Best part of the 80s is riding your bike to the hangout with 10-20 other kids, of varying ages, and playing unsupervised for hours. I wish my kids now could experience this.
Yep. We loved it, and the teachers always broke it up. That being said, now that I'm an adult, I do understand something called liability and how they had to break it up before someone got seriously hurt.
@paulad.4578 The only seriously hurt we ever got was skinned knees, but then again, we were also just playing on grass. And it was also at church, so....
@NehnBellanaris Good points. However, I also heard there were a few broken arms and a dislocated shoulder or two. Hard to know. I just know it was a lot of fun.
The thing about GenX is even though we watched GenX current day media, we also watched and listened to media from the generations before us in the form of reruns. As a kid, I watched tv shows from the 50s and 60s in the form of reruns and movies from the 30s to the 60s. We only had so many channels so we were pretty much all watching the same thing. It drew us all together in culture in ways that the newer generations (who have so much choice and access to tons of current day media both good and bad) will never understand or appreciate.
This is soooo true. My dad was excited when The Macahans was shown as a rerun on TV, as he could share a show he liked from his younger days with us kids. And me and my sister loved stuff from the 70's. And all of the Elvis movies. At the same time our older brothers rented home videos with Alien and Ghostbusters. I think I got to experience the best of both old and new as a kid who grew up in the 80's. (And Thundercats, TMNT and He-Man are still unbeatable as early morning cartoons...)
YES! I used to watch Gilligan's Island, Dobby Gillas, Bewitched(in black and white and in color) I Dream of Jeanne...and probably many more that I can't quite remember lol. I also remember listening to 'oldies' back then, as we didn't have any say what played on the radio in the car and had to listen to whatever mom and dad wanted to, so we listened to the music they grew up on!
@@johnw8578 I think all the various entertainment on demand and having endless options (w/shopping as well), though it may seem nice, has actually been detrimental. People have become accustomed to instant gratification with so many things... It's had negative effects on all of us, but especially in the development of younger people. And the endless options in seemingly everything just makes it confusing and choices much more difficult. We spend much more time just trying to decide what to choose and we also usually end up with more than we planned to get because of it. Like TV... we were exposed to a lot of really great old shows and movies that we likely would have never chosen to watch given the option. There's a lot to be said for more limited choices and delayed gratification.
Definitely, and here in the UK we only had 3-4 channels. On a Sunday if you wanted entertainment on TV you were forced to watch Laurel and Hardy films, as the other channels were only showing dull sports for grandads or religious programming.
I can't imagine what my early life would have been like if I wasn't free to just jump on the bike and go on an adventure. I think life as a kid would have felt like prison without that. A HUUUUGE one he didn't mention is arcades. they were everywhere, every mall had one (there were a lot of malls back then) many strip malls had one (usually next to a laundromat). Arcades and roller rinks were THE places to go. 90% of social life for kids in the 80's happened at an arcade or a roller rink.
70s-80s childhood here. Rode in the very back, also rode in the back of the truck, and in the cabover camper while parents drove. It's a wonder any gen x-ers are still alive, but if you have one in your life, they are who you want on your side during the zombie apocalypse
Lol. I told my kids about hiking in the mountains all day alone and they were stunned. I never really thought about it. Just the way it was. But I never allowed my kids to do such a thing. Different times 😢
@@Woman_In_TX1206 Only place I ever walked alone in a mountain was in China. Don't have mountains in the midwest, so when I was traveling/teaching abroad I went hiking in the mountains every so often. Nice thing about China is "majority" of China is safe in that the biggest thing out there that'll eat you is a rabbit at least from my experience.
Yep, we had 8 children in our Military family and drove all over these states in the back, in the floor board and on the dash without seatbelts while parents smoked in the front. We all lived. My favorite memories.
@@Woman_In_TX1206 yes, when camping was off by myself hiking up & down mountains all day. And with several hundred rounds of .22 ammunition and a pistol.
I’m a Gen X female and I was in the woods on bike trails all day unsupervised, just be back by dark. Road in the back of trucks. Never wore a seatbelt until they passed it into law. Definitely smoked a few packs of candy cigarettes. We had a smoking section in high school and a pay phone. And there was no such thing as a soft dodge ball, those things left a mark.
People had to talk to each other then. I was born in '79. Disco was dying out and rock started rolling. I missed "Night Tracks" music videos that aired years before MTV was a thing.
Not as nerve racking as meeting many of those dads. Mine is retired military, he would take my dates into the den, show off his gun collection, shot targets, military ribbons for marksmanship, and inform them what time I was to be returned.
I had a friend who's father was a Cobb county Ga sheriff's deputy..... he'd clean guns if he knew a boy was going to come see her😂. He'd keep a couple of weapons constantly disassembled for cleaning, in case a boy came over on short notice. They had escaped a serious gvt overthrow in Peru about 40+ years ago. He was a big guy too 😂.
A great thing about the old phones with a landline, they didn't require electricity to work. So if your power was out, you could still make and receive phone calls.
In the 80s you knew who were your neighbors and most of the kids in the area you lived in if you needed ANYTHING you could go to a neighbor for help. You did not talk to strangers every one looked out for each other. And if you did something or been somewhere you were not supposed to be you can bet your mom would find out anyways because the neighbor 3 blocks down saw you and told your MOM. I really feel the kids now are lacking that feeling of freedom and being carefree. I would not change it for anything 70s to 90s the best times ever to be KID AND TEEN.
I was a teen in the 80"s and I can tell you it was an amazing time to be a kid. I wouldn't have wanted to grow up in any other Era. We had a blast!!! We learned how to take care of ourselves and the others around us.
Absolutely, if 8 of you were going up the hills and into the woods in the morning then 8 had to come back. no matter if there was fallouts or arguments, we all knew the base line was no one gets left alone.
The thing about us Gen X ers is simple... we learned that being stupid *hurt.* Consequences were an early part of our lives. So was accountability. They went hand in hand.
We were the crash-test-dummies for Health and Safety Executive only created in 1975 ;-). In the 70's on-site with my Irish dad was not a big deal. I started working at 14 kerbing the A17 in Kings Lynn at the weekends. [ we did £200 of work and my share was £60 in 1984 ]
Waterbeds were much more durable than you would think. Leaks were usually slow and could be patched without draining it. Now when the heater went out during winter and your bed temp dropped to the 60's or 70's, that sucked.
Most waterbeds you could pull the fill plugs and then lay on it without water coming out, if fact laying on the bed with the plug out was the best way of burping the bed.
My mom bought one in the early 2000s because she thought it'd help with some new back pain that turned out to be cancer 😢 After she had unrelated surgeries, we replaced the mattress with a pillow-top "insert" is what they call regular mattresses that replace waterbed mattresses. I still have that bed but it's used for storage.
The funniest thing about all of this is that he is worried about the pay phone being sanitary. I don't remember people being so incredibly worried about germs till around 1995 or so.
It was more into the late 2000’s that people really got bad with it. It’s like going to Subway back in the 90’s. They never wore gloves. They just washed their hands and had at it. Now everywhere you go, everyone e is wearing gloves.
Gen x kids were responsible for their own safety like it should be. You had to be able to evaluate risk and lives with the consequence of your actions.
In the 70s we could make prank phone calls with no worry about caller ID. People would hitchhike without worrying too much about being kidnapped. We would leave our front door unlocked when we went out to play with nobody home.
@@karenbertke3149 Similar situation. My family lived in Atlanta during the child murders. My brothers, who were in that age range of the other victims, used to visit that area because our grandparents lived there. My father, who was mixed, was stopped a bunch by random people and it caused a lot of problems. He later took an order to move to Florida, he's military, and took our Grandma with him.
When you adjust for population disparity between the 1980s and the 2020s you will find out that people still go missing at the same rate. Now media just uses these things to stoke your fears. They want you to molly coddle your kids and treat them like they are incompetent. So when they're 30 they're incapable.
AND WE DRANK FROM THE HOSE! Wait, you left the door unlocked? We were just locked out of the house until parents got home unless, like I was, you were a Latch-Key Kid who got home after school and looked after yourself for 2 or 3 hours every day between when you got home from school and parents got home from work - heck, we even helped cook meals sometimes!
It is shame that kids today don't have as much chance to just hang out with a friend all day having to find stuff to do. We made forts from branches, just because it seemed fun. No reason, but we did learn along the way. Not sure what I learned from climbing onto the school roof, but that's another story... 😅 love your content! 😅
Yep. We built some tree forts that sort of fell apart. Luckily, I asked my father (who was an engineer) for some tips and we learned to build a long lasting, sturdy fort.
Born in `75 in Belgium Europe : In summer you could stay outside `till 10PM with all the neighbourhood kids from different ages, around diner time (we had watches you know, LOL) you just popped in to eat and after diner of you went again. In winter you had to come in at 5 o`clock PM ..because of the summer/winter change in daylight. The sun goes down earlier in winter.
Adding to #25, we use to ride in the back of pickup trucks too. Another fun piece of playground equipment was the merry go round. It was a round platform with handles to hang onto while it was spun around. Most of us tried to make it go as fast as we could until people flew off.
Weird. I never had to give to everyone, My sisters, 10 &15 years younger, though, had to. My mom was upset, not because of the cost, they were, what $1 a box or less, but because it was a "dumb concept" (I graduated in 97 for time reference & lived in the UP in Michigan & ohio)
All the adults when I was growing up always told us to get home before dark instead of before the lights came on. Not that even as kids we weren't aware that going outside after dark was the height of stupidity, since that's when the snakes and coyotes came out. 😅 And dude no, the original Teenager Mutant Ninja Turtles is so much different than what you got after Nickelodeon bought it.
When it snowed, my dad would clear the drive with his tractor. My brothers and I got to ride in the bucket a mile to my grandparents. So he could clear their driveway too. It’s definitely one of my favorite memories.
