Things your parents did that you wouldnt dream of?

[Frasersmum123]

Is there anything that your parents did when you were younger that you wouldnt do?

Our used to leave us in the car while they went shopping, for what seemed like hours, but in reality was probably about half an hour.

There was 4 of us and we all used to squeeze into the back of my dads car, which had three seats.

My Dad left me in the back of a hire car once, I'd fallen asleep and he forgot me. He got home and my mum went spare, but all was well as I'd woken up and they'd found me and taken me into the office, where I was given sweets and cola. Makes me shudder though, anything could have happened really.

My Mum used to give us all an ex-lax tablet on Christmas eve to clear us out and make space for Christmas Dinner the next day. Worked well until one year (I was about 8 and my brothers were 4) we all shat our beds and she had to clean them come Chrimbo morning! Ha ha, served her right. How awful really though?

My parents used to smoke in the car, it made me want to vomit and i think i did on occasion - my parents used to tell people i was travel sick!.

oh, smoked when she was pregnant too!!! smoked in the house - can you notice a theme here!! Used to drag me out bowling every single night, i used to get really tired.

left me outside in pram all day

no seat belt in car - used to let me sit in the back of estate car.

made me wear reins and thinks im bad for not putting them on dd (3.5)

i can remember being sat in the back of the car with my bro and sis and going around a corner wearing no seat belts shouting lean and all squashing upto one another and we were aloud to drink cola out of glass bottles from a young age as much as we liked

My mother used to get the Child Benefit from the Post Office and then go and pay the off licence bill with it. I love the off licence though (spent a lot of time there) because they let me watch them fill the soda syphons.

I pay the electricity and gas with my Child Benefit [polishes halo]

DP and I are pissing ourselves at having ex-lax on Xmas Eve! Ok to make you have room for Xmas dinner, but why?

the Texas Chainsaw Masacre reminds me of another one... My mom took me to see Tommy when I was about 10... I ran screaming from the cinema!

We used to go on holiday with our neighbours, all travelling in the back of my dad's transit van. 4 kids and next door's dad on 3 double bus seats around a home made table covered in sticky backed plastic with a bucket handy for toilet / travel sickness emergencies, not a seatbelt in sight and all 4 parents smoking like chimneys. We had a ball!
We went to Pontins and we'd be left in our chalets - they relied on a listening service where a blue coat would walk up and down outside all the chalets and if they heard crying they'd flash the chalet number up on a board in the ballroom - I'm sure they don't offer that service anymore!

seven of us in the boot of my dads estate.
Smoking everywhere, seem to remember always having a chesty cough!
Mum giving us egg sherry some mornings before school...yummmm...very good for you you know- it has raw egg in it - killing brain cells off with booze, yap a great start for a day in school!! (amazingly none of us are alcoholics)
Being aloud to play without them really knowing where I was til dark.
Them thinking sending me to Scotland at age 6 to stay with my older sister for 6 weeks was a good idea.

We were allowed to play outside mainly down by the river for hours on end with the only restriction being-

'Stay away from the weir and be home by tea!'

I guess we were about 6 & 9 and came across some bloke wanking in a field - my mum went out looking for him but we weren't ever banned from going there again!

Oh where do I start?
Getting the bus home aged 6.
Going to the shops to buy mums cigarettes aged 7.
Being brought home from the hospital in a moses basket stuck on the front seat.
Spending all day out and about and being told to come home when the street lights went on.
Forgetting me and leaving me at the shops.
Being weaned at 8 weeks.
Smoked and drank when pregnant.
How on earth did we survive?

Drink driving with us in the car (Dad's night out with mates at country pub).
Smoking around us all the time (my Mum).
Us kids asleep with duvets in the boot (back seat down) of an astra estate on a French Motorway at 100 mph when the tyre blew out.
DH was raised entirely on carnation milk and was enourmous as a toddler.
Lots of freedom [sad for my kids emoticon]

Me and my mate went on our first holiday on our own just before my 15th birthday! Had previously been to holiday camp in Somerset (almost 200 miles from home!) with parents a few times, but can't begin to imagine how this solo holiday came about. Got coach to nearest town where my Uncle picked us up and dropped us off at site. Stayed for the week, own chalet/full board. Another friends dad picked us up the following Saturday (they'd been at a nearby resort the same week) and put all three of us girls on the coach back home!

I'm an only one and my Mum is really overprotective about a lot of things and quite highly strung (e.g. wouldn't let me go on school trip to France when I was 12)so have absolutely no idea what she was on when she agreed to it (quite readily as I remember!)

I had a late 70's/80's childhood...

My dad gave up smoking when Mum fell pregnant with me. Mum didn't...!

