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 😂

My mum used to put an advert in the newsagents at the top our road for a babysitter for me and my little brother. No interview, no CRB check… could’ve been anyone!! We had some right weirdos looking after us lol

In most pics of me from the 70’s most of the adults holding me have a fag in their hand.
My driving instructor smoked constantly through my lessons. Fags on buses and planes!
I walked about a mile and a half there and back on my own to my first (illegal) job aged 13. Washing pots in a pub for £1 an hour. And ditto car boots, pub beer gardens etc!

I remember when I was young (1970’s) if there was a wedding car they would throw coins out the window hen the drove away from the bride/grooms home and all the kids would run into the road to pick them up. Think it was called a poorout

Being sent to the headteacher for the strap She decided to contact my father as that scared more it did

As kids we used to go on holiday overnight to Dorset in back of dad's transit van with all our duvets and sleep through the journey. God knows what would have happened to us if we had been involved in a crash.

Yes the smoking! It seems mental now but I used to sit in the pub and everyone around me would be smoking. I used to think I was having panic attacks....years later found out I have asthma! I was having asthma attacks.

We got our first car in the mid 70's and the first thing my Dad did was install child seatbelts in it for us. We never, ever rode in my parent's cars without seatbelts. In the very early 80's a child in Reception at school had a red child car seat and, by the time I was about 11, booster cushions were being sold in places like Argos.

When we went to safari parks, we'd sit on Dad's lap and drive.

My parents decided to quit smoking in the early 80s when they realised how much we were coughing and choking in the back seat from the smoke.

My year 5 teacher smoked his pipe in class.

On a year 6 school holiday, the teachers took us to the pub for a coke and a packet of crisps in the beer garden.

As a sixth former in the early 90s, we'd be at the same pub on a Friday lunchtime as the teachers.

In the mid-1960s, we went to the family GP, who had a black Labrador under his desk, and we could stroke him if the GP examined us and we didn't cry!

Playing on piles of gravel next to the intercity and freight rail tracks. We’d wave at the trains as they whizzed past.

We had a dinner lady who had a big estate car. She would childmind after school. It was a common sight to see this lady packing several kids into the boot of her car, as well as too many on the back seats.

I made good money (for a teenager) babysitting various children of my parents friends while they went out for a night to the pub. I know I was baby sitting my tiny baby cousin acted 13 and a half but I started babysitting other kids well before that.

Going to the pub with my teachers in 6th form on a Friday after school and often kicking on to my English teacher’s flat afterwards.

Sitting at my Nan and Grandad’s in the winter, the windows jammed shut to keep the cold out and looking across the other side of the room to them through a visible fog of cigarette smoke.

Being allowed to play in the public park next to our primary school in the summer. We also had no gate on our school. You could just walk in off the street into our playground or the park, and we could if we dared to, walk out of school.

I’m not that old. I’m 43 but all this seems utterly inappropriate now, especially as we lived in London, not some sleepy village.

In the 60s my friend's Dad was a long distance lorry driver. He once brought a tipper truck home and all the kids in our street (aged from about 6 to 10) got onto the back and he raised it up and down to give us a slide. (I just watched cos I was scared I'd get wood spelks in my bare legs😆).

Constant low level misogynistic comments from both of my parents. It massively affected my self esteem and to this day they are both still as misogynistic. Thankfully some of that is slowly changing.

Lots of very hard smacks (often round the head and ear) from my father, particularly if I had been made a noise at church (preschool age)
Buses to places miles away with a friend from the age of about nine and staying out all day
Being hit across the hand with the tawse several times for minor misdemeanours at school
Going to my Grandparent's and sitting quietly whilst they drank, smoked and played cards (never ever seen at home, I thought it was so worldly and exotic)
Having an immunisation in a small room at school, fainting on the stairs whilst making my way back to the classroom on my own, coming to with a huge bump on my head and telling no one.
Having my wrist broken in the gym at school and being taken by an older pupil (primary school so no older than 11) to hospital, having it set in plaster and catching the bus back home. She came with me and told my Mum I had had a accident.
Being kept in late at school with no regard for any parent's concerns.
At three getting separated from my mother in Woolworths in town and making my way home safely a mile and a half across main roads.
My sister taking me (unbeknown to my parents) a 'walk' to the harbour about a mile away - no areas fenced off, just a long drop into the water (or a fishing boat)
Being a teenager at a time (late sixties) where it was commonplace for well under sixteen-year-olds to be in sexual relationships with older boys/young men. No one was ever prosecuted.

