What was life like in the 80s?

[Strangerthanadeadting]

As a recent fan of Stranger Things and having only been four years old at the end of the eighties, I'm fascinated to know what life was like for teens & adults back then.

It's depicted as being so much fun on TV. So colourful, the music is brilliant, the fashion so vivid. It was a time before the Internet, social media, plastic surgery, the Kardashians.

I'm fascinated. I'd love to hear what life was like. What people did for fun, what they ate, how different a working day was, if it really was as glamorous as it looks, if the hairstyles took forever, what people thought the future would be like? Was it a better life? A better time?

The diagnostic criteria for autism was higher back then.

I think there was very little understanding/ diagnosis of "higher functioning" needs such as ADHD (my mother was a health professional and freely said ADHD was made up) let alone ADD without the hyperactivity, and "higher functioning" (I know this term isn't liked by some but for want of an alternative) autism.

However I don't think children with profound disabilities were hidden away - we were allowed to choose voluntary work instead of lessons for general studies at sixth form, and I volunteered on a play scheme for children with disabilities on Saturdays, and we took the children with non verbal autism, cerebral palsy and fairly severe learning disabilities to the beach or playground and to cafes and shops etc and I never remember a negative reaction from the public.

As someone who was a working SENCo throughout the eighties I am slightly surprised by some of this. The influential Warnock report had come out in 1978 and it was a time when we were working hard to develop the focus on individual needs, work alongside children in the classroom rather than in withdrawal groups and focus on inclusion. I don't doubt that there were pockets of bad practice as there always have been, but it was certainly not the spirit of the time for those of us working in the field. Towards the end of the decade I became an advisory teacher working with the development of information technology for individual pupils with learning and physical disabilities. Much of that work was groundbreaking and hugely rewarding and we had lots of government money going into it.
It was a time of great change and a massive shift in attitudes.

@JennyManara I agree that we experiences probably weren't the norm but if our little pocket of society held these opinions, they probably also happened in other pockets too. I think it was a way of parents distancing themselves from potential horror. it wasn't enough to say "that wouldn't happen here" because it did, but they could say "it won't happen to us because we've instructed our dc properly". It was all done with the best of intentions but ultimately misguided in execution.

@summerremembered Yes I can understand that parents might use that as a defence mechanism from the horror. I think it is the same defence mechanism that causes some parents to be totally vicious on social media to parents whose kids have been snatched.

I remember at my school , the headmaster refused to take a pupil who had Down syndrome ,she was fairly high functioning and in this day and age would have managed in a mainstream school with support ,but he was just allowed to make a decision due to her diagnosis and she did end up going to another mainstream school

We certainly knew plenty about ADD / ADHD in our county, ASD was becoming better understood but was concentrated in specialist schools rather than in the units that appeared in the nineties, dyslexia and dyspraxia were diagnosed frequently and had support from peripatetic specialist teachers. We also had a brand new resource centre with full-time staff. We were very keen on developing multi-disciplinary teams with health professionals.
Actually I think schools today would be pretty grateful for the resources that poured in, in the eighties and nineties.
Of course there is never enough funding and the situation was still very far from perfect.

Yes schools could reject children with disabilities in the 80's. It was the 90's that changed.
Interestingly I remember in the late 80's meeting a parent with a severely disabled child who was angry that the definition of disability was expanding. Because the local council was saying publicly it had increased its budget for kids with disabilities, but it had in fact actually cut its budget for kids with severe disabilities.

On the subject of disabilities what where special schools like in the 80,s ? I remember doing a placement a t a disability daycentre for children , one mother had four sons with severe disabilities,they just went to the daycentre I don't know why the didn't go to school it might have been her choice , my son goes to a special school so this interests me .

School toilet paper was like tracing paper or greasproof baking paper. What was that all about?

@x2boys
I did a course at the local FE college in social care in the 80s (I suppose it would be like BTEC now). Anyway we had placements in different environments including special schools. In my borough at the time there were x2 schools for children with severe learning disabilities (but back then they were termed 'mentally handicapped'), 1 or 2 for children with mild learning disabilities and I think 2 for children with physical disabilities. I think there was also a school for children with emotional/behavioural problems.

There was at the time more available for children with special needs. The large hospitals were closing so a lot was being put into community care. There was a fair bit of respite care homes, which seem to be lacking now.

@Spidey66 we were not using the term mentally handicapped in the eighties. Moderate learning difficulty, severe learning difficulty, profound and multiple learning difficulty and emotional and behavioural difficulty were what we used.
In my experience most special schools were good, caring places but sometimes expectations of achievement needed to be raised.

Handicapped was definitely still a widely used term in the 80s.

For anyone who is interested this is what tthe Warnock Report set out. It was law by 1981.
www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803121057612

They may have started being used then, but were not commonplace. I was at college in the mid 80s and worked in an NHS unit for people with learning disabilities in the late 80s till I did my mental health nurse training. Mentally handicapped was definitely the term we used then. I didn't hear of learning disabilities until the 90s. I've worked in learning disability and mental health nursing since 1986.

I have no doubt the use of the word handicapped persisted in general society (it still does in France), but schools and professionals working with the children had changed to the Warnock recommendations.

Yes I think it persisted in the health service Spidey66, though not amongst the OTs and SLTs that worked with schools.

Mencap was still using the phrase “mentally handicapped” in the early 90s when I volunteered with them. Even now they still retain the name of the charity despite its origins.

Language evolves all the time regarding disability ,for autism some people prefer ASC rather than ASD for example ,I'm of and age where I remember derogatory terms used as insults such as "Spaz" "Mong" etc but recently I have heard "special" being used as an insult which I assume is in relation to special needs .

I was just leaving school in the 80's.
There was poverty - Thatcher was a bitch.
No hope job wise. I left school and I signed on.
There wasn't the huge stigma with being unemployed as everyone was.There were very few opportunities.
There was the cheese mountain. We all got given excess cheese.
It was all big hair and large shoulder pads.
Dallas was huge.
I was into rock/metal so was kind of into different music to everyone else generally. We dressed and identified others as being into the same thing and would meet up in clubs/pubs.

The stationery was AMAZING. Paperchase was like Mecca

Me too neveradullmoment we thought we looked alternative in reality we all.looked the same males and females always is all had long luscious hair ,spandex and tight jeans etc 😂

The perms! The double denim!

A PP mentioning DV upthread has just reminded me of one time I was at my then boyfriend's parents, back in '88. One of their neighbours had had the police round and my bf's mum told me they couldn't do anything anyway because it was 'a domestic'. I remember being outraged.

I was 8-18 in the 80's. Lots of memories.
Wet look gel, Jackie magazine, Dewberry perfumes, bottle tops on our shoes. I look at the school-leaving girls in my sons year and it seems just how unsophisticated we were in comparison. My school leavers outfit was a pencil skirt and padded shouldered blouse from C&A, no glam prom dresses or fake tan for us.
My dad worked In manufacturing and spent most if this decade with the threat of redundancy hanging over him. We went camping for our holidays, almost guaranteed sun.
Lots of tragedies too this decade, Hillsborough, Zeebrugge, Pioer Alpha, the Kings Cross fire etc. A century of extremes in many ways.