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To all adults, what was a huge part of your childhood that newer generations wouldn't understand?
Autonomy. I routinely left town on my bike alone when I was 10; no cellphone, no tracking device, etc. Most parents who tried to pull a stunt like that these days risk getting arrested and having their child taken by CPS.
Yea, gooning Round town and my parents had NO CLUE where I was was basically daily. That was like a whole different world though.
Yeah. It was a different world. It was an objectively more dangerous world than today, with a higher crime rate and less built-in safety for every day devices.
Yet, somehow, people are more frightened today than we were back then.
yeah child kidnapping has literally gone down. yet we are way more worried
People are easily controlled through fear. I think it started with the 24 hour news cycle and then was made worse by social media.
I'm not even sure it's a spooky "powers that be master plan" thing. Just an unforeseen side effect of the grind for profit by modern media.
It's sad how quality journalism is less profitable than sensationalist fear mongering BS which gets the most attention/web traffic.
Yes, the days of having a reputable nightly news man/woman that people of all political persuasions trust based on their personal integrity seem to be gone.... would be nice to see it reemerge.
It's sad that we expect news to be a for-profit entity.
Yeah I majored in journalism and this is called “mean world syndrome” and you’re spot on. Mean world syndrome is a hypothesized cognitive bias wherein people may perceive the world to be more dangerous than it actually is, due to long-term moderate to heavy exposure to violence-related content on mass media.
You can also attribute this syndrome to several jobs like police officer or fireman etc. Their whole days are filled with seeing bad stuff, dealing with bad people, seeing death, etc etc so they’re more likely to start viewing the whole world through this lens and viewing the majority of people bad rather than realizing it’s actually the minority.
Maybe it's down because of the cellphones and 24 hour monitoring, etc.?
Now that I look back, I'm kind of surprised I made it to adulthood.
"Go play outside and don't come home until the street lights come on."
yeah i was parented the same way except im genz lol, well actually i had to be home before they were on, and i got in trouble alot because i wasn't.
And the kidnappings that do happen are overwhelmingly by someone the kid knows. “Stranger Danger” is nearly a myth.
My parents have Sky news running 24/7 in 3 (three) separate rooms.
And all the TV’s have a one second delay between them.
And then they worry about things that don’t have a possibility of affecting them. Beyond what it already (for some reason) does.
You should search Reddit for the word "gooning"
This. Not just the freedom to decide what I wanted to do, but actually being forced to get out of the house and find something to do.
Being self-directed wasn’t just an option, it was a requirement. It was part of growing up. Dealing with problems I’d never seen before was not only not bad, it was… fun.
Every time I see some Gen-Z post a picture of their bicycle tire asking for advice on whether it’s worn out or not I want to cry.
This, a lot of my ability to navigate the world as an adult was built on those years. Running around, exploring, getting in trouble out there, getting injured, getting home when you got stranded, figuring out schedules and meeting locations, trying that new skate ramp in somebody’s yard.. my kids will never know that freedom. Latchkey kids helped raise each other.
My mother would ask before I left: "Do you have a quarter for the phone, in case something happens?" I'd say yes whether I had one or not. And, off I rode. Lol
Yup, I kept a spare quarter in my shoe. When I became a teenager, I got a pager and a requirement that I call within 10min of her page - no matter what. I had to memorize the procedure, number and pin to a phone card so I couldn't use the "no money" excuse.
I was all over the county. I had a book of county bus tickets and knew how to use them. LOL
I tell you what, I sure pissed off my parents with 1-800-COLLECT.
"Do you accept a call from 'pick me up at the mall, Mom!' please say yes or no."
Yep, from the age of about 7 on I spent most of my time after school on my bike or out exploring the woods/creek. Catching crawfish, newts, minnows, skipping rocks, etc.
Same, we biked 45 minutes to a ferry and went to an island biked around all day eating candy and tossing rocks at trees. All our parents knew is that we were on a Bike ride
Norman Rockwell level 3
When i was 8 i would walk 5 miles to the mall in the summer and get there when it opened, stay all day and then leave when the mall closed. Parents did not even ask where we were just asked how our day was.
