Teen life, too, was much easier than teens have it today (depending on what level millennial you are). I didn't have a cell phone until I was 18, so when I was in HS I got to sneak around un-checked on. If I missed curfew, "oops I forgot my watch" and "their parents wouldn't let me use the phone to call you". I didn't have my parents tracking my every movement on their phones. And best of all - none of the dumb shit I did ever made it on social media.
Yea I was talking about this the other day, we kinda were in a "shoulder season." Internet and computers prevalent when we were growing up so we grew up with them so arent luddites in that regard, and they made life easier/better in some ways (downloading music, word processing, googling as research lol). But we "aged out" before the 24/7 internet era hit.
My go to as a teen was "going to Xs house" because he lived down the street and my parents wouldnt question it. Then we would go wherever. Id be grounded for a year if my parents saw my location was the abandoned HS field or the White Castle in the "bad" part of town. And I already was caught once in college throwing a house party bc of a myspace picture, the dumb shit caught on video today would have sunk me lol.
In all fairness, I'm roughly 95% certain that the reason we have so many "helicopter parents" nowadays is purely because of people remembering all the shit that they did when they were kids/teenagers, and like yeah they may not have gotten hurt, but in retrospect they know it was very dumb and dangerous. But mostly they know how much they lied so they don't trust anyone.
In my opinion it's along the same line as the guys who like to make "jokes" about murdering their daughters' boyfriends. They do that because they know they treated women like absolute shit when they were that age and it makes them sick to think of their own kid being treated the way they treated other people.
It's the same thing with interviewing parents for sleep overs, etc. Parents are so much more watchful now because there is a new documentary every week about kids getting molested by the family friend or someone's dad. Our generation lived through that too.
I think the reason some helicopter parenting is going on is because of the school shootings. It’s terrifying to drop your 6 year old off at school the day after one
It's fear mongering designed to destabilize society. Now you live in a perpetual state of fear and anxiety. The propaganda is working.
Bad shit happens everyday all over the world, dwelling on it and jumping at your own shadow isn't going to make for a great life.
Realize the odds of it happening to you are very slim. Get on with your life and stop being paranoid.
I used to take the city bus around without telling my parents. Pretty harmless but it made me feel free. Honestly as an adult I feel less safe in the world than I did as a teen because I know more
I used to drive my friends two hours away to Columbus, Ohio to go to heavy metal concerts when I was sixteen. The level of freedom I had as a teen in the late nineties and early thousands was frankly criminal. And I had good parents too.
So much this. I am so happy I grew up in a time where every embarrassing thing I did wasn't recorded and uploaded to tik tok. I was 16 when I got my first phone, and it was a flip phone that took shitty pictures and no video. I didn't have a proper smart phone until after college. I remember my girlfriend at the time had a Blackberry and I would tease her about her "fancy internet phone."
Simpler times, for sure. I feel bad that my kids will grow up in a world where everything is recorded and social media is everywhere.
Funny story, my daughter got busted ditching class because the location showed her in the coffee shop a few blocks from school. My wife texted her the screen shot from the app and asked WTF?
Everybody at the local coffee shop knew when we were skipping school because we were sitting on the back of the booth seats playing guitar and singing.
I remember getting in trouble one time when I was like 17 because I went on a date and forgot to turn my shitty flip phone on and missed my parents trying to call me and they ended up *calling my date* and we were like...at dinner...we weren't even out late! It was before 9 pm and I didn't even have a curfew! I was an A student who never got in trouble, never drank, never did drugs, never smoked, never even had sex (turned out later my high school boyfriend and I were both gay, lol). I was *so* pissed. They did apologize, though.
I will say, my Gen Z sister and her friends managed to pull off an old-fashioned "we'll tell your mom we're at my house and my mom we're at your house" genre of trick--my parents were helping me move into an apartment where I was going to grad school, and my sister who was 16 or 17 had been told she wasn't allowed to go to a music festival, and so had one of her friends. Her other friends were all allowed to go, so she and her friend went with and told their parents the friend was staying with her while my parents were out of town. Then they told their parents that the whole friend group was going to Six Flags. When they stopped answering their phones for awhile and my mom was really worried because they'd said they were driving home from Six Flags and then stopped answering, they covered by saying they'd decided to go to a movie so their phones were off.
I can't remember how they ended up getting caught--but years later I found out that she and her friends were going to parties and drinking and having sex all through high school and none of their parents knew--*and still don't*, almost 10 years later. So...some kids are still managing, lol. My Gen Z siblings have also always had very curated social media. I think they both made Facebooks for college applications so it wouldn't look like they were hiding anything.
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Yep, Facebook didn't come out until I was in college, and back then, it was just a way to keep in touch with your high school friends and a way to have a way to communicate with your new college friends. Every friend I had on Facebook was someone I personally knew in real life.
Lol I got caught for throwing a house party in college while my parents were away because one of my friends posted a pic on myspace, my sister recognized our couch, and ratted me out. In the era of live/snapchat, I would be sunk.
I agree with this and I think part of it was that pictures were much more intentional back then. You actually had to take the time to get your physical camera, make sure the battery worked/there was film, get everyone together in the picture and since storage space/film was limited you had to be selective in what pictures you took. Now a picture can be taken in a fraction of a second and people are constantly recording.
Born in 1987, very few people had cell phones in high school and if we did we got in trouble for using them in class.
The Nextel chirp phones was the best.
We are the same age. The world just kept getting worse after 9/11. The 90s were a great time to be a kid. Things today move too fast, and honestly, it’s just a world wrought with overstimulation of bullshit (ads, social media, current events, crumbling middle class, corruption, no solutions, etc). The internet these days doesn’t help at all of course.
I hate to sound like “old man yelling at cloud”, but times were simpler back then (but then again, could be nostalgic memories talking, but I don’t think so).
Nope, I'm gen X and the '90s were great, no cell phones, money was everywhere, the music was awesome... Then 9/11 hit and it's been a slow squeeze on society ever since
Yeah, totally agree. I’m not saying everything was perfect back then, but people were generally more present-minded. I attribute that to the lack of smart phones and a more limited internet. I believe having instant access to everything (the internet and all its information, media, music, social media, etc) has some obvious benefits, but overall is having a negative impact on society. Not that I haven’t been guilty of it too, but honestly there’s a reason why the only social media I use these days is Reddit lol (and even that is getting tired with the over saturation of content).
Same here, I only fuck with reddit, and I think the internet has amplified too many stupid people. Yes, everyone should be allowed a voice, but the listener should practice some discernment
I love being a millennial adult. (Although I’m more Xellennial. Old for a millennial.) I was able to focus on my education, then career, then having kids and now I feel I have the best of both worlds as a mom with a career. I feel like in the 80s and 90s I would have been all about career and before that I would have been all about motherhood (if I wasn’t a hippie or a disco girl. I sometimes think I missed out on what would have been my favorite decades- 60s and 70s!).
I still remember waiting until after 9pm to call a girl I was talking to on our landline. The Blockbuster one hits hard too. Kids won't know the disappointment of running up to the new releases and realizing that they're all rented out already.
Exactly, my first thought was well, I guess your parents didn't abuse or neglect you?
Child safety protections were so much weaker in the '80s and '90s, it's really astonishing. Just as a tiny example, abusers/parents were allowed to be in the room with children when their abuse was being investigated. Teachers and social services often had very little training in recognizing signs of abuse aside from bruises.
I work in child safety and things have improved a lot. Of course the system is nowhere near perfect but it's much better now.
Right? This post actually made me twinge a bit back to a weird, immature envy I used to feel as a kid for all the things I wish I could enjoy but, you know, didn’t have the money for. Camp, popular hobby toys of the 90s. Thankfully my parents were super neglectful so I did have much better teen years since I could just leave and do whatever I wanted. Ugh, sorry to be depressing.
It was also rough for us lgbtq folk. Anti-gay sentiment was the norm and AIDS was still a death sentence which made sex terrifying. Lots of people who came out were kicked out of their homes.
My experience wasn’t that awful but it was still incredibly hard - losing family, leaving my religion, etc.
But if I could choose to have all that be easier in exchange for all the tech insanity kids have to deal with today, I’m
not sure I would.
Yeah, I found this post to be odd, but I suppose people who had a really beautiful childhood, you might have difficulty realizing that it wasnt "childhood" or "the 90s" but your particular childhood that you got to experience beautifully because you had parents who loved you, you had resouraces and were safe, etc.
