According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us
who were kids in the 40's, 50's, 60's, or even maybe the early 70's probably shouldn't have survived.
Our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paint.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets,
and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets. (Not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking.)
As children, we would ride in cars with no seatbelts or air bags.
Riding in the back of a ute or truck on a warm day was always a special treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.
Horrors!
We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing.
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle, and no one actually died from this.
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then rode down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the street lights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day. WE HAD NO MOBILE PHONES!!!!!
Unthinkable!
We did not have Playstations, Nintendo 64, X-Boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, video tape movies, surround sound, personal cell phones, personal computers, or Internet chat rooms.
We had friends! We went outside and found them.
We played brandy, and sometimes, the ball would really hurt.
We fell out of trees, got cut and broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. They were accidents. No one was to blame but us. Remember accidents?
We had fights and punched each other and got black and blue and learned to get over it.
We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate worms, and although we were told it would happen, we did not poke out any eyes, nor did the worms live inside us forever.
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's home and knocked on the door, or rang the bell or just walked in and talked to them.
Footy and netball clubs had tryouts and not everyone made the team.
Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment.
Some students weren't as smart as others, so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade. Tests were not adjusted for any reason.
Our actions were our own. Consequences were expected.
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of.
They actually sided with the law. Imagine that!
Our generation produced some of the best risk-takers and problem solvers and inventors, ever.
The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.
People under 30 are wimps!:thumb
:alien
silver ·
I couldn't agree more!
lobus ·
That is all spot on. especially this
"We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle, and no one actually died from this. "
that is because everyone wipe the neck off with their hand! The hand that had been diggin the worms up and holding the bike handlebars when it wasn't puttin the chain back on or salvaging bits for the same bike from the tip while your dad was dumping the non bike suff or maybe the last tip trip's redundant bike stuff...
those were the days...
Stanley ·
Well I made it...:alien
Andy42 ·
That is so true it is scary. And oh remember getting the Cane at school when you did something wrong BRING IT ALL BACK AND GET RID OF THE WIMPS AND WHINERS OF TODAY :vader
Midlife crisis ·
I total agree with the above .
We even went into the bush behind our house and chased snakes and other things around.We Built trees house and and fell out of them and we made it through.
Our future is not looking good because this generation expects everything given to them they don't what to chase it, think of it ,or do it
Marc
dodge ·
yeah well that is probably the doing of the generation older than us!
my parents grew up in the 60s and try as hard i could they wouldn't let me:
- hitchhike
- ride my bike with no helmet
- they made me wear a seatbelt
- they had to know where i was, when i would be back (or they would say wen i would have to be back) and who i was with at all times
- mum would always break up our fights so we never had the chance to be black n blue
- we ate worms but mum would make us drink horrible stuff to get the germs outta our system
- if we didn't make the netball/wateva team our parents got mad and made us go and complain (not mine but i know some do this)
so i guess we are the result of the previous generations actions 😉
mwuhahahahahaha, and u tried to put the blame on us, hehehehehe
lobus ·
I've still got faith in this generation. Our generation ( or just b4 it) did manage to give us grovelling johnny winston and wacky georgie W didn't it!
Andy42 ·
dodge wrote:yeah well that is probably the doing of the generation older than us!
my parents grew up in the 60s and try as hard i could they wouldn't let me:
- hitchhike
- ride my bike with no helmet
- they made me wear a seatbelt
- they had to know where i was, when i would be back (or they would say wen i would have to be back) and who i was with at all times
- mum would always break up our fights so we never had the chance to be black n blue
- we ate worms but mum would make us drink horrible stuff to get the germs outta our system
- if we didn't make the netball/wateva team our parents got mad and made us go and complain (not mine but i know some do this)
so i guess we are the result of the previous generations actions 😉
mwuhahahahahaha, and u tried to put the blame on us, hehehehehe
And you did everything your parents told you to Hmmmmmm Me thinks not.... unless you were a NICE little boy back then :kiss
dodge ·
Andy42 wrote:And you did everything your parents told you to Hmmmmmm Me thinks not.... unless you were a NICE little boy back then :kiss
GIRL actually 😉:P
vern74 ·
Boy/girl hard to tell in those days of long hair ! Free lovin and parties that you were expected to go and shag someone elses missus. Shit I was born too late to have any fun
Spook ·
A few of us were only talking about this the other day.
A couple of other things;
Public parks had 8 to 10 foot (steel) slippery dips, with concrete under them. Not to mention those big boat swings that would take your head off if you got too close.
You went to the drive in, as a family, & the kids disappeared in the dark to go to the playground.
If you played up at school, a teacher would give you six of the best. Played up on the street, the local copper would give you a size 11 up the date.
