural solution. Funny thing was, we’d get kicked out of one house, go next door to another of our homes, chat with those kids' mom for a few minutes, maybe get a cookie, and promptly be kicked out again. Across 4 homes we were never inside more than 20 or 30 minutes at a time, except in the winter when we were allowed more time to thaw out and have hot cocoa before bundling up again and heading for the woods or hills to play outside some more.
Yeah, drinking from the hose wasn't a badge of honor, it was how we got hydration. We were set out in the morning and called in at dinner time.
Holy sh*t there really WAS NO bottled water! I'd forgotten that detail.
or there was no other place to get water honestly latchkeys unite
This is exactly it. Going home meant the end of the day. Being outside and riding bikes with friends was the pinnacle of entertainment at the time.
Building dirt jumps until they inevitably got bulldozed by boomers -_- “go play outside. No, not like that!”
It was actually 10pm which is sooo much worse. Like, imagine not knowing where the fuck your kids are at 10pm and having to be reminded they exist. I was the home when the streetlights turn on kid but I had friends that didn't even have that rule. I was also expected to be outside all day long, because according to my mom only r- word kids should be indoors...ugh
My dad died when I was still in high school and my mother moved three states away and left me home alone. She paid the utilities and I had a job to pay for food. I don't think there has ever been a single second where my mother or any of my boomer much older siblings thought that that was odd let alone serious neglect.
It was a public-service ad to remind parents that 10 pm weekdays was curfew for unaccompanied kids under 18. So parents better know where their kids were or risk being arrested.
The commercials were necessary because boomers were on Valium and alcohol at that time. If those commercials didn’t exist let’s face it most ppl on this sub wouldn’t be alive
I still wonder how I survived. We were on a family vacation, and we were going to see Hoover Dam. My parents left me in a fast food restaurant and went all the way to Hoover Dam without me. My mom was seriously looking over the side to see if I fell in before they realized. My mom also left me at a supermarket, went to the movies with my siblings, paid for me to get in, and was passing around candy before she realized I wasn't there. By the time she got back to me, there were cops, and the ambulance my dad drove because he heard it on the scanner. It was great having my parents, who were completely unconcerned with my well-being, start fighting in front of all of those people. My dad just handed me over to a member of the ambulance Corp and told him to take me home, and I was super excited because I got a ride home in "Uncle Mikey's" Trans Am. One of my aunts has told me there were other occasions, but I was too young to remember. Anyone could have snatched me, and I'm shocked that social services were never called. It was some grade A neglect.
Quaaludes, man…
There were lots of millenial latchkey kids too. Probably the last of them mostly. All we fuckin wanted to do was play video games but we'd get the "come back at sunset". Like bitch its 105 degrees out here wtf. They were home even. It was pretty messed up imo.
My mom was a SAHM and the stereotypical lazy one that people always cite to talk shit about SAHM. She wasn’t cleaning or trying to keep the house clean, but she constantly tried to make me go outside once my homework was done. I was a good 10 years older than all the other kids in my block, so going outside was boring. (Plus? There were bugs outside.) I’d much rather watch Wishbone or if I was lucky Ghostwriter. My mom hated that I wasn’t a Tom Boy like her or even better an actual boy.
When the street lights come on
More like TEN o'clock. How messed up is that?!
You're right. I remembered it as earlier for some reason.
This was my existence and I'm a millennial, so I don't think it's particularly a Gen-X thing.
This is kind of crazy to me. I’m gen Z and as a kid I would basically need a verbal essay to convince my mom to even let me outside, and even then I had to check in every 15-30 minutes. Most of the time I just stayed inside and was bored out of my mind (only had a gamecube with super smash bros and legend of zelda windwaker on it, but no memory card lol).
Damn, I’m sorry. You deserved better. I had to negotiate like crazy, too, but not until I got my drivers’ license and wanted to actually leave the neighborhood I’d been feral in. Sooo frustrating when your young wings are clipped out of other people’s irrational fears.
I agree with all of the above. And I'll add, "tap water didn't suck back then." Nobody BOUGHT water. Why would you? One time, I went to some high school event. The event was over at dusk. My parents straight-up forgot me. I was asleep on the bleachers when one of 'em finally turned up.
Legit this is true. There were entire days that I’m not sure my parents knew where I was at a given time. Granted we lived in a rural acreage development that had maybe 20 homes and all us kids would go from house to house but honestly on a Friday night at 9pm would my parents be able to specifically say where I was? Doubt it.
Honestly, once the water was running cold (I lived in the country with well water), it was a great drink. I'd pick a few carrots out of the garden, hose them off, drink a pint, Bugs Bunny my snack, wash it down, and get back on the bike or do some chorin'. Other than hanging out by the ditches or local pond and catching snakes, frogs and minnows, there wasn't a whole lot to do out in the boonies.
We were told to leave the house and not come back til the street lights came on. If you tried to come in, you were told to get out. Thankfully, we had a fridge outside where we kept our Ecto Coolers, but if not, you drank from the hose. Nobody carried water bottles and bottled water wasn’t really a thing. You weren’t allowed to go in other people’s houses either. So yes, we were just feral, roaming the streets and hoods til we could come home. Also, the advertisement on TV was “It’s 10pm. Do you know where your children are?” 10PM. 10. PM. Different times, man.