I loved checking pay phones for quarters! I found two dollars from a row of them in Philly once. Also, Carmen Sandiego was a great show! I would shout at the tv when it was time to do the map part and go: “That marker goes there, not there!” “Come on, that’s an easy one!” And watching that show DID help me with learning geography.
Instead of a stamp collection, 80s kids collected stickers. Puffy stickers, scratch 'n' sniff, and my sister even had "Where's the beef?" stickers. It was common to have colored strings safety pinned to your backpack so you could sit in class and braid friendship bracelets. In the 70s and 80s we had a lot of child serial killers, but in the 70s the kids were called runaways and by the 80s people couldn't ignore how many went missing. So they started putting missing children's faces on milk cartons and teaching children about "Stranger Danger."
I was born in 1978. I literally grew up in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. I miss how simple life was. * I still have all my Garbage Pail Kids cards. Including first edition cards.
6:19 fair question, “How did we, 80s kids, survive?” A lot of luck 🍀😉🤘🏻my father always said, “It’s better to be lucky than good.” Garbage Pale kids were cards you collected. Cabbage Patch Kids were dolls you collected. You mixed up the two. FYI mate. I miss my water bed. They were temperature regulated. They were great for the changing temperature outside.
My father was a software engineer for IBM and was one of the pioneers for creating at home software for the PC. I used to go to work with him and he'd let me go into the giant computer room which had a very specific smell and was loud and contained huge machines. He'd let me watch their dot Matrix and tear the paper off. It was extremely satisfying.
In 84 we got our first computer Commodore 64. My mom used it to do contracts and book keeping. We would spend hours typing programs from computer magazines just to play a game on it. It was the same OS on that Apple II e in the pic. in 3rd grade I got into trouble for making a rocket ship with USA printed on it go acrost my screen from bottom to top. and then had to show my computer teacher how I did it.
Those high metal pipe monkey bars were fun! We had it in school and the public playground. In elementary, my siblings and I played on it. There was the 'monster' who would walk like a zombie on the ground and try to catch us (on the bars.). We played the game IT on the bars. Automatically touching the ground, you were 'out'. The last man standing was the winner. We pretended it was a pirate ship and moved around on the outside and going inside, etc... The imaginations we had to make that monkey bars fun!
I had a semi waveless waterbed when I was a kid. It was amazing. It had a heater to keep the water warm during winter. And in summer it was nice and cool. They are much harder to pop then you would think. My dog loved the bed as much as I did.
I got into the habit of moving my foot to Rock the bed slightly & rock myself to sleep with the waves lol. Now, over 2 decades later (with no waterbed 😢) I *still* move my foot the same way as I'm falling asleep.😂
If you think making ashtrays in art is wild, the guys in wood-shop class almost always made rifle racks as their first project. In high school a lot of kids who had trucks had rifle racks mounted in the rear window, and almost all of us, guys and gals, carried a pocket knife (yes, even to school).
@johnw8578 Colombine, making schools gun free zones. And I think the over prescription of SSRIs and other antidepressants. I started taking them when I was 26 by 27. I stopped because the only emotion I could feel was anger, and they removed any give a f I had about anything. From what I understand, that happens more the younger you are also. Plus, most of them state in the possible side-effects are homicidal thoughts or actions.
I remember that on school! Trip I bought a pocket knife from a stand and no one thought it is wrong. Also staying outside even after dark was ok if you were with your friends. And when we were a bit older like sixteen it was a dare to play basketball or soccer at midnight
The mid to late 80's is when stranger danger became a thing. I remember Adam Walsh was kidnapped in a mall while there with family. After that, there were other child abductions. The change in the freedom kids had happened slowly. I graduated high school in 1992, and I was still pretty free then, but my mom began to worry more and always had me call if I was going to change my plans after I left the house.
When we were kids in the 80s/90s we spend every free minute in the summer at the local public swimming pool. Without parents of course. We went there by bike and every group of friends had their favorite spot to have their base with the towels and bags, so you always found your friends.
That or the mall! We would spend the whole day at the mall -- movie theater, food court, water slide, arcade, skating rink, hide-n-seek in and amongst the stores and sneak into the tunnels underneath until someone chased us out. Summers would fly by!
When I was 14, me and my friend rode our bicycles to the beach, 10 hours away, and camped for a week. We could only afford the frozen microwave burritos we bought at a local store and called the parents collect every couple days. Also, violent crime was worse back then than it is now, we were just less aware of it because of the lack of nation wide communication.
Gen X here. Loved putting blankets down and napping in the back of the station wagon! Scooby Doo and Pink Panther were my favorite cartoons. We only had three channels because we had an antenna and no cable.
Yeah, teenage mutant ninja turtles was 80’s. But, where I lived it wasn’t a Saturday morning cartoon, it came on in the late afternoon. Ahhhh, he never mentioned that on weekdays cartoons would not play on tv until 2pm. 2pm to 5pm was the primetime of cartoons. After 5pm all cartoons stopped.
Strawberry Shortcake made a comeback too.... ours smelled so good, you wanted to eat them. Not to mention Barbie who is still going strong. I got my first Barbie in 1976.. her legs and arms couldnt bend lol
Kids could play unsupervised in the 80s because we all knew each other and your parents would know everything you did . If you did something wrong your parents would get calls telling on you .
I wandered all over the place alone when I was 4-5 years old. But then again, I was born in 1947. I still have a landline with coil wire. I also have my smartphone.💙
@@johnw8578 Yes, we've seen a lot of change. The young people now wouldn't know how to survive if a major world occurrence happened. No electricity, planting/growing food, making clothing, keeping warm, no fuel for cars......
the slap bracelet had a laterally curve to the metal inside the satin bracelet so it's hold it's shape rigid until slapped against the arm inverting that bend and it'd wrap around. iirc there were a few accidents and lacerations it was metal. also the Garbage Pail Kids were a satire of the popular wholesome Cabbage Patch Kids toys. The Garbage Pail Kids cards would be a card set with a stick of awful gum having rhyming names like RV Stevie and the kid on the card might be part television. it capitalized on the kid mentality that gross can be funny. I think it had a movie
I almost think the playgrounds and toys of Gen X'ers and older were deliberately designed in an effort to "thin the heard". Fortunately, kids turned out to be much more resilient than they expected. Something that's since been forgotten.
Oh, most definitely! I had remarked in my own post about the metal strip in the slap bracelets. But I also remember Tonka trucks were made with metal and functioned just like the real vehicles they were modeled after, not some Little Tikes plastic with barely any moving parts!
@@jimf2892 Yes, 2 things I distinctly remember due to injuries. 1: I don't recall if they were made this way or maybe edges would get bent out of their original shape, but there could be sharp edges along where the stamped out sheets of metal were bent into shape. 2: The back of the dump truck could smash tiny hands and fingers. My brother was standing in this knees, lost his balance, and when he went to catch himself he came down onto the back of the truck and my hand happened to be in between the body and the raised back end. Ouch!!!
@@VincentVega--XD Oh yeah. We were pretty quick learners. However, it wasn't often we learned from seeing others get hurt, we usually had to do it ourselves before the lesson stuck. I learned not to go down the metal slide in shorts on warm sunny days, but oftentimes when there's the will, we found a way... When I could remember to, I'd bring a hand towel to sit on.
The kids of today living in a prison!!!They growing up like without any"AUWIES", a litle cut in there fingers and the parents of toda rush to the hospital.😂😂😂😂😂
I was a kid in the '70s. Unsupervised in the front yard? Amateurs! We had the whole neighborhood...which meant as far as we could reach by bike and still make it home for dinner.
You do know that 40-50 years from now, the 20 yr olds will think the same way about YOU. They'll be amazed at how backwards and crazy your younger life was. You know that, right? Every new generation thinks that of their parents/grandparents. What amazes me is that y'all think you're different. 😂😂😂
As an 80s kid… We got to experience disappointment we actually got hurt. We fell down and we busted an arm or leg and It was cool. not everybody won an award you just had to suck it up buttercup. Just made us want to be better. 💙
I remember when my sister was teething, mom would put brandy on her gums to alleviate the pain. Imagine doing that now, you'd have CPS knocking at your door faster than you could screw the top back on the bottle!
That or they knew the small amount of alcohol you drank would make us sleepy so the parents at the party could really get into the degenerate things they wanted to get into.
The problem is their parents don't even know the traffic rules. I mean look at the way they drive and it is so rare for me to see somebody actually ride a bicycle correctly. I mean we were taught as kids. Hey you ride on this side of the road. You do this. You do that you know. Yeah we may not have done it in our neighborhoods as much but when we went out onto a road that was going a little further than our neighborhood. We tended to follow the bicycle rules better kids today. Don't even know the damn rules
I miss those parks. They were so fun. You could go so high on the swing. Seesaws would go way, high! I miss the fairy go rounds! Everybody would gather in the center and one of your parents would spin it and you'd try to stay on it without flying off! It was great. Climbing on top of the monkey bars was great! Trying to get to the highest part of the playground was fun. I don't miss the metal slides. Those hurt a lot in the summer. Not a good idea but the slides used to be way higher and way more fun.
humans will have feelings, it will be mandated, you'll have to schedule a weekly feelings exposure session with a licensed emotional support officer. It will only be the feelings you are authorized for, of course, and only for the half hour session... but humans will still have feelings in 30 years. The complete ban on feelings doesn't happen until 2093.
