This question reminded me of an incident from first grade, over 50 years ago.
I had stayed overnight (on a school night, too!) at my friend Bobby C’s house. It was a winter night, and it snowed that night. Bobby’s dad was going to drive us to school in the morning. The plow had come by the house just before Mr. C drove the car out of the driveway, so there was a mound of snow at the end of the drive that he had to shovel before we could leave. He left the car running to warm up while he went to the front of the car and started to shovel the snow there.
The car had an automatic shift, which I had never seen before (my dad always drove cars with manual transmissions), so he left the car in Neutral, I think, as he went to shovel. Bobby was sitting in the front seat and I was in back. The two of us started playing some kind of keep-away game, or mini tug-of-war over the front seat back. (I don’t recall that part so well.) But Bobby kept leaping up from the front and over the seat back to try to take something away from me; that much I do recall.
At some point in our game Bobby must have moved from the passenger side into the center of the seat (maybe because the seat back was lower there, and it was closer to where I was in the back seat behind the driver’s location), and he bumped the gearshift into Drive and in his jumping he was tapping the accelerator pedal. He did that several times before I finally heard Mr. C yelling – LOUDLY! – from the front of the car to quit that. I looked ahead and saw him frantically trying to jump the snow mound or onto the hood of the car as it kept running into him and backing off, running into him and backing off, as Bobby jumped and accelerated, or relaxed and let the car idle backwards. Bobby apparently didn’t hear, because he kept playing the game as I tried to get him to look at what was happening in front of me and behind him.
Eventually we got Bobby’s attention and things got back to more or less normal. Mr. C came back to the car and shut it off while he finished shoveling, a little bumped up (and wet!) but unhurt.
That ride to school was a little grim and chilly after Mr. C finally got back in the car with us. I don’t recall staying with them any more after that…
I’m with those who say that “private property” in this case trumps all of the kids-will-be-kids stuff. Although whenever new home construction was going on in our neighborhood – which was often in my childhood – we were all over those sites nearly every evening.