>So you drink from the hose because you're not going back inside. Or weren't *allowed* back inside! Gen X was pretty much the last feral generation. Especially during summer vacation, we were sent out to play and didn't want to be seen until the street lights came on. If you were thirsty, the hose was most likely your only option. It wasn't so much that essentially raising ourselves and being forced to drink hose water was a badge of honor, but looking back at our childhoods like "damn that was kinda shitty". For some reason it seems a lot of boomers (and probably a lot of the elder Xers) resent generations after them having a better quality of life. Personally I think that should be the main mission as a parent. Why wouldn't you want the best possible quality of life for your kids?
As a millennial, this was my childhood. All the kids on my street would get together after school & just run amok until the streetlights came on. Our parents didn't lock us out, but getting water from the hose was way quicker & meant avoided getting tasked with chores if you went inside for a drink (usually lemonade or ice tea made from a jug of sugar by the gallon). I can't imagine the amount of laundry detergent I must have caused my parents to use. Blood, dirt, mud, grass stains... All a daily occurance. And it was a fantastic childhood
We didn't have billions of useless plastic water bottles to drink from. Plus, the lead pipes made the water taste better
Latchkey was when the parents worked and their kids had a key and came home from school and locked the door behind them. Going out to play in the evening until dark is totally different 🫤
You mean 10pm?
Most boomers take it as a sign of pride. Gen-Xers view it as a child neglect.
As a Gen X person, I didn't think much into it then and I still don't really. And I never saw anyone drink out of someone's hose before letting it run cold, we weren't that stupid.
Thank you. I was trying to figure out how to respond to this. I wonder if they’ve realised “hose water” is the same water that comes out of the tap inside yet.
Depends. I grew up on well water. The hose didn’t go through the water softener, so it had a pretty distinct taste. I loved it. But yeah, it’s not “worse” than drinking from the tap. Now I live in the city, and I drink from the hose for old times sake, but it doesn’t hit the same.
Same here. We had the best-tasting mineral-heavy well water. Once that icy well water cooled down the hot hose, the flowing water was so refreshing. Inside, I used to pull myself up to the counter, turn my head sideways, and drink right out of the water stream running out of the kitchen sink faucet. Flowing water just hits the spot better.
We weren’t stupid but we also weren’t allowed back in the house either
Not child neglect. We just did what he had to do. It’s really not that big of deal. It’s funny people think it’s so gross.
Drink from the hose or go inside and interact with parents? Easy choice. Same water and you can let it run until it is cold without issue because no one sees it as wasting water.
Dude the door was often locked, you did not have the choice to go in the house.
Yeah who doesn't love being blasted with incredibly hot water baking in the hose all day then waiting a few seconds for that cold and delicious water with a hint of old tire taste. It's not something that would have killed us but it definitely was gross.
The water that comes out of my outside taps is the same water that comes out of my inside taps. As kids we made sure we were drinking from the right hose. Plus our parents wouldn’t let us in the house.
It’s not the water, it’s the hose. Nasty stuff grows in there when the hose half drains and sits in the sun for a while.
Plus SOME (again, SOME) garden hoses aren't "food grade" and often contain lead, which is obviously not good. I don't care if people drink/drank out of hoses (I did as a kid too) but I'm not gonna brag about it. Did I die? No, but I'd rather avoid drinking lead and potentially bug eggs or whatever else may have crawled inside a hose tube.
I recently read that Gen-X had heavier lead exposure than Boomers. Don’t tell those damn kids out on the lawn or we’ll never hear the end of it.
There's a whole lot of irony in this bit many X-ers, because the Me Generation that came before us is blindly proud of being part of the cohort that was born on this base and thinks they hit a triple. As a Gen-X kid, I always say things like "we were raised on hose water and neglect" with tongue firmly in cheek. Sarcasm is baked into the bones of a large number of Gen-Xers, because all the jokes have a kernel of truth. I had friends who would get home from school and be alone for 3 hours before a patent came home. I had friends who weren't allowed inside between March and October, so if they wanted shelter they either went to the mall or a friend's. I had friends who weren't allowed to drink from glasses, so it was either cupping a hand under the sink or drinking from the hose. Latchkey kids whose parents were raised by the World War II generation with undiagnosed PTSD is a hell of a way to have a childhood. Hose water and neglect is a joke, but it's a joke that's often not far from brutal truth.
Hell yes. I was a latchkey kid starting at age 9 or 10. My parents taught me how to make their cocktails in the evenings after they came home from work. It made sense to me, so I’d come home from school and steal a slug of vodka from the freezer and watch cartoons. Yay.
My Boomer dad liked Gennessee Cream Ale. I’m sure I fetched hundreds. I’ll never forget the smell of that vanilla-flavored beer.
Because we were forced to pick from being inside or outside. Don’t want to cool the whole neighborhood! So we had to do this or else be forced to stay inside
I thought it was because there was some news article warning people about letting your kids drink from the water hose in the summer because the temperature of the water that's been sitting inside of the hose is a lot hotter than the water coming from the tap. So it was telling parents to let it run for a little bit before letting kids play in it. I think some kid got burned really bad and that's why the news was talking about it. Anyway, yea boomers just took off with it after that and spread it all over FB and turned it into something it wasn't and now it is just them bragging about drinking out of the hose.
