Teen stories from the 90s (or earlier) that would never be allowed today

[Martinii]

And most for good reason!

My sister who was 15/16 in 1997 told me the story of when her and her friends (same age) used to go to/hang out at a blokes flat to smoke fags and weed, he was 26. One of her friends was shagging his his upstairs neighbour, also 26, and one day (whilst the girls were playing truant) the guy upstairs's girlfriend went storming upstairs and caught them. She threw a glass at my sisters friend, cutting her face.

The guy downstairs apparently drove them to a&e where she received some butterfly stitches (all in their school uniform) then dropped them off at school 🤔 No way would anyone get away with this nowadays without serious questions!

Do you have any teen stories you'd never get away with nowadays?

We used to go drinking with a few of the teachers. One of the nuttier ones used to do spot uniform checks by jumping out of the shrubbery on the school drive in the mornings
Sorry, that made me laugh. 😁

I went on a German trip at 14. In the days we were taken to places and allowed to go off on our own and in the evenings too we were allowed out. So we got drunk and went clubbing.

I've started watching a comedy on iplayer called Mammoth. It's about a PE teacher from 1979 teaching in a modern day school and doing lots of inappropriate 70s things.

The same at my school. Teachers would be in the queue with us to buy ciggies too.
Loads of affairs with teachers. Older boyfriends completely acceptable, at school they knew, parents knew.
Smoking and drinking was acceptable at 14/15. I had to get the morning after pill a couple times and my friend had it most Mondays of the month. Eventually she went on the pill at 15.

I remember being groped on the bus and no one had any sympathy and I was told it a compliment as I was pretty.
We fancied a teacher and sent him notes and bought him presents to try and seduce him. He was the only teacher that wasn’t interested but our antics were seen as cute by our family.
We lived in an affluent area and we had good parents it was just different times.
We went abroad on skiing trips and were completely unsupervised. We survived by eating a restaurant nearby as our teachers didn’t see us for the week and had made no plans for us.
If we wanted extra cash we would babysit. No qualifications, no experience just taking care of babies and toddlers sometimes overnight. We were useless as it. I remember feeding a 2 year old sweets for tea.
If my teenagers did any of this I would cry with anxiety.

This happened in the 80s and didn't involved me, but I saw it numerous times. I would go to the nearest city by bus and the bus stopped at a small town to pick up passengers. The driver, married with kids, would get off the bus and go off with a young girl who was waiting and come back 10 or 15 minutes later - leaving the bus full of people sitting there!! I used to go on that bus a lot and it happened every time, so I'm assuming it happened every day. It seems that no-one ever complained. I think the driver eventually left his wife and went off with the girl.

Some of these stories !

Do teenagers still babysit? Used to babysit neighbour’s babies, and our Venture scout troop ran a babysitting circle. So. 16-18 year olds would babysit stranger’s children. Does that kind of thing happen nowadays?

This made me howl 😂😂

I was a teen in the 80s but did nothing worse than going to house parties and drinking cider 😆 and nor did my friends. Occasionally me and my best friend of the time would have a swig from my mum’s brandy but that’s it. We were all v innocent!
Didn’t smoke a joint til I was 19 or club until 18!

Yes, my DD babysat from age 14 onwards.

Amy Fisher

My year 11, 15yo dd would find what we did quite disgusting and wouldn’t do it herself. She thinks it’s cool that a 17yo fancies her, which made me chortle. He’s only the year above but her birthday is at the end of the year. My comment was I can find an 18yo and a 25yo, who fancies her and older for sure. Apparently that’s pervy. As for the drinking and smoking they just don’t do it… or not much. They can’t get into clubs or underage drink. Dd has been to the under 18 nights a couple of times in a nearby club but doesn’t like it much because of the people, who frequent it. Apparently it’s full of girls, hardly any boys either.

They go into town, go to the pub occasionally for soft drinks. Lots of eating out with friends, going round friends houses. Sleepovers with a friend or group of friends are a big thing and often, dd has one most weekends. These didn’t happen much in our day as we were out. She has also started to have mixed sex sleepovers (friends only) at ours. She’s careful with who she invites and it’s not just one boy but a few girls and boys. My rule is no alcohol as albeit no one is intending on having sex but alcohol and hormonal teens all in one room could be a disaster! For me this is just what we did at university, ie bed shared sometimes with a male friend, just a few years younger. They have an absolute ball. In fact dd is enjoying her teens far more than I enjoyed mine.