Can't ever remember being strapped into the car, and had plenty of trips sat on peoples laps or rattling round in the back of estate cars belonging to friends parents - occasionally with a couple of alsations for company!

Managed to survive measles, mumps, rubella and a particularly nasty bout of whooping cough which left me needing physio for a collapsed lung

Was allowed to watch Dallas, Dynasty and the Kenny Everett show - must have been about 5 at the time

From about 8 used to go romping off over the fields and woods behind our house with my little (boy) friend from the next street, for 2-4 hours at a time

My dp was taught to drive a tractor at 5. Off-road, of course, but still...

Also, seeing the last few posts:

Used to do the 7 mile round trip into town and back with a friend or 2 from about 10YO

Can never remember a time when I didn't drink coffee (Mum used to make me 'milk and a dash' - hot milk with coffee in it - as a bedtime drink. No wonder the doc prescribed Phenergan for me !)

Uncle "converted" an old bread van for us all to travel in - 6 of them, 4 of us - with chairs nailed to the floor around a central table so we could play games etc no seatbelts.

Dipping sticks of rhubarb in sugar as a healthy snack

Riding Dad's motorbike around the back garden with no helmet

Learning how to make home brew aged 8

Would never do this now, but looking back it was all such fun, and all of us survived...

I used to be allowed to lie on the parcel shelf and roll on to the back seat of the car to amuse myself on long journeys! And we used to pile 5 kids in the back of the car-2 used to sit in footwells, and mum used to tell us to put coats over the footwell kids if we went past a policeman.

Also properly camping out in the back of the car. And dad leaving me on my own in the cottage (from about 6/7) to go to the pub when I stayed with him.

Was also allowed to play in various fields on my own, but if there were gypsies camping in them I wasn't to talk to them!!

Oh yeah-cooking apples in a bowl of sugar, mmmmmm!!!

Did anybody else have half an orange with a sugar cube stuck in the middle? Lardy cake? My (wartime baby) parents are obsessed with sugar and fat.

oh yeah, weaned at 2 months on weetabix, fish and scrambled egg (because scrambled egg is soooo digestible for newborns...).

Being left in the house with my brother and the neighbour's kid while the adults all went to the pub. We'd dive- bomb into the sofa and trampoline on it all night. One of the men would bring us a glass bottle of Coke and a packet of crisps at some point and check we hadn't burnt the place down. It was great. Playing knock and run, and Spotlight with a torch on winter evenings.

Walking to school from the age of 5- me too. Going out all day long up the woods. Walking for miles and miles and miles on a Saturday, to the other side of the mountain, when we were 8 or so. Belting around on horses, having had no lessons at all, terrified but loving it. Discovering an abandoned warehouse full of rubbish (ie.treasures) and spending about 3 days climbing over piles of broken glass and mangled steel to dig out old dolls and stuff, when we were 8 or 9.
I remember people giving their kids milky sweet tea; and feeding a crying baby whisky to calm it down.

But then my father tells me he used to go off with his friend in a sailing boat they'd cobbled together to camp on a sand spit in the estuary every weekend when they were 12/13 or so. And his awful mother used to lock him and his little brother in the bedroom for the night at 4pm so she could go and spend the whole afternoon and evening at her sister's.

smoked endlessly everywhere

my mother used objects riding whip etc to hit us with as she didn't want to hur her hands?

left us outside the pub in the car for literally hours with eventually a coat over us and a coke to share

massive lack of security safety and consistency

Oh yes, babysitting my four younger siblings from when I was age 5 onwards (including 3 month old baby sister at that age...) for hours at a time while they were out. There was an earlier attempt at leaving us unsupervised for hours on end which ended in my then 3 yr old sister being taken to hospital to have her stomach pumped after I encouraged her to eat a mothball- as a scientific experiment you understand, not part of an evil plot to kill her. I was 4!

We used to be let out to play and would be out for hours,my older brother,me some other children,even when I was very small,four or five maybe,but everyone did that in the late 60's.I wish I could give my dc's more freedom than I do in fact.Rhubarb dipped in sugar,I'd forgotten that,is that so terrible? The same as stewed rhubarb surely?
We were big on jam sanwiches in our house,as a snack..yum,white bread,lots of cold butter and a thick layer of jam.My folks were quite protective actually,but smacking!We were smacked for such trivial things.Horrible.
My friend's father drove his vintage car around the common with several of us little girls clinging to the BONNET.I have never really thought about that until now!

Driving down to the coast for the summer holiday. 7 hours in the car with my dad smoking like a chimney.

And of course driving back home at night after a party and too many drinks.

That was late 70is.

Riding into town with a friend (we were 8 or 9) through not-so-deserted-fields since a woman was raped there!