You kids get off my lawn!

This phrase presents the supposed reaction of a stereotypical elderly homeowner confronting boisterous children or heedless teens entering or crossing their property.

[1] During the post–World War II economic expansion, many persons from rural and urban backgrounds moved to single-family detached homes with lawns in the suburbs or in horizontally developed cities.

In the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, some of these first-generation homeowners were approaching or reaching retirement age, while the suburban-raised baby boomers were accustomed to the affluence symbolized by lawns as unremarkable.

[6][7][8] This led to instances of the archetypical encounter envisioned by the idiom, of an older homeowner's reprimand of careless or disrespectful minors heedlessly shortcutting across his highly valued lawn.

[10] The Capitol Steps album I'm So Indicted included "Hey, You, Get Off of My Lawn" (a parody of "Get Off of My Cloud"), and comic social commentator Jon Stewart described United States Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as "a cantankerous old man who takes a hey-you-kids-get-off-my-lawn approach to foreign policy".

[19][20] But these referred to a well-known 1969 incident in which Prime Minister Harold Wilson told trade-union leader Hugh Scanlon to "Get your tanks off my lawn".