Things you remember from your childhood that would not be ok today!

[Starlight1984]

Light-hearted and inspired by the comments on the baby in the pub thread (and TikTok!)😀

But what are things you remember from your childhood that people would be absolutely outraged at today?!

I remember being babysat by our neighbours child when I was 4/5 and she was about 12/13. God knows what she would have done if anything went wrong as there were no mobile phones to get hold of our parents?! 🤔

Also remember going to the pub in the summer but kids weren't allowed inside so we sat in the beer garden with a coca cola and bag of crisps whilst the adults were inside 😂

Loads
when I was about 10 we kept a fire going in the garden of a house being done up for about 3 weeks, scrounging things to burn when the workmen hadn't anything, cooking baked spuds every day.

trip to London with family friends, 8 kids in the back seat!

roaming for miles, as long as you were home for meals it was fine

buying mum's fags

getting drunk by my father when I was 14

riding "backie" on someone's bike when they stood up down hill on a major road...I flew off once

big uns looking after little uns on our adventures (10 years old looking after 4 years old) when wandering miles from home

hanging off the pig man's van as he drove around the streets picking up pub swill

Knocking off school to navigate for my dad as a driver's mate aged 10 ... Basically took a year off!

being sent to highly dangerous factories aged 14 to help out for the day

Sounds like the nuns at my school with the purgatory talk. They weren't actually violent though but bloody scary

Remembering more since speaking to my sister earlier.
We had a vicar who would come in to speak to us regularly at assembly time while in primary school. He was absolutely hammered every time without fail, staggering, slurring and stinking of booze. Everyone knew, teachers and parents and even us small children. It was just accepted as the way he was. He even drove over a few times 😬 despite it being walking distance.

Sounds like the nuns at my school with the purgatory talk.

I taught in a school run by an Order of nuns and one of the very ancient ones always referred to the IRA as 'the boys back home' when there'd been some atrocity.

Ugh. I remember kids from other schools telling us we were terrorists and members of the IRA. Joy of attending a catholic school in the early 80s

Yes, the secondary was indeed run by nuns. The primary was catholic though not nuns - presumably, they couldn't wield a belt or cane with sufficient force.

Being left in the car with my brother and sister while our Mum and Dad went it into a tearoom for a fancy afternoon tea on holiday 😂

My Mum leaving the baby asleep in the car whilst she did the big family shop at the supermarket in the early 90s

Being dropped off aged 8 at the flat of some random old lady, who I'd never met before, to do my brownie cooking badge by my mum. Nobody else there. My mum left me there, alone with her, to do my food prep and I just remember this very stern elderly (she was probably 50!) woman standing over me, telling me off when I didn't wash the carrots.

I bet there wasn't much in the way of safety checks back in the 80s

Going on an overnight stay with a youth group, in a residential centre, when I was six, in the 1980s. My dad was a helper on the trip, and he slept in one of the boys' dormitories, with five boys - absolutely unthinkable now; and after only one night, we went home. Many years later, he explained why: the teenage helpers were having sex with each other in the children's dormitories, and some of the children knew this.

My brother sleeping on the parcel shelf of the car on long trips

My grandma used to let their dog wander the streets, a bit like people do with cats nowadays

Physics teacher asking if anyone had a penknife when he needed to repair a piece of equipment. At least half the boys and a few of the girls were carrying... The only people who got cut were incompetent knife owners and it taught you to be more careful next time.

Being bought a pint in a pub by my chemistry teacher when I was 17. It was also lunchtime, so we all trooped (in some cases drove) back to the school for afternoon lessons.

Happy days...

Driving down the road in the back of a pick-up. Holding on to the side.

car treasure hunts with our youth leaders at church, one leader, 4 kids, jumping in and out of cars all over the countryside, no seatbelts - fantastic!!

riding our bikes in to the village to the garage to buy sweets, age 7!

going down to the beach on our own all day with our parents having no clue where we were or what we were up to! Primary age

sleepovers or playdates with friends my parents had never met

back seat having no seatbelts

Yes!! My mum always says about our dog before I was born that he just took himself off for the day, I was like WHAT?! You just let the dog go wandering?! Apparently so!

Loads.

Sitting in the front footwell between my Nan’s feet. Sitting on laps, up to 7/8 cousins in the back of the car. Being slung in the back of my grandfather’s transit van with the same cousins and driving up to 30-40 miles away. Sitting in the boot of the Volvo with two dogs.

Being left in the car for up to two hours at a time outside the supermarket, parents’ friends houses or sometimes (on father’s visit time) the pub.

At 5 or 6 years old being regularly looked after by 12/13 year old relatives or neighbours.

I got us home from school, looked after siblings and got dinner started by the time I was 10 because my mother was at work. It’s just how life was. I’m a very resilient adult, kids are mollycoddled for far too long now. This wasn’t 60 years ago, it was the mid 90s.

Yes! I was only talking about this the other day. My relatives dog, used to call for another dog and they would go off in the evening together and then just come back to their respective houses. Absolutely bonkers! Could you imagine Facebook if that was allowed today!

@Lifealittleboulder There were loose dogs EVERYWHERE when I was a kid. My school was in the middle of a large council estate and it was like running a gauntlet of variously behaved and socialised dogs bothering or not bothering you.

Riding around in the back of my mum's friend's 2CV standing up with out heads sticking out of the top, singing at the top of our voices. My mum was considered pretty overprotective for the time too (and she definitely knew about the 2CV rides - sometimes she was with us and even taught us some new songs to sing).

Went to a relatives 60th birthday party where an Al Jolson tribute act performed. Probably late 90s?

If returning from visiting friends late at night, my brother and I would sleep with the back seats down along with duvets/pillows (essentially in the car boot!)

All the neighbourhood kids outside on bikes, roller skates, playing ball etc and in/out of each other’s houses. It’s so weird how quiet streets are now.

We used to drive home from family sometimes over a particularly brutal humpback bridge. No seat belts, big wide leather seats and my dad would get us to kneel on the back seat without holding on whilst he went as fast as he could over the bridge. So much fun 😁

I think as well as the lack of adult supervision/freedom to roam and the normalisation of casual violence, the thing that people who grew up even 20 years after me (born in the 60s) don't really understand, and today's generation will never come close to comprehending is the aching, terrible boredom we experienced as children. We were lucky and did have a TV but there wasn't children's programming all the time, only for a short time a day and only one channel and my mother incredibly strictly regulated access to it in the belief too much would cause our brains to melt. There's nothing to touch waking at dawn as young children will, on a long rainy summer's day, knowing you can't play outside and you've read every scrap of reading material in the house three times over and can't afford the bus to town and the library and shops for another 3 days when you got your pocket money. It's really hard to comprehend now quite how torturous that was, but it did force you into playing with your siblings and neighbourhood kids, using your imagination and so on, there really wasn't any other option, you would literally be climbing the walls otherwise... Also why I think every kid in my village worked as soon as anyone would pay them anything for anything, like others have said we all did paper rounds and babysat and collected glasses in the pub or cut grass or ran errands or whatever would scrape us together a few pennies because bus trips into town were lifelines really. Today's kids who have grown up from birth with 24/7 tv and streaming and online shopping and ebooks just won't ever know that level of claw your own (or your sisters!) eyes out boredom!

@maxelly You're so right! Two hour car journeys to relatives felt interminable. My sibling group used to tear lumps out of each other, mostly due to boredom.

Kids tv was 6-8, then 3-4:30 and that was it.

And parents definitely didn’t actively entertain you, we were expected to get on with it and only bother them at meal times or if we were injured! 😂