I loved the back of station wagons! I was a kid in the 70's. We didn't even have seatbelts until I was older. Candy cigarettes were NOT good. Slides were metal. Imagine burning all the skin off your legs. Thank goodness the Dewie Decimal system was replaced. That shyt was CONFUSING! I was in highschool in the 80's. I took a computer class. I learned how to program a computer to count from 1 to infinity (or whatever number it managed to get to by the end of class.) Yay! 😂 I can still hear the sound a dot matrix printer made. They took literally FOREVER to print a whole page, and we would print banners out on them. Sipping adult beverages as a child... Yep. Guilty. 😅 The sound of a dodgeball is SO nostalgic. I wish I currently had one of those red rubber balls just to bounce it and hear it's familiar almost metallic sound, or smell the distinctive rubber smell of the gymnasium cart they were stored on. We didn't use them only for dodgeball, they got used for so many different games. Slap bracelets were metal wrapped in fabric We didn't have streaming services or cable, so Saturday mornings were THE time to get our cartoon fix. I had a waterbed in the 90's. Didn't like it. When the power went out the bed got cold! We went SO far on our bikes! He didn't mention the secret code we had to call our parents on a payphone, collect, to get our parents to pick us up from the mall or the movies or the roller-rink without having to pay for a call... Operator to parent: You have a collect call from: Child: The movie's over come get us Operator: Do you accept the charges. Parent: click 10-15 minutes later, here comes the station wagon!
Ol' boy should have said 70s kids!! No one ever thought about a wreck.... What's a seat belt? NOTHING protects a pack of front seat kids like a parent's swing arm😂😂😂😂
1. My uncle put a play pin in the back of his full sized van and placed my cousin in it while driving. 2. I broke my collarbone in a accident as I was standing behind the front seat of the driver's side. 3. Garbage Pail Kids were a trading card/sticker spoof of the insanely popular Cabbage Patch Kids dolls. 4. I used gasoline to wash the oil off my hands when helping my dad work on the car. 5. I walked and bought my mom her cigarettes. 6. I was given brandy as a gum numbing when I was teething. 7. Had my first beer/wine cooler at 10. 8. The computer when it first came out they said oh 250 gb hard drive was enough space for a lifetime lol... now we have TB HDs. 9. DOT Matrix came in two versions plan and green/white stripes. 10. Lit my mom and aunts cigarettes for them. 11. Dodge ball was a slaughter. 12.Slap bracelets were fabric covered medal that when it started to cut through they were sharp. 13. The zip zip zip sound of some of the fabric like corduroy and the old wind breaker fabric would give you away in hide and seek. 14. Water Beds are still sold and the material they made the mattress out of was pretty thick. 15. late 80's early 90s. The show America's Most Wanted was hosted by a guy who's son was kidnapped and gruesomely SAed and murdered and that was the reason for him to host the show. 16. We didn't have participation awards or all or none Valentines cards. 17. Lawn Darts. metal tipped short arrows that you were supposed to throw in the air aimed at the circle laid on the lawn... we threw them at each other lol.
We still buy chalk for the kids in our family. They do drawings on the sidewalk or driveway, lol. My parents definitely cared about sugar in cereals. We ate Rice Crispies, Chex or Raisin Bran. Or if mom was feeling nice, Golden Grahams. We didn't wear neon all the time. Just occasionally. Usually it was jeans and simple t-shirts. Or Cosby style sweaters, lol.
As far as the computer went nobody had a PC at home but the school had them. You either played Number Munchers or Oregon Trail. When I was 5 my mom let me sip her Bartles & James wine coolers and my dad would let me sip his Colt 45. Yeah, everything he said is as real as a heart attack. Fun times
For my group of friends, it was Zork! Nothing better than a text based game where you would have to input what you wanted to do but didn't always know how to word it so the game understood what you wanted!
Haven’t you had a corded phone at work? You have never had a clear phone conversation, cellphones still have trash reception. The best iPhone is not as clear as a random corded phone.
I HAD A WATERBED until I was old enough to decide I was too old for a waterbed and got a traditional one. I still miss it! It was warm in the winter and cool in the summer. You learned early not to leave anything sharp. If you found something slipped under your sheets and popped it there were “reinforcement tapes” that you cut to patch the hole. Wow… your channel is nostalgia central.
Also there were different levels. I grew up in a family of 6. 3 of us had one. There was a like a Goldilocks level of “wave”. No wave, it’s a waterbed…but mostly cushion.. you’re not going to move around much. Midwave- when you move it will move a bit but not much. Free wave- you move and the whole bed moves like you’ve got a small ocean in your bed. My siblings and I had the mid and freewave, I had an aunt and uncle with the midwave and then they changed it to the No Wave. They were a hassle to refill. (If you did pop your bed you need to put the water back in) They were a hassle to empty out…. You couldn’t move it or rearrange your room. It was a fixed piece. Obvious flooding/leak concerns…But I still miss it. 😂😂😂it was so warm and comfortable. You could adjust the temperature…. Worth every penny.
Real talk, they beat the competition out of Gen Z 😂 I had to troll my son relentlessly to finally get him to be competitive. It so weird. And that it’s all or none? Kids were left out, it happened. We didn’t make a big deal about it. Quite frankly I blame the schools for undermining how us as parents. Telling kids the will get in trouble for defending themselves against bullying especially.
I agree with you totally. We had a way of working things out without having weapons. I also think it was far more normal for other people to step in and stop bullying. These days kids walk by, stand and watch, or make sure they get it on video. It’s a different world.
💙 I was born in 1967 & graduated High School in 1985! My husband of 34+ years (High School Sweetheart) & I bought a house last January & found an original floppy disk computer upstairs in a closet! Brought back memories of Senior year when computers were introduced in our school, in the fall of 1984, for the 1st time!
Crime rates and kid kidnapping stats are way overblown. Crime is lower than it has been in 50yrs. Radically lower than the 90s. Almost all kidnapping is done by a parent. A childs chance of kidnapping is a million to one. The safety thing is ruining our kids. A lack of confidence. Fear of everything. Young people are getting out of college totally unprepared. For instance... I had a job when I was 10. Two hours, after school. I was paying social security at 16. Holding full time jobs during summer. I left home the day after high school graduation. None of this was odd amongst my peers. I worked a couple years and put myself thru college, working full time to do so.
11:22 hahaha now the ashtrays are coasters or just decorative items. they still glaze them and make them look pretty. I didn’t know this is how it started! 🤣🤣 I probably made one and didn’t realize.
16:45 #6 Waterbeds didn't just 'pop'. Occasionally, there would be a leak (really small), but they came with a repair kit (kind of like a tyre repair kit), but even if you didn't have that, a bit of duct tape would do the trick. I guess if you didn't put the cover on, leaks would be more frequent, but i can only remember one on mine, and I had it for years,... Who is taking knives or scissors to bed?
My favourite was when my parents would take my cousins and I to the drive-in, 17 of us kids in total, all pile into the back of their ford gremlin. We all sat in front of the car with our blankets and pillows and a boom box tuned to the correct station. Mismatched tupperaware full of spaghetti bolognaise and enjoyed the show 😋
I have a few opinions about this video, but I'll try to keep it short. "play in the front yard." Who ever stayed in the front yard? Maybe the front yard of my friend's house three blocks away. "Ride in the back of the car." Yeah, we had a pickup truck, try that at 70 mph on the highway. Playing unsupervised, yeah it was early Gen X parents that stopped that in the mid 90's. We know what kind of things we did unsupervised. I'm not so sure stopping it was a good thing. I mean look at what we did to the generations after us.
Jesus yeah I had cigarette sweets in the early 80s in the UK. Playgrounds had real tarmac, none of this bouncy rubber or wood chips for soft landings. I was lucky to have a ZX Spectrum 48k, when the cassette tapes used to take from 5-15 mins to load, if it loaded properly. Those of us in the know used to use a jewelers screwdriver to adjust the mechanism to adjust the position and tone. Chalk erasers were full of dust and hurt if you threw it at someone. Smoking amongst parents was just normal and I hated the smell even back then. Making huge home made BMX ramps and the best huge jumps had an old soggy wet mattress at the end. Rope swings hung on trees that always were made of the worst fraying rope that's ready to snap and you were scared you'd fall but making the swing was awesome. Your coming Home time was either dinner or when the street lights all came on, no phones for parents to call us on lol.
In the USA, the first missing child panic actually occurred in the 1980s with a few cases and kids on milk cartons - but, generally, there were so few cases back then that most people didn't take it seriously unless they lived in an unsafe area. The next missing child panic came in 2002 with some more famous cases happening then. That is when society started shifting.
I love that you had to carry a 35mm camera or polaroid to document your life. Usually it was a parent taking the picture. So the majority of your childhood is undocumented. What a relief I don't have to look back on 80s hair styles I had.
if you want to see how the kids in america lived in the 80s, research how kids in japan live today. some differences, but not much. the rearward facing seat in the family station wagon was great. i used to pretend i was a tail gunner in ww2.
A dirt lot near us had the front of a ship in it. We were always playing World War with someone. We didn't care about rattlesnakes or bees nests. It was the best.
Also, I distinctly remember my aunt and mom at a cookout drinking something called Malt Duck, which was a grape beer or something. One of them gave my four-year-old cousin a sip. She kept grabbing it, taking swigs and they were just laughing. Everyone just thought it was funny as hell. 😄
We had fun, lots of kids and lots of wonderful memories. I wouldn’t trade my life for anything. I can look back at the great times and still have most of my friends today. A couple have passed on but they will never be forgotten.
#24: We didn’t really wear seatbelts ever back then. #22: You could typically hear when someone picked up the phone. The main issue was determining which house had the annoying little sibling trying to listen the convo. 😂 What was also annoying was hearing someone dial a number before verifying whether the line was free or not. #19: Merry-go-rounds FTW lol. #12: Adam Bomb! Bruised Lee! New Wave Dave! … loved the names. #10: no no no… but 1-3 Swatches on each wrist-absolutely. #7: Saturday morning cartoons were the best. #3: We sometimes made collect calls with devised code names to convey messages. The person being called would “not accept the charges” but would know the intended message by the name used-a perfect way to save a quarter haha.
