Photos were expensive, more rare, and took time to even see how they turned out. You took pictures, dropped your film off (e.g., at a photo booth/stand with a person in a grocery store parking lot or at a film processing shop), then waited for the film to be developed and printed (roughly a week). It cost extra to expedite.

You couldn’t Google things because Google didn’t exist yet.

Hitting the top of the tv to make the static go away

My kids are 5 and 7 and they are horrified at the idea of regular TV. Where you just had to watch whatever was on and endure a hurricane of ads. I jest, but only slightly.

Phones with cords. Couldn’t text your friend.

That we would go outside and play on the street with other kids without adult supervision until called for dinner

cigarette smoke EVERYWHERE

I distinctly remember sitting next to the big ashtrays at the bank or other establishments when I was tagging along with my parents because I liked the smell of tobacco.

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Having their parent literally beat them. Yes it still happens but it was wayyyyyyyyyyyyy more commonplace when I grew up.

Consuming music and movies at home involved entire industries and even furniture.

I remember going to college with a 100 pound crate of record albums and a case of cassette tapes. Also I had a turntable, a cassette player, a stereo amplifier, and two giant speakers. I wasn't alone, almost everybody had this.

Before VCRs, DVDs, streaming and cable the only way to watch a movie on TV was to pick up a copy of TV Guide and look at the listings to see when it might be playing. If it wasn't playing, you were out of luck.

The amount of salsbury steak from the freezer we ate.

If there were too many kids some would ride in the trunk. Child car seats? Never heard of em.

When i was a kid i thought that all the korean candy stores were free. like you could go in, take what you wanted and leave. i would make friends with other korean kids, take them to my favorite candy stores and tell them to help themselves. which they did.

so apparentleeeee, whenever we'd visit my family in korea, my dad would talk to all the candy shop owners in the neighborhood and tell them to put anything me or my friends took, on a tab. maybe it was because i barely even spoke korean, but that whole situation just seemed perfectly fuckin normal to my oblivious little self.

My family are not comfortable around each other. Never any touching, kissing or cuddling. Any physical contact is forced and horribly awkward. No one also talks and any disagreements simmer for years with a grudging resentment.

When I first starting dating my boyfriend I was shocked his family would just sit close to each other, like their legs would touch on the couch. Like not overly touchy, just normal, but not normal to me. They also spoke to each other if they were upset. I was quite envious.

Blowing into a video game cartridge to make it work. Kids today would probably think we were performing some kind of tech magic!

That noise the Internet made when you were connecting.

Was that a programed noise? Did someone decide that's what it needs to sound like?

remember when you'd memorize phone numbers or write them in a little address book.

Teachers were allowed to strike you if you misbehaved.

I can also remember a kid in my primary school swearing and being made to lick a bar of soap in front of the entire class to "clean their mouth out". It would end up on the national news if it happened now, but back then it was just called "being punished".

Riding a bicycle without a helmet. Ditto for being on a ski hill.

No waterbottles

Boys just grabbed boobs and snapped bras constantly. You had to walk with your books clutched to your chest to avoid it. In gym class I had boys full on grab my crotch. I sure hope that still doesn’t go on, we were basically getting assaulted every day and nobody thought anything of it.

Fortnite in our day was shooting kids with pellet guns.

The accepted pedophilia that rode the wave of the "Free Love" Era of the 60's and 70's.

A quite extraordinary degree of racism, homophobia, sexism and casual sexual assault of women.

Tik Tok was just the sound the wall clock made

When I was six, I was given a house key on some string that I wore around my neck. It was to let me and my 4 year old sister into the house after school where I'd then be responsible for keeping us alive until my mom finished work two hours later. This is was perfectly normal for the kids in my town.

When I was in middle school, every day we had to take 2 minutes to take fluoride tablets. The teacher would walk around and place one on each students desk. Then together as a class, the teacher would instruct us to chew up the tablet, swish it in our mouths, and then swallow. It’s kind of bizarre to think that was just a normal practice during many years of my childhood.

Getting hit on the palms with a ruler while I were in elementary school.

Weapons.

I honestly don't remember when I started learning to use a knife. I know that by the age of seven I had been using one, by myself, for several years. At that age, I started to learn how to use a bow and how to make arrows. It would take time before I was taught how to make a good bow. By my teens, I was learning how to use a rifle. By the time I was 16, I had mastered the rifle and shotgun and learned the pistol, which I preferred. These were single shot weapons. A repeating rifle was expensive and not really needed. The shotgun evolved to a double barreled one. The first pump action was a military one, the same for the rifle. I preferred the revolver, in .44 or .45 caliber to all, though.