Edit - to add, I know my dd and her friends are privileged and it’s not like that for all teens...

I agree to a certain extent.
I agree that kids needs to figure stuff out and have more independence but I think the lack of child protection and what many under age kids were doing was totally inappropriate (see the post after yours where two 15 year olds were’fucking like rabbits’ with two grown men 😬)

Regarding fun I totally agree. I think there are not enough outlets for teens to have fun without adults today and certainly not enough ‘scenes’ and subcultures. In the past you had a huge variety of subcultures for teens to identify with ie goths, metalheads, ravers, punks, mods, rockers, rappers, new wave, grunge, pop etc. Now everything is so homogeneous and vanilla. I’d go as far to speculate that part of the attraction to the trans/lgbtqia movement is kids needing a ‘clan’, needing an identity. It’s part of the teen psyche and society has done away with all the messy stereotypes and culture.

I was 37. My dd is year 11. There are plenty of mums my age or similar near me. My approach is pretty similar to most parents of dd’s peers.

@Sandwichblock
There are plenty of universities supporting no alcohol. https://thetab.com/uk/2024/01/05/happy-dry-january-these-are-officially-the-top-10-most-sober-universities-in-the-uk-344301

Love this thread!

I was a teen in the 90s and my friends and I were really into Indie so would go to pub gigs (often bands who later became quite famous) regularly from the age of 14. Pubs and bars are so strict about ID now, I can’t imagine that happening anymore. I feel a bit sad for teenagers now because it was brilliant fun. Nothing dodgy happened apart from a bit of underage drinking but it was such a great scene and time.

Oh another thing from the 90s that wouldn’t happen now - it was not considered at all weird when we were in 6th form to be mates with some of the younger teachers. We’d even go clubbing together!

@nothingsforgotten I got a bus home in 90s on a rural route and there was a bus conductor that always reeked of alcohol. There was a biggish town about halfway along the route and here the conductor would hop out and walk into a pub beside the bus stop and we would wait a few minutes for his return. In my innocence at first I thought he was using the toilet but i noticed a fresh alcohol smell when he returned. Apparently he knocked back a drink there, they had it waiting for him and he did the same at a pub in a village at the end of the bus line, presumably also in the city at the start of the route. He did this every day and the driver just sat there with a bus full of people waiting.

Thanks that does make sense. I am only a couple of years younger than you and wouldn't describe myself as having been a teenager in the '80s - the 90's was definitely my decade, but at 11/12 I13 I was still a child . I feel like one of the older Mums at Dd (yr12) school.

Yeah same here! BBQs and nights out with our sixth form teachers!! 😱

Yes, I was also a teen in the 1990/91 but an adult by then and at university and had calmed down somewhat…

I couldn't go to Liveaid because I was too young ALL my cousins went (ages 20,19 & 15) I am still bitter.

Hmmm I can talk about being on the other side of that one. I was an English assistant in France for a year age 20/21 in a Lycée. So 3 years and the equivalent of year 11/12/13. It was awkward for me really because I wasn’t the teacher’s age but I was almost the same age as some of the students - in France, you repeat years and some had repeated twice.

A lad from seconde (so year 11) and age 15 invited me to his house party. I thought it would be a whole group of kids and why not. Oh noooo it was him and about 4/5 other boys. Goodness knows why he invited me, just bizarre. Anyway quite a lot of alcohol was consumed and one of his friends got terribly drunk, pissed in the bathroom sink in front of me then fell asleep in the bath.

Another time, a student, who was final year but I think he’d repeated somehow so he was 18 or 19 invited me back to his to eat (he was from Cameroon and living in a studio and I think it might have been a sort of halls of residence for foreigners). He then proceeded to tell me that he got hard thinking about me… I didn’t know what he meant at the time . I knew he must be saying something about fancying me and I somehow found out what that meant afterwards. But he told me this another time as well. Just why?? Nothing happened between us btw and I actually had a bf in the uk but I was mightily relieved when he got a girlfriend and I commented to him that she was lovely and he told me he no longer got hard thinking about me. 😂😂