Things that were normal but wouldn't fly these days

[ChopSuey2]

Not really an AIBU but we totally derailed another thread. Following on from the thread about TV programmes that may or may not have been appropriate for young children, I'm wondering what things were totally normal in your childhood but would not be considered acceptable today.

Some of the ones I have been reminded of from the other thread include

• travelling without a seatbelt, in the footwell, in the boot, in the back of a van on a cardboard box
• graphic public safety videos at primary school
• watching graphic true crime under the age of 10
• smoking in cars and homes with kids, smoking in pubs and taking kids to pubs late at night
• playing out under the age of 10 with parents not knowing where their kids are precisely

I wonder if children are better behaved in class and at home now that the prospect of a small smack on the bottom as a result of rude behaviour has been removed....

But the past behaviour of some teachers as described on this thread was absolutely appalling.

As a child of the seventies lots of things in this thread resonate. Corporal punishment in schools was the norm, I can remember several instances, primary school around 9 yrs being bent over and slippered in front of entire class, same teacher throwing heavy blackboard dusters at the boys. Caned on the hand at senior school….I wasn’t a particularly bad kid either. We all walked to school on our own from about 6, meeting up with friends along the way. Most cars didn’t even have seatbelts in the back in the early seventies, we all piled in the back of friends dad’s work vans if we were ever lucky enough to cadge a lift.

We could probably all say “me too” although looking back, it didn’t really bother us that much….we’d just laugh at a wolf whistle in the street and learn to avoid or insult back the office letch. I suppose we didn’t know any better.

There were a lot of things wrong about those times, but I do wonder, as a few others have also pondered about the resilience of kids these days, everything is organised for them, they are driven everywhere, their battles fought, their friends chosen with care.

Yes we played out all day, made dens on building sites, came home when it got dark, necked bottles of sherry before the school disco and smoked behind the bike sheds, but we learnt so many life skills that are lacking these days. We ended up (mostly) able to regulate ourselves and learned how to avoid the pervs in the bushes. Our parents often had no clue where we were, but we also learned to earn their trust.

I think these days, the sinister dangers lurking on the internet for kids and the social media pressures and bullying have caused far more massive mental health problems than we ever had to worry about. We label them so quickly now, every normal emotion now is a mental health problem. Screens are far more of a danger than anything else. I’d go back to those carefree days in an instant.

I’m an American who attended a strict girls’ private school. On a 1985 field trip to England, we were allowed to drink half pints of shandy, sent on walks without adult supervision, and wander alone in museums for up to three hours alone. We had watches, and knew where to meet up afterwards.

I remember a card game called "Bloody Knuckles"—similar to what you describe except that you would chop the opponent's knuckles with the edge of the deck of cards depending on which card was drawn:
e.g. 10 of spades or clubs would get you ten hard chops
10 of diamonds or hearts would be ten soft chops

On my final day of secondary school I finished my last exam by lunchtime, and our English teacher lent a bunch of us kids her car so we could go to a party... on the provision that we would go and collect her at the end of the day to take her to the party also.
Six teenagers rammed into a MIni and stopped at the off licence on the way home.

Omg when was this?

I know it was the norm in the 80s but I passively smoked so many cigarettes as a kid I had constant chest infections. I’m a non smoker adult . Hate it. Caused so much il health and death in my family.

Funnily enough when I moved out of home twenty plus years ago I never had a chest infection again. Very glad smoking inside everywhere was banned.

We used to sit in car boots regularly.

Looked after ourselves at 10/11 primary school while mum and dad at work in the holidays/after school.

I remember going to a pub near school where the teachers were drinking too.

In the early/mid 90s when I started work, we sat in offices with our bosses who smoked, everyone regularly had very drunken lunches and we (the female trainees) had to ask permission of a female partner to wear trousers. They were eventually allowed, but only as part of a trouser suit.

Later on they introduced a smoking room. I remember when they introduced computers on desks, we could only email internally and me and my friends used to spend all day sending each other ridiculous messages.

I remember walking to primary school alone, going to the shop (the beer off) to take bottles back to get the deposit. Also being sent out to play all the time. We roamed the streets in primary school on our bikes, meeting up with whole gangs of people in the park. I think my mum thought I stayed in the park all day.

Also sitting outside a pub with a packet of crisps and a drink.