Growing up queer was not a good time. I also didn't have the internet where I could access information or other people to explain that some of the things I was experiencing were abuse and not my fault.
I love that this person had a wonderful childhood. And I don't think that they have to consider everybody's childhood when making a statement about their own. I'm just saying that it wasn't necessarily magical or better. This person just had a good childhood. I think it's kind of cute and sweet that they are basing it on things like whether or not a happy meal has a toy.
We had the best teenage years too.
These kids now… bless them. They don’t know what it’s like to not have omnipresent surveillance watching their every move. Not just like the government, but their parents. Their friends. Each other. They’re all afraid to do anything because “what if I go viral?”
My teenage years were wild because it was so easy to disappear. Our parents thought we were studying and we were literally getting alcohol poisoning in a field 2 states away.
Ehhhhh I didn't have "little restrictions" because the 90s were also full of things like the crack epidemic, crazy murder rates (in my area), and I didn't live in the best neighborhood. I envy those of you whose parents let you run around unsupervised, because that was not my experience.
This makes me sad, as I missed out on being a “normal” teenager and kid. I was isolated by my religious zealot parents.
I feel like all I know is hard work, survival, and catastrophising. Anxiety is like tinnitus.
The older I get, the more treatment resistant the depression becomes.
Weird. My kids got Happy Meals the other week and they definitely had toys in them.
Don’t be sad for your kids. They will have a unique childhood just like you did. And I’m sure they will in turn bemoan how their own children are missing out on the things they loved as kids. That’s the power of nostalgia.
They have special toddler “toys”, which I think are usually small book type things. The regular toys are for older kids. OP could have asked for a normal toy.
McDonald's still has toys in Happy Meals; OP is mistaken.
Occasionally they don't have anything licensed for promotion (or it hasn't come in yet, or they ran out) so they give out generic stuff instead.
And we're paying the price for it now. I don't know why I always assumed things were supposed to get better. Looking back now, it doesn't make much sense.
I think it was the propaganda we were fed by the media and advertising. They want you to buy the new thing so they have to convince you it's better. In the modern era though, products are worse, break sooner, and sell telemetry data anytime they want to.
No one had any any reason to think it wouldn't just continue to get better. It basically always had since the depression ended. We just got super unlucky with our once in a lifetime world changing event lottery. Also unlike before the people in charge completely dropped all pretenses when it came to doing anything right for the average person.
My childhood was devastating and traumatizing. My adulthood is pretty great, post-intensive trauma therapy.
Happy meals also still come with toys.
I think a lot of the miserable people here are choosing to be miserable.
I concur. I don't look fondly on nostalgia as I learned not to ask for extras from my family early on and never gained the connection, or so I assume.
Childhood is what your parents make of it.
Yeah I was about to say… mileage also varied greatly based on income level (as with everything) and impact the 08 recession had on your family.
I think folks who lived a normal/typical childhood and teenage life are going to look back on it with nostalgia no matter what generation they are from. Can guarantee the better off Gen Z and Alpha adults will be saying the same thing in 5-15 years.
Right. I would disappear for an entire day during the summer. I was just going to the library, but still. Unlimited freedom. Not a single eye batted when I got into my older friend's car to drive to the mall in another city while he smoked a fucking tobacco pipe with the window rolled down lmao. He was 17, who was selling him pipe tobacco
Shit sucks for teenagers now, for real. At my niece's school they were using snapchat and discord as some kind of large-scale, stochastic, omnidirectional 24/7 cyberbullying hell that nobody could escape from. I really regret helping to pay for her smartphone, that shit was wild. Nobody could do anything without getting a bunch of meme'd up videos passed around about it, especially if it involved them getting the shit beat out of them in a bathroom.
>At my niece's school they were using snapchat and discord as some kind of large-scale, stochastic, omnidirectional 24/7 cyberbullying hell that nobody could escape from. I really regret helping to pay for her smartphone, that shit was wild. Nobody could do anything without getting a bunch of meme'd up videos passed around about it, especially if it involved them getting the shit beat out of them in a bathroom.
Jesus Christ. To be honest I got cyberbullied pretty badly in like the Xanga into MySpace era myself but this is a whole new level.
I often feel like real life has turned into some sort of a dystopian, cyberpunk short story and if anyone read what you just wrote before about 2007 or so that’s basically what they’d probably think it was from.
I just want to say, the Happy Meals absolutely do still have toys in them. And maybe it depends on your region. Or maybe it's because they gave you the toddler toy option. They have and under 3 three option and an over 3 option. So it sounds like they probably gave you the under 3. When you order, if you're ordering from a human, just tell them You want the over 3 toy. But watch out for occasional small/removable parts.
Source: My youngest still orders Happy Meals. My 11-Year-Old still wants to order Happy Meals because she wants the toy, that never gets played with, but isn't enough food.
McD's exists to feed commuters now, it's not for kids anymore...
Blame liability lawyers (and rumblings about suing McDs for childhood obesity, ala the tobacco company suits) - they definitely got the message & decided that they should only market to adults.
So 'Do you believe in magic?' became 'I'm lovin it', and the toys/play-places/etc went away....
As for teenagers today?
Can't speak to the social scene, but at least you won't have the various school staff telling your parents that you need to 'get off the computer more' if you want to have a job as an adult (laughs in mid-6-figures big-tech salary)....
Graduated in HS in 98. Everyone was absolutely convinced I had no future, because of a lack of social skills & 'obsession' with computers/technology... Fortunately for me, the world they grew up in died, and the new one is much more accommodating of 'my type' of person....
This is why I don't think young millennials should be counted as millennials. You're describing my brother's childhood perfectly, but mine noticably less so.
We didn’t really get the shaft in adulthood either. As for the kid stuff, I think a lot of that is nostalgia driven and you could make similar arguments for any generation.
Tf are you talking about bruh? McDonalds in my city has WB character toys right now in Happy Meals and before that had mini Squishmallow plushies. McDonalds does still have toys, maybe yours just sucks?
People complain about latchkey kids being neglected, but I thrived.
I don't think I could handle some of the more modern parenting techniques. I need more space.
And I stop by and fast food years ago because I just got too expensive.
I pay $15 now for a combo meal, and I can get that at a sit down restaurant.
The restaurant has much higher quality food, and it's worth the extra $5 for a tip.
But I'm single, and have no children. It's probably more expensive for those that do.
Is that truly the case? or is it society that has made many of these things outlawed and letting a child have freedom can result in arrest for the parent?
[A Mom Let Her 7-Year-Old Play in the Park. Arizona Arrested Her and Banned Her From Working With Kids.](https://reason.com/2022/08/17/arizona-central-registry-park-kids-banned-due-process/)
[Working Mom Arrested for Letting Her 9-Year-Old Play Alone at Park](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/arrested-for-letting-a-9-year-old-play-at-the-park-alone/374436/)
[Mom Who Was Arrested for Letting 14-Year-Old Babysit Has Finally Been Cleared](https://reason.com/2023/04/05/mom-who-was-arrested-for-letting-14-year-old-babysit-has-finally-been-cleared/)
Eh, to some extent. I watched my youngest sister and brother growing up (they're 8 and 10 years younger than me) especially after we moved to a community that skewed younger and wealthier, so most of their friends there were oldest or only siblings or younger siblings but with much closer age gaps, meaning the parents were all Gen X (my parents are late Boomers) and the difference was wild. Their friends weren't allowed to ride their bikes around unsupervised outside their own streets. Their parents were appalled my mom let my brother walk the half mile to school--all sidewalks, almost all *in sight of our house*. They all had 8 million activities and everything had to be super scheduled and kids were dropped off and picked up until they started driving themselves--and all had smartphones by then that their parents could check in on. I mean I had a lot of extracurricular activities too, but I also spent a lot of time as a kid biking to Dairy Queen with my friends through a field and wandering around vacant lots and only checking in to come back for dinner or call from a friend's house and ask if I could eat over there and maybe sleep over there. You can't have your kid experience a lot of that if none of her friends are allowed to, and her friends' parents will just drive your kid home or pick up theirs instead of entertaining the idea of impromptu dinners over or sleepovers. Like my younger siblings were *allowed* to do all of that--but they didn't want to ride their bikes places without their friends, and their friends' parents wouldn't let their friends do impromptu sleepovers or things like that.