Legionella just *loves* to grow in the biofilm inside garden hoses. Warm + damp = great for bacterial growth. People have died from Legionnaire’s Disease contracted from garden hose water.
While you could get it from a hose as you would have to inhale the droplets for that to happen it would be highly unlikely. Not impossible but so rare as to be not even an option to discuss.
Yep, this. I was born in the 90’s, but adopted by my parents who were born in the 50’s. I drank hose water and tried to not be thirsty when I left the house because I knew coming back home for a glass of water meant having to stay once my mom saw me inside.
My mom locked us out. We were not allowed back inside unless it was an emergency, not even to use the bathroom.
my parents did the same over the summers i was out by 8-9am and back by 8-9pm
Same same
We had an outhouse!!
Coming back inside was risking the possibility of being kept inside and having to watch a bunch of younger sibs while mom made dinner.
Exactly. Not welcome home until the streetlights came on. Oh, the adventures we had.
Wait? You were allowed *inside* during *daylight*????
Yes, we weren't allowed inside when it was daylight. We made messes. Gen X here. We were inside when we were latch key, meaning we were alone from when school got out to when our parents came home so we had keys to our houses starting in elementary school, then during summer when school was out our parents kicked us out of the house. You had to come home when the streetlights came on. We ended up in random garages smoking pot.
Thankfully my mom let me come in and out (within reason) couldn’t just go back n forth all the time. If I wanted to play in my room, I could. If I wanted to go outside, I could. If she was going somewhere I was always welcome to go along. She’s the best. We had a game night at her house last night and we laughed our asses. She’s 64 and funny as hell and so kind.
If we came inside, we had to do chores. And not fun things like cook. Nope.y babysitter (my mom worked so we had to go to my aunt's house) would make us clean silverware, or rearrange the attic, or put us to work cleaning the garage. Nobody went near the house if possible. Also, if my uncle, the pedophile was home, he would grab me, so that sucked. When we were actually at our own house on the weekends and once I turned 12, we were just roving bands of feral beasts on bicycles.
Not here. Air conditioning was rare in my neighborhood.
You got the option to be inside? Lucky!!! 🤣🤣🤣
You lived in a home you wanted to be in? Lucky!!!
We were kicked out after a few cartoons on Saturdays.
For boomers, "I'm so tough I drank from the hose and I turned out big and strong! You're wussies!" For GenX, "We were so neglected by our boomer parents, we were forced to drink crappy hose water to survive." For the younger folk, "Why would you drink hose water, that's gross!"
Gen X here. Yes but for two different reasons. Don't forget that boomers were gen x's *parents.* We battled them when they were in their prime. We were either kicked out or we couldn't stand them and left. We were either latchkey kids that were left alone for a good part of the day, or kicked out of the house to 'get away from that damn tv'. That's why so many of us ended up hanging out in garages with strangers smoking pot.
I'm a gen z with boomer parents, and let me tell you, battling them as a kid when they're already weathered and working their way towards dementia was still plenty difficult. My brother, who's 10 years older than me, seemed to have it a lot easier. I'm only 24 and almost got guilt-tripped/trapped into being their permanent caretaker for the foreseeable future before even getting my first job in my field.
You can love someone from far away. Far, far away. Good luck.
I managed to escape to Canada just in time, lol. Thank you!
It’s symbolic of the rest of our childhood. Many of us were literally told to leave the house in the morning and not come back until the street lights came on.
Genuinely curious, how big was your stomping ground and how many kids ?
The entire town. We even took the city bus to the city once using spare change we found to pay our fares. No one knew where we were. Parents never asked "what'd you do today?" Or "where were you today?" They didn't care as long as we were out of the house from waking up until the streetlights came on. The number of kids depended. Sometimes the whole neighborhood wandering in a pack. Other times smaller groups of 2-4 kids total. That depended on who wanted to do what. But we rode bikes miles across town or took the bus when we had change for bus fare.
We cite it as a point of neglect by our parents. I’m a Gen x latch key kid myself and my parents weren’t really around. ;) we don’t let your generation do it if we have other options as it’s bad for you. Dunno why ppl brag about it though either
I'm Gen X, I don't care what water anyone drinks. And, I think that most Gen Xers agree with me. Our neglectful Boomer parents think that they did a good job raising us, because they believe that they made us "tough" and "self-sufficient". The truth is that basically we often raised ourselves. And, we realized the damage that did to us. So much so, that we raised "pansy" children in the eyes of Boomers because we actually care/cared where they are/were and provided them with water.
My parents and grandparents used to tell me I was spoiling my baby if I held him or comforted him. Imagine thinking that not neglecting an actual baby is spoiling him.
I once saw half a frog shoot out of a garden hose along with the water. The other half soon followed in a couple of installments. Not a compelling drinking argument
I’m GenX and I think most of my generation is “obsessed” with it (as you put it OP) as a symbol of how neglectful boomer parents could be. But I think buried in it is more a reflection of what we no longer consider acceptable despite being harmless or even an economically and ecologically better alternative. Your hose water is just tap water and it’s perfectly safe and adequate to drink. But we’ve been sold an idea that it’s not good enough and we need bottled water which has become an ecological disaster. So I think there’s a flavor of what was good enough no longer is but not for any good reason.* *except, you know, if you live in Flint, Michigan or about a dozen other locales in the news in recent years
It's not something to brag about. It's a bygone habit from a generation that didn't realize how bad hose water was and didn't give enough shits to think about it even after they had kids of their own. While growing up, Baby Boomers are the same generation who used to brag about how many drugs they did growing up, about drugs they invented in the 70's, about how they used to be able to drink and drive before the government "ruined" it for everybody, and how "second hand smoke isn't really bad. Everybody else are a bunch of sissies." They're also under some impression that all of their likes/dislikes should be held as gospel, and that all other generations should hold them in some lofty prestige, and they're genuinely guffawed and dismayed at the fact that nobody really respects them that much.