I could go on...!

@Pricelessadvice
Mine was a slipper rather than the bamboo. I'm 43 now but it still sends shivers down my spine.
And if me and any of my sisters were both naughty we had our "heads banged together"

I remember going out with friends, aged between around 9-11 with their two massive dogs - we'd wear roller skates and get the dogs to drag us down the hill on either the road or pavement

Awww. That sounds a lovely memory. I guess it would not be considered acceptable to have a dog in the GP surgery now. That said, our local a and e department has a cat!

Remember regularly having to evacuate the science labs as the latest experiment went wrong and dangerous gases were in room!

We had lots of ad hoc lessons outside!

Inspired by another thread: Drinking with the teachers on a school trip (we were 16 so totally legal to have a drink in the pub with our meal but definitely wouldn’t happen now!)

To be honest, there’s very little from my childhood that’s ok now 🤣 My children are either envious or horrified by the things that were totally normal then (and I’m not actually a million years old either!)

My mum is a retired nurse and she told me that all the nurses used to take stuff out of the medicines cabinets for nights out. At Christmas they kept a free bed with curtains drawn and it was stocked up with bottles of spirits 'because it was Christmas'. She said everyone was on it including all the consultants.

Not really childhood as most of us were 18. A level biology teacher asking us round (all girls school) to his house for an end of schoo!/exams party . He had a reputation for being a bit creepy. Hardly anyone turned up. Funny that. It was the year 2000.

I remember one morning in the baking hot Summer holidays of 1976 one of my school friends knocking on the door asking if I wanted to go to the seaside as her Dad was taking her and a few others from our class. We were equivalent of today's year 5/6. Her Dad was a plumber or something similar and we were going on this trip in his van. There were about 5 of us sitting on the floor in the back with the tools and another 2 or 3 on what was basically a bench sear in the front, with no seat belts of course.
I'm really stunned that my Mum let me go off with a bloke that, as far as I know, she'd never even met before in totally unsuitable transport! Nothing bad happened - he really was just a Dad doing something spontaneously nice for his daughter and her friends - but it seems crazily risky with hindsight!
Another one is that I stayed for a few nights in my friend's caravan at October half term when we were about 13 or 14. It was just me and her, no adults. We went on the train and then walked to the caravan site which was quite isolated and almost empty at that time of year. I think I'd be anxious about that now to be honest, and of course in those days there were no mobile phones so I have no idea what we were going to do if anything went wrong. It's really unlike my parents to have let me go so looking back on it I wonder if they actually realised that my friend's parents weren't going to be there or maybe I wasn't entirely honest about that!

Like tapioca, yuk. We always called it frog spawn.

Traveling in the back seat of the car as a young child with sibling, pillows and quilts, no seatbelts.

Cooking dinners for my dad when mum was in hospital. I was 7. He just “didn’t/couldnt” cook. I was a girl , so even at 7 I was assumed capable. Taking random days off school aged between 6 and 14 to look after mum who had chronic migraines. No aunties ever stepped in. My sister ( married) in her 20s didn’t step in. My dad just expected life to go on as normal even though my mum had aura migraines so bad, they’d last days.

Chemistry sets were available to me at the age of 8 or 9 including I think a Bunsen burner which was actually a little pot of paraffin. And actual chemicals. I loved it and especially the ones that turned the liquid into different colours. Never supervised. The chemistry at secondary school was very boring in comparison and I gave it up. Generally roamed around the countryside by the river, swimming in summer, lots of tree climbing and investigating building sites. Walking to school with others. And no seatbelts and sleeping in the morris traveller to the south of France. Left in hospital for tonsil / appendix removal . Horrible nurses.

No one ever knows what I'm talking about when I tell them about the bride and groom pouring a bag of pennies out the car door. 😂

Why would all the kids would run over and scrap over shrapnel? Why would people save their copper for months? Why would they tip a load of coins from an Asda bag into the gutter? They ask.