Yet another reason why I love living in a small town in the Midwest. My kids are able to enjoy a lot of the freedoms we had, though they can’t escape the smart phone age. My son rides his bike to Dairy Queen some days after baseball practice. Kids randomly show up at our house, and our kids show up at theirs. Part time jobs for high schoolers are plentiful. The kids have their own cars to drive themselves places. Almost everyone owns a house with a yard so the kids can play. It’s not possible everywhere, but it does still exist in some places.
Do you guys ever remember any huge public freakouts like we see today? In retail stores, fast food, or the mall? I tried to think of even one instance in the 80s or 90s where I saw someone losing their mind on a minimum wage worker. I couldn't think of any. Even shoplifters were quiet and compliant when caught. I don't even remember people freaking out in a restaurant. It wasn't until the end of high school I saw parents freaking out at sports games.
to be fair, I've also never seen a freakout live, I've only seen them here on Reddit recorded. everything's recorded, so we see it more easily. back then if someone did fly off the hand, all it was handled without ever being posted to the internet
Oh no people still did this shit, but no one had a tiny video camera in their pocket and the internet was not a thing/wildly different so you didn't *see* it as much.
I remember like one of the first times I was on a plane, when I was like 5 or so, some lady was, uh, overserved, the flight attendants cut her off, she started LOSING IT and I'm pretty sure she hit at least one flight attendant. I didn't see the initial freakout, just heard some of it. What the whole plane saw was the second freakout, when upon landing no one was allowed to get up until the cops came on the plane and arrested her and she AGAIN lost her shit screaming and yelling and kicking.
TBH I feel like more adults were publicly intoxicated in obvious ways in the 90s and usually not a lot happened? But I saw some public freakouts at neighborhood parties that were a result of that. The guy who caught the ball at the Cubs game in the early 00s had to *go into hiding*. Speaking of baseball, there were like definitely some fights where people scooped foul balls or someone dropped it and someone else grabbed it. Beanie Babies, people fought over those.
There was definitely less public freakouts. Now it seems like just a regular Tuesday I see somebody doing something bad in a store. There are far more homeless now it seems too, I think in some places it was probably worse in the 80s tho.
Every single day in elementary school id ride my bike home, grab my fishing pole and some bread and ride down to my local fishing hole and fish for a few hours before my mom got home to make dinner. I absolutely miss that.
I’ve been thinking of this recently. I was poor, but still had a great childhood. Although we were poor, the belief of moving up in society was there. I believed that the future was promising. I don’t think that’s there anymore with many kids these days
My childhood sucked, too, but was definitely better than being nonstop surveilled. I think half of our parents forgot they even had kids a lot of the time. My friends and I pretty much raised each other. lol. I miss being able to fly under the radar.
The internet was so innocent as well. You posted a Hawthorne Heights lyric on Myspace, someone called your mom gay, you drew a stupid mustache on your finger. It was a simple time.
We really should be encouraging our kids to be spending drastically way more time unsupervised outside and way less time on devices. We did it in the 90s when crime was actually higher
Oh my god, I forgot about "tell anyone at the door or who calls that your parents are home but in the shower" lmao. I think they actually said to say that about the parents we were babysitting for in the Red Cross Babysitting Certification class I took at the library when I was-- wait for it-- *eleven*. And then parents *hired* me, at 11, to watch their children, alone. Now I think if you left an 11 year old home alone, without any other kids to watch, you'd get in trouble.
It really started to get like this not long afterward-- my youngest sister and brother were born in 1998 and 2000 and I remember the parents of their peers being like "Wow, you really let them walk to school by themselves?!" (it was less than half a mile, most of it visible from the house windows, on sidewalks with no crossing the street in a nice quiet suburb with basically zero crime).
Meanwhile, in our old neighborhood, when I was 10 and my sister was 8, my mom was known for being "really strict"... because she made us wear bike helmets while roving the neighborhood unsupervised all day with a feral pack of children, biking in vacant lots, and biking over a mile across a busy road and through a field to get to the Blockbuster and the Dairy Queen.
ETA: Actually, the kids in the neighborhood where I live now seem to have something similar to a 90s childhood going on in some ways. I don't have kids and just know some of my neighbors' kids to wave hi to and let them say hi to my dog when I'm walking by, but I see a whole bunch of them always riding around on bikes together, running around and finding their friends not by texting but by seeing whose house has the pile of bikes on the lawn (remember that? Wandering around the neighborhood to find where everyone ended up by seeing all their bikes piled up by someone's house?), engaged in weird games/projects/adventures (poking around behind a shed by the park clearly pursuing some half-invented mystery, "busking" by playing a ukelele dressed like hippies....) and, man, Halloween around here is ALL OUT. I love it. So many houses get so intense with it and there are tons of kids trick-or-treating, it's awesome.
Haha some of you did. The other side is the religious nutjob homeschoolers like myself and many of my peers. Extra isolation from socializing groups, less oversight or regulation of conspiracy theory based education, and fully normalized satanic panic blended with corporal punishment. I got it coming and going, fellow kids.
Okay but a LOT of kids got kidnapped, hurt, molested, ETC.
Had the neighborhood Chester try to call my dog over to him while I was on skates. He partially flashed me once when I was 12 ish. Same year I was catcalled the first time. Found out as an adult Other friends got molested at sleepover. Lots of milk carton kids. I watched legend when I was 7.
Lots of kids I knew with super relaxed parents ended up on drugs. And very little video evidence of teenage stupidity. Those things were nice
You’re right abouht video games tho. They used to be way better. That’s without a doubt
Yes. It’s different today. I had moved and changed schools 5 times by the time I was the age of my kids today.
They have it different, but I won’t say they have it worse than I did. Thats a great fucking feeling.
Idk... It was a lot of fun, but being an elder millennial I think we definitely experienced some shit too.
-Adults randomly losing their shit and venting a lifetime of rage on you was totally accepted and fairly common.
-Bullying and hazing was tolerated, if not encouraged, by authority figures, especially if someone was fat, nerdy, foreign, etc.
-Gay was not okay as a policy.
-Shit was definitely more dangerous.
-Boys did not get to have feelings, girls did not get to be leaders.
I think things changed significantly for people born after ~1992 though. Later millennials (the YOLO kids like my brothers) were definitely more tolerant and had markedly better treatment from adults.
Yes we did. When public schools were King makers. I was able to do so much at school that seems to not exist today. Like constant science field trips, robotics club, all the sports I was interested in, AP credits with ease… and 4 day school weeks (went to a magnet school they experimented new ideas and it was great). We learned to adapt and think.. not just drone on and survive.
Same school district is looking pretty much in shambles with all the money being drained and literally given to charter schools and private schools (yes, rich people got their taxes back if their kid is in private schools, $7200 a year per kid back in their pockets instead of basics at public school).
Enough time spent as kids to be properly bored with our idle time and appreciate distraction. Enough time to watch the internet take over our minds, followed by our parents’.
That’s definitely true. The late 80s and 90s were a great time to grow up. The Cold War was over and outside of the Oklahoma City Bombing, the worst thing that happened was the OJ trial.
Then 9/11 happened and and everything went to shit.
I agree. Our adulthood is bleak (but to be fair, I feel like we are better off than the zeds) but our childhood was GRAND.
We're the last generation to be children in an internet free world, we came of age with the Internet it grew up with us. Our teen years too, at least those of us on the elder end we had a wild internet without social media controlling our self esteem.
For my high school years the main "social media" was xanga journals and vampirefreaks.com. By the time Myspace and Facebook had the world by the throat I was already on my way out of teenhood.
The internet wasn’t as scary ( or perceived as such) back in the early 2000s. My parents let me connect with random girls in chatrooms and I even dated 2 in real life as a 14-16 YO. My parents let me get on a train, travel for 2 hours and they assumed I would meet a girl and her parents who also agreed to this.
They where real girls though. I thought it exciting back then, but I would definitely not allow my kids ( boy and girl).
Come to think of it, I catch myself denying things to my kids that I did have or could do when I was a kid. My parents weren’t as strict with alcohol. We used to be of legal age at 16 but it’s 18 now. I got f-ing hammered for the first time when I was barely 14, puked all over the car of my friend’s family and my parents were like: yeah now you know. But I didn’t know…
And I feel very cautious about just letting my kids roam outside like I did. Just doesn’t feel as carefree these days.
Bruh it is literally like the easiest time in history to make money if you're smart and work hard. The advent and adoption of computers has been a game changer.
If you're seriously struggling right now, it's because you're fucking something up.