You came home when the street lights came on! .
And if you didn’t your parents stood outside screaming your name until you did or they called all your friends moms and asked if your friends knew where you were.
This was my childhood! It was always when the lights came on or when dinner was ready.
I think it gave our parents a much needed break to have kids play outside every day without them needing to be around.
Full name : first, middle & last
At that point, you didn't want to go home.....you knew you were "dead man walking" lol.
Basically like a house cat, enjoying the outside too much.
Going to the video store Friday night hoping they have a copy of the new release movie. Watching movies and eating pizza with your family.
Be kind, rewind!
The Blockbuster tub of popcorn
I worked at a video store. Most enjoyable job I've ever had by a long shot.
The local movie rental place near me had old horror films 5 movies for $5 and my friends and I would watch them all through the weekend. Miss that so much.
There was no instant gratification. You waited until Saturday morning for your cartoons. You got a limited number of TV shows and your shows were on once a week. Then you waited through 13 weeks of reruns for the next season. You couldn't contact friends at a moments notice. You read or had hobbies to keep you entertained. Now get off my lawn!
Being able to see a photo you took could take weeks or months if it took that long to finish that roll of film.
You forgot to add in the part of childhood with pen pals and writing letters to friends and relatives. It night take weeks to get a letter in return.
Finally catching an episode of that one show that you're never sure when it's on, but it's a repeat of the one episode you've already seen.
For me, in the 90s, it was the Magic School Bus show, and the episode was always "Inside Ralphie". I must have seen that episode 4 times, and only two other episodes during that time.
I was trying to watch Star Trek: TOS when it was locally syndicated in order to catch up on the episodes I had missed, and they were always playing "The Doomsday Machine" episode.
I was trying to catch a well-known British TV show from decades before, being shown on public broadcasting, and out of a total recorded 101 episodes, saw the same episode twice over months apart and in two different physical locations.
Conan the Adventurer was the worst for me. The animated one.
I was super into medieval fantasy action when I was a kid. That show must've been about 75% two-part episodes, and I swear I never managed to watch both of any of them.
funny you say limited numbers. we had only 2 channels and one of them was news channel. i used watch sports news at least twice a day to learn about results of some sports events(or read in news papers). used to read news paper quite a bit daily. always wanted to go to play after 4pm or so. that’s why i hated rain because if it rained before or during late afternoon then the field feels so bad. i still kind of hate rain instinctively even now though i no longer play outside for long long time
Dragonball Z. The frieza saga took forever. Literally a month of Goku and frieza scream at each other.
Yes! I'm 24, and I LOVED the tradition of waking up earlier than my parents to watch Saturday morning cartoons! My favorites were Liberty's Kids, Go, Diego, Go, and Dinosquad. I used to feel so mature making my own cereal bowl to eat while watching them. I'm a bit sad my children won't have that experience of Saturday morning cartoons because of the ease of streaming.
Having questions and having to ask an adult or find a library book to answer them. Or if the question was embarrassing, just wondering. Because there was no all-knowing internet.
On trips, packing a camera and trying to figure out how many rolls of film to take with you. Waiting for a week while the film was sent off to be developed. Then inviting neighbors over for a slideshow of your trip— because you couldn’t post it on Facebook.
There used to be a special feeling that came with finding out the answer to a question. Like you'd think to yourself "Who was the lead singer of X Band?" And you'd just be annoyed with this question until you found someone wearing the band's T-shirt and you'd be like "Who's the lead singer!?" and they'd tell you and you'd have this wave of gratification like "Oh! That's right! Thank you!" but now it's literally a motion and a sentence away.
Making a mixed tape for that special someone
I made her a spotify playlist but she told me she uses amazon music only..
