Five Reasons Eighties Kids Shouldn’t Have Survived Childhood

There’s a great piece on MSNBC this week about all the horrible things we went through as kids that OUR kids will never have to survive.

It says if you grew up in the fifties, sixties or seventies, you’re pretty darn lucky to have made it out alive. What with chomping on the lead painted bars of your cribs and the family tanning sessions in the backyard, some of us are pretty screwed.

So what was missing from the article?

The eighties kids – who make up a large portion of today’s parents too (yes, that’s me . . . and my husband) and who likewise biked helmet-free and drank copious amounts of green cordial.

So instead of another tale of our own parents walking uphill bothways in a snowstorm on the way to school (or, from my father, the stories of pushing the bus out of the ditches… which he wasn’t actually exaggerating on), I offer up a taste of how great our kids have it and how horrible our childhoods were in comparison:

1. Peanuts. We ate ‘em mashed into peanut butter, shaped into Reese’s Pieces and scattered across ice cream cones every summer. And it started about the time we could gum them down to nothing. So much for allergy prevention.

2. Huggies. Not the nappies – those tiny plastic barrells filled with colored sugar water which we drank all summer long. Just thinking about one the other day gave me a toothache. A sweet, sweet toothache.

3. Mobile phones. We didn’t have them. Neither did our parents. And somehow we made it home from wherever we were by dinnertime, hair plastered to the backs of our neck from the sweat of peddling like mad down that last street or two to get there before Mum pulled the green beans out of the microwave.

4. Vegetables. Oh, we had them – often wishing they would be sent to those starving children in Ethiopia. But they were your old-fashioned frozen variety, covered in water and thrown in the microwave for five minutes. I’m guessing there was no organic farmer packaging them up for our dinner table.

5. Cigarette ads. They were everywhere, and if you collected your dad’s empty packages of Camels, Joe would send you a free t-shirt. Which you could then wear to school . . . and no one cared. Except the kid with the Marlboro Man hat.

What did your eighties childhood do to you?

Image/Source: MSNBC