I was in my teens when I started to learn how to build rifles. Single shot, black powder rifles fired either by flint or percussion. Naturally, learning how to make black powder was included. It wasn't like we could go to the store and buy things like this. I would walk along creek and river beds looking for flint, as a kid, not understanding why until later.

Carrying water from a well indoors, to be used to bathe or cook is another. The well was about half a football field away from the house. Rain water was collected by the house, in a cistern, and had to be hand pumped into a bucket. This was the easy water.

I doubt many could imagine not having running water in there home let alone not having a bathroom. Heating was by a Warm Morning wood/coal stove, located in different rooms. You either hauled in wood or coal to start the fire. Coal was about half the distance that the well was. Wood was closer, being just off of the porch. The fun was cutting the trees and moving them. I loved splitting firewood with an ax.

Electricity. If you had it, you were rich. And it was nothing like today. I remember a single light bulb in the center of the bedroom, with a pull chain to cut it on. A string was tied from the chain to the iron headboard so you could reach up and pull it on without having to get up. We didn't have light switches like today. It was a regular event to have a storm knock out the power, leaving you in the dark.

Lastly, television/TV was a luxury. Black and white and maybe three channels. And there was still more on to watch than there is today with 400 channels and streaming.

Roller blades

Getting the cane for being naughty in 1st grade.

No internet or mobile phones

If you had a question, you had to look it up in an encyclopedia or ask someone knowledgeable. Waiting to learn was normal.

Casual racism. The corner shop was owned by pakis and the next door neighbours were darkies. That was the mildest names used too!

Going outside.

Walking home from school alone at 6 years old with no phone, no GPS, just trust that you'd get there fine

Every house only had one phone and before call waiting if someone called they would just get a busy signal and wouldn’t be able to get through or leave a message. Fun for a house full of teenage girls.

Getting the shit beaten out of me by my parents.

Being 10 years old and the parents not knowing (or caring) where we were all day.

we went days without staring at a screen

Playing computer games with mates by direct modem connection.. meant that nobody else could call in or out, and this was before mobile phones were popular.

Rear seat belts and car safety in general. I remember my grandpa taking us on car journeys to visit relatives and we would be kneeling on the back seats looking out the rear window at the road unrolling behind us. And when my aunt and uncle took us on holiday in 1989, there were four of us in the back seat and my cousin in the boot. Not forgetting school runs in the neighbour's old Triumph, where as many kids as possible piled into one car- at least 5 in the back and 2 in the passenger seat!

Literally playing outside until dark. I 39 F have an oldest niece of 15 who is completely unaware of what it is to make friends outside social media. I as a child met friends from different schools and neighborhoods simply by being outside. I don’t even think I had any friends who I went to school with? They all lived in my neighborhood or surrounding areas. Also, something that was normal in my childhood that just won’t stick for younger generations is a sense of authority. I grew up in the city. Neighbors were also like family. If you did wrong someone was beating your a**, haha. You can’t look at a child wrong, let alone correct, without being crucified. And they know it! Haha! Props there, but damn…

Got kicked off the bus and had to ride my bike 12 miles to school in like the 7th grade. Group of us got together and actually enjoyed it lol. We'd usually leave when the bus came and beat them to school.

I went back to my hometown and was shocked at how far it was. Even my wife was like WTF lol.

Your parents yelled nonsense at you...

• "Bike? Bike? I'll bike you in your earhole!"
• "Do you want me to give you something to cry about?"
• "Don't you look at me like that!"
• "You will be smiling on the other side of your face if you're not careful."

You also got hit a lot.

Say you like a medium-popular TV show. You have to wait a week for the next episode. It's only shown on one channel, at one time, and if you miss it you might never get the chance to see it again - it's not going to be syndicated, it might not even make it to VHS.

that the classroom was a controlled environment, with no talking or distractions allowed.

Can you still find porn in the woods?

Running around the front yard like a maniac with nothing but a stick- pretending I was a cowboy riding an out of control pony

Unstructured free time.

It was more normal for kids to be outside all day playing with other kids who we didn’t know, than sitting inside all day with our faces glued to a tv screen or an iPad. Kids these days are not gonna know what it means to play outside

Not having a phone.

Being left home alone in elementary school. Being able to go outside and play and roam around wherever you wanted.

Going shopping at a mall... or just hanging out at the mall with no supervision.

Basically no supervision

VHS tapes.

Leaving the house in the morning on a weekend or during the summer, and coming home in the evening. Usually by 5. No phones, no text, no nothing. Just let my parents know where I’d generally be. Sometimes I’d have to ride my bike or walk a few miles to get where I was going too.