My heart breaks for you...but better to know something like that now, than after marriage
That's very true. Thank you, friend
Oh wow, that brings me back... although that mixtape my first crush ever gave me has long worn down, I still remember every single track and what order they were put on. It was sweet ❤️
What was the 6th song? Artist/Song/Album-- Go!
The feeling of excitement watching a television event. You couldn't pause, or watch it later, so it really felt exciting knowing that you had to watch it then and there.
The all out sprint to get back from the bathroom before the commercials ended when your brothers shouted that it was back on.
Here in the U.K., there was a measurable spike in the power grid when adverts came on. Everyone would rush out to the kitchen, flick the kettle on and make a cup of tea. The power companies used to have to factor the spike into maintenance works. Happens less now with streaming etc but it’s still there with big live events.
Leaving the house to adventure around and not returning till almost dark
Which during Midwestern summer months could mean as late as 10pm!
So much fun.
Playing hide and go seek tag with all the neighborhood kids as soon as it got dark and the lightning bugs came out.
What I would give to go back
OMG...did you grow up in Columbus Ohio??! That is EXACTLY what we did!
Dude I'm from a small village in Portugal and we did that to lol
Rockford Illinois. I miss the Midwest
Gathering every kid in the neighborhood together every day at the same place and same time during the summer and just wandering around getting into stuff outside until the street lights came on.
Just going out of the door at 5or6 in the evening and grabbing whatever kids you can find to play with them. Sometimes it'll be one more kid, sometimes we had like 20-30 kids
Memory cards ~ couldn’t save progress in any games without those.
Dial-up Internet ~ had to wait to go online if someone was using the phone and vice versa.
I can still hear that dial up sound
Do dooo. Dooo lol oh and on snow days AOL and stuff were over loaded.
You should have been around 2 console generations earlier. Games had passwords to save progress, and some got pretty long. The Guardian Legend and River City Ransom immediately spring to mind. Battery backup of cartridge memory was a thing, but that upped the cost of the game.
Complete neglect. To the point where TV stations ran a PSA at night reminding people they had children.
“It’s nine PM. Do you know where your children are?”
That was it that was the whole message. It wasn’t like there was something else on the screen to give more context. Nope. Just straight up, “Yo! You seen your kids recently?”
They say GenX is “independent”, because of the “autonomy they were given.” Truth is we’re independent, because we’d have died as preteens had we not been.
Survivorship bias.
Walking to the school yard with friends and playing outside.
Being born in the early 60s, I fully expected to encounter more quicksand than I ever have.
I have encountered exactly 0 quicksands in my life.
Deadass
User deleted comment
14d
The importance of verbal communication. Fuck texting
You say. On a texting based social media platform.
Playing the Alphabet game on Road trips
I make my kids do this now. They don't find it as fun as I did growing up because now they have tablets and phones to keep them busy. Growing up all we had was whatever radio station we could tune in at the time.
I imagine it wouldn't be quite as fun if my parents had to force me to play lmao
Waiting by the radio in the hopes of having to your song come on so you could record it to tape.
Going wild with glee when The Wizard Of Oz was occasionally shown on network TV.
There were no dvds, blu-ray, streaming, vcrs etc.
It was a VERY big event when it was shown on TV.
And The Sound of Music!
And Peter Pan with Mary Martin
King Kong was a big event that sometimes happened on Thanksgiving Day.
I still remember exactly at what scenes the commercials would play. Like when the lion jumps through the window after the wizard scares him.
Road trip games like counting yellow cars
Calling someone on the phone and having no idea where they were if they didn't pick up.
The absolute lack of Safety precautions. We rode in the back of a pickup truck on the highway, No seat belts required, playground equipment that either burned you or gave a mighty static shock. We were raised feral as all children before us were.
Or in those big old cars with dashboards in the back window…the joy of crawling up there and watching the traffic!
Encyclopedias
Still have Mine
Having a paper route.