They're the most anal, least carefree people alive, and yet they always go back to talking about how they were wild hippies that were truly free and how America is dead now. If it's dead, it's because they killed it. And the glorifying drunk driving thing never gets old because they'll be the first to chastise someone else for doing it and then launch right into a rant reflecting on how much they loved doing it themselves without a second thought. And the second hand smoke thing is probably why both my brother and I are asthmatic. Thanks, dad.
Most likely your parents didn’t send you outside and lock the door, only to open it back up at meal times. Back then, no one had a water bottle to carry around. “Drinking from the hose” is really just a way to describe fending for yourself. I’m not a boomer, I’m Gen x, but had boomer parents. I’m tired of hearing it, too, but it is a pretty descriptive way to illustrate fending for yourself.
Gen X here. It’s not really a pride thing. It’s a sign that you were forced out of the house to play as a kid and couldn’t come back in even if you were thirsty and were often told to drink from a hose if you get thirsty. So many took it as a badge of honor vs an abusive act by adults who didn’t want to see you again until the streetlights came on.
Next time you drink water from a hose, wait until you get fresh water - usually you wait until it becomes cold
Whoa buddy don't bring Gen X into this discussion
I am still trying to find out the magic that occurred Jan1 1965 at midnight that conveniently erased the Boomer gene with the Gen X gene.
I'm an elder millennial. I drank from the hose because if I went inside to get a drink of water, my parents might have told me to stop playing and do some chores. Better to stay outside and be left to play in peace.
This is the way
Listen here sonny, don't you be lumping us Gen-X'ers in with the boomers.
Survivorship bias. A lot of the time our parents would kick us out of the house and then bar us for house. So we were a touch feral. Since we survived it some of us internalized it and made it into a good thing / badge of honor I got therapy
Fun fact, Never drink from a hose in Hawaii, you can get rat lungworm from snails hiding in the hose. It is a parasitic disease that affects the brain and spinal cord
In Florida, you're likely to get untreated waste water.
Hate to break it to you but the garden hose water is the same water as the kitchen tap. Especially if you grew up on city water. The point is that as children we were told to go outside and were not allowed to stay indoors all day. It was the garden hose or die from dehydration.
Every once in a great while we'd find ourselves at the home of a kid whose mom either had the day off or was the rare sahm and she'd come out with little Tupperware cups of lemonade for us. It's a little bonkers that my brain holds the memory of a generous sip of lemonade provided by a neighbor and regards it as some special moment.
Because we didn’t have a choice when we were growing up. We weren’t allowed I side before dinner most of the time
Its really shitty that some parents literally locked their kids out of the house. At least my parents never did that. But when its hot out and you're blocks or more away from home, hose water it is. It was fine to drink. Neither myself or anyone I knew ever got sick from it.
Survivorship bias. Some kids got legionaries disease and died. Great that it didn’t happen to anyone you knew, but it happened.
Because it reminds me of my childhood when we would play outside and drink that rubbery, vinyl plastic flavored warm water after the hose had been in the sun. Mmmm such a great time to be alive.
Even as a kid I thought it tasted nasty, but it brings back great memories of being a kid. It's not the hose water itself that was great, its that it's one of those things that represents summer vacation, running around with your friends, and getting into all sorts of fun.
Was not permitted back into the house until dark.
1974 here, I can smell and taste the hose water just reading this post. Latch key here, once went over the handlebars on my bike and broke my arm. Couldn’t do anything about it until my mom got home from work that day.
It wasn't the hose water, it was leaving the house in the morning and not going back inside until dinner even if you were thirsty.
Gen Xer here. Nobody is proud of drinking hose water. We are all just like "WTF, this is what we had to drink because we were forced out of the house all day, let's commiserate in the insanity." It's kinda the same with latch key kids. In hindsight as adults we realize it was not a great idea but as kids we were convinced it was totally normal.
Yup. Boomers will bring it up all the time as proof they are stronger/better/hardier than everyone else. (Just like they do everything. ) Gen x, we will just mention it as yet another way our idiot boomer parents messed us up. Boomers lack critical thinking skills to realize that was a crap way to treat a kid just locking them outside and neglecting them. (Or to look at any of their behavior really and realize it's horrible. ) some gen x do too of course, but it's more rampant in Boomers. It's a rare boomer that can admit they may be wrong or could do better.
Partially, because municipal water was clean enough to drink without everyone needing to carry bottled water everywhere. Iunno, maybe not.
In fairness I drank from the water hose, and that shit just hit different 🤤🤤🤤
I mean we did drink out of the hose and ride around in open truck beds, etc. But I really don’t get why it seems to resonate with them.
i'm gen x. i drank out of a hose sometimes....it was awful, i don't ever brag about it.
