to ask how young people passed their time before they had screens 24/7

[WeneverownedaniPad]

This is not a "it were all fields round here" post but ...

DD(14) has been getting a lot of headaches. The optician says it's a combination of tiredness and possibly too much screentime so I need to act.

Thing is, her teachers say she gives 100% in school and her behaviour is excellent. I never have to nag her to do homework and she is very sunny-natured - no adolescent mood swings. She trains a couple of evenings and every weekend for the team sport she competes in. The rest of the time she is on her phone/laptop/Netflix. She's not interested in social media and her friends don't seem to "hang out" in real life - probably because they're glued to their bloody phones!

What did we do (those of who are that old!) before there was so much screen time available?

What do your teens do?

Spent ages on the phone to my best friend talking about boys (much to my mum’s annoyance)
Dossing on the streets smoking
Saturdays were spent in the amusement arcades
Sundays were very boring as I did nothing

Early/mid 90s teen: walked home from the bus (20 min) so home by 345; watched TV and ate a bag of crisps, did piano practice, did whatever chores my mum had written for me (chop veg for tea, run hoover round, dust). Walked dog for 30 mins, did homework. Mum got home about 5, had tea at 530 unless Mondays when I just went straight to the track from school. Spoke to friends on phone after tea for prob an hour. at athletics (4-7 on Mondays), guides/venture scouts (6/7-8/9) Thursdays or youth club 7-9 Fridays from 12-14. More athletics weekends, shopping/mooching in city centre, early teens badminton club on Saturdays, more dog walking, get bus to McDonald’s, cinema, ice skating. Reading for hours, more talking to friends on the phone or going to theirs for movies and sleepovers every Saturday. Post 15, Going to boyfriend’s house, listening to music, playing music. Lots of doing makeup and hair. Then more hanging out with friends, drinking at the beach, getting into pubs, playing/singing in bands, more homework as exams required, duke of Edinburgh award volunteering, training for that. Very little screen time and I was a pretty normal kid. I think.

Teen of the 80s here. I used to call for nearby friends, sit in their bedrooms listening to music, walk to the local shop with 15p! watch TV ;like Top of the Pops. I think i had a better childhood than my teen DDs and that makes me sad.

Read books, watched tv, baked, all the stuff I do now really but I watch Netflix instead of tv and look at my phone instead of tv programmes I’m not really interested in

I read. All the time. Drove my mother mad. She had to restrict the amount of time I could read.

You were having sex at 14?

^^

Not quite. Was trying hard though!

We used to go and raid the paper bank, rest our bikes next to it, climb in and find porn magazines.

Smoked and drank.

Recorded our voices on cassette tape and played it back.

Hang out at friends houses.

Snog my brothers mates.

Try and get served in the pub.

Sing in the mirror.

Carve things in trees with our pen knifes.

Build dens in the woods.

Drinking
Smoking
Hanging out in woolies stealing lipsticks
Reading
Being really really bored
Getting flashed at by horrible men in parks

Ah the good old days

During weekdays I went to school, did homework, helped with cooking and cleaning the house.

On the weekends, helped with house shores in the morning, meet with friends in the afternoon and evenings to chat, roller skate, play follow ups on the streets, house parties, meet with boys or at the Local sport centre playing basketballl or swimming.

I'm so glad I started this thread. God, my OP sounds so uptight now!

In my case (teenager in the nineties),

-Read lots of books
-Cycled 8 miles to the riding stables and spent weekends and holidays messing around with horses
-Looked after my many pet rabbits, and other animals
-Went to local town with friends, though not often due to lack of cash

All rather tame in retrospect

Played guitar 4 hours a night, stayed awake until the early hours listening to music through headphones and trying not to be heard turning over a record or swapping a tape! I had a fluted glass bedroom door and my but I would light up the room so had to throw a blanket over it to avoid detection!

*my hifi would light up

I read until the early hours from about yr8 onwards.
Called friends on the home phone and got told off for being on too long.
Recorded music onto tapes from the radio.
Played out 1,2,3-60 with mates on the allotments.
Babysat a lot.
Worked 2 nights after school and a day at weekend.
Swam a lot.
Horse rode on Saturday afternoons when not working.
Watched a fair bit of tv. The phrase I always remember; “can you put Eastenders on record for me coz I’m going out”. What a faff; setting the vhs to record everything!
From 16, was at the pub every Friday night drinking snake bite and black or pints of Stella

When I was 14 I spent all my free time hanging around the park, drinking, smoking and causing havoc around our village. There was about 30 of us in our ‘gang’

What is the difference between spending time looking at a screen to looking at a book. This is our lives and future now. I would look at your daughters headaches again, I think it is very normal for girls her age to have headaches it is hormonal I think. Make sure she is drinking plenty, that may help.