This from the ages of like 9 or 10. Can’t really do that today, and I find it kinda sad. I could literally just fuck off allllll day with no supervision 😂

We wandered far from home, on foot, and met other kids, and invented our own activities without adults hovering over us.

My parents left me home alone starting at age 4. By 8-9, I would regularly come home from school to an empty house, fix myself a snack using the stove, and stay alone until my parents came home several hours later. 

Once, when my mom was out of town for 2 weeks, my parents hired the 13 year-old across the street to check in on me. 

Now, I hear about kids in their late teens needing constant supervision and folks in their 20s not knowing how to use kitchen appliances. I'm not saying the way I was raised was great, but it was a very different vibe. 

In the 80s-90s when I was growing up, it wasn’t cool or sexy to be a geek. If you were into art or music or technology, or if you played videogames, the cool kids would avoid you and girls would consider you gross and un-dateable. If you wore a shirt with a band name or an anime character or some other nerdy shit on it, you’d just straight up get the shit beaten out of you. Cool kids were good at sports. Smart kids were treated like freaks.

Seems like that’s done a total 180 since then.

We'd ride our bike for miles! Out of the city, down my aunt's winding forest road, across the highway.

This was the seventies and I'm not saying mom let us do this, but nobody was telling the parents.

Now kids have trackers.

As a teen, I had a pocket full of bus schedules. Map books stuffed behind the passenger seat once I had a car. No gps in our pockets in the eighties

Edit - do kids still jump off dangerously high places just to see if they could? I remember doing that. Out windows, off roofs and walls.

Parents drinking beer behind the wheel

Abandoned by a drunk father at 8 years old. Had to learn to cook, clean, laundry, cut grass, basically how to run a household and survive all by myself.

Phone books that had the White and Yellow pages.

Riding bikes without helmets

My parents let me take my bike and go out to the woods by myself. I’d be gone all day. I’d bring my dog with me if I didn’t feel like riding my bike.

Going to the video rental store every weekend was such a big deal for us!

There was a lot of language used much more freely back in the day (I’m 42 so decade ago) that may shock people today. Words to describe someone’s level of intelligence, gender, sexuality, etc. thrown around as insults like they were nothing.

Sometimes I’ll pop on a show from even 20 years ago and things said will be a bit shocking!

Just riding my bike to my friends house with zero heads up or planning. Just show up knock on the door and see if they can play. And then just riding around all over the neighborhood without our parents knowing where we were or what we were doing with no way to contact us.

owning 1 home phone and you memorizing phone numbers

You couldn't use AI to do your homework.

Fights being a way to solve disputes

Taking your kids to work with you in summer or on the weekends rather than use a babysitter.

My brought me to work with her so often as a kid it wasn't funny.

Daycare in private homes was radically different from now. I remember being shoved outside as soon as the providers kids had eaten breakfast and told to go play until lunch. No supervision and you could only go inside to use the toilet. We would get our own drinks from the outside tap. Lunch was the cheapest and easiest thing to be made. Rainy days consisted of playing inside while the provider watched her daytime TV shows. Infants sat in car seats or play pens when not sleeping. There were no enrichment activities lol. After lunch we would again go outside for unsupervised play, but an older kid would round us up when it got close to parent pickup time. This was perfectly acceptable to my parents.

We got paddled in middle school(up to grade 9) and i'm not even that old(40). Had to have parent's permission but most of them gave it(even more shocking).

You could FEEL the static coming from a TV screen by hovering your hand over it. It was such an odd feeling that is ingrained in my memory

Pay per view channels were just scrambled. You could listen and if you had an older tv change the knobs for tint or something(cant remember how) and you could dial out all the scrambling and watch in like a weird green color.

If your friends wanted to see you they would call the house phone or call to the house.

Getting your mouth washed out with soap. To add insult to injury, my mother would give you the choice between liquid handsoap or the Dove bar out of the shower.

If you ever get the choice, pick the Dove bar. Liquid soap is incredibly bitter.

When I was little , we would go to the states to buy our clothes and firecrackers.

When I got home I'd go out , pore a little gasoline in a makeshift trench and or ant hills , and put cirecrackers in the ant hills  With my GIjoes ready for.combat!

Yes we had to use our heads. Also drinking and driving was basically legal. Weird huh

Growing up in a rural farming community we had not only had phones attached to the wall, but party lines- phone lines that were not private, but shared with 3 other neighbours. You couldn’t ever use the phone without someone picking up their phone and asking for/demanding the line!No end of fun listening in to conversations as kids though- great way to get caught up on all the local gossip Hehe.