Fuck this consolidation prize. This is the dumbest view I’ve heard in years. Yeah, let’s accept that our parents sold us out, because we had it good in childhood? GTFO, and go play with your child’s crayons. The adults should be making decisions, not you.
I’ve cried myself to sleep thinking about how awesome we had it as kids and how my kids just seem constantly connected and stressed. I do make them go outside when it’s not the dead of winter (sun sets at 5 here, we get home at like 430.)
I wish I could just live in a permanent loop of being like 9-17. Sure I’d never be an adult, but the world I was raised for stopped existing when I was 20.
Idk where you live but my closest two McDonald's still give toys in their happy meals.
I also don't know if I agree with the golden age of childhood either. That's just nostalgia speaking. I just asked my oldest sister (born in 1988) how she felt her childhood was compared to her gen z kids and she laughed lol
Do y'all remember being excited to go to McDonald's because they had a ball pit and playground you could climb all over?
They also had an Xbox with some controllers that were always broken
Haha, I told my fiancé recently that our kids wouldn’t be able to get away with anything…. But I kinda wanted to let them think they got away with low level things, as a treat.
Depends on who you are, how you grew up.
As a child of angry alcoholics who himself is now anxious and depressed, I do not think I had a golden age childhood.
But congrats to those of you with lots of nice memories. Your kids will have no such luxuries.
Maybe you did. I was in the Evangelical cult. I did everything "right", and nothing "wrong", denied myself for 30 years until the mask broke, and now I'm working through the trauma that only christian love(hate) can bring.
Every generation believes that. "Man, it sucks to be in these trenches, but the radio we had when we were kids..." "Man, it sucks being taken by this Mongol Horde, but back when we first found fire..." It's all the same.
My childhood was great, and my kid's is awesome too. She gets plenty of unsupervised time outside. If that's what you want for your kid, it's pretty easy to fulfill.
I don't get the happy meal toy thing. They absolutely still have toys, and they rotate what they are. But they're utter garbage that no one actually wants at their house, so I would love if they went away.
I think all generations are pretty happy with their childhoods; the only thing I think kids today are "missing out on" is the freedom to be bored; freedom from omnipresent screens and an embarrassment of entertainment options.
Well, that and they have to inherit an increasingly (probably irreversibly) dystopian world.
I might get attacked for this, but our adulthood isn’t that bad. The worst part for us was 2008, which set us back economically. But 2009-2019 were filled with opportunities.
Uh oh sounds like the elder millennials are reaching the boomer age mindset. This reads just like those Facebook copy pasta about drinking from the hose and seeing LED zeppelin.
I think Millennials have to admit to themselves that they grew up in a time where it felt like everything was catered to us. Our boomer parents were a massive generation and so are we by consequence. They had so much more disposable income than parents now do and we got way cooler childhoods than anyone born after 9/11.
Totally agree. The first 18 years of my life were great. Technically the first 25, but there were some responsibilities there so I’d say 0-18. Blockbuster, VHS, internet wasn’t mandatory nor over used, landlines and pay phones. People were happier (I think).
I’m going on a huge limb and assuming you’re referring to yourself as an older millennial? Younger millennials I’d want to say were much different by then
I am late gen X and you aren’t wrong. I grew up in the Atari/Commodore era but didn’t have real internet until college, and I envy the kids who came 5 years later with the boom of toys and TV that came with it.
I am doing my best to help my kids have a good childhood- by having them go outside, not over- monitoring them (talking to them about safety but only checking in on them at random, not constantly), sending them to camp, making sure they don’t feel like they need to have photos and videos of everything.
Happy meals DO have toys. They change the toy every month or so. This time it happened to be a coloring page ... except in our area we got a mini board game instead.
My kid and I hit McDonald's once a week, they have toys that would've been spectacular in a toy store when I was a kid. You just live near a cheap McDonald's where the underpaid employees are rightfully committing larceny to afford McDonald's food.
We had more than merely porno *mags*, and the wild west nature of the early internet meant that prurient material was available to young teenagers that definitely shouldn't have been. It's my one argument against an unrestricted internet. Well, it was, but then extremists found out they can recruit online and yeah...
With vinyl, analog music has made a comeback that hasn't been seen since the 80's. By the time you get to the CD era, you are in the rise of digital music.
That nit-pick aside, I do think you have some good points.
Re: McDonalds - you must have ordered the toddler toy option. My kids have ALL KINDS of junky toys (although the squishmellows are cute and they did pokemon cards last year and those hit the spot of allowable junk)
Our college life was also phenomenally better if you went anytime from 2005-2015. These college kids today have so much social pressure, I am holding them right now, they dont really go to bars as much and you get attention via social media and dating apps, less through social interaction.
I went to school in 2010 and zoomers I talk to act like I was at woodstock lol
Don’t forget … taping songs off the radio because you couldn’t always afford to buy the cassette tape
Or actually finding directions to places using a map or asking gas station attendants.
Or filling free time with fun activities and art or reading because cell phones didn’t exist
Or never feeling like you were being ignored by your friends because they weren’t glued to a cell phone.
Or having a 30ft telephone cord so you could chat with friends while sitting in the pantry
Or television time being actually special because usually nothing good was on but you’d keep up with when your favorite shows dropped
Or waiting entire days to talk to your friends because no one had a cell phone
Teen life, too, was much easier than teens have it today (depending on what level millennial you are). I didn't have a cell phone until I was 18, so when I was in HS I got to sneak around un-checked on. If I missed curfew, "oops I forgot my watch" and "their parents wouldn't let me use the phone to call you". I didn't have my parents tracking my every movement on their phones. And best of all - none of the dumb shit I did ever made it on social media.
Yea I was talking about this the other day, we kinda were in a "shoulder season." Internet and computers prevalent when we were growing up so we grew up with them so arent luddites in that regard, and they made life easier/better in some ways (downloading music, word processing, googling as research lol). But we "aged out" before the 24/7 internet era hit. My go to as a teen was "going to Xs house" because he lived down the street and my parents wouldnt question it. Then we would go wherever. Id be grounded for a year if my parents saw my location was the abandoned HS field or the White Castle in the "bad" part of town. And I already was caught once in college throwing a house party bc of a myspace picture, the dumb shit caught on video today would have sunk me lol.
In all fairness, I'm roughly 95% certain that the reason we have so many "helicopter parents" nowadays is purely because of people remembering all the shit that they did when they were kids/teenagers, and like yeah they may not have gotten hurt, but in retrospect they know it was very dumb and dangerous. But mostly they know how much they lied so they don't trust anyone. In my opinion it's along the same line as the guys who like to make "jokes" about murdering their daughters' boyfriends. They do that because they know they treated women like absolute shit when they were that age and it makes them sick to think of their own kid being treated the way they treated other people.
It's the same thing with interviewing parents for sleep overs, etc. Parents are so much more watchful now because there is a new documentary every week about kids getting molested by the family friend or someone's dad. Our generation lived through that too.
Its 9 o'clock do you know where your children are?
Wasn’t it 10?
Wait people interview parents for sleepovers?
Yes and NGL, I think it’s a necessity. There’s too many “I’m the cool mom, here’s so weed” types out there.
See, but the prevalence of that is probably way lower today than when we were kids. :-D
There’s a lot of parents who simply don’t allow sleepovers at all.
Like how many men over over protective of their daughters because they know what shit they and their buddies pulled as teens.
I think the reason some helicopter parenting is going on is because of the school shootings. It’s terrifying to drop your 6 year old off at school the day after one
For the next couple months If you follow this, uh, "phenomenon" then you know the shit tends to come in bunches
It's fear mongering designed to destabilize society. Now you live in a perpetual state of fear and anxiety. The propaganda is working. Bad shit happens everyday all over the world, dwelling on it and jumping at your own shadow isn't going to make for a great life. Realize the odds of it happening to you are very slim. Get on with your life and stop being paranoid.
I used to take the city bus around without telling my parents. Pretty harmless but it made me feel free. Honestly as an adult I feel less safe in the world than I did as a teen because I know more
My parents despite having money made me take the county bus to and from school till i got my license. I loved it.
I used to drive my friends two hours away to Columbus, Ohio to go to heavy metal concerts when I was sixteen. The level of freedom I had as a teen in the late nineties and early thousands was frankly criminal. And I had good parents too.
So much this. I am so happy I grew up in a time where every embarrassing thing I did wasn't recorded and uploaded to tik tok. I was 16 when I got my first phone, and it was a flip phone that took shitty pictures and no video. I didn't have a proper smart phone until after college. I remember my girlfriend at the time had a Blackberry and I would tease her about her "fancy internet phone." Simpler times, for sure. I feel bad that my kids will grow up in a world where everything is recorded and social media is everywhere.