We had a merry-go-round at our middle school that we called 'The Puker' it was your typical merry-go-round, but with one big difference, it was just a skeleton, it had the wooden seats still, but the center where the wood would've been was completely gone, so we could throw 6 kids in the middle to push! It was like a very low tech carnival ride lol. There would be kids that would hold onto the bump between the benches and kick their legs out and go till they couldn't hold on any more. It was a great time!
I still miss Saturday morning cartoons. Occasionally I'll watch some of them, like The Smurfs or Dungeons & Dragons. I mentioned in another comment that He-Man and Thundercats were afternoon cartoons for me, after school.
I was born in 78, grew up in the 80's, at the park we used to swing as high as possible and then jump off to see where you landed, provided you didn't get caught on the swings chain, I do remember having the garbage pale kids in the UK in the 80s. I recently found the movie on Prime it wasn't as funny as I thought as a kid🤔, we played dodgeball outside of school, we also used to play kerbie where you and a friend stood at opposite sides of the road from each other and threw a ball to try and hit the pavement (sidewalk edge) kerb so it bounced back and the person who got moved forward and got an extra throw. I remember the Mr T cartoon along with the Ewoks/Pole Position /Dogtanain / Willy Fog / Silverhawks /Dark Wing Duck and the other cartoons mentioned along with the Rackoons/ Moomins and Willow the Wisp, then shows like The A-Team/Airwolf/Knight Rider / Streethawk/ Fall Guy/ Dukes Of Hazzard. We never called our friends, we used to just go round and see if they were coming out, and we we're alway's told to be back by a certain time or supper (dinner) would be in the dog, then the introduction to the Nes and for me it was the Sega Master System before the Sega Mega Drive I could never beat that Bonanza Brothers game
We were actually free. One thing, we were in a 1983 Datsun pickup truck riding in the back of the truck. My mother was driving god rest her lovely soul. We pull into Thomas and Mac Center for Van Halen concert and out in the parking lot. David Lee Roth was out riding his 10 Speed before the concert. My friends and I went flying when she stomped on the brakes because she almost ran him over. This was Van Halens 1984 tour in Las Vegas NV. But I can tell you some killer stuff that we did as kids. Riding our bikes all over the country. The drugs as pre teens, most teens were having sex at age 11 - 13 was the common starting age. Ive personally lived at least 6 lives before 1990. I was born in 1968 and my era has experienced nearly everything. Drinking smoking , weed, acid, hash, pills, you name it we all did it. And don't think that you know more about technology then we do. Gen X are not Boomers. I used to put computers together back in the late 1990's. I was building custom PC towers and selling them. We are still on the computer. Most 80's kids that would wear Neon were either poser kids, girls, and later Gen X of little kids. Not the old Gen X born to lat 60's early 70's. We were into Rock N Roll, concert shirts, half shirts, cut off jeans and flip flops, Vans, or OP shorts. Then came ADIDAS which stood for All Day I Dream About Sex shoes. yeah corny, but it was a saying on the west coast.
We had to program our computer, typing in code, debugging it. They didn't come setup out of the box. But these kids think we don't know anything about computers 😂👍
You aren't kidding one bit about sex... I swear Nikes, "Just do it" campaign was a nod to us. That's all we heard from our peers in Middle/Jr.High School. "You should just do it and get it over with". The pressure was intense. That culture that developed during the 60's, but especially the 70's with younger and younger kids was awful. I think of movies like 1973's Jeremy with Robby Benson. Or the 1979 made for TV movie Sooner or Later with Rex Smith and Denise Miller (I was only 10, but watched with my older sister)... Both were packaged and sold as young love stories, but ultimately they were meant to normalize the idea of having sex to their young pre-teen and teen female audience. Entertainment has been used to drive culture for decades... it's far worse and MUCH more direct now than EVER before. It was still at least somewhat subtle and often even romanticized when we were kids.
@@noself7889 My 1st concert was in 1983. But it was Van Halens future lead singer, Sammy Hagar on his "I can't drive 55" tour. Would have loved seeing VH with Davis Lee Roth.
@@misslora3896 I as under 15 so my mom took me at the time to all these concerts. I started in 1978 Van Halen and seen them every year and twice in 83 with US Festival. My mother was really cool and concerts was my friends and my moms thing to do for all of us. Ive been to a concert every week from 1978 to around 1986 with her, then I was going myself with friends if she didn't want to come. My mom was a hard core rocker.
I turned 13 in 1980. I only remember little kids and kids on tv wearing neon. The 80s to me was waiting with hordes of other teenagers to get the best spots at a Ratt concert when festival seating was still a thing. And I probably paid $11 for the ticket.
I would sit in the middle where the middle seatbelt was just a lap belt not like the other two were over the shoulder seatbeltsand make it as big as i could so i could lay across the whole back seat
i was born in 1971 in n-e england. had an outdoor toilet until i was 6, went camping ,aged 14, unsupervised, with 4 schoolfriends for a week, no mobile phones or any contact at all to home. leave home at dark o'clock in the morning and return at bedtime. knock on strangers doors to ask for a drink ( water ) or to use the toilet. great times! :)
From 75, i often drove behind the rear seat row in the VW Beetle............my uncles 1975 VW Dasher Station Wagon had no backseat belts, my Cousins( 3 girls ) and me had so much fun on the Autobahn....
Turning Point re Unsupervised Kids - Probably started after Adam Walsh’s son went missing. That changed a LOT of things in America, culturally and legally. Many forget or don’t realize that the 80s was the height of Serial Killers here. We didn’t know until it was much too late.
Of these, I definitely miss being a kid in a neighborhood full of best friends running around all day on bikes and having all that freedom. Even our parents were all best friends and all the social parties were fuggin epic! They were garage central, but some roamed indoors, and all roamed outdoors. Man, our parents were friends with ranch owners. We got horses and ponies to right every big party day. God, I miss those days.
What I miss the most is not being bothered by the phone once leaving the house. Being UNPLUGGED WAS A WAY OF LIFE😂😂😂
Yas 👏!! You said it!
Some of those candy cigarettes had powdered sugar in them, and when you blew through them it looked like "smoke"... Ah, the good 'ole days!
Loved them 😋
Oh yeah…. Now that you mention it, I remember that.
Best part of the 80s is riding your bike to the hangout with 10-20 other kids, of varying ages, and playing unsupervised for hours. I wish my kids now could experience this.
Why can they not? Is there some US law?
@anderslundqvist9259 no, parents now are lame and over protective.
Oh the good old days. 😢 Miss them
I actually got my 19 year old daughter chalk and she made the whole driveway into Rapunzel sun and flowers❤❤😊 so nice, she loved it😁
@@audreytryba2575 my boys use sidewalk chalk on our driveway all the time.
Everyone talks about Dodge ball. Who remembers playing Red Rover?
FONDLY! Regularly played them both on the same days!
Rover, Red Rover, please send so-and-so right over. 😊
Yep. We loved it, and the teachers always broke it up. That being said, now that I'm an adult, I do understand something called liability and how they had to break it up before someone got seriously hurt.
@paulad.4578 The only seriously hurt we ever got was skinned knees, but then again, we were also just playing on grass. And it was also at church, so....
@NehnBellanaris Good points. However, I also heard there were a few broken arms and a dislocated shoulder or two. Hard to know. I just know it was a lot of fun.
TV had to remind parents: It's 10pm do you know where your children are
😂😂😂 yes! That literally used to appear in white on a black screen.
And they showed the empty swing.
ITS 10PM DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR KIDS ARE🤣🤣
The thing about GenX is even though we watched GenX current day media, we also watched and listened to media from the generations before us in the form of reruns. As a kid, I watched tv shows from the 50s and 60s in the form of reruns and movies from the 30s to the 60s. We only had so many channels so we were pretty much all watching the same thing. It drew us all together in culture in ways that the newer generations (who have so much choice and access to tons of current day media both good and bad) will never understand or appreciate.
This is soooo true. My dad was excited when The Macahans was shown as a rerun on TV, as he could share a show he liked from his younger days with us kids. And me and my sister loved stuff from the 70's. And all of the Elvis movies. At the same time our older brothers rented home videos with Alien and Ghostbusters. I think I got to experience the best of both old and new as a kid who grew up in the 80's. (And Thundercats, TMNT and He-Man are still unbeatable as early morning cartoons...)
YES! I used to watch Gilligan's Island, Dobby Gillas, Bewitched(in black and white and in color) I Dream of Jeanne...and probably many more that I can't quite remember lol. I also remember listening to 'oldies' back then, as we didn't have any say what played on the radio in the car and had to listen to whatever mom and dad wanted to, so we listened to the music they grew up on!
@@johnw8578 I think all the various entertainment on demand and having endless options (w/shopping as well), though it may seem nice, has actually been detrimental. People have become accustomed to instant gratification with so many things... It's had negative effects on all of us, but especially in the development of younger people. And the endless options in seemingly everything just makes it confusing and choices much more difficult. We spend much more time just trying to decide what to choose and we also usually end up with more than we planned to get because of it. Like TV... we were exposed to a lot of really great old shows and movies that we likely would have never chosen to watch given the option. There's a lot to be said for more limited choices and delayed gratification.
@@jimf2892 Leave it to Beaver, Andy Griffith show, I love Lucy.
Definitely, and here in the UK we only had 3-4 channels. On a Sunday if you wanted entertainment on TV you were forced to watch Laurel and Hardy films, as the other channels were only showing dull sports for grandads or religious programming.
I can't imagine what my early life would have been like if I wasn't free to just jump on the bike and go on an adventure. I think life as a kid would have felt like prison without that.
A HUUUUGE one he didn't mention is arcades. they were everywhere, every mall had one (there were a lot of malls back then) many strip malls had one (usually next to a laundromat). Arcades and roller rinks were THE places to go. 90% of social life for kids in the 80's happened at an arcade or a roller rink.
I feel the same way about the adventures and also about the arcades and roller rinks.
Real Talk
agree.
arcades were amazing.