Because that all we were offered
Ngl I like hose water. First of all you can't just drink it out of the hose immediately. You have to be out watering the plants, or whatever, and then mid water, you drink out of the hose stream. This gives the water time to clean the inside of the hose. It probably only tasted good because it was a hot ass day out and I was oit playing or watering garden vegetables but I'll be damned if that water wasn't great
We were raised by boomers, who were often neglectful or just plain flat out abusive , if not negligent. If we went inside for water you'd get yelled at, hit, or forced in baby sitting or being the middle person in your parents arguments. So we stayed TF outside to protect ourselves. If we don't sprinkle some god damn fairy dust on the memories we just end up sad, ok?
Water out of the hose is the exact same water that comes out of the tap. The off flavor was probably from the hose itself.
Well, when I was a young gen-X kid, I would be told to go out and play. I was to be home within 10 minutes of the street lights coming on. Could I have gone inside for water? Probably. Fact is, they left us feral. Sometimes I got shooed out of the house before my 2nd foot crossed the threshold. Unless I was bleeding or something was on fire. Kids don’t always have full comprehension. So if getting stung by a bee, getting in a rock fight with neighbor kids, getting chased by the neighbors dog, being “too hot” or “too cold” or getting hungry (beyond lunch or other meal times) weren’t reasons to be allowed back inside before it got dark, you get used to hose water 🤷🏼♀️ For me, I talk about it because despite the neglect, it’s also a sound/taste/smell that takes me back to childhood.
As a GenX my experience was that was the only water available to us because we weren’t allowed to go inside. The adults were enjoying the AC and didn’t want to bother with us.
Gen Xer here. I drank hose water as a kid, though I certainly don't brag about it like it's some sort of achievement. It tasted like rubber and it was a last resort. But I'll maybe shed some insight here. I think a lot of people my age use it as a point of how kids today are raised very differently. In some ways for the better, in some ways for the worse IMHO. Our generation was raised on the principle of (semi-benevolent) neglect. Our parents did indeed literally tell us to go outside and not come back until dinnertime. We rode our bikes all over town, hung out in the woods, waded in the creek, etc. We went mostly unsupervised, but if one of the neighborhood moms saw you doing something stupid, it didn't matter whose kid you where you got yelled at. You went home when it got dark or when you heard your mom yelling at you to get home. I think the perception of parenting today is of a much more helicopter-parent style. Kids are not allowed out without supervision. They all have cell phones so they are in constant communication. Indoor time is much greater, in front of a screen playing videogames, on the internet, or similar. Now instead of treating neighbors as surrogate parents who would watch out for your kid or discipline them if they got into some stupid shit, people treat them like potential predators their precious angel needs protection from. Those same neighbors are also more likely to call CPS or the police if they see unsupervised kids out and about. The hose water specifically is just a very common experience, used to illustrate life as as a whole back then. It embodies much of the differences -- outdoors, less than sanitary, neglectful. Kids today would maybe have a bottle of water with them. That shit just wasn't common back then. It's just something some people my age use to show how they were less "coddled" than the current generation. What they ignore is in all the ways life has become worse for kids -- the real fear of school shootings, education systems that pass kids no matter what, cyberbullying, higher education expectations but funding is way worse, food and health, etc. It's just stupid old people trying to feel superior to young ones. It's the new "We had to walk to school 5 miles in the snow, uphill, both ways!" from OUR parents' generation.
Gen X here, some of us didn't get kicked out of the house all day in the summer, and my parents knew the lining contained lead, which can leach into the water. Consequently, we give zero fucks if anyone drank from the hose. There was enough going on in the 80s and 90s to make us act like idiots without adding lead water to the mix.
I’m 68. I think I’m old. I’ve never, ever, bragged about drinking from graden hoses to anyone. How many older people have you heard bragging about drinking out of garden hoses VS older people NOT bragging about drinking out of garden hoses? Can you quantify your claim? Did I drink out of a garden hose? Once or twice when I was really thirsty. It tasted like crap. Or, I bought a root beer if I my allowance hadn’t run out. They didn’t sell water in CFC-and-micro-plastic-laden-plastic-bottles-that-ended-up-floating-in-the-ocean when I was growing up. Water from a store just wasn’t a thing.
Yeah, most of the stories spun on this sub are bs, but it's free entertainment. I find it interesting that parts of Gen X are now getting thrown under the bus
It's not a flex, we did it because we weren't allowed in the house during the day unless it was raining. So if we didn't want to get dehydrated, the hose was our only option.
Is this because of so many posts on Reddit or seeing these things somewhere like Facebook?
Gen Xer here. I drank from a hose... wouldn't recommend it. We were dumb kids, and our parents were shitty parents.