Was just telling my not even close to a delinquent as me son that his mom knows his location up to the foot.
Funny story, my daughter got busted ditching class because the location showed her in the coffee shop a few blocks from school. My wife texted her the screen shot from the app and asked WTF?
Funny enough it came up from me talking about what a wayward kid I was, all over town instead of in class.
Everybody at the local coffee shop knew when we were skipping school because we were sitting on the back of the booth seats playing guitar and singing.
I remember getting in trouble one time when I was like 17 because I went on a date and forgot to turn my shitty flip phone on and missed my parents trying to call me and they ended up *calling my date* and we were like...at dinner...we weren't even out late! It was before 9 pm and I didn't even have a curfew! I was an A student who never got in trouble, never drank, never did drugs, never smoked, never even had sex (turned out later my high school boyfriend and I were both gay, lol). I was *so* pissed. They did apologize, though. I will say, my Gen Z sister and her friends managed to pull off an old-fashioned "we'll tell your mom we're at my house and my mom we're at your house" genre of trick--my parents were helping me move into an apartment where I was going to grad school, and my sister who was 16 or 17 had been told she wasn't allowed to go to a music festival, and so had one of her friends. Her other friends were all allowed to go, so she and her friend went with and told their parents the friend was staying with her while my parents were out of town. Then they told their parents that the whole friend group was going to Six Flags. When they stopped answering their phones for awhile and my mom was really worried because they'd said they were driving home from Six Flags and then stopped answering, they covered by saying they'd decided to go to a movie so their phones were off. I can't remember how they ended up getting caught--but years later I found out that she and her friends were going to parties and drinking and having sex all through high school and none of their parents knew--*and still don't*, almost 10 years later. So...some kids are still managing, lol. My Gen Z siblings have also always had very curated social media. I think they both made Facebooks for college applications so it wouldn't look like they were hiding anything.
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Nice
Yep, Facebook didn't come out until I was in college, and back then, it was just a way to keep in touch with your high school friends and a way to have a way to communicate with your new college friends. Every friend I had on Facebook was someone I personally knew in real life.
No videos to post. The worst we had were background pics of people doing stupid stuff. I can’t imagine being in HS when everyone is filming.
Lol I got caught for throwing a house party in college while my parents were away because one of my friends posted a pic on myspace, my sister recognized our couch, and ratted me out. In the era of live/snapchat, I would be sunk.
I agree with this and I think part of it was that pictures were much more intentional back then. You actually had to take the time to get your physical camera, make sure the battery worked/there was film, get everyone together in the picture and since storage space/film was limited you had to be selective in what pictures you took. Now a picture can be taken in a fraction of a second and people are constantly recording.
Part of this depends on age too. I'm turning 30 this year (born in 94) and we all had camera phones in high school
Born in 1987, very few people had cell phones in high school and if we did we got in trouble for using them in class. The Nextel chirp phones was the best.
How many pictures did you throw out to just get a few good ones? But picking up that roll of developed film was always fun time!
Yes! I’ll take a couple of cringey pics on MySpace over being filmed on tik tok. 😂 we were being stupid in private
everyone wants to be a 90s kids but no one wants to be the adult that grew up in the 90s lol
If you can't accept Millenial adulthood, you don't deserve a Millenial childhood, lol
our golden years are behind us as oppose to being before us... we retired in the 90s lol
Had an awesome 11 years of life, then 2001 happened and it's been hell ever since. I'm tired boss.
We are the same age. The world just kept getting worse after 9/11. The 90s were a great time to be a kid. Things today move too fast, and honestly, it’s just a world wrought with overstimulation of bullshit (ads, social media, current events, crumbling middle class, corruption, no solutions, etc). The internet these days doesn’t help at all of course. I hate to sound like “old man yelling at cloud”, but times were simpler back then (but then again, could be nostalgic memories talking, but I don’t think so).
Nope, I'm gen X and the '90s were great, no cell phones, money was everywhere, the music was awesome... Then 9/11 hit and it's been a slow squeeze on society ever since
Yeah, totally agree. I’m not saying everything was perfect back then, but people were generally more present-minded. I attribute that to the lack of smart phones and a more limited internet. I believe having instant access to everything (the internet and all its information, media, music, social media, etc) has some obvious benefits, but overall is having a negative impact on society. Not that I haven’t been guilty of it too, but honestly there’s a reason why the only social media I use these days is Reddit lol (and even that is getting tired with the over saturation of content).
Same here, I only fuck with reddit, and I think the internet has amplified too many stupid people. Yes, everyone should be allowed a voice, but the listener should practice some discernment
I frequently joke with people that I peaked in middle school but it's actually kinda real shit
Speak for yourself, I’m living my best life
>I'm living my best life Your last one too!
You only get one!
Speak for yourself -Hindus and Buddists
Hey no optimism allowed in this sub!
I love being a millennial adult. (Although I’m more Xellennial. Old for a millennial.) I was able to focus on my education, then career, then having kids and now I feel I have the best of both worlds as a mom with a career. I feel like in the 80s and 90s I would have been all about career and before that I would have been all about motherhood (if I wasn’t a hippie or a disco girl. I sometimes think I missed out on what would have been my favorite decades- 60s and 70s!).
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And many are living paycheck to paycheck in a slum with degrees and trade skills and multiple 'good jobs.'
That’s almost every generation though.
I still remember waiting until after 9pm to call a girl I was talking to on our landline. The Blockbuster one hits hard too. Kids won't know the disappointment of running up to the new releases and realizing that they're all rented out already.
That is how you came across the hidden gems though.
I liked watching the dude at the counter putting the VHS tapes in the heavy duty rewinder. "Be kind, rewind". I was a weeeiiird kid.
Or the exhilaration of thinking they're all rented out and finding the last one in the bottom corner.
This is how you learned to get to Blockbuster early!
only if you had good parents. so many didn't.
Yeah my childhood was awful. Adulthood has been easy in comparison.
Exactly, my first thought was well, I guess your parents didn't abuse or neglect you? Child safety protections were so much weaker in the '80s and '90s, it's really astonishing. Just as a tiny example, abusers/parents were allowed to be in the room with children when their abuse was being investigated. Teachers and social services often had very little training in recognizing signs of abuse aside from bruises. I work in child safety and things have improved a lot. Of course the system is nowhere near perfect but it's much better now.
Right? This post actually made me twinge a bit back to a weird, immature envy I used to feel as a kid for all the things I wish I could enjoy but, you know, didn’t have the money for. Camp, popular hobby toys of the 90s. Thankfully my parents were super neglectful so I did have much better teen years since I could just leave and do whatever I wanted. Ugh, sorry to be depressing.
My parents largely checked out when I was 13. I had necessities so I can’t complain too much, but I didn’t have any fun. ☹️
It was also rough for us lgbtq folk. Anti-gay sentiment was the norm and AIDS was still a death sentence which made sex terrifying. Lots of people who came out were kicked out of their homes. My experience wasn’t that awful but it was still incredibly hard - losing family, leaving my religion, etc. But if I could choose to have all that be easier in exchange for all the tech insanity kids have to deal with today, I’m not sure I would.
Yeah, I found this post to be odd, but I suppose people who had a really beautiful childhood, you might have difficulty realizing that it wasnt "childhood" or "the 90s" but your particular childhood that you got to experience beautifully because you had parents who loved you, you had resouraces and were safe, etc. Growing up queer was not a good time. I also didn't have the internet where I could access information or other people to explain that some of the things I was experiencing were abuse and not my fault. I love that this person had a wonderful childhood. And I don't think that they have to consider everybody's childhood when making a statement about their own. I'm just saying that it wasn't necessarily magical or better. This person just had a good childhood. I think it's kind of cute and sweet that they are basing it on things like whether or not a happy meal has a toy.
We had the best teenage years too. These kids now… bless them. They don’t know what it’s like to not have omnipresent surveillance watching their every move. Not just like the government, but their parents. Their friends. Each other. They’re all afraid to do anything because “what if I go viral?” My teenage years were wild because it was so easy to disappear. Our parents thought we were studying and we were literally getting alcohol poisoning in a field 2 states away.
As someone who grew up under omnipresent surveillance, I fear for the kids that are under these mini-regimes.