I think there was crap parenting then, as there is now. Some things were just downright wrong -corporal punishment - I remember boys getting slippered and hit with rulers (girls seemed to escape it in my school). But going out to play wasn't wrong I don't think. We didn't have after school clubs and we didn't have playdates.

I remember the casual acceptance of abuse -we all knew my friend's dad was a monster and beat up his wife, but we didn't do anything. No one did anything. Then again, we all know this still happens now - as far as I know, abuse isn't any less prevalent now than is was then. Nor is child abuse, rape, racism or sexism.

I knew not to use the P word when I was growing up - but then I was considered "half caste" (and called it, and other words regularly) so I was sensitive to this.

If hitting/caning kids was such a brilliant discipline method, it wouldn't have been done so frequently.

Hitting is for lazy, self-centred and not very smart adults who haven't got the brains, discipline or inclination to learn their own self-control, explain things or impose natural consequences. It is an absolutely shit parenting/teaching technique, much as I realise people don't like admitting that they were raised on shit techniques. It has been abandoned for a reason.

I know, I know... "never did me any harm". Well yes it did, if you're not only advocating assaulting children but taking offence when people refuse. And anyway, is that the best you want to achieve as a parent? Not to actively psychologically fuck your kids up for life? Well done you. These days, we have slightly higher goals than that.

Omg that's so awful. We had at least 2 'open secrets' at our school - male teachers having flings with girls who were pupils. Holy shit no I remember a third one whose wife had just had a baby! One was asked to leave and got another teaching job elsewhere but nothing was done about the other 2 at all. This was in the mid 2000s. I hope today with improved understanding, safeguarding and me too it wouldn't happen anymore or if it did the teachers would be reported and properly punished.

In primary school they used to send two children from year 6 each week to walk to the council building and take post from school there. I couldn't wait until I was in year 6 to get to do this but then two children were approached by a man and they stopped doing it altogether. Of course I understand now why they stopped but back then I was just gutted.
All the squeezing extra people into cars, we had a Lada when I was little and there were 7 of us in the family, 4 children squeezed into the back seats and one in the boot!

Our school also at age 13 used to have this initiation kind of thing where they took a group of you on Friday afternoon, drove you 30 miles away in a minibus, gave you a map, compass and camping equipment and told you to be back at school in time for Sunday evening service.
That sounds really fun though! Not quite the same but in scouts last spring my 11 year old DD had a scout camp where they were dropped off in the countryside in groups of 3, with a map and a compass, and had to make their way to the campsite themselves, stopping at checkpoints along the way to do different activities like cooking their dinner on a camping stove. But it was only for a few hours not a whole weekend (well, it was supposed to be a few hours but DD's group got lost and eventually an adult had to go looking for them when they hadn't arrived at the campsite by 8pm)

Some of the things mentioned here are still normal in Finland, like children walking to school alone from a young age, and playing out (although they don't go knocking on doors to play, they message each other to arrange things first. Except for the estate we lived on when DD was 3-5yrs old and the children the same age roamed from house to house to play, but they didn't knock either, they just walked right into my house!).
No fences or gates or locked doors at DD's school either, anyone can walk in as I know because when DD has her physio sessions in the nurses office at school I just walk in through the preschool entrance. Her nursery didn't have locked doors either but they closed down all the old nurseries and built a big new one and that one has locked doors with a code for parents to get in so that's a bit safer at least. No consent forms for school trips, consent is assumed, one year the teacher took her class ice fishing - I can't imagine that would have passed a risk assessment back in the UK! After school nature club took them all fishing at the lake, DD fell in and had to just be soaking wet the rest of the time and walk home, no one called me to suggest collecting her or anything (not that it would have made a difference as I don't drive but still, I would have preferred to know so I could have told her to come straight home rather than wait for the end of the club)

Caning was terrible. Hitting was terrible. A small smack on the bottom wasn't. And I'd like to see evidence that a light bottom smack has resulted in anyone becoming a traumatised adult.

A "small smack" is a hit and it's a shitty, lazy way of teaching anything, including how to control your own temperature and express your own displeasure. And it won't seek small to someone a quarter of your size.

And if the best you can say about it is that it isn't traumatising, you need much higher standards.

And it traumatised me.

It's an independently shit parenting "technique" and we abandoned it for good reasons. I've managed to raise happy, well adjusted, well behaved children without ever hitting them.

"Temperature" should be "temper". Fuck you, autocorrect. Perhaps I'll try hitting my phone. Will that help?