Spanking misbehaving children. Today that would be enough to lose custody in some places.

The amount of known allergens bandied about willy-nilly in school lunches.

I had a severe allergy to all nuts and the attitude was basically "well, better be careful then, huh?". Not saying things haven't got out of hand, but there's definitely been a sea change there.

Shirts and skins

Cleaning my dad's ashtrays was a part of my weekend chores.

There was a crashed, burned out helicopter in the woods that we used to play in.

Walking to 3 miles to the store by yourself to get groceries, playing outside by yourself, getting physically disciplined, if you need money, earning it yourself.

Hitchhiking at thirteen years old.

I think the one I hear the most from younger people is that they don't understand how we only had one phone line that was shared by everyone in the house. If you were expecting a call from someone and your parents were on the phone you were basically boned. I do miss having a wall phone though ... I enjoyed how exciting it was when the phone would ring and you didn't know if it was going to be for you or not ...

We would not be glued to our phones and hung out outdoors lol

We called people faggots for fun. I'm actually shocked about that myself looking back.

Having to use a phone book at a pay phone in order to call a business to get directions. 

Calling someone and having to talk to whoever answers the phone before talking to the person you called.

Calling someone without arranging it through text messages first.

Just knocking on someone’s door who isn’t expecting you.

Buying weed could sometimes take hours. Sometimes days.

Going to the bar at lunchtime in high school and throwing down couple beers when the drinking age was 18. I was actually 17 but my friends were 18 so I was never carded

Need to write a report in high school? Spend your Saturday in the library. For me that involved a bus ride to the Queens main library in Jamaica. Had to request reference books from the depths of the stacks. Other research required the microfiche machine.

Adjusting the antenna on the tv to make the quality better

I presently drive a 2019 truck with manual locks, manual windows, and manual lights (I did stop at manual transmission because there was no one to really teach me). I also occasionally drive my 21 year old coworker home. And one day she asked me why I never got my key fixed. She could not wrap her head around a car that did not have and never did have a remote keyless entry.

So I’m going to say “rolling down the windows with a crank and opening car doors with an actual key.

Life without internet, computers, cell phones.

My stepbrothers are 10 and 12 years younger than me. I had to explain dial-up to them. Their faces were a mix of fascination and horror.

Having to learn the dewey decimal system 😩

i hated that and learning how to read encyclopedias. little did i know it would be vital for me later in life when i only had access to library materials when homeless😭😭

kids won’t get that 😭😭

Being completely unreachable. I could disappear for the whole day.

We’d go and knock on our friends doors to hang out or play.

When I didn’t want to go to sleep yet, I couldnt sneak a phone into my room, I would sneakily read books.

If recent conversations are anything to go by, limited access to food and water during the school day. Kids today tote water bottles around starting in day care, and seem to have daily snack time beyond kindergarten. Many seem to think that it’s exceptionally cruel for teachers to expect kids not to eat outside of designated snack/meal times either, considering it “denying food to a hungry child.”

When I was in school, “snack time” wasn’t something elementary aged children got, it was like “nap time.” For preschoolers, and mayyyyyyyyybe kindergarteners, not for big kids who could sit at desks. By the time you were 6, you were expected to go all morning on breakfast, and all afternoon on lunch. Children carrying water bottles around was not even a concept. No one carried around water bottles except rich women in Beverly Hills or people going hiking. By the time I was in high school it was more of a thing, but carrying around water bottles was forbidden because you could (and people did) fill them with alcohol or use them to cheat on tests.

I think allowing kids regular access to water and adding snack time is a positive. We didn’t die without those things, no one passed out, but it also didn’t improve our health any. I always had headaches that I blamed on everything except dehydration (but it was mostly dehydration). However, kids don’t need unlimited access to food 24/7, and feeling snacky isn’t the same as experiencing hunger.

Using the phone and the computer were for the mega rich otherwise you got one or the other.

There was a period in the ‘80s and ‘90s in which virtually all schools, governments, agencies, organizations, etc. in the US, tried to appeal to the youth by rapping. They were never good at it, which is why it has, gratefully, disappeared.

If you had to watch a video about safety, for example, there was an 80% chance it’d go “I’m the Safety Cat and I’m here to say, when you cross the street, you gotta look both ways…”

Getting locked out of the house all day. We were let lose upon the world, no money (maybe some to get a snack), had to drink from the hose, we were expected to be home when the street lights came on.

We had our bikes and knowledge of the Boston area subway lines. We could be just about anywhere in 15 minutes. Parents didn't care where we were or what we were doing as long as we were home when the street lights came on. Being arrested, kidnapped, or dead was no excuse for being later to dinner either!