AIBU to think 80s parenting was often hands-off and unsupervised?

[N3wUs3rNam3Again]

Is this familiar to anyone else ? I was born in the 80s, my Dad worked a physical job long hours, often away and seemed to mostly sleep when home. My Mum worked part time, mostly school hours, although not when we were little, but she wasn't really a present mum, definitely not child focussed. I don't remember her ever playing with us, although she did read and sing to us at night.

I am 1 of 3 children, so was lucky I had 2 siblings to play with and keep me occupied. In the summer we spent a lot of time outside playing with neighbouring kids, this was without adult supervision, kids ages would range from 5-12, we'd be booted out at 9am. Go in for lunch then back out until 5, we'd go on adventures, get chased by farmers, the big kids looked after the little kids. Were streets safer? There were definitely less cars and more kids, so safety in numbers perhaps.

At home we had a television and a commodore 64, although spent more time watching the commodore 64 load than we did playing it. But I watched Tele, loads of it, Lassie, black beauty, little house on the prairie, the Walton's , neighbours, home and away, blockbusters, why don't you, heart beat, grange hill, BykerGrove, button moon, playschool, T bag, Timmy Mallet, the list is endless and I watched it all without parent oversight.

My parents and their friends, mostly our mum's, drank a lot at weekends, I remember many gathering aged from 5-11 either at our house or friend's where our mum's would get drunk and in the summer we kids would roam outside. We didn't get in to trouble, though I think that's due to luck more than anything. In the winter we'd pile in to a bedroom playing hide and seek in the dark , telling ghost stories, calling up spirits, playing truth or dare and raps (card game).

Even at the beach the parents didn't seem to supervise us, all the kids would be in the sea, mums sunbathing / sleeping but the older kids looked after the younger ones. Again it was probably more luck than anything that we didn't get into trouble.

All sounds quite lovely really even with absent parents although my mum was definitely present if we misbehaved or made a fuss and would give us a smack across our legs for bad behaviour and from memory I think we must have been pretty bad and often!

I just wondered really if my childhood was so totally different to everyone else's as reading posts on here, it seems everyone used to do it so much better than the parents who are doing it today. Don't get me wrong I had a happy enough childhood and my basic needs were met but just because my parents didn't give me a handheld screen to watch doesn't mean they were present and doing it better than the parent today who does.

AIBU - that is not how it was in the 80s for you and your parents were way more present than parents are today.

Thanks for starting this one @N3wUs3rNam3Again it’s a really good read.
So Interesting to see the difference for the 70s/80s parents too who are now grandparents (almost getting a second chance at it, having to fit in with how parenting has changed) and for many that still means living with mental health struggles which weren’t supported back when they were parents…

Through need rather than from guidance and natural development. The thing is , is easy to forget about the “collateral damage”. The drop outs, the addicts, the ones that just disappeared, the ones married/pregnant at 15/16 , the ones that killed themselves.

We’re also ignoring the grownups with a myriad of issues, the ones with life long depression and other mental health issues , the ones just being diagnosed now .

I knew a girl who killed herself, I knew several school refusers, I knew several drop outs, I knew 3 girls with anorexia, 5 self harming and so on.I wasn’t in a good place myself (drank myself to sleep for a while, self harmed etc) and I still remember a classmate telling me I was the happiest girl she’d ever met. It’s easy to forget , and it was even easier to not know or actively ignore , dismiss and deride while it was happening.

So how many people are like this now? Is it really any less

Yet most of us turned out to be productive, resourceful and independent.

Not really. Many in their 40’s today would have had caring parents. Many had supportive older siblings to lean on, I definitely had.
Maybe it is where you grew up, in my experience there is a lot of really fucked up adults secretly battling addiction in their 40’s, alcohol, drugs, food, shopping. Then there is the ones who are hopeless homeless addicts and a huge chunk are dead too. So I don’t think the majority turned out to be productive, maybe on the outside.

Sexual abuse was not rampant! It could be that in certain families it was, but not universal. We didn’t see drunk parents either. Definitely a working class city behaviour I think. Everyone we knew had lovely parents. Mine were a bit odd but we played outside for hours. Parents didn’t play with dc but facilitated play between dc. Now they just give dc screens and we have a mh epidemic. I’d go back to a play outside model!

Mine was nothing like that, I was born in the early 70s and my DP were hyper vigilant. I did play out a bit with the neighbours, but not ‘chucked out’ at 9am type scenario - we’d collect conkers in the park over the road and picked blackberries. I’d have friends over and we’d do silly stuff but nothing dangerous (although I do remember playing ball outside the house quite a lot, or skipping rope w friends and on my own).
My parents didn’t go to the pub, my mum liked a sherry or two and would drink at events and functions - I was allowed a Malibu and pineapple at home from around 15 and would sometimes have a sherry w my mum!
Weekends I’d go to organised things on a Saturday and my dad worked on Sundays so my mum and I would chill/visit relatives or go to a museum. I remember being bored quite a lot!

How would you know? Especially since you were a child. Would you really know if Suzie was targeted by her grandad? Or if Sarah was attacked in another room on residential? Or if Mary was being touched by your maths tutor under her clothes at the same table as you? Would they have said anything? Would you?

Like I said earlier, ignorance was/is bliss.

Yes, totally agree with you, OP. In the past parents didn't need to be so 'present' as now. You could play in the streets because there were less cars. You had friends where your parents didn't know their parents, no play dates then. And much less health and safety consciousness. At family gatherings everyone smoked until your eyes were stinging.