I have a vague memory of a school trip which involved putting us in a lorry with bales of straw and driving around a forest Park which was on side of mountain. It was brilliant and remember singing She will be coming round the mountain when she comes. Parents would be aghast today. I don't remember if I had to get permission. This would have been late sixties

I was hit. I was also smacked (it was normal in our household. One I remember. The others I don't. But my brother was absolutely traumatised by verbal abuse and us still damaged by it. And I remember the exact words used by 2 verbally abusive teachers.

Words can be incredibly wounding and leave long lasting damage. Just as there is a huge difference between a 'telling off' and a verbal onslaught, so there is a huge difference between a rare, small smack on a clothed bottom and a beating. I suppose we all come to this from our own experiences. I wish you well. (PS my now adult children love me and happily give me our gorgeous grandchildren to care for. They're obviously not traumatised!)

CohenTree · Today 04:48

I remember a card game called "Bloody Knuckles"

We played that, but it was just called "Knuckles." You'd get half a dozen lads and whoever got the lowest got that number of raps, the sealer changed when he lost.

We also had Shitty Stick, where someone would wipe a stick in a dog turd - plentiful on the school field! and you'd form a circle, throw it in the air and the person it headed for had to catch, or get piled on.

Split the Kipper, a circle of lads would have a knife, which was thrown near the foot of someone opposite. You had to move your foot to the knife, then it was your turn. If it hit your foot, you were allowed to aim at the original thrower's foot.

That was in the 80s.

This is derailing the thread a bit (a lot) but of course smacking is shit parenting. There are reams and reams of psychological research telling us so. So is verbally abusing and shaming kids. Obviously! It is now very well established that authoritarian (and, at the other extreme, permissive) parenting correlates with bad outcomes for kids and authoritative parenting correlates with good outcomes for kids. On average.

I was a shit parent this morning, I threatened my son with losing a sleepover with his best friend because he was playing up mildly and I didn’t have the energy to use my usual strategies. It’s not abusive, but it’s still shit, lazy parenting. Most of us engage in shit parenting from time to time. I can never understand why the smackers don’t admit it.

I walked to school on my own aged 5. Mum took me the first day but after that it was just me. Same with DH. This was in the fifties.

1. Standing right by the side of the motorway to measure traffic flow in geography (I know some kids still have to measure traffic flow as part of their geography but they’re at a safe distance or up on a bridge that goes over the motorway, we were literally standing within touching distance of the vehicles).

2. Driving without seatbelts. We never wore them in the back of cars. I don’t even move my car now unless everyone is strapped in.

3. Getting ‘carry outs’ from the pub for our parents. I was always doing this. I remember going to the pub for my parents when I was about 8 and getting them their cigarettes and cans on a Friday night. My husband did it for his parents too. I also was tasked with doing the big family shop on my own too. I’d be given a list, some money and would go off to the big supermarket and get a taxi home. It was great!

4. Growing up I was a member of both the Scouts and St. John’s Ambulance and both just used to take us up into the hills and tell us to purposefully get lost so the older kids and adults could use their skills to find us (and in the case of St. John’s they would ‘cure’ the fake wounds we were given).

Why do hitters always have to deflect by telling us that verbally abusing your kids is bad too? Did you not realise that either?

Your defensiveness about it even now, after all the evidence of what a shit technique it is, is exactly what I expect from hitters. No sense of learning, of self improvement, of knowing better now, because that's exactly the kind of growth that hitting prevents from happening. Just a blunt, because I said so, might makes right mindset. No humility, no willingness to learn. That's what it does.

I hope to God you don't hit your grandchildren.

Also walking to school on my own. It was only about half a mile away but it was over two busy main roads.

My sons school isn’t that much further away from us now, and with just as any main roads, but no way would I let him walk.

The difference with you is:

a) you have the humility to accept you made a mistake, something that hitters often don't have, probably because it's not a technique that engenders humility

b) you can withdraw the threat with no harm done now that you've cooled off and realised you made a mistake. There's no going back after you've hit your children.

The best way to raise kids to act a certain way is to model the behaviour you wish them to learn. You can't teach a skill you don't have. So if you can't manage your temper, prevent situations from escalating or respond intelligently to stress, don't expect your kids to work it out either. And then when you hit them because you're too lazy and stunted to have shown them any better yourself...

Of course none of us are perfect parents but we don't get any better by continuing to defend actions that we now know to be shit.