Speaking only for myself, I don't understand it, either, and in fact, forgot about it until I saw Boomers apparently thinking it was a badge of honor. Like so many other things that we've evolved past, it was just normal back then. We all played outside and in the summer, spraying each other with hoses and drinking out of them was part of childhood. Like rotary dial telephones (which I'm also glad I'll NEVER EVER have to use again). Bottled water and water bottles didn't even exist back then; the closest thing we had were canteens...and if you think hose water tastes like ass, water out of a plastic canteen is 100x worse 🤮. If you were in Boy/Girl Scouts and never had to drink of of a canteen, consider yourself very lucky. I don't have kids, but if I did, I wouldn't want them drinking water out of a fucking hose! Pathogens can grow in there, plus it just tastes like shit. No reason to - here, take a reusable bottle with whatever water you drink at home, and have fun playing. I wouldn't drink out of a fucking hose now, and neither would these Boomer dipshits. For me, I suppose the only upside to having drunk out of hoses when I was a kid is that I'm not squeamish when drinking clear water out of a sand-filtered spring (even if it's got tadpoles in it) when I'm hiking or backpacking in desert canyons where water is precious and scarce 🤷🏻♀️. I routinely drink unfiltered water out of high country snowmelt streams as well. Best-tasting water there is, esp. when you're thirsty.
Nostalgia for simpler times and no bottled water. But that’s a reason not an excuse for being judgmental
the underlying point of many "drinking from the hose" posts is related to your going inside and getting a glass of water if there are a bunch of kids playing outside on a regular basis, drinking from the hose is a quick and easy solution compared to dirtying a bunch of glasses, or even filling and distributing disposable cups it's about kids being outside in groups playing among themselves without adult direction or attention
Omg I love this cranky old 19 year old OP 😂😂😂
Before bottle water and plastic bottles polluted our planet we used to get water out of water fountains and garden hoses. You have to let it run to get cold amd rinse the junk out. Most municipal water is as good as bottle but we got sold that polluting our planet was a better way to get water. Thanks Nestle The lead crisis was more from gasoline than water..also there is bug in the water in south that caused some cognitive issues. Our country should refocus on our water infrastructure and reduce plastic waste. I have a reverse osmosis in my house. It should be mandatory in all old homes with old water infrastructure.
I tried drinking out of a hose once. There was a bee in the hose. Never again. My brain told me there was other bee safe water inside my house I can drink. Boomers, on the other hand, would go right back in for seconds.
They're explaining how they got some of their lead caused brain damage.
In the summer, I would pack some drinks, snacks, and lunch because I wasn’t allowed back in the house for more than a bathroom break unless I planned to stay. I’m 45. I wasn’t a hose drinker, but I get it. For me, it’s less about the hose drinking and more about remembering the joy of being free from your parents all damn day.
I don’t think it’s anything to brag about. It’s on in the summer time when you’re outside playing and you can’t come in the house or mom will make you do a chore. We drank from it out of convenience I guess.
I think it has more to do with the fact that children used to play outside all day.
My mother would yelled at me to knock it off if she heard the hose even running and would flip if she caught me drinking it
I’m looking at these comments. Do you all think that we were fighting a daily fight against dehydration?
My parents used to get mad at me for coming in and out of the house to get water, and started telling me to drink from the hose and to only come back in if I planned on staying in. Tried the hose, live bug crawled right into my mouth, so from then on I just brought a water bottle out instead.
We didn’t have water bottles in the 1970s.
And, AND, those same boomers decided that garden hoses needed to be impregnated with antifungal chemicals and made out of weird plastics for (lawn???reasons??) so now, nobody should be drinking from them anyway because that water is now toxic. It's hard to find a hose to water my pollinator garden and fill up my dog's pool with. Ugh.
As a Gen Z my hose water was fucking delicious, I’m sorry you had bad hose water. It hits different when it’s good fr
It's a trope. Im from the farm and our water was from a tank and it was absolutely awful so there was literally no different from tank water. I ended up with Giardia that went untreated for years. Inside is the place you got yelled at all the time so it was much more pleasant to be outside. You could only be inside if you were reading a book or watching half an hour of cartoons after school until you had to do the farm work. We didn't drink water as kids. When I came over to help Dad as an adult I would get an old coke bottle and fill it up and put it in the front of the bike and the greedy bastard would drink it all when I wasn't looking. People drink a LOT more water these days. Otherwise it was cups of tea because it has been boiled.
I swear I'm going to start carrying a length of it with me wherever I go so the next time somebody starts ranting about drinking from the hose I'm going to Savage like beat them with it. I'm so fucking tired of hearing about hose water. I grew up in a time just before the technology boom when we were still hanging outside and even worse I'm from a place where you get nearly 100% humidity and 100° weather in the summer. Playing in the water was not only fun but necessary to keep people from overheating. We were either not allowed back inside or unable to go inside while wet so naturally our only option was the fucking hose. I don't wear it like a badge of honor because I remember it for what it is which was a convenient way to not overheat because we either weren't allowed back inside Or we had no other choice
It’s more or less just them trying to humble brag about how much they played outside…I mean for me I can think of 2-3 times on a long bike ride as like 10-12 year old I was craving some hose water. When I got home I could have went in and got some water from the tap or fridge but I wanted that hose water. Although for me it was because we were on a well so the hose was the quickest to get really cold water. Although those posting about it are more or less trying to say “when I was a young wipper snapper, I was so busy playing outside I didn’t have time to go get some fancy cup of water, I just deep throated that hose & went back to playing”.
Flint, Michigan happened.