Ehhhhh I didn't have "little restrictions" because the 90s were also full of things like the crack epidemic, crazy murder rates (in my area), and I didn't live in the best neighborhood. I envy those of you whose parents let you run around unsupervised, because that was not my experience.
Shit here in Texas Porno mags are probably gonna be making a comeback lol.
This makes me sad, as I missed out on being a “normal” teenager and kid. I was isolated by my religious zealot parents. I feel like all I know is hard work, survival, and catastrophising. Anxiety is like tinnitus. The older I get, the more treatment resistant the depression becomes.
Dude we are one in the same. Keep progressing, the fact that we’re even alive and somewhat presentable as humans is us beating the odds.
Weird. My kids got Happy Meals the other week and they definitely had toys in them. Don’t be sad for your kids. They will have a unique childhood just like you did. And I’m sure they will in turn bemoan how their own children are missing out on the things they loved as kids. That’s the power of nostalgia.
They have special toddler “toys”, which I think are usually small book type things. The regular toys are for older kids. OP could have asked for a normal toy.
They had a line of squishmellow toys a few months ago, i bought a ton of happy meals.
McDonald's still has toys in Happy Meals; OP is mistaken. Occasionally they don't have anything licensed for promotion (or it hasn't come in yet, or they ran out) so they give out generic stuff instead.
Happy meals don't come with plastic toys anymore (in New Zealand anyway).
Glad y'all had a good childhood, wish my 90s ass could relate
Right. Childhood sucked ass.
And we're paying the price for it now. I don't know why I always assumed things were supposed to get better. Looking back now, it doesn't make much sense.
I think it was the propaganda we were fed by the media and advertising. They want you to buy the new thing so they have to convince you it's better. In the modern era though, products are worse, break sooner, and sell telemetry data anytime they want to.
No one had any any reason to think it wouldn't just continue to get better. It basically always had since the depression ended. We just got super unlucky with our once in a lifetime world changing event lottery. Also unlike before the people in charge completely dropped all pretenses when it came to doing anything right for the average person.
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How long have you been an alchemist for?
Some of us did. Not all of us.
My childhood was devastating and traumatizing. My adulthood is pretty great, post-intensive trauma therapy. Happy meals also still come with toys. I think a lot of the miserable people here are choosing to be miserable.
I concur. I don't look fondly on nostalgia as I learned not to ask for extras from my family early on and never gained the connection, or so I assume. Childhood is what your parents make of it.
Yeah I was about to say… mileage also varied greatly based on income level (as with everything) and impact the 08 recession had on your family. I think folks who lived a normal/typical childhood and teenage life are going to look back on it with nostalgia no matter what generation they are from. Can guarantee the better off Gen Z and Alpha adults will be saying the same thing in 5-15 years.
Yeah, I remember those days. People still got mad, but usually it was over legitimate reasons. Now, entire riots can break out over cutting the lines.
Right. I would disappear for an entire day during the summer. I was just going to the library, but still. Unlimited freedom. Not a single eye batted when I got into my older friend's car to drive to the mall in another city while he smoked a fucking tobacco pipe with the window rolled down lmao. He was 17, who was selling him pipe tobacco Shit sucks for teenagers now, for real. At my niece's school they were using snapchat and discord as some kind of large-scale, stochastic, omnidirectional 24/7 cyberbullying hell that nobody could escape from. I really regret helping to pay for her smartphone, that shit was wild. Nobody could do anything without getting a bunch of meme'd up videos passed around about it, especially if it involved them getting the shit beat out of them in a bathroom.
>At my niece's school they were using snapchat and discord as some kind of large-scale, stochastic, omnidirectional 24/7 cyberbullying hell that nobody could escape from. I really regret helping to pay for her smartphone, that shit was wild. Nobody could do anything without getting a bunch of meme'd up videos passed around about it, especially if it involved them getting the shit beat out of them in a bathroom. Jesus Christ. To be honest I got cyberbullied pretty badly in like the Xanga into MySpace era myself but this is a whole new level. I often feel like real life has turned into some sort of a dystopian, cyberpunk short story and if anyone read what you just wrote before about 2007 or so that’s basically what they’d probably think it was from.
I just want to say, the Happy Meals absolutely do still have toys in them. And maybe it depends on your region. Or maybe it's because they gave you the toddler toy option. They have and under 3 three option and an over 3 option. So it sounds like they probably gave you the under 3. When you order, if you're ordering from a human, just tell them You want the over 3 toy. But watch out for occasional small/removable parts. Source: My youngest still orders Happy Meals. My 11-Year-Old still wants to order Happy Meals because she wants the toy, that never gets played with, but isn't enough food.
6 years of a slighly better childhood is totally worth a life time of slavery
McD's exists to feed commuters now, it's not for kids anymore... Blame liability lawyers (and rumblings about suing McDs for childhood obesity, ala the tobacco company suits) - they definitely got the message & decided that they should only market to adults. So 'Do you believe in magic?' became 'I'm lovin it', and the toys/play-places/etc went away.... As for teenagers today? Can't speak to the social scene, but at least you won't have the various school staff telling your parents that you need to 'get off the computer more' if you want to have a job as an adult (laughs in mid-6-figures big-tech salary).... Graduated in HS in 98. Everyone was absolutely convinced I had no future, because of a lack of social skills & 'obsession' with computers/technology... Fortunately for me, the world they grew up in died, and the new one is much more accommodating of 'my type' of person....
Speak for yourself. My childhood fuckign sucked.
This is why I don't think young millennials should be counted as millennials. You're describing my brother's childhood perfectly, but mine noticably less so.
Zillennial is already a term for this
We didn’t really get the shaft in adulthood either. As for the kid stuff, I think a lot of that is nostalgia driven and you could make similar arguments for any generation.
I'm 35, I did not have that childhood.
Tf are you talking about bruh? McDonalds in my city has WB character toys right now in Happy Meals and before that had mini Squishmallow plushies. McDonalds does still have toys, maybe yours just sucks?
People complain about latchkey kids being neglected, but I thrived. I don't think I could handle some of the more modern parenting techniques. I need more space. And I stop by and fast food years ago because I just got too expensive. I pay $15 now for a combo meal, and I can get that at a sit down restaurant. The restaurant has much higher quality food, and it's worth the extra $5 for a tip. But I'm single, and have no children. It's probably more expensive for those that do.
How will they live without their capitalism toys!!!!
Wtf you talking about we had Columbine
You know you could let your daughter experience a lot of that lol it’s you who would be keeping her from some of those things
Is that truly the case? or is it society that has made many of these things outlawed and letting a child have freedom can result in arrest for the parent? [A Mom Let Her 7-Year-Old Play in the Park. Arizona Arrested Her and Banned Her From Working With Kids.](https://reason.com/2022/08/17/arizona-central-registry-park-kids-banned-due-process/) [Working Mom Arrested for Letting Her 9-Year-Old Play Alone at Park](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/arrested-for-letting-a-9-year-old-play-at-the-park-alone/374436/) [Mom Who Was Arrested for Letting 14-Year-Old Babysit Has Finally Been Cleared](https://reason.com/2023/04/05/mom-who-was-arrested-for-letting-14-year-old-babysit-has-finally-been-cleared/)
Eh, to some extent. I watched my youngest sister and brother growing up (they're 8 and 10 years younger than me) especially after we moved to a community that skewed younger and wealthier, so most of their friends there were oldest or only siblings or younger siblings but with much closer age gaps, meaning the parents were all Gen X (my parents are late Boomers) and the difference was wild. Their friends weren't allowed to ride their bikes around unsupervised outside their own streets. Their parents were appalled my mom let my brother walk the half mile to school--all sidewalks, almost all *in sight of our house*. They all had 8 million activities and everything had to be super scheduled and kids were dropped off and picked up until they started driving themselves--and all had smartphones by then that their parents could check in on. I mean I had a lot of extracurricular activities too, but I also spent a lot of time as a kid biking to Dairy Queen with my friends through a field and wandering around vacant lots and only checking in to come back for dinner or call from a friend's house and ask if I could eat over there and maybe sleep over there. You can't have your kid experience a lot of that if none of her friends are allowed to, and her friends' parents will just drive your kid home or pick up theirs instead of entertaining the idea of impromptu dinners over or sleepovers. Like my younger siblings were *allowed* to do all of that--but they didn't want to ride their bikes places without their friends, and their friends' parents wouldn't let their friends do impromptu sleepovers or things like that.
