1980s Childhood

Childhood in the 1980s was possibly different from what may be remembered by kids in later decades. For one thing, we went outside a lot. We would spend hours of our days where we had free-time outdoors with other kids. There were nice kids, mean kids, normal kids, weird kids, all kinds of kids. We would run into the same ones in our suburban neighborhood and do something pointless and fun.

There were the usual kids' games, such as hide-and-seek, tag, duck-duck-goose. We grew up in an environment inundated with toys. Water pistols, action figures, slip and slides, radio controlled vehicles, legos, blocks, all kinds of things to have a good time with. Boys' toys as we aged tended toward the more aggressive, but I was never really into G.I. Joe or army men too much, although I could definitely assault someone with a Super Soaker 500 and get them drenched.

There were things we could play with that we were not supposed to play with: the garden hose, and those hard, blunt objects: rocks. We were told over and over again not to throw rocks at each other, but we just didn't seem to listen. We never picked up the huge gravel-stones by the office building. Instead, we picked up little bits of smaller driveway gravel and chucked them at each other. We were looking to annoy each other, not kill each other.

At some point we decided that dropping stones through a sewer grate and hearing them splash in the water was an incredibly entertaining thing to do. At this point, our parents would often look out the window, see us around the sewer, and decide correctly that we were up to no good. We didn't understand too much about the design of a sewer system; our parents knew that if you dropped enough rocks into a sewer, it would get clogged and maybe even back up, flooding water into the parking lot. This would have been undesirable. Therefore, we would get yelled at and our fun dropping rocks into sewers would end for that day.

We would learn how to ride bicycles. I would start out on mine with the training wheels on, like most kids do. There was a family down the block who had a daughter who learned to ride an age younger than me; she had two big brothers to help her learn. There were mean kids. I didn't realize it at the time, but just by being a well-doted-upon little snot of a kid, I did much to provoke them. Not everyone had parents who cared about them, and I would learn this in time.

We told on each other for swearing. Until a certain age, swearing was not allowed. It was something you could be grounded or sent to your room for. When someone would say a rude word, the kids would start their little song:


So, we would learn one by one what words we were and weren't allowed to say. Nevermind that within six years we would all be saying them, but for a parent to have a young child pull out a swear word in front of other kids, it was an embarassment. We would hear these words from more "educated" kids who wanted to be troublemakers, or from a movie our parents were watching. As this happened, these words entered our vocabulary and we made trouble for ourselves.

No one likes a tattle-tale though. After a certain age our parents would tell us this. They would be concerned that we'd be known as "that kid who always told on everyone." That would be such an embarassing position to be in for a parent, to have such a widely disliked child. Slowly we would learn that enjoying trouble was more fun than tattling on each other, and so we did stupid things like kids are wont to do.

We would fight in the forest with sticks, climb trees we weren't allowed to climb, do dangerous things on swing-sets. Most of all, we were with each other. One fine day, however, we would discover video games, and from thenceforth the television became not a passive thing to watch, but something you could control things on for fun. For us, it would be in the 1990s before most of us would get to this stage.