But both these bastards would then ring your old man, & no one dared question his right to put you in line.
I got the scars from the billy carts & the pushbikes. I remember the first colour tv in the street & how the first movie we watched on it was black & white.
Andy42 ·
dodge wrote:
Andy42 wrote:And you did everything your parents told you to Hmmmmmm Me thinks not.... unless you were a NICE little boy back then :kiss
GIRL actually 😉:P
SORRY Can i just claim ignorance and blame to many hours at work :cry
pod ·
how true is this all😉
i still remember our class going out from kindergarten at school and going to one of the kids places to watch the first man walk on the moon:thumb
but we all made it, the big nasty things of today never got us:alien
Grey 57 ·
Yeah I am amazed I survived this far. Just didnt realise how dangerous living was until some one told me.:P
VolksFolks ·
i remember a copper stopped me on my push bike with no lights, i got a 'clipped ear' and sent home, now days a copper just touches a child and they are up in court, arrr the good ol days.....
andy
$2.63 homebrand baja ·
I'm only but 30 am proud to say I ate perkins paste, but didn't sniff glue... never got the cane but remember very early on the naughty boys getting caned. The days when a 5 or six year old could take off down the street without a helmet nor fear of perverted strangers. You could have neighbourhood wars throwing rocks etc at eachother, then escorting a fallen buddy to the doctors to get stitches, without fear of litigation..... you would leave early morning and be back by evening, having fun, not chroming, drug taking or drinking.... just well..um. mucking about.... now I look at my 4yr old son and think how ripped off he is... 🙁 ... though helmets and seatbelts are good things. I survived without a playstation etc.. so can he??? lol.
robnjo ·
......are yes, thoughs were the days.
baybuscamperkid ·
Desert Moose wrote:People under 30 are wimps!:thumb
:alien
oi! not all of us are whimps! look at the dozen or so of us on this forum who are under 18 and ripping our hands to pieces playing with the electrics and engines and bodywork on our cars! anyway, isnt it the parents/adults enforcing the laws, rather then the kids who are getting caught up in them who are the wimps?
Robo ·
Its easy to look back with rose coloured glasses and think the old days were better! Thats because they WERE!!!!
Rob...😎
Peter Leonard ·
all the innovators and rule makers and movers and shakers and litigators are over 35 too.... what does that tell you.....
they invented the brain rotting playstationing, rampant consumerism, false advertising; they are the outraged litigationists, the wowsers, the lawyers and the parents.
those of us under the 35 barrier are in this state 'cause of your decisions, so throw us a frikken bone:cussing:duh
twoguns ·
so true. i couldnt agree more. i came off my road bike last year at about 100ks. wrote the bike off and i got up with barely a bruise. some of my young mates said i was lucky and couldnt believe it. i tell em its because i was brought up to bounce, unlike the kids today. we used to fall of the pushies as kids. we used to jump off the neighbours single storey house onto ground and leap off our two storey balcony onto a trampoline... sometimes it didnt come off but we bounced and grew to bounce more....
funny though, my sister remembers all this and used to participate. never hurted herself seriously . but her poor kids arent allowed to even ride their pushies in the street. dont know what happens when parents have kids, htey seem to loose this 'feeling of life and experience' thing. and i am very scared about the future, and feel sad that some of these kids today dont know waht living life is all about..
Oasis ·
For fear of having you all throw bricks at me, I don't the world is any more dangerous than it was 30 of 40 years ago. The only thing that has changed is that our peers, government and media have instilled fear in us so they can make us do what they want. We're all scared of riding without a helmet, or letting kids go to the park alone, or going 55 in a 50 zone (when it was actually a 60 zone a month ago), etc... The media has put the fear into us to control us. That's why I don't have a TV. The information it brings into our lives is the only thing worth fearing. Now I'm going to play a game of cricket on the main road... see you tomorrow...
ducky ·
$2.63 homebrand baja wrote:I'm only but 30 am proud to say I ate perkins paste, but didn't sniff glue... never got the cane but remember very early on the naughty boys getting caned. The days when a 5 or six year old could take off down the street without a helmet nor fear of perverted strangers. You could have neighbourhood wars throwing rocks etc at eachother, then escorting a fallen buddy to the doctors to get stitches, without fear of litigation..... you would leave early morning and be back by evening, having fun, not chroming, drug taking or drinking.... just well..um. mucking about.... now I look at my 4yr old son and think how ripped off he is... 🙁 ... though helmets and seatbelts are good things. I survived without a playstation etc.. so can he??? lol.