This was first thing I thought of too. And to think we went door to door to strangers houses to collect too😂
My siblings and our 93 year-old mother were talking recently about the concept of "free-range" children. We laughed about our roaming the neighborhood thinking that our parents had no idea where we were. No, said my mother. She said, "we had a network of mothers in the neighborhood who called each other when neighborhood kids showed up at the house or were seen in the yard." She continued that the process only worked because every mother in the neighborhood was a stay-at-home mom.
Being a freerange kid. Left the house after dinner, be back before dark was the only thing we had to do.
If we were not at someone's house then no way to find us.
I knew every block and back lane of my neighbourhood to the point where i can see a google street view pic 40 yrs later and still know roughly street and cross ave.
So we were left to discover our world at the speed and deal with things our self.
If my parents knew 1/10 th of what we got up to they would have died of fright for us or sent us to jail.
Right?? We used to roam the back alleys picking green apples and mulberries from bushes hanging over fences. Till after dark. Or walk along abandoned railroad tracks, or explore other neighborhoods far from where we lived.
A group of little girls no older than 8-9 years old. Impossible to imagine now.
In the 70s, we'd clip hockey cards on our bikes so they click in the spokes to sound like a motorbike. Also, throwing hockey cards against the wall... closest card wins them all. If I still had those cards, I'd be rich. :-p
I loved doing that. Thanks for bringing that memory back.
I remember Post cereals had a plastic doohickey that clipped onto the bike, but it didn't sound as good. :-p
Haha. I just remember cruising down hill and looking back in deep admiration of my bike purring and then running into the back of a pickup.
lol... I've never done that. But my first time on a bike was grade 1... maybe 2... parents put me on the bike with training wheels at the top of the hill in our neighborhood, then gave me a little push. I had a great time, until I turned into our yard... forgot to pedal backwards to stop the damn thing... headfirst into a rose bush. :-p
Haha. Solid parenting. There really was no handbook back then. That sounds incredibly painful. I bet you learned that braking system after that.
My old man used to take me surfing as a kid and when I was learning he’d always get me to take off on all the big nasty close outs. He got a kick out of seeing me get worked. I’d pop up after getting hammered and he’d be on his kayak smiling with an “almost had it!”. Of course there was no way the wave was even makeable.
Life before the damn Internet.. 😕
It did really change everything.
To think some people just thought it was a fad that would quickly be forgotten...
thats genuine comedy
pop culture but the young ones have their own they'll create and live through. there will never be experiencing the the 02 as its original build of the Millennium dome. parents having ZERO idea where the fuck i was until dinner time when i came back, still to this day i dont spend longer then a couple hours inside any given building
Demo 1 ps1
Life before affordable retail home computing. Example :
- banking was semi manual
- typists in the office
- handwritten and copied school questions
My granddaughter had no idea what a scantron sheet was.
How to use rotary phones.
It could be tricky. You didn't want your finger to slip or you'd have to start over.
I'm surprised at that, but after a little trial and error on a thrift shop phone, it's just finger in the hole with the number you want, and turn until it stops.
How to use rotary phones to make prank calls! Caller ID ruined that for smartass kids everywhere.
Hanging out at the mall, playing with neighbors in the streets all day, recording ringtones from the radio, MySpace songs/top 8, aim messenger, dialup
Downloading music through limewire and using mp3’s! What a time, so thankful for Spotify 🫶🏻
I actually remember when mp3s came out and people were sharing them before Napster or Limewire (heck they shared the raw audio before that but most people didnt have the harddrive space for much). There were ftp sites and IRC bots to give the links. They had a quota system too so you had to upload music to be allowed to download...
At 56k speeds, mp3s download nearly in real time. 56k was new when I'm talking and not many ISPs supported it yet. So you just had to turn it on and go to bed and check it in the morning.
Being read to on road trips. PG Wodehouse , The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Ghost Stories of the places we were going to visit.
I’m 20 but where I’m from, everyone has developed social skills and people would be active in the community, moved out of state to go to college and everyone is scared to talk and they go home and watch tv or scroll social media for hours, it’s so fucking pathetic lol
Using our imaginations and playing outside every day.
Saturday morning cartoons.
