What made your parents paranoid when you were growing up?

My best friend wasn’t allowed to watch Grange Hill 🤣

A terror of what people might think.
I’ve grown up to be the complete opposite.

Drugs.
My parents were investigating cleaning my older brother’s room once and found some beans sprouting in a container (it was for a school assignment).
They panicked thinking they were some kind of organic drugs he was cultivating, along the lines of magic mushrooms.
So they took them to my uncle who was a hippie to see if he knew what they were. He bs’d them for a laugh and told them they were hallucinogenics known as “magic beans”.
They went back and confronted db who absolutely fell about laughing.
They have never lived it down 😄

Yes i just googled it there was a child and mum on the escalator ,child was wearing red wellies and keeps moving her foot to the side ,it then shows a clip of a blue wellie being sucked into the side of the escalator and crushed
It must have made an impression on me as i have always jumped quickly off escalators in case my toes got sucked in at the end and crushed!

Drugs. My dad was always lecturing me about drugs.

One day he brought a leaflet home on what signs to look for if your child might be on drugs.

After seeing this I started to wind him up by making flour or sugar into little white lines on the kitchen and bathroom counter top, and burning a couple of teaspoons.

I was 28 before I learned in a psychiatry seminar what burnt spoons had to do with drug use!

Boys. Now I’m an adult I can see why and I have the same worried for my DD.

My mother: what people will think, and going anywhere further than the end of the street on my own, in case I was picked up by a grooming gang. These days, she still gives too much advice and seems to forget that I am an adult sometimes! (At the moment, it's the Perils of Poultry Keeping).

My grandfather: going outside of the boundaries of our village, because everywhere else was 'unsafe'... driving on the motorway... being late for anything... and again, what people will think. Oh, and if I smelt of smoke coming off the school bus, he would insist on smelling my breath to ensure that I hadn't been the one smoking. I've never smoked a cigarette in my life!

Very similar. We had adventure playgrounds just held together with wood and nails and ran by volunteers. No safeguarding! Anything could’ve happened.

In fact we were left to roam the streets but usually me and DB and our friends who were same age and same sex as us. We didn’t leave anyone alone. But would offer to do and got cars to wash in our street, on a hot afternoon and then we’d go to the fairground afterwards. When we went on holiday same thing they gave us money to wander off with. A place we used to go to was Ferring near Littlehampton. Has river going to sea and caravan parks. A few years later on tv I saw a child was murdered near there. Sarah Payne, rip angel. 😢

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Sarah_Payne#:~:text=Sarah%20Evelyn%20Isobel%20Payne%20(13%20October%201991,in%20West%20Sussex%2C%20England%20in%20July%202000.

I think similar with mine, but meant tramps and so on (though we weren’t mean to them).

Strangers outside. My DB always used to attract strange, weird men in parks. Didn’t help that he looked blond, angelic and baby faced.

‘What will the neighbours think?’. About everything. Everything in my childhood was about being seen to be functional. At huge personal cost. It took me decades to realise that my parents should have been more concerned about my feelings and wishes rather than those of the randoms who just happened to live on our street/s.

That standing next to the microwave would give me cancer.

Not my parents, but my Grandma had a horror of ' dirty old men ' and wouldn't let me near one!

I love the Rhyme😄

I was one of the kids who was caught by a lace and dragged down the escalator in the 70s. Didn't know there was a public information film though, was it shown on tv?

Meningitis, a boy in my brother’s class died and my Mum was paranoid and every time we felt poorly she would hold our neck and force us to look at the light.

My father was the exact opposite.
He wouldn't go in a swimming pool or allow me in one because he grew up in the era when they were a common place to catch polio (pre-vaccine for polio) - even though by the time I was born you could be vaccinated against it and swimming pools were a lot safer.
However he had no qualms about the sea - he'd swim about with me on his back and by the time I was about 6 I'd learnt to swim in the sea on my own. (Obviously it's a lot easier than learning in a pool because you are so much more bouyant.)

