To having been born in the 1970s and see how much the world has changed?

[Deeperthantheocean]

Yes, so a '70s child so have lived through everything beyond the days of MN world, with advice and experiences of parents and grandparents.

I feel so fortunate to have embraced technology. I am in awe of how the world has been revolutionised it as mostly to the greater good of mankind in many ways.

Just from a personal perspective, I feel it's so sad that the school playgrounds we used to go to to play the sports with our friends are all now barricaded, the youth clubs we went to and had a 10p drink and 12p bag of crisps for a night our aged 13, also the innocent early 1980s school discos we did just dance and had fun with our dowdy outfits. My Mum made me a rara skirt from an old skirt to look more modern, amazing talent among so many others.

So, back to my title, oh boy the works has changed so much! My generation knows how much our parents' generation had it hard and those before then so much harder. Poverty was working to be able to work and buy food on rations, that was women also.

Now we do generally have to work as parents but please don't forget our Mums and grandmother's also did, but after looking after children. Unsociable hours, after hours, basically anytime husbands were home to listen out for anything.

I'm 50 and I agree with you, OP.

It will be interesting, in the next 30-50 years, to see how much change someone born in the 70s will live through in their whole life span.

Thinking of my parents now in their 80s - 'Silent Generation' born during WW2 - my mum didn't have electricity in the house she was born in (and it wasn't a rural house, it was in a mill town) as just one example of the scale of change.

Depending on where tech takes us, it could end up being greater for Gen X!

Also agree with PP who loves Life on Mars for its 70s ambience. There's a wallpaper in one of the episodes that we used to have 😃

My mum was born in 1928. On the day she was born it was cold and icy and the horses had to have hessian bags strapped to their feet to stop them slipping on the cobbles.
She died January 2023 at her funeral on the order of service pamphlets there was a qi code on the back so you could scan and donate directly to nominated charities. Biw that’s progress.

Also born in the 70s. I don't have a rose tinted view of it, but am glad that I grew up pre-social media and mobile phones. Cutting edge technology was the ZX Spectrum 😀I also feel a bit nostalgic for 10p mixes and 2p ice lollies from corner shops, but that's remembering childhood not a better historical era generally.

Apologies, thread's point was do we all realise how lucky we are and appreciate how hard life was for our parents and grandparents?

On the subject of housing alone I have to disagree with this. My grandparents and parents were home owners from a young age. I can't see the same happening for my children.

Plus I'm not sure things were harder for the previous generations in work. The pressure for women to have a full time career and still be full time mums is enormous. My mum worked part time school hours, my Grandmother worked very part time and looked after me when needed. Our situation as parents was very different and definitely not easier.

Yes tangy toms probably - small bags of tomato “flavoured” crispy balls - 5p 🤩

Crisps were 5p from a vending machine in the 70s. I remember the day they went up to 6p because I stood disconsolately holding my shiny, useless 5p piece.

I remember insects- loads of them. Lying in the grass watching the mini world go by.

And a plague of ladybirds.

And toilet roll rationing.

When I first remember buying them, a Twix was 7p and a mini-milk lolly was 6p. A Funny Foot was 10p. I used to get 10p a week. By the time I was in my teens, my pocket money had risen to the dizzy heights of £1 a week. That's inflation for you!

In 40 years' time, Gen Alpha will be coming on Mumsnet, if it's still here, to say they 'remember toilet roll rationing' from early Covid Days.

Born mid 60s and, although modern technology is amazing, it is evolving far faster than our ability to deal with it.

I remember true boredom in my teenage years but lots of sport with my sibling and the excitement of just meeting friends at their houses, for a movie or for a walk. Also the excitement of The Charts and discussing the latest soap or sport with friends. We did have a lot more commonality then.

The other thing is that if you were with a friend or at a party, you were 100% in the moment. That is rare now.

And privacy! No cameras except those that used film and people just didn’t take that many pictures (they cost a lot to develop). No CCTV, ring doorbells, DNA analysis. Of course they all have benefits but they have sprung up insidiously. If you had suggested the amount of surveillance that we have today in the 80s or 90s people would have said that it was like East Germany and would never happen in the UK.

Honestly, I do worry for my children’s generation. Maybe every generation fears ‘the new’ but technology grows at an exponential rate and no one seems keen to evaluate and control it.

I was born late ‘50’s and I went to a youth club in early ‘70’s and had crisps and a bottle of juice for pennies. Happily I wasn’t drug addicted at 14 (or at any time!)

The first UK IKEA opened in Warrington in 1987. I took my Mum there a few times as it was so exciting. The first UK shopping centre opened in 1976 (Brent Cross) and we all went crazy it was so exciting!