Every Saturday I went to the roller rink. We always had so much fun.
@ That’s awesome!
70s-80s childhood here. Rode in the very back, also rode in the back of the truck, and in the cabover camper while parents drove. It's a wonder any gen x-ers are still alive, but if you have one in your life, they are who you want on your side during the zombie apocalypse
Lol. I told my kids about hiking in the mountains all day alone and they were stunned. I never really thought about it. Just the way it was. But I never allowed my kids to do such a thing.
Different times 😢
@@Woman_In_TX1206 Only place I ever walked alone in a mountain was in China. Don't have mountains in the midwest, so when I was traveling/teaching abroad I went hiking in the mountains every so often. Nice thing about China is "majority" of China is safe in that the biggest thing out there that'll eat you is a rabbit at least from my experience.
Survive the Zombie Apocalypse? Heck, we used to play that as a neighbourhood game! 🤣🤣
Yep, we had 8 children in our Military family and drove all over these states in the back, in the floor board and on the dash without seatbelts while parents smoked in the front. We all lived. My favorite memories.
@@Woman_In_TX1206 yes, when camping was off by myself hiking up & down mountains all day. And with several hundred rounds of .22 ammunition and a pistol.
I’m a Gen X female and I was in the woods on bike trails all day unsupervised, just be back by dark. Road in the back of trucks. Never wore a seatbelt until they passed it into law. Definitely smoked a few packs of candy cigarettes. We had a smoking section in high school and a pay phone. And there was no such thing as a soft dodge ball, those things left a mark.
People had to talk to each other then. I was born in '79. Disco was dying out and rock started rolling. I missed "Night Tracks" music videos that aired years before MTV was a thing.
calling your crush and having to talk to her father first was so stress inducing
Not as nerve racking as meeting many of those dads. Mine is retired military, he would take my dates into the den, show off his gun collection, shot targets, military ribbons for marksmanship, and inform them what time I was to be returned.
We had a cord on the phone long enough that you could squeeze yourself into the linen closet for privacy.
And this built resilience to stress inducing situations we have to handle later.
@@sassykat200080s kids ❤ We’re Ford tough 💪🏾
I had a friend who's father was a Cobb county Ga sheriff's deputy..... he'd clean guns if he knew a boy was going to come see her😂. He'd keep a couple of weapons constantly disassembled for cleaning, in case a boy came over on short notice. They had escaped a serious gvt overthrow in Peru about 40+ years ago. He was a big guy too 😂.
A great thing about the old phones with a landline, they didn't require electricity to work. So if your power was out, you could still make and receive phone calls.
And the early touch tones you could click the receiver tabs to mimic the pulse of the rotary dial
When the internet came who remembers if someone picked up the phone and tried to make a call while you were on AOL it would kick you off the internet.
@@VincentVega--XD I didn't have to deal with that. I was an adult living on my own when I got my first computer with dialup.
@@VincentVega--XDI remember that! And whomever was online would get pissed because it took so long to download anything. 😂
Still have one, and made sure my daughter got one in her first place to just in case
In the 80s you knew who were your neighbors and most of the kids in the area you lived in if you needed ANYTHING you could go to a neighbor for help. You did not talk to strangers every one looked out for each other. And if you did something or been somewhere you were not supposed to be you can bet your mom would find out anyways because the neighbor 3 blocks down saw you and told your MOM. I really feel the kids now are lacking that feeling of freedom and being carefree. I would not change it for anything 70s to 90s the best times ever to be KID AND TEEN.
💯
I was a teen in the 80"s and I can tell you it was an amazing time to be a kid. I wouldn't have wanted to grow up in any other Era. We had a blast!!! We learned how to take care of ourselves and the others around us.
Absolutely, if 8 of you were going up the hills and into the woods in the morning then 8 had to come back. no matter if there was fallouts or arguments, we all knew the base line was no one gets left alone.
The thing about us Gen X ers is simple... we learned that being stupid *hurt.* Consequences were an early part of our lives.
So was accountability. They went hand in hand.
hand and ass so to speak.
Nailed it
We were the crash-test-dummies for Health and Safety Executive only created in 1975 ;-).
In the 70's on-site with my Irish dad was not a big deal.
I started working at 14 kerbing the A17 in Kings Lynn at the weekends. [ we did £200 of work and my share was £60 in 1984 ]
Except 80’s kids are gen y or millennials
@@user-ot9tg1mr6u 80's BABIES are Gen Y. as in born then.
Gen X lived through and are old enough to *remember* the 80's as being formative.
Waterbeds were much more durable than you would think. Leaks were usually slow and could be patched without draining it. Now when the heater went out during winter and your bed temp dropped to the 60's or 70's, that sucked.
I didnt have one but one time I was at a friend that had one so I layed in it it was an amazing feeling. I still remember it because I soo wanted one.
Sooo cold!!!😂
Most waterbeds you could pull the fill plugs and then lay on it without water coming out, if fact laying on the bed with the plug out was the best way of burping the bed.
I had one up until about 2009.
Man I miss that thing.
My mom bought one in the early 2000s because she thought it'd help with some new back pain that turned out to be cancer 😢
After she had unrelated surgeries, we replaced the mattress with a pillow-top "insert" is what they call regular mattresses that replace waterbed mattresses.
I still have that bed but it's used for storage.
The funniest thing about all of this is that he is worried about the pay phone being sanitary. I don't remember people being so incredibly worried about germs till around 1995 or so.
sharing is caring ;)
It was more into the late 2000’s that people really got bad with it. It’s like going to Subway back in the 90’s. They never wore gloves. They just washed their hands and had at it. Now everywhere you go, everyone e is wearing gloves.
I wiped the ear part on my shirt sleeve and all was good lol. Used many pay phones when i drove semi long haul. Just wipe on shirt and make my call
@@shawnkelly695 I remember those days riding with my dad and pawpaw. The good ole days of trucking.
Gen x kids were responsible for their own safety like it should be. You had to be able to evaluate risk and lives with the consequence of your actions.
No that is not the way it should be. Gen x kids had the laziest most self involved parents of any generation.
In the 70s we could make prank phone calls with no worry about caller ID. People would hitchhike without worrying too much about being kidnapped. We would leave our front door unlocked when we went out to play with nobody home.
@@karenbertke3149 Similar situation. My family lived in Atlanta during the child murders. My brothers, who were in that age range of the other victims, used to visit that area because our grandparents lived there. My father, who was mixed, was stopped a bunch by random people and it caused a lot of problems. He later took an order to move to Florida, he's military, and took our Grandma with him.
When you adjust for population disparity between the 1980s and the 2020s you will find out that people still go missing at the same rate. Now media just uses these things to stoke your fears. They want you to molly coddle your kids and treat them like they are incompetent. So when they're 30 they're incapable.
AND WE DRANK FROM THE HOSE! Wait, you left the door unlocked? We were just locked out of the house until parents got home unless, like I was, you were a Latch-Key Kid who got home after school and looked after yourself for 2 or 3 hours every day between when you got home from school and parents got home from work - heck, we even helped cook meals sometimes!
@cubist24, And then there was the old Slip & Slide. Attach the hose on a hot summer day and it didn't matter so much if you didn't have a pool.
It is shame that kids today don't have as much chance to just hang out with a friend all day having to find stuff to do. We made forts from branches, just because it seemed fun. No reason, but we did learn along the way. Not sure what I learned from climbing onto the school roof, but that's another story... 😅 love your content! 😅
Yep. We built some tree forts that sort of fell apart. Luckily, I asked my father (who was an engineer) for some tips and we learned to build a long lasting, sturdy fort.
Our station wagon had a 3rd seat pulled up from floor. It looked backwards. You go in from tailgate.
Gen X motto: F*ck around and find out! 😂😂
my mom put me out of the house after school. and told me to come home when the street lights came on.
They couldn't clean the house if you keep messing it up. Lol.
For us country kids it was when the porch light came on.
@ it was always 6pm. thats what time all of us kids went in for diner and to stay
We were kicked out after dinner till dark.
Born in `75 in Belgium Europe : In summer you could stay outside `till 10PM with all the neighbourhood kids from different ages, around diner time (we had watches you know, LOL) you just popped in to eat and after diner of you went again. In winter you had to come in at 5 o`clock PM ..because of the summer/winter change in daylight. The sun goes down earlier in winter.
Adding to #25, we use to ride in the back of pickup trucks too. Another fun piece of playground equipment was the merry go round. It was a round platform with handles to hang onto while it was spun around. Most of us tried to make it go as fast as we could until people flew off.
The cards for Valentines day I had to give one to everyone back in the 80s.
Even in the 70s
Weird. I never had to give to everyone, My sisters, 10 &15 years younger, though, had to. My mom was upset, not because of the cost, they were, what $1 a box or less, but because it was a "dumb concept" (I graduated in 97 for time reference & lived in the UP in Michigan & ohio)
Late 60's, 70's and 80's here. Childhood and growing up was amazing.
All the adults when I was growing up always told us to get home before dark instead of before the lights came on. Not that even as kids we weren't aware that going outside after dark was the height of stupidity, since that's when the snakes and coyotes came out. 😅
And dude no, the original Teenager Mutant Ninja Turtles is so much different than what you got after Nickelodeon bought it.
When it snowed, my dad would clear the drive with his tractor. My brothers and I got to ride in the bucket a mile to my grandparents. So he could clear their driveway too. It’s definitely one of my favorite memories.
I loved checking pay phones for quarters! I found two dollars from a row of them in Philly once. Also, Carmen Sandiego was a great show! I would shout at the tv when it was time to do the map part and go: “That marker goes there, not there!” “Come on, that’s an easy one!” And watching that show DID help me with learning geography.