Bugged Again ·
Playing cricket on the main street and having to take the garbage/milkcrate wickets away when a car came????
playing chicken on pushbikes!!!
mmmm memories
Peter Leonard ·
we all ate perkins paste, but who ate clag as well, and which did you prefer?
amazer ·
Bugged Again wrote:Playing cricket on the main street and having to take the garbage/milkcrate wickets away when a car came????
You would be dead if you did that today fer sure. Back then the out of control teenage hoon was belting around in 1969 toyota corollas with blown headgaskets and a boot full of water bottles. If you were lucky mum or dad would go guarantor for a loan and you could upsize to a 1600 escort or in my case I had the big block 180B SSS. When we came around the corner there was plenty of time to get the milk crates out of the way. Today you leave school and because you have a good credit rating from your mobile phone you get a loan for a WRX and take off a perfectly good exhaust and bolt on some shiny stainless crap that means you cant go over a speed hump, you put the front seat in the back so that you cant see over the wheel nor reach it, put soft 35 series tyres on it so you need to get a new loan every 18 months, $7000 for a sound system but still want more, add some neon lights and drive around thinking the sun shines out your bum, thinking the rest of us are looking at how cool you are, when really we are thinking you are a deadset wanker!
Remember the days when a new car came with an AM radio. You had to upgrade to a cassette deck that chewed your tapes. And it all played through the original centre mounted 15W dashboard speaker.
aggri1 ·
Yeah, I understand what you people are on about... Thing is, I was in Switzerland when I was about 10, and there it was still more like you {old people} are describing. We went out early in the morning, came home when the church bell sounded six, or it was getting dark. No-one was driven to school - we all walked or rode pushies. Kids were given some level of trust and ...
... kids were assumed to be capable of surviving an entire day (outside, no less!) unsupervised.
Now isn't that incredible. The thing is, I was 10 about 14 years ago, not 40.
Cheers folks, Aurel.
HotRodMatt ·
Our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paint.
Everyone knows lead based paints are far superior in taste!
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets
Ah yes, the bginnings of chemical entertainment. Where would we be without the spaced out mind wandering of Jim Morrison, Timothy Leary et al...
and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets.
And we rode much more dangerous contraptions than kids today!
As children, we would ride in cars with no seatbelts or air bags
Hell, I used to ride on dad's lap doing the steering! He did the pedals and the gears - now that was cruise control! I even remember going to the footy once in out Datsun 1200 with 5 in the backseat, 2 in the front passenger seat and 1 in the passenger seat footwell!
Riding in the back of a ute or truck on a warm day was always a special treat.
Especially fun when standing!
We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.
Flouride, rust and rubber particles - the foundations of any good diet!
We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing.
Running around playing cops and robbers or cowboys and indians. God, sometimes we even had toy guns that fired projectiles that made us run even faster!
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle, and no one actually died from this.
Except those that died from the beatings from leaving floaties or doing roll backs....
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then rode down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
We don't need no stinkin' brakes. What was wrong with using the bumper bar of a parked car for stopping?
We played brandy, and sometimes, the ball would really hurt.
Especially when you couldn't find a tennis ball and had to use on old cork ball!
We fell out of trees, got cut and broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. They were accidents. No one was to blame but us. Remember accidents?
Obviously we never watch "LA Law" as children!
We had fights and punched each other and got black and blue and learned to get over it.
And never was a knife pulled! And no one ever kicked or hit a person on the ground.
We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate worms, and although we were told it would happen, we did not poke out any eyes
And if you did it was an accident anyway!
Some students weren't as smart as others, so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade. Tests were not adjusted for any reason.
That's when it was worthwhile doing well on a test!
Our actions were our own. Consequences were expected.
Usually painfull consequences.
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of.
They were last you wanted to know! The punishment from them was usually far worse!
Baja Wes ·
well I'm a late 70's kid, and I remember pretty much all of that, and then the transistion into the modern era.
I used to ride a push bike with no helmet, and yes I split my head open on the road when I stacked it. Still got a scar where hair doesn't grow...
I used to make billy carts out of crap. And yes I never figured out how to make brakes, shoes seemed to do the trick. But then I did roll a few, and also crashed one into the back of a parked car...
Climbing trees was a great hobby for me, and yes I fell out of a few. You'd stop breathing for about 60 seconds but you'd be right after that...
my friends ate clag, but I was a fussy eater and never developed the taste...
when I was a kid I slept in a bunk bed with no guard rail. One morning mum found me on the concrete floor below still asleep (or unconcious?) with a bruise on my head...
one day we were have rock fights with friends, then my mum come down and yelled "don't throw rocks you'll hurt someone", "throw dirt bombs instead". We saw that logical in that, and found dirt bombs more spectacular when you hit someone anyway...
sitting in the back of a ute is for wussies. I used to get a double on the back of my dad's motorbike around the bush when I was 8, no helmet, no pillion pegs, just hold on and don't let go...
dad used to purposely weave wildly from one side of the road to the other, cos us kids thought it was fun to be bounced around and play corners with extreme G forces...
hiding under a blanket on the back seat of the car to get in the drive-in free...
putting electrical tape around the brandy ball so it hurt more...