1970s Britain was terminally dull. No shopping on Sundays, virtually nothing to do, hardly anywhere to go if you were too young for pubs. No phones, no internet, only 3 tv channels and no breakfast tv or daytime tv apart from in school holidays. No computers. Boredom was real, not just something teenagers said.

On the plus side, parents didn’t control your every move!

No cameras except those that used film and people just didn’t take that many pictures (they cost a lot to develop).

And when you got them back, at least 10 on your roll of 28 would be out of focus or shots of half someone's head because they moved at the wrong moment!

So, good old days (not forthgoing with the abuse that went on)

Well that’s a mighty big thing to just discount, isn’t it? 🫤

This thread is like those weird FB nostalgia groups where people reminisce about products you can still buy in the shops. Who remembers Mini Milks, eh?

Blondie's Heart of Glass always takes me right back to playing ping pong at the youth club. Paper cups of juice and cheap crisps. Bliss. My first boyfriend courted me with a packet of Polos. Great days. We were feral and free range teens but scrubbed up for church on Sundays.

I can remember getting a bag of meanies for 5p and and orange tiptop for 10p then standing round the dance floor watching the others throw some shapes! Ahh the days.

I think you miss the point - people are reminiscing about the things that were part of their childhood. It might be that you can still buy mini-milks but the reality is you'd probably buy a Magnum as an adult as a mini-milk, rather than the highlight of your week as a 5 year old, would be a tiny stick of disappointment in your 50s 😀

There were good things about the 70s but also bad. Waiting with my mum in endless queues in the Post Office to pay bills, or in the bank to get money out, or in the council offices for god knows what. It was incredibly boring for me but it must have been torture for her.

Summers playing outdoors and getting appalling sunburn. Winters with ice on the inside of the single-paned windows.

Smoking on busses, in cinemas, in GP surgeries, on trains, in cars; just everywhere.

Less traffic on the roads but way more pollution. Remember acid rain? Cars running on 4* leaded petrol without catalytic converters?

What the fuck are you talking about? I was born in the 70s and aged 14 was clubbing and taking a load of drugs at clubs all around the country

🤣🤣🤣🤣

You can't really draw conclusions by comparing eras only, without taking into account the circumstances of the individual living in that era though, can you? Which vary hugely. The only safe conclusion is that if you are fortunate to be born into a middle class affluent family you will have an easier time of it than if you are not, whether that's the 70s or now. There have been a greater many improvements to the world that should make it better for us all. Unfortunately due to social and wealth inequality we don't all get to benefit as we should.

That fabulous summer of 1976, I was 18 and had just started my nurse training! Such fabulous memories….!

Every generation does this. Dh and I wereborn opposite ends of the 70s. He thinks the 80s were the best; I think the 90s. My dad thought the 60s. My mum, not so much. The 90s ended up being her era, as she was finally able to get back to work after having to give it up to look after us.
My teenage dc are already commenting on how the kids' TV they watched was superior to the stuff kids watch now. It never ends.

There will always be something around that makes us lament what this generation are missing out on or are being damaged by. Remember when young ladies reading novels was seen as cause for concern? The pamphlets deriding them and caking on young girls to pick up their prayer books and improving books instead?

Not only cheap, so easy to buy at 14. I used to buy them at the shop before getting on the school bus. In my uniform!
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I can't tell you how many FB groups I've joined - "I Grew Up in the Sixties", "60s London Photos" "70s Music and Fashion" - and then had to leave just because they focussed less on nostalgia and more on grumpy, ungracious and unfounded moaning about 'disrespectful kids today', 'crap modern TV', 'not the London I grew up in' and 'it's all this fucking wokeness, that's what's wrong with society now'.

I mean, since time began a large percentage of old people have been curmudgeonly, selfish whiners, but my generation seem to have turned it in to a lifestyle. Or perhaps - and this'd be ironic - it's that the technology they blame for the price of cod'n'chips has given them a place to bang on about how shit everything is, and it was better before all these boats came over and also strawberries don't taste like they used to.

I have a lot of nostalgia for the 70s and 80s and feel sad that my children don't have, or don't seem to want to have, the freedoms that we enjoyed. In the 80s, I spent every single weekend with friends. We would go shopping, save up to buy 1 item of clothing, then we'd go for a pizza or round to someone's house, play games and just chat.
Now it takes an inordinate amount of double guessing to find something that my 3 will all enjoy doing, and the days that they go out with friends is very rare.
Things were not perfect then, they are not perfect now, but when I look back at my childhood/teenage years, they were fun, carefree and stress free. I sincerely hope that the youth of today will be able to look back on their childhood/teenage years in the same way.