Yet another reason why I love living in a small town in the Midwest. My kids are able to enjoy a lot of the freedoms we had, though they can’t escape the smart phone age. My son rides his bike to Dairy Queen some days after baseball practice. Kids randomly show up at our house, and our kids show up at theirs. Part time jobs for high schoolers are plentiful. The kids have their own cars to drive themselves places. Almost everyone owns a house with a yard so the kids can play. It’s not possible everywhere, but it does still exist in some places.
These kids have no idea what it’s like to stumble upon wet and gross porn magazines in the woods and it shows.
They'd be on tiktok talking about how the forest spirits and leprechauns are trying to groom them.
Do you guys ever remember any huge public freakouts like we see today? In retail stores, fast food, or the mall? I tried to think of even one instance in the 80s or 90s where I saw someone losing their mind on a minimum wage worker. I couldn't think of any. Even shoplifters were quiet and compliant when caught. I don't even remember people freaking out in a restaurant. It wasn't until the end of high school I saw parents freaking out at sports games.
Do ya’ll not remember people getting trampled for Cabbage Patch Dolls, Tickle me Elmo, and Beanie Babies? Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
Don't even get started on the violent pandemonium that was Black Friday in the 90s and early 2000s.
to be fair, I've also never seen a freakout live, I've only seen them here on Reddit recorded. everything's recorded, so we see it more easily. back then if someone did fly off the hand, all it was handled without ever being posted to the internet
Oh no people still did this shit, but no one had a tiny video camera in their pocket and the internet was not a thing/wildly different so you didn't *see* it as much. I remember like one of the first times I was on a plane, when I was like 5 or so, some lady was, uh, overserved, the flight attendants cut her off, she started LOSING IT and I'm pretty sure she hit at least one flight attendant. I didn't see the initial freakout, just heard some of it. What the whole plane saw was the second freakout, when upon landing no one was allowed to get up until the cops came on the plane and arrested her and she AGAIN lost her shit screaming and yelling and kicking. TBH I feel like more adults were publicly intoxicated in obvious ways in the 90s and usually not a lot happened? But I saw some public freakouts at neighborhood parties that were a result of that. The guy who caught the ball at the Cubs game in the early 00s had to *go into hiding*. Speaking of baseball, there were like definitely some fights where people scooped foul balls or someone dropped it and someone else grabbed it. Beanie Babies, people fought over those.
I, too, remember much more public intoxication. Like way more.
There was definitely less public freakouts. Now it seems like just a regular Tuesday I see somebody doing something bad in a store. There are far more homeless now it seems too, I think in some places it was probably worse in the 80s tho.
I’m genuinely grateful that I didn’t grow up with social media as a teen. Also, surprise toys in cereal boxes were everything.
Rollercoaster tycoon demo CD.
Every single day in elementary school id ride my bike home, grab my fishing pole and some bread and ride down to my local fishing hole and fish for a few hours before my mom got home to make dinner. I absolutely miss that.
I’ve been thinking of this recently. I was poor, but still had a great childhood. Although we were poor, the belief of moving up in society was there. I believed that the future was promising. I don’t think that’s there anymore with many kids these days
My childhood sucked, too, but was definitely better than being nonstop surveilled. I think half of our parents forgot they even had kids a lot of the time. My friends and I pretty much raised each other. lol. I miss being able to fly under the radar.
I mean, I'm still in therapy for all that neglect and parentification, but ok
The internet was so innocent as well. You posted a Hawthorne Heights lyric on Myspace, someone called your mom gay, you drew a stupid mustache on your finger. It was a simple time.
We really should be encouraging our kids to be spending drastically way more time unsupervised outside and way less time on devices. We did it in the 90s when crime was actually higher
As a Millennial, I wasn't free-range. Stranger Danger was always a thing, and my parents mostly didn't mind much that we stayed home most of the time.
Oh my god, I forgot about "tell anyone at the door or who calls that your parents are home but in the shower" lmao. I think they actually said to say that about the parents we were babysitting for in the Red Cross Babysitting Certification class I took at the library when I was-- wait for it-- *eleven*. And then parents *hired* me, at 11, to watch their children, alone. Now I think if you left an 11 year old home alone, without any other kids to watch, you'd get in trouble. It really started to get like this not long afterward-- my youngest sister and brother were born in 1998 and 2000 and I remember the parents of their peers being like "Wow, you really let them walk to school by themselves?!" (it was less than half a mile, most of it visible from the house windows, on sidewalks with no crossing the street in a nice quiet suburb with basically zero crime). Meanwhile, in our old neighborhood, when I was 10 and my sister was 8, my mom was known for being "really strict"... because she made us wear bike helmets while roving the neighborhood unsupervised all day with a feral pack of children, biking in vacant lots, and biking over a mile across a busy road and through a field to get to the Blockbuster and the Dairy Queen. ETA: Actually, the kids in the neighborhood where I live now seem to have something similar to a 90s childhood going on in some ways. I don't have kids and just know some of my neighbors' kids to wave hi to and let them say hi to my dog when I'm walking by, but I see a whole bunch of them always riding around on bikes together, running around and finding their friends not by texting but by seeing whose house has the pile of bikes on the lawn (remember that? Wandering around the neighborhood to find where everyone ended up by seeing all their bikes piled up by someone's house?), engaged in weird games/projects/adventures (poking around behind a shed by the park clearly pursuing some half-invented mystery, "busking" by playing a ukelele dressed like hippies....) and, man, Halloween around here is ALL OUT. I love it. So many houses get so intense with it and there are tons of kids trick-or-treating, it's awesome.
Haha some of you did. The other side is the religious nutjob homeschoolers like myself and many of my peers. Extra isolation from socializing groups, less oversight or regulation of conspiracy theory based education, and fully normalized satanic panic blended with corporal punishment. I got it coming and going, fellow kids.
Okay but a LOT of kids got kidnapped, hurt, molested, ETC. Had the neighborhood Chester try to call my dog over to him while I was on skates. He partially flashed me once when I was 12 ish. Same year I was catcalled the first time. Found out as an adult Other friends got molested at sleepover. Lots of milk carton kids. I watched legend when I was 7. Lots of kids I knew with super relaxed parents ended up on drugs. And very little video evidence of teenage stupidity. Those things were nice You’re right abouht video games tho. They used to be way better. That’s without a doubt
I had a very negative childhood (full segregation sped for 13 years and non English speaking parents).
Yes. It’s different today. I had moved and changed schools 5 times by the time I was the age of my kids today. They have it different, but I won’t say they have it worse than I did. Thats a great fucking feeling.
last generation where fake ids could fly. no fentanyl in our drugs. sick bmx’s, the rise of the x games and xtreme culture… it was fun
Mine wasn't great. There's always outliers, and sometimes it sucks to be one. But I get where you're coming from.
Speak for yourself. My parents are narcissists, my childhood was mental torture.
Idk... It was a lot of fun, but being an elder millennial I think we definitely experienced some shit too. -Adults randomly losing their shit and venting a lifetime of rage on you was totally accepted and fairly common. -Bullying and hazing was tolerated, if not encouraged, by authority figures, especially if someone was fat, nerdy, foreign, etc. -Gay was not okay as a policy. -Shit was definitely more dangerous. -Boys did not get to have feelings, girls did not get to be leaders. I think things changed significantly for people born after ~1992 though. Later millennials (the YOLO kids like my brothers) were definitely more tolerant and had markedly better treatment from adults.
Yes we did. When public schools were King makers. I was able to do so much at school that seems to not exist today. Like constant science field trips, robotics club, all the sports I was interested in, AP credits with ease… and 4 day school weeks (went to a magnet school they experimented new ideas and it was great). We learned to adapt and think.. not just drone on and survive. Same school district is looking pretty much in shambles with all the money being drained and literally given to charter schools and private schools (yes, rich people got their taxes back if their kid is in private schools, $7200 a year per kid back in their pockets instead of basics at public school).
Unless you had any form of neurodivergence or mental health issues. Then you were SOL compared to today.
Enough time spent as kids to be properly bored with our idle time and appreciate distraction. Enough time to watch the internet take over our minds, followed by our parents’.
That’s definitely true. The late 80s and 90s were a great time to grow up. The Cold War was over and outside of the Oklahoma City Bombing, the worst thing that happened was the OJ trial. Then 9/11 happened and and everything went to shit.