I am genuinely enjoying these Gen X videos. Great memories. 😊
Instead of a stamp collection, 80s kids collected stickers. Puffy stickers, scratch 'n' sniff, and my sister even had "Where's the beef?" stickers. It was common to have colored strings safety pinned to your backpack so you could sit in class and braid friendship bracelets. In the 70s and 80s we had a lot of child serial killers, but in the 70s the kids were called runaways and by the 80s people couldn't ignore how many went missing. So they started putting missing children's faces on milk cartons and teaching children about "Stranger Danger."
I was born in 1978. I literally grew up in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. I miss how simple life was.
* I still have all my Garbage Pail Kids cards. Including first edition cards.
Born in 1976 and same with the Garbage Pail Kids :)
born 77 and still have my GPK stash
1979 and same! I have James Flames on my fridge right now 😁
I loved those. I think they tried a comeback but people were offended lol
@@pinktastic6159of course they were lol
6:19 fair question, “How did we, 80s kids, survive?” A lot of luck 🍀😉🤘🏻my father always said, “It’s better to be lucky than good.”
Garbage Pale kids were cards you collected. Cabbage Patch Kids were dolls you collected. You mixed up the two. FYI mate.
I miss my water bed. They were temperature regulated. They were great for the changing temperature outside.
I got stickers with my Garbage Pail kids and put them all over my notebooks. Trapper Keepers ftw!
I miss my Cabbage Patch doll! I asked for a whole years before I finally got one for Christmas! 😅
Most of us learned to be just damn good! 🤘🏿👍🏿💪🏿😆
My father was a software engineer for IBM and was one of the pioneers for creating at home software for the PC. I used to go to work with him and he'd let me go into the giant computer room which had a very specific smell and was loud and contained huge machines. He'd let me watch their dot Matrix and tear the paper off. It was extremely satisfying.
Kids today: haha we have all these computers! Boomers and Gen X: who do you think invented that? Haha
In 84 we got our first computer Commodore 64. My mom used it to do contracts and book keeping. We would spend hours typing programs from computer magazines just to play a game on it. It was the same OS on that Apple II e in the pic. in 3rd grade I got into trouble for making a rocket ship with USA printed on it go acrost my screen from bottom to top. and then had to show my computer teacher how I did it.
There’s another one! We went to work with our parents!
Those high metal pipe monkey bars were fun! We had it in school and the public playground. In elementary, my siblings and I played on it. There was the 'monster' who would walk like a zombie on the ground and try to catch us (on the bars.). We played the game IT on the bars. Automatically touching the ground, you were 'out'. The last man standing was the winner. We pretended it was a pirate ship and moved around on the outside and going inside, etc... The imaginations we had to make that monkey bars fun!
I had a semi waveless waterbed when I was a kid. It was amazing. It had a heater to keep the water warm during winter. And in summer it was nice and cool. They are much harder to pop then you would think. My dog loved the bed as much as I did.
I got into the habit of moving my foot to Rock the bed slightly & rock myself to sleep with the waves lol. Now, over 2 decades later (with no waterbed 😢) I *still* move my foot the same way as I'm falling asleep.😂
If you think making ashtrays in art is wild, the guys in wood-shop class almost always made rifle racks as their first project. In high school a lot of kids who had trucks had rifle racks mounted in the rear window, and almost all of us, guys and gals, carried a pocket knife (yes, even to school).
Yep, those racks weren't empty at school either.
How do kids today survive without a pocket knife?
@@TheMrGreen28 Yet no school "incidents". What changed?
@johnw8578 Colombine, making schools gun free zones. And I think the over prescription of SSRIs and other antidepressants. I started taking them when I was 26 by 27. I stopped because the only emotion I could feel was anger, and they removed any give a f I had about anything. From what I understand, that happens more the younger you are also. Plus, most of them state in the possible side-effects are homicidal thoughts or actions.
I remember that on school! Trip I bought a pocket knife from a stand and no one thought it is wrong. Also staying outside even after dark was ok if you were with your friends. And when we were a bit older like sixteen it was a dare to play basketball or soccer at midnight
The mid to late 80's is when stranger danger became a thing. I remember Adam Walsh was kidnapped in a mall while there with family. After that, there were other child abductions. The change in the freedom kids had happened slowly. I graduated high school in 1992, and I was still pretty free then, but my mom began to worry more and always had me call if I was going to change my plans after I left the house.
Who remembers rescue 911 and unsolved mysteries?
When we were kids in the 80s/90s we spend every free minute in the summer at the local public swimming pool. Without parents of course. We went there by bike and every group of friends had their favorite spot to have their base with the towels and bags, so you always found your friends.
That or the mall! We would spend the whole day at the mall -- movie theater, food court, water slide, arcade, skating rink, hide-n-seek in and amongst the stores and sneak into the tunnels underneath until someone chased us out. Summers would fly by!
When I was 14, me and my friend rode our bicycles to the beach, 10 hours away, and camped for a week. We could only afford the frozen microwave burritos we bought at a local store and called the parents collect every couple days.
Also, violent crime was worse back then than it is now, we were just less aware of it because of the lack of nation wide communication.
Gen X here. Loved putting blankets down and napping in the back of the station wagon! Scooby Doo and Pink Panther were my favorite cartoons. We only had three channels because we had an antenna and no cable.
Yeah, teenage mutant ninja turtles was 80’s. But, where I lived it wasn’t a Saturday morning cartoon, it came on in the late afternoon. Ahhhh, he never mentioned that on weekdays cartoons would not play on tv until 2pm. 2pm to 5pm was the primetime of cartoons. After 5pm all cartoons stopped.
Strawberry Shortcake made a comeback too.... ours smelled so good, you wanted to eat them. Not to mention Barbie who is still going strong. I got my first Barbie in 1976.. her legs and arms couldnt bend lol
Kids could play unsupervised in the 80s because we all knew each other and your parents would know everything you did . If you did something wrong your parents would get calls telling on you .
We did more than play in the front yard. We roamed the neighborhood.
Or even the next 2 towns over. I regularly hopped the train in CT and go in to NYC for the day.
TMNT on Nickelodeon was NOT the same as the OG TMNT!
I wandered all over the place alone when I was 4-5 years old. But then again, I was born in 1947.
I still have a landline with coil wire. I also have my smartphone.💙
The thing with GenX and older generations, we lived in both pre-internet and post-internet worlds. We know both.
@@johnw8578 Yes, we've seen a lot of change. The young people now wouldn't know how to survive if a major world occurrence happened. No electricity, planting/growing food, making clothing, keeping warm, no fuel for cars......
BOOMERS LOL
My mom did that in the 30s.she could take the trolley all over town. She'd go watch movies for a whole day.
@@katrinalarsen4048If there is an EMP you might need some boomers around.
GenX, the free range children 😂😂😂
lol some might say feral ;)
@@scotmax8426We definitely had a few of those. It was like Lord of the Flies out there some days.
Im gen x. 57 this month. The eighties ruled!!!
the slap bracelet had a laterally curve to the metal inside the satin bracelet so it's hold it's shape rigid until slapped against the arm inverting that bend and it'd wrap around. iirc there were a few accidents and lacerations it was metal. also the Garbage Pail Kids were a satire of the popular wholesome Cabbage Patch Kids toys. The Garbage Pail Kids cards would be a card set with a stick of awful gum having rhyming names like RV Stevie and the kid on the card might be part television. it capitalized on the kid mentality that gross can be funny. I think it had a movie
Dodgeball was my favorite anger management class😂😂
I almost think the playgrounds and toys of Gen X'ers and older were deliberately designed in an effort to "thin the heard". Fortunately, kids turned out to be much more resilient than they expected. Something that's since been forgotten.
Oh, most definitely! I had remarked in my own post about the metal strip in the slap bracelets. But I also remember Tonka trucks were made with metal and functioned just like the real vehicles they were modeled after, not some Little Tikes plastic with barely any moving parts!
All kids quickly learned metal slides were off limits on sunny summer days.
@@jimf2892 Yes, 2 things I distinctly remember due to injuries. 1: I don't recall if they were made this way or maybe edges would get bent out of their original shape, but there could be sharp edges along where the stamped out sheets of metal were bent into shape. 2: The back of the dump truck could smash tiny hands and fingers. My brother was standing in this knees, lost his balance, and when he went to catch himself he came down onto the back of the truck and my hand happened to be in between the body and the raised back end. Ouch!!!
@@VincentVega--XD Oh yeah. We were pretty quick learners. However, it wasn't often we learned from seeing others get hurt, we usually had to do it ourselves before the lesson stuck. I learned not to go down the metal slide in shorts on warm sunny days, but oftentimes when there's the will, we found a way... When I could remember to, I'd bring a hand towel to sit on.
@@misslora3896 I just felt that pain while reading your reply...Y'ouch!
The kids of today living in a prison!!!They growing up like without any"AUWIES", a litle cut in there fingers and the parents of toda rush to the hospital.😂😂😂😂😂
Seatbelts weren't even mandatory in the back when I was a kid ...
A lot of our cars didn’t have seatbelts
Loved my water bed i had mine from 7 year olds to 17
highlight of breaking an arm or leg... you get a cool cast that all your friends can write there well wishes on..
Or that one person who would write in the binding of your yearbook "glad I was the first one to sign your crack"
I was a kid in the '70s. Unsupervised in the front yard? Amateurs! We had the whole neighborhood...which meant as far as we could reach by bike and still make it home for dinner.
You do know that 40-50 years from now, the 20 yr olds will think the same way about YOU. They'll be amazed at how backwards and crazy your younger life was. You know that, right? Every new generation thinks that of their parents/grandparents. What amazes me is that y'all think you're different.
😂😂😂
As an 80s kid… We got to experience disappointment we actually got hurt. We fell down and we busted an arm or leg and It was cool. not everybody won an award you just had to suck it up buttercup. Just made us want to be better. 💙
#13 yes we we offered a sip of beer, but i think it was because our parents knew we wouldn't like it.
True.