Calling time and temperature
Grinding poverty!
Similarly. I started working in my family business (house painting) at 12yo. I went to college and got a degree but I worked while doing it. I never had fun vacations. All school breaks since I was 12yo were spent working. I considered school to be a vacation.
Good thing was that by 18yo I was an expert painter and by 25yo I started my own business. I left it all behind to be an IT professional (it's what I always wanted to do).
👍👍👍👍
you called your friends house, and if they wernt in, you had to wander about until you found them
or if their parents didnt like you and got to the phone before you lol
How Reddit replaced my parents
Land line telephones with party lines
People smoking everywhere.
The anticipation buildup waiting for the Christmas catalogs from Sears, Montgomery Wards and JC Penney.
Walkie-Talkies.
Breaking up via text on a flip phone
A house without a computer in it. I really really miss those days.
Playing outside
Watching things on tv I otherwise never would have watched but since we had one tv it was for everyone. Kids now have a tablet they can fire up and an algorithm that caters to their whim
I've tried to keep that up, if I have no reason for or against a video I'll just watch it, becuse why not. Yt shorts has helped me do that, I can sub to a channel and like that video for more, and my algorithm gets all the more out of whack.
Those rubber bands were a scourge at the summer camp I worked at one year!
I was born shortly before the digital natives who have never not known the Internet. Our computer teacher had lessons on how to Google and vet online sources. At the time, one of the top search results when you searched for Martin Luther King Jr was a website by these nazi teenage sisters, if memory serves correctly. (The more things change, the more they stay the same…)
Other things:
Having to hang up the phone to use the internet
Resisting having a cell phone (why would i want my parents to be able to call and ask where I was at all times?)
Being able to fight someone in high school without being filmed
Downloading games for your graphing calculator…that feels like playing Atari compared to what phones can do now
Neighbors knew each other, especially families with kids. You still have this in pockets (a friend recently lived on a city street with so many kids that they have an email list and shut down the street for Halloween and parties…feels super rare these days). We had block parties and parents were tight knit, even if they didn’t like each other cause you might have to help each other figure out where your lil crotch goblin ran off too to get them home for dinner.
Sidenote on that: I got in trouble once when I was like 10-11 cause two slightly younger neighborhood kids and I were playing in the woods by my house. Parents figured out very quickly who was missing before cell phones.
Hours upon hours spent building forts, climbing trees, digging holes, making our own BMX track in the woods by my house. I was definitely a suburbs kid but i luckily lived near open spaces to traipse around in
Sleepovers! My similarly-aged family members with kids won’t let them go to sleepovers out of fear that their kids will get molested. Not completely unfounded but that was also a concern when I was in elementary school…parents seem more protective now. I think parents should exercise caution and make sure you know who’s in the home but completely barring your kids from going would have been super rare when I was growing up.
There’s my random spattering of what I remember from my childhood in my neck of the woods.
Nobody except very wealthy business people had cell phones or high speed internet. I'm sure most people can understand that but society functioned quite differently back then. Probably in ways that people would have to learn how to adapt to those circumstances in order to function in that society.
Hobos would buy us beer if we paid them enough to get a 40oz.
We were grateful.
Buy 'em smokes too.
That sound when your modem is connecting to the internet.
Normalized racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia
Not sure if it's actually different now or kids are just more two faced than ever, but the social pressure to join in on the humor was real
Vietnam war-
Oregon Trail.
Walking out the front door and not coming back until lunch time, eating and heading back out. 1960’s!! I was never asked where I was and I dint have to tell anyone where I was.
No phones. No social media.
Kids today will never understand the feeling of calling your crush, and being terrified that their dad will answer the phone.
Having to wait 4-8 weeks for most anything to be delivered by mail
Dragonball Z, mountain dew, hot pockets, halo 1, getting broadband internet for the first time
Answering machines
Phone boxes
Walking to your friends house and ringing the doorbell to ser if they're home and want to play.
No tracking devices.
Memorizing telephone numbers.