Both of mine medical so -

bike helmets always
strange Issue with wearing scarves if walking on roads with Lorry going past fast
very very wary of paracetamol usage or overdose by paracetamol (lots of horror stories about that)
couldn’t play in houses or have sleepovers if parents smoked (fire risk)
No hot drinks around kids/babies
Knew which neighbours were medical incase in house on own and choking

But then free 80s upbringing with few other rules, no care about what people thought, curfew just when last friend came home, penknives, treehouses, playing out for all hours etc, chilled about drinking, open house for friends etc

My Mum was and still is extremely fixated on my iron intake.

Sugar, and not eating everything on your plate. They were absolutely terrified we'd end up 'fussy eaters' and wouldn't buy anything vaguely sweet or processed. It wasn't just a preference, it was a real moral failing if you liked the look of something with, say, icing on. My mum will still pull faces of absolute disgust and make comments if someone buys or eats something ready made.

Education. Everything had to be educational. A huge amount of so-called 'holidays' had to involve educational trips plus grim amounts of follow-up checking we'd understood it all. Lots of homework at home, going over what we'd done at school. They try to do the same with all of their grandchildren - if they come up they'll always want to bring educational activities and sit down to drill the children in maths or whatever. When I was 18 and had just passed my A Levels (5 As, off to Cambridge, not really a disappointment) and they were completely dismissive about it. I remember being genuinely surprised when my boyfriend's mum asked hadn't anyone told me I'd done well or said congratulations. It was a real turning-point moment for me, because she wasn't terribly keen on me really and wouldn't have said something nice for the sake of it, but she was quite shocked. I always tell my DD how well she's doing and try not to put pressure on her, and it makes me so aware how damaging it is to push children like that.

OTOH they were absolutely blase about physical danger or anything like that, and the idea of eating disorders went straight over their heads.

Tbf rabies is a terrible disease. It would certainly put me off stroking any passing stray animal abroad.

Parents: not much. Typical 80s laissez-faire parenting. Did a lot of climbing very big trees, falling off horses, grubbing around in dirt picking up interesting worms etc - all fine. My mum's only thing was NO TAMPONS due to terror of toxic shock. Bought some at 14, didn't know there were two kinds, bought the applicator kind, couldn't quite figure out how that was meant to work and got a painful injury. Gave up on the idea, had lots of embarrassing school incidents bleeding through skirts and in beds in other people's houses etc and didn't try again til my twenties. I still hide them if she's around. I'm 48.

Grandma: no eating in the street, going out with damp hair will kill you even if it's 30 degrees out. Women don't go in pubs alone or drink pints. A drink within a foot of the edge of a table requires a reminder to be Very Careful at least twice a minute.

For reasons I don't understand my mum was always warning me not to become 'the school bike'. Her words not mine.
I had a couple of boyfriends at school (1980s). But I was quite a long way from being promiscuous 😂

Also, I remember her classic advice when I was about 15/16. "I dont mind what you do as a job when you're older Additup, as long as it isn't a stripper or a prostitute" 🤨

I can only assume she was uncomfortable with my burgeoning teenage self and had a few hang ups of her own.

I've never shown and interest in stripping or prostitution.

Both my mum and my nan were paranoid about boys and me "getting myself pregnant". At 16 I had a really lovely boyfriend, very sweet and respectful and never once mentioned sex. My mum kept making "funny" little comments to him about keeping his hands to himself, keeping it in his pants etc. On his 18th birthday she loudly told him in public in front of everyone that he'd better stay a boy as far as her daughter was concerned and funnily enough I never saw or heard from him again after that. Ironically a few weeks later I ended up getting pushed into losing my virginity to someone not nearly as nice. I wish she'd been able to keep her big mouth shut. When she found at I was sleeping with a boyfriend at 19 years old she called me a dirty little slut, thanks mum!

My brothers were allowed to do what they wanted cos you know "boys will be boys", no use trying to stop them! She'd never say a word to their girlfriends, they were even allowed to stay over and she'd be sickeningly nice to them. She never fretted about her precious boys getting anyone pregnant!

Early eighties. Aged sixteen. I’d saved up my cash from my Saturday job and had booked a hair appointment in the nearest big city (normally went to the lady round the corner) for highlights and a cut.

Massive lecture over why I shouldn’t be doing this and how I mustn’t have a ‘male’ hairdresser / what if you get a slight cut and there’s blood, etc (Aids was just getting a lot of publicity at the time and there were many misconceptions around it).