My grandma would pour me a little juice glass of beer and water it down 😂 I hated it but I always asked her for some
I remember when my sister was teething, mom would put brandy on her gums to alleviate the pain. Imagine doing that now, you'd have CPS knocking at your door faster than you could screw the top back on the bottle!
That or they knew the small amount of alcohol you drank would make us sleepy so the parents at the party could really get into the degenerate things they wanted to get into.
I wish every child could experience the freedom as a child that gen x had. Jump on your bike and go. Hang at the pool all day! Swing by the arcade.
It's actually safer today than in the 80s. Parents need to chill. If your child isn't a toddler and knows traffic rules, it's gonna be fine.
The problem is their parents don't even know the traffic rules. I mean look at the way they drive and it is so rare for me to see somebody actually ride a bicycle correctly. I mean we were taught as kids. Hey you ride on this side of the road. You do this. You do that you know. Yeah we may not have done it in our neighborhoods as much but when we went out onto a road that was going a little further than our neighborhood. We tended to follow the bicycle rules better kids today. Don't even know the damn rules
I miss those parks. They were so fun. You could go so high on the swing. Seesaws would go way, high! I miss the fairy go rounds! Everybody would gather in the center and one of your parents would spin it and you'd try to stay on it without flying off! It was great. Climbing on top of the monkey bars was great! Trying to get to the highest part of the playground was fun. I don't miss the metal slides. Those hurt a lot in the summer. Not a good idea but the slides used to be way higher and way more fun.
Bold of you to assume that in 30 years, humans will even have feelings.
😂😂😂
humans will have feelings, it will be mandated, you'll have to schedule a weekly feelings exposure session with a licensed emotional support officer. It will only be the feelings you are authorized for, of course, and only for the half hour session... but humans will still have feelings in 30 years. The complete ban on feelings doesn't happen until 2093.
@@baneblackguard584 🙊🙈🙉
I feel you my masked member!
Oh shit -----wrong video!
I loved the back of station wagons!
I was a kid in the 70's. We didn't even have seatbelts until I was older.
Candy cigarettes were NOT good.
Slides were metal. Imagine burning all the skin off your legs.
Thank goodness the Dewie Decimal system was replaced. That shyt was CONFUSING!
I was in highschool in the 80's. I took a computer class. I learned how to program a computer to count from 1 to infinity (or whatever number it managed to get to by the end of class.) Yay! 😂
I can still hear the sound a dot matrix printer made. They took literally FOREVER to print a whole page, and we would print banners out on them.
Sipping adult beverages as a child... Yep. Guilty. 😅
The sound of a dodgeball is SO nostalgic. I wish I currently had one of those red rubber balls just to bounce it and hear it's familiar almost metallic sound, or smell the distinctive rubber smell of the gymnasium cart they were stored on. We didn't use them only for dodgeball, they got used for so many different games.
Slap bracelets were metal wrapped in fabric
We didn't have streaming services or cable, so Saturday mornings were THE time to get our cartoon fix.
I had a waterbed in the 90's. Didn't like it. When the power went out the bed got cold!
We went SO far on our bikes!
He didn't mention the secret code we had to call our parents on a payphone, collect, to get our parents to pick us up from the mall or the movies or the roller-rink without having to pay for a call...
Operator to parent: You have a collect call from:
Child: The movie's over come get us
Operator: Do you accept the charges.
Parent: click
10-15 minutes later, here comes the station wagon!
I pity the fool who doesn't get this reference 😉
I still smoke cigarettes. Not the candy ones or electronic ones.
How much is it for a pack these days? 😬
@@TacomaGirlWe're paying less than what they were back when I started in the early 90's 😁
$13 to $15 where I'm located in VT.. plus tax ofc!!
Ol' boy should have said 70s kids!!
No one ever thought about a wreck....
What's a seat belt? NOTHING protects a pack of front seat kids like a parent's swing arm😂😂😂😂
1. My uncle put a play pin in the back of his full sized van and placed my cousin in it while driving.
2. I broke my collarbone in a accident as I was standing behind the front seat of the driver's side.
3. Garbage Pail Kids were a trading card/sticker spoof of the insanely popular Cabbage Patch Kids dolls.
4. I used gasoline to wash the oil off my hands when helping my dad work on the car.
5. I walked and bought my mom her cigarettes.
6. I was given brandy as a gum numbing when I was teething.
7. Had my first beer/wine cooler at 10.
8. The computer when it first came out they said oh 250 gb hard drive was enough space for a lifetime lol... now we have TB HDs.
9. DOT Matrix came in two versions plan and green/white stripes.
10. Lit my mom and aunts cigarettes for them.
11. Dodge ball was a slaughter.
12.Slap bracelets were fabric covered medal that when it started to cut through they were sharp.
13. The zip zip zip sound of some of the fabric like corduroy and the old wind breaker fabric would give you away in hide and seek.
14. Water Beds are still sold and the material they made the mattress out of was pretty thick.
15. late 80's early 90s. The show America's Most Wanted was hosted by a guy who's son was kidnapped and gruesomely SAed and murdered and that was the reason for him to host the show.
16. We didn't have participation awards or all or none Valentines cards.
17. Lawn Darts. metal tipped short arrows that you were supposed to throw in the air aimed at the circle laid on the lawn... we threw them at each other lol.
250 GB is only a quarter of 1 TB. So, that's like one or half a HDD generation. I think you meant MB.
We still buy chalk for the kids in our family. They do drawings on the sidewalk or driveway, lol.
My parents definitely cared about sugar in cereals. We ate Rice Crispies, Chex or Raisin Bran. Or if mom was feeling nice, Golden Grahams.
We didn't wear neon all the time. Just occasionally. Usually it was jeans and simple t-shirts. Or Cosby style sweaters, lol.
As far as the computer went nobody had a PC at home but the school had them. You either played Number Munchers or Oregon Trail. When I was 5 my mom let me sip her Bartles & James wine coolers and my dad would let me sip his Colt 45.
Yeah, everything he said is as real as a heart attack. Fun times
For my group of friends, it was Zork! Nothing better than a text based game where you would have to input what you wanted to do but didn't always know how to word it so the game understood what you wanted!
If you havnt died of dysentery in your life you didnt know what a great childhood was. hahahaha
SMELLY MARKERS THEY SMELLED SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD
I was the one that did not get many cards but life is not fair and I learned early. not a bad thing to learn
I was always told that "fair" was where you go to play games and eat pie -- that's the only "fair" in life.
Pulling the ends off of Dot matrix paper!!!! Who knew I’d be looking back on that one day as such a fond memory!!! 😂
Haven’t you had a corded phone at work? You have never had a clear phone conversation, cellphones still have trash reception. The best iPhone is not as clear as a random corded phone.
I HAD A WATERBED until I was old enough to decide I was too old for a waterbed and got a traditional one. I still miss it!
It was warm in the winter and cool in the summer. You learned early not to leave anything sharp. If you found something slipped under your sheets and popped it there were “reinforcement tapes” that you cut to patch the hole. Wow… your channel is nostalgia central.
Also there were different levels. I grew up in a family of 6. 3 of us had one. There was a like a Goldilocks level of “wave”.
No wave, it’s a waterbed…but mostly cushion.. you’re not going to move around much.
Midwave- when you move it will move a bit but not much.
Free wave- you move and the whole bed moves like you’ve got a small ocean in your bed.
My siblings and I had the mid and freewave, I had an aunt and uncle with the midwave and then they changed it to the No Wave.
They were a hassle to refill. (If you did pop your bed you need to put the water back in)
They were a hassle to empty out…. You couldn’t move it or rearrange your room. It was a fixed piece. Obvious flooding/leak concerns…But I still miss it. 😂😂😂it was so warm and comfortable. You could adjust the temperature…. Worth every penny.
Real talk, they beat the competition out of Gen Z 😂 I had to troll my son relentlessly to finally get him to be competitive. It so weird. And that it’s all or none? Kids were left out, it happened. We didn’t make a big deal about it. Quite frankly I blame the schools for undermining how us as parents. Telling kids the will get in trouble for defending themselves against bullying especially.
I agree with you totally. We had a way of working things out without having weapons. I also think it was far more normal for other people to step in and stop bullying. These days kids walk by, stand and watch, or make sure they get it on video. It’s a different world.
💙 I was born in 1967 & graduated High School in 1985! My husband of 34+ years (High School Sweetheart) & I bought a house last January & found an original floppy disk computer upstairs in a closet! Brought back memories of Senior year when computers were introduced in our school, in the fall of 1984, for the 1st time!
Crime rates and kid kidnapping stats are way overblown. Crime is lower than it has been in 50yrs. Radically lower than the 90s. Almost all kidnapping is done by a parent. A childs chance of kidnapping is a million to one.
The safety thing is ruining our kids. A lack of confidence. Fear of everything. Young people are getting out of college totally unprepared.
For instance... I had a job when I was 10. Two hours, after school. I was paying social security at 16. Holding full time jobs during summer. I left home the day after high school graduation. None of this was odd amongst my peers.
I worked a couple years and put myself thru college, working full time to do so.
So true! I know some younger people who have major anxiety issues because they are afraid of everything.
11:22 hahaha now the ashtrays are coasters or just decorative items. they still glaze them and make them look pretty. I didn’t know this is how it started! 🤣🤣 I probably made one and didn’t realize.
Waterbeds came with patches in case you got a hole. They were hell to move if you moved.
Candy cigs. I guess I’m weird, I liked the taste of them. Miss them.
16:45 #6 Waterbeds didn't just 'pop'. Occasionally, there would be a leak (really small), but they came with a repair kit (kind of like a tyre repair kit), but even if you didn't have that, a bit of duct tape would do the trick. I guess if you didn't put the cover on, leaks would be more frequent, but i can only remember one on mine, and I had it for years,... Who is taking knives or scissors to bed?