I teach 5th grade. My students can't even imagine what people did with their free time prior to scrolling on smartphones all day, much less what we did before the social media era (pre-2006 or so).
So something as simple as reading a book to pass the time rather than as an assignment is something pretty much none of my students can understand. They can't sit still for 30 seconds, so the idea of sitting still for hours and reading words is like absolute torture for them. They think everyone pre-2010 was just bored out of their minds all the time.
Having nothing to do so digging a hole in the garden.
Just going out of the door at 5or6 in the evening and grabbing whatever kids you can find to play with them. Sometimes it'll be one more kid, sometimes we had like 20-30 kids
Knocking on neighbours doors to see if X was coming out to play then proceeding to ride around the city until it got dark.
"It's 10pm do you know where you're kids are?"
Logical thinking and compromise
Drawing the Stussy symbol on everything
Rushing home from school and jumping on the internet so the teacher couldn't call your parents.
Logging onto neopets when nobody was using the landline in order to procure free dinosaur egg omelettes to feel my highly converted Cyebunny.
Playing outside until the sun went down
Saturday/Morning/evening Cartoons.
You wake up at 6-7am turn on that shit wait through the lawyer ads, drugs, and VHS programs and then the glorious intro/s begin and the first cartoon starts and your ass is there until 10.
They knew peak times was when kids were home so the new episodes would come out then.
We had a nice house but my friends and I LIVED in the woods almost all summer.
Reading.
Going to the corner store with a note from your parent to get a pack of smokes.
Collecting pop bottles and cashing them in for loot at the corner store.
Delivering newspapers in the four seasons.
Going to the library for books
Serial killers, so many serial killers, and a lot of mysteries disappearance, most of the serial killer victims and mysteries disappearances were women, it was like you couldn’t go a day without hearing about 10 women being murdered or mysteriously disappear, crazy times.
My mother had a rule on weekends and summers: Occupy yourself or be put to work. Left the house after breakfast and roamed the neighborhood and woods on foot or our bikes. Gone all day, be back at dinner. She had no idea where we were or what my brother and I were doing. It was so much fun. This was in the 70s.
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Calling on your friends house
Hunting
Spending most days after school 🚴🏻♀️⛹🏻🛹🛼
Ice trays. It was a pain to have ice in those days.
Getting the family together to watch the final episodes of the novelas.
Playing outside lol
No smartphones.
Sneaking through the woods to get to the subdivision on the other side. Where my friends from school lived. My Dad was a cop and never knew.
BB gun wars.
Playing chicken with lawn darts
Smear the queer.. Football version Baseball with 6 boys per side.
No batting helmets and throwing HARD. Girls liked blood & bruises.
More autonomy and (almost) no devices and no social media.
Playing outside all the time. Building forts in the forest. Playing marbles, kick the can. Our parents never worried about us being out as long as we were home before dark.
Growing up in Europe in the 80's, the cold war and constant sense of imminent doom of nuclear war.
One Direction XD
Pitting go9d on the table and working hard all day every day even after school
Neighbors.
Like, actually knowing who your neighbors are and talking to them.
Smoking indoors everywhere.
Having to blow in my Atari and NES cartridges, rewinding a rented VHS (Be kind rewind), having to memorize phone numbers, using a payphone, lanline rotary dial, recording songs off a radio station on a tape, staying outside from sun up till sun down.
Games for PC in cereal boxes.Made eating breakfast worth it.
Climbing trees, waiting for my favorite TV shows to air...
Racism ! Oh, wait... nevermind. Bullying, f**k I did it again. Air raid drills
Leaving the house at noon, on foot, and not coming back until dusk.
In 2nd grade.
Not being connected to the internet at all times.
That being said that is still an option, it's just up to the parents how much or little exposure they want their kids to have.
Answering machines and caller ID. Not everyone or every phone had those things back in the day, so you had to hope someone was home so you could leave a message or that they had their machine set up, or that someone in the house knew your number to call you back if you forgot to add it at the end of your message.
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