It must have been so much easier being a parent in those days!

Sexual abuse was rampant regardless of lower, middle, upper class . Just look at the boarding school and clergy abuse claims coming out from decades ago.

This is so interesting, where is the balance? My 90s childhood was similar and we definitely learned to cope, solve problems, were resilient and resourceful as a result.
It does feel like it’s massively swung the other way. I’ve seen threads on here with parents trying to get jobs for their adult kids and one mother trying to control her 30 year old son’s relationships…
I wouldn’t let my kids loose on the streets in the same way I was, but equally not doing everything for them and entertaining them 24/7 is important. Allow them to get bored 🤷‍♀️

We have to remember that in the mid 20th century there were few private cars so the streets were not the dangerous places they are today. There was no social media and therefore no moral panics to whip parents up into a safeguarding frenzy.

The good thing about parents leaving their children to play in the streets (up to the 1980s) was that we played in mixed age groups and we socialised ourselves. The older kids invented and ran the games and generally supervised. The younger ones joined in and learned the rules and concepts like fairness, fitting in and so on. If you did not fit into the group you soon got booted out by your peers. If you misbehaved by pushing, hitting or name calling you were not allowed to join the group. So you were socialised by your peers. We fell in and out of friendships and parents rarely intervened. In effect children had their own world within which they had agency. They learned useful skills like negotiation, independence and resilliance. The very skills which are required by fully formed adults when they enter the world of work.

Children now are socialised by their parents and teachers. They are cohorted into age related groups in school and by child minders and "school mums". Play is supervised in play dates where mums become anxious if their child is pushed or hit. This kind of behaviour is part of the rough and tumble of childhood but too many children are shielded from it now. They are ferried around like parcels from one artificially directed "activity" to another. In the 1980s and before children largely made their own fun and learned to cope with boredom. We walked or biked everywhere we needed to go.

Its not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with either parenting style. Rather that they are at either end of a spectrum.

Exactly. There is a balance to be had. I suppose some people find it more difficult to get it right because of their own experiences, and swing too much the other way.

I grew up in the 70s we had to become resilient and harden up to get by. Is this such a great thing?

Fascinating article. Thanks for posting. Children had more freedom in the past and that meant parents didn't need to supervise them all the time. Probably the biggest factors were less cars and bigger families so there were a lot more children around.

This is even more true the further back in time you go.

I was completely unsupervised. I used to take my baby brother out into the fields and cook us sausages on a bunson burner! No idea where I got the sausages. I must have been about 7 or 8 and he is 6 years younger. Mum never questioned any of this! I also roamed or rode my bike for miles. And yes as a little blonde girl I was approached by dodgy men on several occasions (but I knew about ‘stranger danger’ so avoided them).

The kids in my street ‘play out’ all the time like we used to in the 80s and 90s. They’re always playing football in the road and that’s a good thing imo.

I'm not sure anyone would have noticed mental illness in children when I was younger. Looking back at my childhood, I was often miserable and self harmed as a teen and it was just written off as dramatic. I wasn't taken to a GP and my mum (who was more engaged and involved than many tbf) didn't contact my school to enlist their help or even ask them to keep an eye on me.

I sent letters to one of my teachers that were a clear cry for help, and when I was called in to discuss them, it was to tell me that I shouldn't send letters and that teacher wasnt a counsellor so wouldn't be able to help me anyway. Case closed. 😵

I had friends that I knew were living in really risky situations and it was just 'normal' in the same way it was 'normal' for adult men to cat-call teenagers in school uniforms etc. Nobody asked us if that made us anxious or sad - the idea that a child would need mental health support didn't seem to exist until relatively recently.

@DysmalRadius Of course people noticed years ago. However it was not common. Just because you were not noticed, that isn’t every child. Parents were vigilant and loved their dc in the 80s!

How could they be vigilant if they didn’t even know where their kids were?

I think this is a great comment. Children had agency in a way they do not today. I don’t mean considering their feelings and putting them at the centre. I mean they could sort out their games and friendships without adults hovering over them all the time.

In those days, other people looked out for the kids too. They also told them off if they were doing something wrong and told parents if something wasn’t right. People wou,d comfort a crying child and no one would bat an eyelid about giving a cuddle. With laudable efforts to safeguard children, we have also lost something-the belief that other adults interacting with your child have benign intentions.

Porn on mainstream TV every friday night? was this in the UK if so which channel as I don't remember that and I was born late 70s. definitely remember programmes such as the word etc on channel 4 on a friday night.

They had Debbie Does Dallas and stuff like that on C5 on Friday evenings! That stopped entirely in the very early 2000s.

Does anyone remember Eurotrash? I watched that as a teenager, the accents were amazing.

Everyone loved Eurotrash! First time I saw a gimp mask was on Eurotrash. And the busty German ladies in costume. And poor lola something or other.

There were plenty of cars around in 80s and 90s in my small town. Two kids were killed by them. Kids tend to be knocked over by other kids now- usually on unlicensed motorbikes.

I'm not sure I buy the kids looking out for each other thing too. It could be pretty terrifying out there, but you didn't tell your parents; you just tried to keep your head down. Apart from the kid who actively used to hunt us down. We told on him. Other adults knew who you belonged to, but they were more likely to just snitch to your parents than step in if anything kicked off.

Pretty sure the porn was on channel 5.

Or you know, they put a 16 year old on Page 3! 🤮 sums up the attitude towards safeguarding back then, doesn't it!

the other thing that was very common was children playing on railway tracks.