I too remember the huge steel slippery slides, and the monkey bars that were 2m off the ground and falling meant a sprained ankle at least...
Jumping off the second story of a mates house into bushes for fun...
clearing tracks through lantana bush with maschetties and axes at about the age of 10...
riding an XL185 trailbike when I was 12 and had no chance of touching the ground so had to stop near someone to help me off the thing.
lollies were so cheap you'd get 3 for 1cent...
best friend punched me in the face and gave me a blood nose, and we were still best friends afterwards....
I could go on and on. My point is, I don't think it's limited to 35 and over. Maybe 25 and over, depending on where your parents were brought up. Mine grew up in ipswitch, so maybe they were behind the times. :duh
Craig Torrens ·
Yes Wes, are you still trying to prove your manhood :thumb
sgetty ·
[
I could go on and on. My point is, I don't think it's limited to 35 and over. Maybe 25 and over, depending on where your parents were brought up. Mine grew up in ipswitch, so maybe they were behind the times. :duh [/quote]
mmmmmmmm yes i think it does depend where u grew up, ive done all the same things wes has mentioned, never had a playstation only got a computer in 2000 and my girlfriend grew up in a small place outa tamworth and didnt have a tv till she was 13 or something like that.....
soooo it all depends, yeah i do agree that there is a softer generation growing up but that is not all, i was made to work for dad for pocket money never got given anything, dammm and im still working for him...
Baja Wes ·
Craig Torrens wrote:Yes Wes, are you still trying to prove your manhood :thumb
If I wanted to do that I'd just post a picture of it.
But the admins would delete it anyway, and besides, it'd take up too much bandwidth 😀
amazer ·
Those slippery dips where you fried your ass in summer? I know where there is one, still living, and monkey bars as well. At the butterfly "farm" where the bug in was held last year.
baybuscamperkid ·
HotRodMatt wrote:
and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets.
And we rode much more dangerous contraptions than kids today!
i am 18 and i ride nothing less then 20 years old! i have a schwinn cruiser, myer speed and hustler dragsters, and i tell you right now, a longframe dragster on 80s tyres with no brakes down a big hill into a sharp corner is much more dangerous now then when the tyres were new ( and had tread!)
and yes, where you grow up does make a difference. i was involved in several of the things that you list (even had an industrial motor powered go-kart with trike style balloon tyres) and my cousin who lives in the country is well known for falling out of trees and escapades on his mini-bike.
OZ Towdster ·
Cmon Dave B lets here your stories like running away from dinisours when you were young hehehehehehehehehehehe
Desert Moose ·
Peter Leonard wrote:we all ate perkins paste, but who ate clag as well, and which did you prefer?
Clag was best by far :duh
lulu94 ·
i remember getting that in an email ages ago.
i was born in 81 and i still did some of those things, played in the street with the neighbours, climbed trees. fell of my bike.
i did have a nintendo but hardly played it, didnt get a computer till i was 16. my cousins used to come stay in the holidays and we would wrestle on the blow up mattress and have concerts for our parents, that usually involved dressing up and dancing to kylie minogue or the smurfs album
the days when we used our imaginations
Danielle
$2.63 homebrand baja ·
:alien perkins was a bit too tangy for mass consumption, bit like a strong fermented, sweaty sock style cheese. It was an aquired taste, though there were a couple of kids who really dug the taste, I was more a kid who gave into peer pressure and ate it, trying desperately to fit in with the 'cool' kids... :duh
Clag was 100% better taste wise, bit like farex with fragrent dishwashing liquid flavour. In fact I eyed off the bottles at the supermarket yesterday, ahhh the good old days.. Didn't want to buy, just wanted to smell it again for old times sake.... :duh
Question is why? why eat perkins paste, and why invent perkins paste? It never really stuck anything down, not like clag.. went all crusty and ur piccies in school projects always fell off.... sorry getting sidetracked here...
did anyone else have a weird kid in class who collected colour coded pencil shavings? :duh
amazer ·
Weirdest kid I went to school with was obsessed with time. If you asked him what the time was, you would get the seconds as well. He spent hours at the train station checking if they were on time, pretty much had the timetable memorised.
He got picked on a lot. Everyone would synchronise their watches on different times and it would freak him out.