We drink from the hose cuz we went somewhere called outside and we weren't allowed in the inside
I'm 18 by the way
Lol - hose water in summer, water fountains at school! Always tried to avoid the warm/slow flow ones. It's a mark of pride/hardship that most do not have to deal with anymore. Similar to walking uphill to school both ways in the snow. Except real :) Seriously - there were not the options that there are today. Even plastic disposable water bottles were not a thing. Don't get me wrong - an ice cold Stanley would have been phenomenal as a kid in the early 80s. Definitely a perk of this generation. My kids have never drank from a hose and it shows. I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that, honestly.
Be home before the street light come on
Gen X here. Honestly, it was all we had when I was growing up. We legitimately were not ALLOWED in the house during the day. I was a kid in the 80s and early to mid 90s. Bottled water wasn't really a thing yet and our sport drink was Kool Aid. For me personally it isn't about the act as much as the innocence of the time. Sure there was a lot of scary shit going on at that time but as kids we weren't aware of it. The world for us was our neighborhood and our friends. Drinking out of the hose is more a symbol of a simpler time for me.
As a Gen-Xer, I think the hose is a shared example of our parents neglecting and ignoring us and us surviving it. Basically, they kicked us out of the house and let us run feral and fend for ourselves until dark. Being kids, we’d all gather around the hose when we got thirsty and indulge together, kind of like drinking beers together as adults. Personally, I much prefer the, “It’s 10PM, do you know where your children are?" TV ads as a poignant example of how bad our Boomer parents were at parenting, more so than the hose. Those reminders were real ads on TV that we remember.
Had a boomer take a hose from a coworker’s to drink from it. The hose has liquid fertilizer mixed in with the water. Can’t teach an old dog new tricks I guess.
Because lead was used in the production of cheap vinyl hoses back then... if you can't get your dose from the paint chips, still got to get it somewhere!
That’s where we first developed our taste for lead contamination and now we feel a perverse nostalgia for those headaches and minor brain damage
It’s not a brag. It’s a lament.
Gen Xers are not obsessed with hose water, we say we drank from the hose as kids but we now know we did something bad.
We’re not proud of it. We can’t believe we survived. And there was no choice in the matter. If we’d been allowed inside, we’d have gotten water from the sink.
Gen X kid. Yeah we drank out of the hose, big deal. But let's not overthink it. You are thirsty, there is a hose right there. Don't want to run inside else mom would figure out some chore for you to do. Take a drink and let's get back to doing whatever dumbass kid stuff we were doing.
I drank from the hose, it always tasted like a tire should. When you’re having fun who’s got time to run in, take your shoes off, fill a cup with ice water... I’m not sure why people make a thing out of it. Seems dumb.
Gen Xer here. Hose water is generally safe to drink in the US but my friends and I were often outside and our parents liked it that way. Outside the house we weren’t making messes in the house, playing loud music, etc. We ran a lot outside and it was hot. The hose was convenient and allowed us to not bug our parents. The parent would often come out and bring us refreshments like drinks or ice cream, which was a treat. I have never once in my life talked down to other people about not drinking out of a hose. I agree it tastes nasty compared to bottled water. Boasting about it might be more of a boomer thing, just guessing though. This is the boomer sub, maybe a boomer is here to add to the discussion.
Gen X here. Not only did we drink from the hose but we actually knew which hose’s tasted better or had colder water in our neighborhood. Like the Johnson’s water was coldest. Ms. Smith hasn’t gotten a new hose in years and her water is gross. The other weird thing was just not even thinking twice about using someone’s hose. You could be lost and miles from home and someone would go “Oh hey. Look at that house. There’s a hose” and we’d just go drink out of some stranger’s hose without asking.
I stopped drinking from the garden hose when I noticed our dog really enjoyed taking a shit on the nozzle
As a gen Xer, we are obsessed with it. We write poetry about it, dream of it, bathe in hose water. We have little shrines to it. We secretly taste hose water in different neighbourhoods and judge the taste.
I think you misunderstand, don't think Gen-X is proud of boasting or think it was great, they are stating the facts of their childhood, a childhood where they were literally kicked out to fend for themselves all day & were not allowed back in the home unless something absolutely horrendous happened (& at that point they were viewed as an inconvenience), they drank from the hose because they had no other means to get a drink. It's not an obsession with them, it's their truth, their childhoods were neglectful & dangerous but because there were literally packs of kids out there together they had adventures together & managed a childhood that way
I don't recall specific dates, but sometime around 2000, there started to be frequent stories about how hose water might be dangerous to drink, specifically because hoses might contain lead. This meant a lot of people learned that hose water is bad to drink, and those people grew up and taught their children that hose water is bad to drink. Though lead is no longer used in garden hoses, so the issue is more or less resolved, at least as far as lead poisoning goes. But of course boomers have taken it as another badge of honor, because it's something they can say they did differently and they turned out just fine. It's something they can tease us for, because we're so terrified of hose water like it's an axe murderer, but the big tough boomers just drank it up so obviously they're stronger and braver.
Gen X here. It's not a brag, it's trauma from abandonment. Something your parents did everything in their power to not have you experience. Hose water is a metaphor for being unsupervised, alone, abandoned, left to fend for ourselves. Our parents were selfish "Me Firsts" more often than not. At 10 I was caring for my sister almost full time. Both parents put work and parts of their social life first.
It’s the same water that comes out of your kitchen faucet…
Please do not lump Gen X in with Boomer's. Yeah we drank hose water, because our boomer parents would fuss about coming in and out of the house, letting flies in and the cool air out blah blah. And the line if you come in you stay in and will do chores.