My favourite was when my parents would take my cousins and I to the drive-in, 17 of us kids in total, all pile into the back of their ford gremlin. We all sat in front of the car with our blankets and pillows and a boom box tuned to the correct station. Mismatched tupperaware full of spaghetti bolognaise and enjoyed the show 😋
I have a few opinions about this video, but I'll try to keep it short. "play in the front yard." Who ever stayed in the front yard? Maybe the front yard of my friend's house three blocks away. "Ride in the back of the car." Yeah, we had a pickup truck, try that at 70 mph on the highway. Playing unsupervised, yeah it was early Gen X parents that stopped that in the mid 90's. We know what kind of things we did unsupervised. I'm not so sure stopping it was a good thing. I mean look at what we did to the generations after us.
I know young folks filled with anxiety because they are scared of everything and are not confident in their decisions.
The first one always makes me think of mad max when the baby has his ice cream crying getting thrown around in the boot of the car 😂😂😂
Jesus yeah I had cigarette sweets in the early 80s in the UK. Playgrounds had real tarmac, none of this bouncy rubber or wood chips for soft landings. I was lucky to have a ZX Spectrum 48k, when the cassette tapes used to take from 5-15 mins to load, if it loaded properly. Those of us in the know used to use a jewelers screwdriver to adjust the mechanism to adjust the position and tone. Chalk erasers were full of dust and hurt if you threw it at someone. Smoking amongst parents was just normal and I hated the smell even back then. Making huge home made BMX ramps and the best huge jumps had an old soggy wet mattress at the end. Rope swings hung on trees that always were made of the worst fraying rope that's ready to snap and you were scared you'd fall but making the swing was awesome. Your coming Home time was either dinner or when the street lights all came on, no phones for parents to call us on lol.
I grew up during the 70's & 80's. Have rode in the back of my Dad's Ford Transit van when we went karting ! It was bumpy but fun xx
In the USA, the first missing child panic actually occurred in the 1980s with a few cases and kids on milk cartons - but, generally, there were so few cases back then that most people didn't take it seriously unless they lived in an unsafe area. The next missing child panic came in 2002 with some more famous cases happening then. That is when society started shifting.
I love that you had to carry a 35mm camera or polaroid to document your life. Usually it was a parent taking the picture. So the majority of your childhood is undocumented. What a relief I don't have to look back on 80s hair styles I had.
if you want to see how the kids in america lived in the 80s, research how kids in japan live today. some differences, but not much. the rearward facing seat in the family station wagon was great. i used to pretend i was a tail gunner in ww2.
A dirt lot near us had the front of a ship in it. We were always playing World War with someone. We didn't care about rattlesnakes or bees nests. It was the best.
Also, I distinctly remember my aunt and mom at a cookout drinking something called Malt Duck, which was a grape beer or something. One of them gave my four-year-old cousin a sip. She kept grabbing it, taking swigs and they were just laughing. Everyone just thought it was funny as hell. 😄
We had fun, lots of kids and lots of wonderful memories. I wouldn’t trade my life for anything. I can look back at the great times and still have most of my friends today. A couple have passed on but they will never be forgotten.
Adam Walsh disappeared in 81 since John Walsh was a meteorologist it was a big deal it slowly started changing after that.
#24: We didn’t really wear seatbelts ever back then. #22: You could typically hear when someone picked up the phone. The main issue was determining which house had the annoying little sibling trying to listen the convo. 😂 What was also annoying was hearing someone dial a number before verifying whether the line was free or not. #19: Merry-go-rounds FTW lol. #12: Adam Bomb! Bruised Lee! New Wave Dave! … loved the names. #10: no no no… but 1-3 Swatches on each wrist-absolutely. #7: Saturday morning cartoons were the best. #3: We sometimes made collect calls with devised code names to convey messages. The person being called would “not accept the charges” but would know the intended message by the name used-a perfect way to save a quarter haha.
We had a merry-go-round at our middle school that we called 'The Puker' it was your typical merry-go-round, but with one big difference, it was just a skeleton, it had the wooden seats still, but the center where the wood would've been was completely gone, so we could throw 6 kids in the middle to push! It was like a very low tech carnival ride lol. There would be kids that would hold onto the bump between the benches and kick their legs out and go till they couldn't hold on any more. It was a great time!
I still miss Saturday morning cartoons. Occasionally I'll watch some of them, like The Smurfs or Dungeons & Dragons. I mentioned in another comment that He-Man and Thundercats were afternoon cartoons for me, after school.
I was born in 78, grew up in the 80's, at the park we used to swing as high as possible and then jump off to see where you landed, provided you didn't get caught on the swings chain, I do remember having the garbage pale kids in the UK in the 80s. I recently found the movie on Prime it wasn't as funny as I thought as a kid🤔, we played dodgeball outside of school,
we also used to play kerbie where you and a friend stood at opposite sides of the road from each other and threw a ball to try and hit the pavement (sidewalk edge) kerb so it bounced back and the person who got moved forward and got an extra throw.
I remember the Mr T cartoon along with the Ewoks/Pole Position /Dogtanain / Willy Fog / Silverhawks /Dark Wing Duck and the other cartoons mentioned along with the Rackoons/ Moomins and Willow the Wisp,
then shows like The A-Team/Airwolf/Knight Rider / Streethawk/ Fall Guy/ Dukes Of Hazzard.
We never called our friends,
we used to just go round and see if they were coming out, and we we're alway's told to be back by a certain time or supper (dinner) would be in the dog, then the introduction to the Nes and for me it was the Sega Master System before the Sega Mega Drive I could never beat that Bonanza Brothers game
We were actually free. One thing, we were in a 1983 Datsun pickup truck riding in the back of the truck. My mother was driving god rest her lovely soul. We pull into Thomas and Mac Center for Van Halen concert and out in the parking lot. David Lee Roth was out riding his 10 Speed before the concert. My friends and I went flying when she stomped on the brakes because she almost ran him over. This was Van Halens 1984 tour in Las Vegas NV.
But I can tell you some killer stuff that we did as kids. Riding our bikes all over the country. The drugs as pre teens, most teens were having sex at age 11 - 13 was the common starting age. Ive personally lived at least 6 lives before 1990. I was born in 1968 and my era has experienced nearly everything. Drinking smoking , weed, acid, hash, pills, you name it we all did it. And don't think that you know more about technology then we do. Gen X are not Boomers. I used to put computers together back in the late 1990's. I was building custom PC towers and selling them. We are still on the computer.
Most 80's kids that would wear Neon were either poser kids, girls, and later Gen X of little kids. Not the old Gen X born to lat 60's early 70's. We were into Rock N Roll, concert shirts, half shirts, cut off jeans and flip flops, Vans, or OP shorts. Then came ADIDAS which stood for All Day I Dream About Sex shoes. yeah corny, but it was a saying on the west coast.
We had to program our computer, typing in code, debugging it. They didn't come setup out of the box. But these kids think we don't know anything about computers 😂👍
You aren't kidding one bit about sex... I swear Nikes, "Just do it" campaign was a nod to us. That's all we heard from our peers in Middle/Jr.High School. "You should just do it and get it over with". The pressure was intense. That culture that developed during the 60's, but especially the 70's with younger and younger kids was awful. I think of movies like 1973's Jeremy with Robby Benson. Or the 1979 made for TV movie Sooner or Later with Rex Smith and Denise Miller (I was only 10, but watched with my older sister)... Both were packaged and sold as young love stories, but ultimately they were meant to normalize the idea of having sex to their young pre-teen and teen female audience. Entertainment has been used to drive culture for decades... it's far worse and MUCH more direct now than EVER before. It was still at least somewhat subtle and often even romanticized when we were kids.
@@noself7889 My 1st concert was in 1983. But it was Van Halens future lead singer, Sammy Hagar on his "I can't drive 55" tour. Would have loved seeing VH with Davis Lee Roth.
@@misslora3896 I as under 15 so my mom took me at the time to all these concerts. I started in 1978 Van Halen and seen them every year and twice in 83 with US Festival. My mother was really cool and concerts was my friends and my moms thing to do for all of us. Ive been to a concert every week from 1978 to around 1986 with her, then I was going myself with friends if she didn't want to come. My mom was a hard core rocker.
I turned 13 in 1980. I only remember little kids and kids on tv wearing neon. The 80s to me was waiting with hordes of other teenagers to get the best spots at a Ratt concert when festival seating was still a thing. And I probably paid $11 for the ticket.
#2 I LOVED Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego. It was a great game. They even made a TV based on the game in the early to mid 90's (in the US)
Cartoon AND kids game show if I recall correctly!
I would sit in the middle where the middle seatbelt was just a lap belt not like the other two were over the shoulder seatbeltsand make it as big as i could so i could lay across the whole back seat
80's was a great decade too grow up in! Plus the great music, movies were so much better then the crap today!! Made real cars back then too!!
i was born in 1971 in n-e england. had an outdoor toilet until i was 6, went camping ,aged 14, unsupervised, with 4 schoolfriends for a week, no mobile
phones or any contact at all to home. leave home at dark o'clock in the morning and return at bedtime. knock on strangers doors to ask for a drink ( water ) or to use the toilet. great times! :)
From 75, i often drove behind the rear seat row in the VW Beetle............my uncles 1975 VW Dasher Station Wagon had no backseat belts, my Cousins( 3 girls ) and me had so much fun on the Autobahn....
Turning Point re Unsupervised Kids - Probably started after Adam Walsh’s son went missing. That changed a LOT of things in America, culturally and legally.
Many forget or don’t realize that the 80s was the height of Serial Killers here. We didn’t know until it was much too late.
Of these, I definitely miss being a kid in a neighborhood full of best friends running around all day on bikes and having all that freedom. Even our parents were all best friends and all the social parties were fuggin epic! They were garage central, but some roamed indoors, and all roamed outdoors. Man, our parents were friends with ranch owners. We got horses and ponies to right every big party day. God, I miss those days.