As an ‘80s kid: doubt. There were a few of us that could maybe pass for older, but we didn’t look like we were roadies for RATT.
Oh well the guys in my high school did.
It’s Bon Jovi, is it not?
Doesn’t mean they had an easy life … I grew up surrounded by all my older relatives who looked like this when they were teenagers in the 80s. The thing was … they all had rough lives and basically childhood (if they had any) lasted about two or three years. Childhood was just never ending terror with rampant alcoholism, abuse at every corner and violent adults making your life miserable. Mix in there that you were expected to work, run errands, stay quiet or get slapped around for even existing. Most of the boys I knew had really rough fathers who beat them for even looking the wrong way … then they hit 12 years of age and almost by necessity, they had to grow up immediately. They had to grow old, tough, strong, fast and rough because they had to stand up to a previous generation that took it out on them. I remember my older cousin turning 13 and standing up to his dad in a fist fight. It was ugly but he stood his ground … neither won but he never got beat again.
The Breakfast Club. I was a cross between the nerd and the stoner.
Funny you should mention that movie … I just finished watching ‘War Games’ with Matthew Broderick … those films just take me back to the 80s. It was a great time because everything was so simple … but like I said in my previous comment, it was also a rough period because the adults still lived in this world where they weren’t so easy on the kids. You could wander around town and if you did something … anything wrong, chances were high that you could run into an adult that could slap you around and if you told your parents, they’d ask YOU what you did wrong.
Yeah, a lot of those adults lived with the consequences of two world wars and the great depression. They either lived through it or their parents did. It left scars on a lot of them. Sometimes I wish I could go back to the easier times of the eighties, then I think, they really weren’t that easy.
It was probably all the cigarettes
Not even smoking cigarettes. Just being brought up by your parents who smoked every time they blinked.
Yep both my parents smoked and you were tramp in the car with them windows rolled up. And they wondered why we bagan smoking in our teens. It was endemic, every one we saw or hung out with smoke. From grandma to parents, aunts, uncles. Hell I still remember our doctor neighbor was a snoker. Why all the appliances and furniture was either yellow or brown. To hide the cigarette smoke I presume.
Young people were much more confident and independent back then
We also were able to drive and own cars at 16, which isn’t a thing in Canada anymore, and if you pissed off your parents they would throw you out even if you were 15. Parenting was much more lax back then.
Also almost any job paid enough to make a living.
Also parents wouldn’t have their kids taken away for letting them spend time alone in public
In which country? My first job was $3.35/hr in the mid '80s, and I can assure you there was no living to be made at that wage.
Isn’t that like half the current US minimum wage while costs have increased several times?
You are correct And parents of today treating their kids as babies causes them to never grow up and deal with life
I don’t agree. Many young girls got molested because we were just left to our own devices outside for hours and hours.
As horrible and disgusting as that is, I still believe that today many, not all, parents are over protective. I don’t have the stats but there certainly seem to be more perverts out there and parents should probably spend more time explaining this to their kids
Once I was at my friend’s house, and her parents were gone for like three days. We were 9, and it was totally normal for kids that young to just stay alone. One day this man who had been tutoring her in math at some learning center called, which was weird because he had no reason to call as school had just let out and she was done for the summer, and he had never called her before. Well, he had called because he wanted to force her to talk dirty to him while he pulled his horn. She was a rare person with two phone lines, so she called the police on the other line while I made up things to say to him to keep him on the line and record what he said. I was pretty funny in what I came up with to say, pretty snarky. The police arrested him on this basis. When her parents came back and she told them, they were angry at her for making trouble for the teacher and involving them in a court case.
That’s what 80s parents were like.