Read a lot
Guides
Duke of Edinburgh awards
Played outside
Watched TV
Waited until the free hour on the house phone
Wrote to my numerous pen pals (including two lads in the army!!, I was only 16 then too 😳😳).

My dd is too busy for a lot of screen time. She dances and that takes her out of the house for a couple of hours, several nights a week. She also goes to a drama group at the weekends.

Apart from that, she reads a lot, bakes, plays badminton once or twice a week, does homework, tidies her room, goes to her friends' houses or has them over to ours, goes shopping with us or with her friends, visits her grandparents, goes for long walks with me. I don't actually limit her screen time but she is generally too busy with other stuff to spend hours looking at her phone or watching TV.

I had various after-school jobs from when I was 14 - paper round/shelf-stacking and then I had Saturday jobs - Woolworths etc. Hung out with other young people at the chip shop/Woolies cafe etc. Read books, smoked, looked at boys, put on ridiculous amounts of make-up and padded my bra with tissues in order to pass for 18 to get in to pubs and failed spectacularly. Watched telly

The real difference was a lot of unstructured time.

It was all about music for me and my friends. Reading Smash Hits, Melody Maker etc and cutting out the pics to make wall posters. Using tape to tape to make top 40 compilations. Meeting in town to go round record shops and buying patches and badges for our school bags. Going to gigs and meeting the bands at whatever hotel they were staying in (knew someone who worked at the BBC so he told us which hotel). Tie dyeing tsirts, bleaching jeans in the bath, dyeing and bleaching hair, piercing our ears with needles.

Whan at home it was ridiclously long telephone converstaions with best mate, like 2-3 hours. Dad went ape at the phone bill if I rang her whereas her parents didnt give a shit so she range me mostly. Tv was Blind Date, Generation Game etc. That rights programme with Ester Rantzen was a good one in our house, and Crimewatch.

Summers were spent with the above and watching the tennis on tv, some sunbathing revising in the garden. Staying in town longer. Going to a UK holiday with family. Just normal stuff I suppose but was never bored!

At 14 I was going to choir practice once a week, having piano/violin lessons.

Spent a lot of time at friends' houses, or they'd be at mine, listening to records, talking about boys, doing each other's hair and make-up, playing those silly "how much you love each other" games on bits of paper and getting screamed at by parents to turn the music down/stop dancing as the light fittings downstairs were rattling

There was an under 18s night in a local nightclub which I attended religiously (when I wasn't sneaking off on a bus to the nearest City centre with enough money for a return ticket and half a lager )

Reading ... I was just thinking this morning about how much time I spent as a teenager just lying on my bed (or outside in the garden during summer) reading.

Trying to talk to my friends/boyfriend on the house phone while my dad did an impression of a cuckoo clock, popping his head round the door, huffing, puffing and tapping his watch every 2 minutes.

I did watch telly, but definitely not as much as now, due to there only being 3 channels for most of my teen years .I also think this is why there seems to be a lack of General Knowledge amongst teenagers these days as they're not forced, out of either boredom or parents insisting on being in control of the tv, to watch a programme they haven't chosen to watch.

Hang about with mates. Had a Saturday job. I think one of the main differences is that we looked outward, literally in a physical way. Nowadays all of us hardly ever look at anything more than 10 feet away, very unhealthy for our eyes and our minds

I read loads of books and magazines. Hung out with my friends. Now I wonder myself, why I waste so much time on my phone, iPad or laptop when i do not need to....for example now...on mumsnet....

My children are young, 5 and almost 7, but they too of course like to play games or watch shows. We try to limit as much as we can. I guess its a lot easier when they are younger, as they are happy to play in the park, with their toys, listen to audio books or now my daughter enjoys reading herself before bed. Of course if I allowed it they would rather be playing on the phone or iPad, but its off limits especially before bed. We try to go a few days during the week with no screen and not tv, but they get it during the weekend for 1-2 hours.

I loved to read, and I still do. I also loved to do gymnastics, dance etc. and my mother had made The basement of our house in Florida into a dance area for me. The problem is, I am visually impaired and could never see the cockroaches or spiders I was sharing it with… So I would do a cart wheel and land on the cockroaches and scream ha ha Ha. I also loved my trampoline, bike riding, yes we lived in a very rural area or even a blind child could ride a bike without having to worry. Roller skating… I was part of the church youth group as well so we would often good activities. I was also a rainbow girl, it's not like in the UK, it's like a branch of the Masons but for girls. Anyway, we had to memorize things, so that took up my time. I was also very into languages, as I am now so are used to find neighbors who could speak different languages I had a German neighbor at one point and she and her husband would teach me German. Even now though, I'm still fine when I don't have a screen it. It's hard at first, but I get used to it when I have to.