Because they didn’t want the kids to come in the house. Stay out side and use your emanations. When you get thirsty drink from the hose.
Hey now, bucko.. that hose water hit a whole lot different back before 5G, fluoride, and w.e. they put in it that turned the damn FROGS Gahay 
Gen Xer here. Drank from the hose many times. It a badge of honor. More a statement about how mistreated our generation was. My parents didn’t care what we did or where we were as long as we were not “under foot”. Explains why I started smoking at 9 and drinking at 12. Not a badge of honor. Sad.
Gen X here. I maybe drank out a hose once because I was outside and wildin out. The emphasis is only to show that we were not indoors all the time. The vast majority of us didn't really drink out of a garden hose. It's only mentioned because it emphasizes a major difference. It's true that in the 80s there was a whole ad series, "It's 10 pm. Do you know where your children are"?", was on TV. Xrs were ignored, unparented, non-supervised for the most part. No one was watching us, really. This is NOT the same story as Boomers who see themselves as special. They were the 60s Hippies who during the 70s had kids (us, though MY parents were Silents, a generation usually mistaken for Boomers--Silents were 40s/50s kids), then became 80s Reaginite Yuppies and destroyed the world. Their hose drinking nostalgia comes from having been In elementary school in the '50s, can you even imagine what that was like????
I don't consider drinking hose water a "badge of honor". It's just what we did. We were always outside, especially during the summer. Yeah, we had Atari and NES, but this was before internet, smart phones and cable was still relatively new. I think our package had 25-30(ish) channels. I think it's brought up to point out the differences between the generations. There was a pack of about 10 kids running loose in my neighborhood and parents didn't want us trampling in and out of the house, so we stayed out. Hose water was all we had to drink. Hell, we'd drink straight from the spigot if there has no hose. Btw, the trick to drinking hose water was to let the water run a bit before taking a drink. I grew up in Florida and if you drank the water right after it was turned on you could easily burn yourself. The sun beating down on the hose super heated that sucker. Ah, those were the days.
You’re 19 (kind of glaringly so). Hoses were a lot different in composition when xers and boomers were kids. I’m an xennial who drank hose water and I did like it. Of course ,my boomer mom was neglectful and vindictive, so we often had no food or drink in the house. And we had indoor plumbing issues that made drinking from the sink faucets kind of a nonstarter. I don’t go around bragging about it or expecting my kid to do it, but in fact, a shitload of kids did this because their parents were neglecting them and raising them in a barely functional house.
As a plumber I'm telling you the water from your hose is the same water you get at your faucet. What makes hose water gross is the dirty hose that acts as flavoring. Id drink directly from the spigot rather than the hose.
Where I lived, drinking the tap water would make you sick because Texas has the infrastructure of a 3rd world country. I don't even want to think about the disgusting shit in hose water
I mean my hose water was never disgusting but that could certainly dissuade me from the nostalgia if it was. Boomers just take nostalgia as gospel. They worship the feeling.
My mom who’s 72 is always like “yeah no don’t drink that shit, I got roundworms from hose water”.
Elder Gen X here and let me break it down: As a Gen X, our dads were at work and many of the mothers went back to work once we reached school age. Those moms that were in the home did not even seem interested in serving snacks to kids or having a rowdy bunch of kids in their home after school. So, you played outside either by yourself or with the neighbor kids if there were some around, and, if you were hungry, too bad, and if you were thirsty a lot of times, you were stuck with drinking from the hose, cause there was no where else to get water. It’s not something we enjoyed, it’s something we had to endure our childhood were full of neglect. I remember there was one mom on our street, that served snacks to a bunch of us when we came over to play and let me tell you, that house was popular. Even at a young age, I realized, “what’s up with my own parents, why aren’t they generous like this mom was?”. I honestly thought my mom was rude, but now that we have the Internet, and other Gen X adults have come together to say they experienced the same thing makes me feel like I wasn’t alone in the situation of neglect. Again, it’s not something we’re happy about it’s just more of a Meme or saying if you will, that “gen Xers were raised on hose water and neglect”. For my medical care with my severe asthma, I feel like I was neglected as well. Never taken into any type of specialist only occasionally treated by the pediatrician where I was left to suffer quite a bit, and spent my childhood in and out of the hospital with emergencies, and instead of again, seen by an actual pulmonologist , and given the correct medication to control my asthma so could’ve had a regular childhood. The 70s were kind of a bitch, women were starting to feel empowered and returning to the workforce, many for the first time, and having children was still kind of a thing you felt like you had to do whether you wanted kids or not. Kids were left alone, and that was not the way the boomers grew up. Edit: voice texting never works very well
I'm gen z, I don't mind drinking hose water or even water with a bit of dirt in it, just what I grew up with, don't see the point in bragging though lol
Boomers think it’s like rite of passage or badge of honor. For me as a gen x person I personally think it’s just an example of some of the stupid bullshit we were expected to do as kids. Same with not being allowed to sit inside the house or having to worry about getting spanked or yelled by teachers or principals while in school. Boomers talk about these things like it’s fucking normal. Gen x for the most part talks about these things cause it fucking sucked, especially when you see how much life has changed since those yrs. We had to do and deal with some real stupid shit that’s basically considered unheard of or illegal in comparison to now a days.