Crazy stuff your parents did that would have social services out now

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Dipping the dummy in sugar, fizzy juice for toddlers…did your parents do anything that would be considered shocking now?

For me, I looked after my younger siblings when I was 11 (they were 8 and 5) overnight a few times a week due to clashes of my mum & dad’s nightshift work. No adults in the house, just the three of us. It didn’t cross my mind that it was crazy at the time but when I think back, it was insane.

Ride ponies with no hat
Climb trees and regularly fall
Bounce about in trailer on back of tractor
My mother tipped us all out of the pram at one point or another and we certainly weren't taken to A&E!

Walking to/home from school by myself every day.

Coming home, I got knocked down crossing the busy road, age 7. I was fine, no ambulance needed but the police were called and i was taken home in the police car. my mum wasn’t home but my sister and brother were sat in the garden waiting for her (age 8 and 9). Police were just about to ship us all off to the station when mum turned up, she reeled off some yarn and they let her off. As usual, she’d been sat in the bingo gambling all day 🙄

to this day she blames my sister who was 9, as she shouldn’t have walked off ahead of me . She takes zero responsibility 🤨

Love this thread!

Child of the 80s.

Smoking indoors, smoking while holding the baby
Smoking in the car
Being able to run riot at family weddings, taking sips of the plastic cups of coke that were actually brandy/vodka trying to find a drink
Being chucked into the pub playground for hours being fed coke and crisps
Allowed to go to sleepovers at a young age
Walking to the bus stop for school alone from age 8
Was allowed to be left home alone age 12 and up
Weaned on chocolate pudding age 3 months (and have terrible IBS!)
Whats a seatbelt?

I absolutely love to read about parents who broke the cycle in my parents generation. Your mum sounds fab.

my dad used to have a small van (think Ford Escort or Astra van size) me and my brother sitting in the back, nothing to hang onto, no seatbelt and my dad belting down the main carriageway at 70 mile an hour. We loved it. Being thrown from side to side as he went round corners, it was brilliant. Would never even dream of doing that these days with my kids.

Mum and dad smoking in the car and refusing to open window as mum didn't want to mess up her hair.
Friends dad had an escort hatch back with a spoiler. As a treat he'd allow some of the kids in the street to stand on rear bumper and hold onto spoiler and go for a drive. The parents thought this was very kind!
On holiday my DM would make us get sunburnt so it would turn into a tan so that "people would know we'd been away". I remember crying at night in pain and DM telling us "no pain no gain".

She didn’t /doesn’t deserve you . 💐🤗

Let me walk 2 1/2 miles home on my own at the age of 5 (I wanted to do this and this was the mid 50s so the roads were quieter).

Where do I start! Violent rages from my DM leading to smacking, my dad filming it on one occasion while we were on holiday.
Locks on outside of bedroom doors to lock me in bedroom.
Leaving me home alone for periods during the day. I can't recall my age but young enough that I remember hiding behind the sofa the whole time as I was so scared of being left alone.
Leaving me to sleep in the car while she went shopping in a town centre - waking up alone and unsure where everyone was.

One bonfire night back in the 80s we had a street party and one of the neighbours had made hot orange squash in a big copper pot for the kids. The acidity reacted with the copper. We were so sick with copper poisoning and no one thought to take us to A & E.

My mum had the same as a child
Her dad was foreman of the docks and her mum worked in a laundry so when she finished school she walked home, got her dolls pram and the shopping envelope and took it to the greengrocer and butcher so they could give her what her parents needed for dinner
She then would go home and chop everything and wait for her mum to get home and cook it
When she developed Alzheimer's and I had an injury I sent her over the road to the shop with a shopping envelope and she instantly remembered the rountine

I did that with DD, she was so proud going to buy eggs from the shop down the road.

Loads of shit my Mum did tbh. She was a regular drink driver with us in the car for starters. She loved going to the pub at the weekend but rarely had a babysitter so we got dragged along and would just have to sit there in a smoky room bored shitless for hours eating crisps and drinking panda pops. If we were lucky, the pub had an outdoor play area and the weather was ok but that got boring eventually too. Would beg to go home but it was always 'one more drink', would often be up past midnight without having a proper meal.

Holidays were just us shoved in the kids club so she could relax by the pool all day, never left the hotel. Maybe not SS material but still shit parenting.

Not my own parents,but parents of friends and relatives - stuffing 4 or 5 of us kids in the boot space of hatchback cars.

My DP's drove around with me F12, DS5 and DS3 not wearing seat belts. They didn't wear them either. It was totally normal to just climb in the backseat and not bother with the seatbelts.
Absolutely crazy to me now considering how much we've spent on car chairs and boosters for our 3 DD's.
Also things like being out alone at 11/12 years old, cola for breakfast or no breakfast at all. All the processed crap my mum fed us because she absolutely hated cooking. Soo many takeaways too.

I honestly think that's why my mum and I clash soo much now I'm a mum too. I do everything so differently to her and she doesn't even realise why I don't want to raise my children like she raised us.
I'll admit we turned out alright. We're all good girls that grew into wonderful women. I just really don't want to be my mum in the 90's 🙅‍♀️🤷‍♀️

My dad used to smack us really hard around the head, possibly because if he hit us anywhere else there would be bruises!

My dad would leave me alone late evening so he could go to the shops when I was little I remember one time he knocked on the door and pretended to be all spooky as a joke and I was so scared I wouldn't let him in. Then he got mad at me 😂 I love him so much but I'd never do that to my kids !

That reminded me; apparently I was a hungry baby. When I was 2 weeks old, my DM started putting baby rice (Farex?) into my bottle, at 2 months I was having Weetabix. By the time I was 6 months old I was given cow's milk in a doidy cup - DM says that taking bottles away when I was so young was the reason I sucked my thumb for a good few years! And yes, I also have IBS

NYE 1983 my cousin had to be picked up from a party at her school friend's parents house because she was unconscious on the floor through drink.

She was 10.

(The adults at the party all thought it was hilarious. As did her similarly 10 year old school friend who was far more used to drinking alcohol than she was.)

All the smoking non stop, being left in the car for half the day with no food or drink from around four etc. like most people on here. Add in sexual abuse and emotional abuse too. Beaten for nothing, always trying not to wake the dragon so the dragon didn't scream at you and beat you. We moved abroad and were sent to boarding school, me at 7or 8 , can't remember exactly. I was put on the train in the north by my grandmother at eight. I had to change at Crewe and when I got to Euston I had to get myself to Victoria coach station to get to the airport and then get on the right flight. I was never shown the route before hand or told platforms to go to or how to get across London, I was just expected to do it. I then had to do it reverse on the way back. They were too tight to spring for a 'Universal Aunt', someone who picked children up from the train station and took them to their next station or airport. I was born mid sixties and this was early seventies.

DH and his little brother, aged 9 and 6 were left alone one night whilst his parents were out at the pub. They were left with the pub phone number. The little boys were watching TV, when someone hurled a brick through the window. DH rang his mum at the pub, terrified. They returned home, but when DH's mum told me the story years later, she said "Ooh, I got such a shock! We just downed our drinks, and rushed back home!" So they finished their drinks first! 😮

In 1978, I was put on the train in Newcastle, to go to my gran's, in Bishop Stortford. I was handed to a guard and a middle aged couple chatted to me until Peterborough.

The guard spoke to the platform guard, who got me on the train to Ely and the same for the next change. I had 2 apples and no money!

My older sisters went to my aunt's, it was a school holiday.

I was 8 years old.

Seems like I was a lucky one.

We used to fight over who could travel in the boot with a duvet and pillow with the boot cover still on! Madness now 😅