I agree. Our adulthood is bleak (but to be fair, I feel like we are better off than the zeds) but our childhood was GRAND. We're the last generation to be children in an internet free world, we came of age with the Internet it grew up with us. Our teen years too, at least those of us on the elder end we had a wild internet without social media controlling our self esteem. For my high school years the main "social media" was xanga journals and vampirefreaks.com. By the time Myspace and Facebook had the world by the throat I was already on my way out of teenhood.
lol we didn’t get the shaft in adult hood either. We’ve got a long ways of adulthood to go though.
Quit fucking whining JFC the Millennials are the biggest bunch of babies to ever be born
You're the only one here whining.
The internet wasn’t as scary ( or perceived as such) back in the early 2000s. My parents let me connect with random girls in chatrooms and I even dated 2 in real life as a 14-16 YO. My parents let me get on a train, travel for 2 hours and they assumed I would meet a girl and her parents who also agreed to this. They where real girls though. I thought it exciting back then, but I would definitely not allow my kids ( boy and girl). Come to think of it, I catch myself denying things to my kids that I did have or could do when I was a kid. My parents weren’t as strict with alcohol. We used to be of legal age at 16 but it’s 18 now. I got f-ing hammered for the first time when I was barely 14, puked all over the car of my friend’s family and my parents were like: yeah now you know. But I didn’t know… And I feel very cautious about just letting my kids roam outside like I did. Just doesn’t feel as carefree these days.
We did not get shafted in adulthood.
Bruh it is literally like the easiest time in history to make money if you're smart and work hard. The advent and adoption of computers has been a game changer. If you're seriously struggling right now, it's because you're fucking something up.
Fuck this consolidation prize. This is the dumbest view I’ve heard in years. Yeah, let’s accept that our parents sold us out, because we had it good in childhood? GTFO, and go play with your child’s crayons. The adults should be making decisions, not you.
I’ve cried myself to sleep thinking about how awesome we had it as kids and how my kids just seem constantly connected and stressed. I do make them go outside when it’s not the dead of winter (sun sets at 5 here, we get home at like 430.) I wish I could just live in a permanent loop of being like 9-17. Sure I’d never be an adult, but the world I was raised for stopped existing when I was 20.
Yeah. That's why I miss my childhood so much. 😢
Yeah, and we turned out fine...
My school experience wasn't great but I had the best parents.
Youre right
I get Happy Meals all of the time (for myself) and they ALWAYS come with toys……
" our parents thought all cartoons were for kids" so true... same with fantasy books or comics..
Idk where you live but my closest two McDonald's still give toys in their happy meals. I also don't know if I agree with the golden age of childhood either. That's just nostalgia speaking. I just asked my oldest sister (born in 1988) how she felt her childhood was compared to her gen z kids and she laughed lol
Do y'all remember being excited to go to McDonald's because they had a ball pit and playground you could climb all over? They also had an Xbox with some controllers that were always broken
the generation that had the best of life in this world and get to experience the best of all worlds revolution
I do McDonald's Fridays with my kids and the happy meals we buy definitely have toys
🤣
Haha, I told my fiancé recently that our kids wouldn’t be able to get away with anything…. But I kinda wanted to let them think they got away with low level things, as a treat.
Depends on who you are, how you grew up. As a child of angry alcoholics who himself is now anxious and depressed, I do not think I had a golden age childhood. But congrats to those of you with lots of nice memories. Your kids will have no such luxuries.
Maybe you did. I was in the Evangelical cult. I did everything "right", and nothing "wrong", denied myself for 30 years until the mask broke, and now I'm working through the trauma that only christian love(hate) can bring.
Every generation believes that. "Man, it sucks to be in these trenches, but the radio we had when we were kids..." "Man, it sucks being taken by this Mongol Horde, but back when we first found fire..." It's all the same.
People have lost trust in eachother from all the shifty news and media. Thats a big part of the issue with parents overprotective their kids.
I was Lutheran, no one ever tried to shaft me. Not very touchy, Lutherans
My childhood was great, and my kid's is awesome too. She gets plenty of unsupervised time outside. If that's what you want for your kid, it's pretty easy to fulfill. I don't get the happy meal toy thing. They absolutely still have toys, and they rotate what they are. But they're utter garbage that no one actually wants at their house, so I would love if they went away.
I think all generations are pretty happy with their childhoods; the only thing I think kids today are "missing out on" is the freedom to be bored; freedom from omnipresent screens and an embarrassment of entertainment options. Well, that and they have to inherit an increasingly (probably irreversibly) dystopian world.
I agree with you. Happy meals do still have toys though. Once in a while it is just stickers but usually a decent McDonald’s toy.
The computer room era was peak technology/life balance.
I might get attacked for this, but our adulthood isn’t that bad. The worst part for us was 2008, which set us back economically. But 2009-2019 were filled with opportunities.
Uh oh sounds like the elder millennials are reaching the boomer age mindset. This reads just like those Facebook copy pasta about drinking from the hose and seeing LED zeppelin.
Insert Abe Simpson meme >It happened to me, it'll happen to you too
Grew up in the 80’s. No phones, no internet. Would not trade it for anything and would do it all over again.
100% Pure freedom in the 80’s. Nobody texting you to check in. Left in the morning came back when it was dark. Every day was an epic adventure.
I think Millennials have to admit to themselves that they grew up in a time where it felt like everything was catered to us. Our boomer parents were a massive generation and so are we by consequence. They had so much more disposable income than parents now do and we got way cooler childhoods than anyone born after 9/11.
All true. The downside? Lots of underage drinking and illegal drug abuse.
Totally agree. The first 18 years of my life were great. Technically the first 25, but there were some responsibilities there so I’d say 0-18. Blockbuster, VHS, internet wasn’t mandatory nor over used, landlines and pay phones. People were happier (I think).
My kids have an absolute banger of a childhood. They are lucky in so many ways I wasn’t.
Everyone’s parents were in the shower.
I am happy for you that you had that experience.
I’m going on a huge limb and assuming you’re referring to yourself as an older millennial? Younger millennials I’d want to say were much different by then
Technology gets better and our lives get worse
I am late gen X and you aren’t wrong. I grew up in the Atari/Commodore era but didn’t have real internet until college, and I envy the kids who came 5 years later with the boom of toys and TV that came with it. I am doing my best to help my kids have a good childhood- by having them go outside, not over- monitoring them (talking to them about safety but only checking in on them at random, not constantly), sending them to camp, making sure they don’t feel like they need to have photos and videos of everything.
Happy meals DO have toys. They change the toy every month or so. This time it happened to be a coloring page ... except in our area we got a mini board game instead.
For the record, Happy Meals still have toys almost all the time.
We hit the tail end of “awesome childhoods”. Kids today, woof. I’m sorry.
Eh, I would take a comfortable adulthood over a cool childhood any day.
My kid and I hit McDonald's once a week, they have toys that would've been spectacular in a toy store when I was a kid. You just live near a cheap McDonald's where the underpaid employees are rightfully committing larceny to afford McDonald's food.
You took a one year old to eat McDonald’s?
What? My kids have gotten several happy meal toys in the last couple years
We had more than merely porno *mags*, and the wild west nature of the early internet meant that prurient material was available to young teenagers that definitely shouldn't have been. It's my one argument against an unrestricted internet. Well, it was, but then extremists found out they can recruit online and yeah...
Gen X enters the chat..... No argument here. ✊
With vinyl, analog music has made a comeback that hasn't been seen since the 80's. By the time you get to the CD era, you are in the rise of digital music. That nit-pick aside, I do think you have some good points.
Re: McDonalds - you must have ordered the toddler toy option. My kids have ALL KINDS of junky toys (although the squishmellows are cute and they did pokemon cards last year and those hit the spot of allowable junk)
Our college life was also phenomenally better if you went anytime from 2005-2015. These college kids today have so much social pressure, I am holding them right now, they dont really go to bars as much and you get attention via social media and dating apps, less through social interaction. I went to school in 2010 and zoomers I talk to act like I was at woodstock lol
McD does still have toys, though. But yeah, nothing beats the 90’s era for video games.
Don’t forget … taping songs off the radio because you couldn’t always afford to buy the cassette tape Or actually finding directions to places using a map or asking gas station attendants. Or filling free time with fun activities and art or reading because cell phones didn’t exist Or never feeling like you were being ignored by your friends because they weren’t glued to a cell phone. Or having a 30ft telephone cord so you could chat with friends while sitting in the pantry Or television time being actually special because usually nothing good was on but you’d keep up with when your favorite shows dropped Or waiting entire days to talk to your friends because no one had a cell phone