1980s summers

[Anonymous]

Can the SA folks make up their own thread instead of hijacking this one

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Can the SA folks make up their own thread instead of hijacking this one

Point taken.
1980s summers?
Van Halen blasting on ride down to beach and later at night dancing to Michael Jackson's Rock With You and Wanna Be Startin Something in clubs.

Good times!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s funny how many parents program every one of their kids days now. It’s so sad. We are lucky to live in a neighborhood where kids spend the summers home. Very old school

The difference seems to be all the mothers are working now, in the hey day they were at home. Can't leave the 8yr olds home alone, so, off to camp they go!

Many of the moms in my neighborhood worked. We were the latch key kids before there were summer camp offerings. I started coming home to an empty house at nine and was on my own all summer. There were definitely downsides to having so much freedom but we became very resilient and very independent.

There are no latch key kids now. They are at camp.

Forced schedulized summers equals increase in anxiety, ADHD, and depression as well as a decrease in autonomy, resilience, confidence, street smarts, and fine and gross motors skills

ADHD isn't caused by "schedulized" summers... WTAF are you talking about?

[Anonymous]

Pool, things like neighborhood tennis lessons, biking around the neighborhood , and lots of swim team practices (some twice a day starting at age 12 or so). Starting at about age 14 I also worked a ton…babysitting, local day camp, etc. At nights German Spotlight, movies, the usual.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s funny how many parents program every one of their kids days now. It’s so sad. We are lucky to live in a neighborhood where kids spend the summers home. Very old school

The difference seems to be all the mothers are working now, in the hey day they were at home. Can't leave the 8yr olds home alone, so, off to camp they go!

Many of the moms in my neighborhood worked. We were the latch key kids before there were summer camp offerings. I started coming home to an empty house at nine and was on my own all summer. There were definitely downsides to having so much freedom but we became very resilient and very independent.

There are no latch key kids now. They are at camp.

Forced schedulized summers equals increase in anxiety, ADHD, and depression as well as a decrease in autonomy, resilience, confidence, street smarts, and fine and gross motors skills

Only summers though? If you want to be taken seriously don't make up words like "schedulized" to try to sound like you know what you're talking about.

[Anonymous]

I spent the time watching TV and riding my bike- there were no summer camps we could afford so I stayed home by myself while my parents worked from the time I was 8 until I graduated from high school.

When I was 6, they hired a babysitter/ house cleaner, and at 7 I went to my mom's office job and alphabetized cards all day while her coworkers smoked. By 8 I could make myself lunch and be trusted not to burn the house down by myself. Good think I liked TV and reading.

In my 40s, my mom had the gall to comment on my temporary unemployment and wasn't I bored all day long? Nope mom, prepared me for that for 10 years stuck carless in suburbia.

[Anonymous]

- girl scout camp, day camp then a week or two overnight
- local pool pretty much every afternoon (then I started working there once I was old enough)
- much television and movies. I started watching my siblings when my mom went back to work FT and we would go to the local (not even blockbuster) video rental place (ok, this was more the early 90s when I was a teenager) and rented new kids movies pretty much every other day
- played outside in the creek out back

My husband played video games all day, pretty much, unless his mother dragged him kicking and screaming to a camp. He turned out fine.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What were your summers like in the 80s if you were a kid/teen? Fun? Boring? Both? I was a kid on the 80s and keep hearing about how boring they were. My summers in the 90s as a teen weren't even boring. So what was it like for you? Was I just lucky?

Born 1975. Grew up in St. Louis (Clayton)
Latch key generation with two working parents. It was super normal back then to just let kids roam freely and that’s what we did. I doubt my daughter will ever have this level of freedom in her childhood here.

Free range summers! Age 8 onwards, up and out by 7:30. Wake up, make my bed, eat breakfast, brush teeth, make a brown bag lunch, grab my pool pass, some allowance money for treats, a towel, and my house key on a lanyard. Tell my dad or mom I am going to be at the pool all day. They said, take a quarter to call home if you’re in trouble, be home by dinner time (6:30pm) and off I went to Shaw Park Pool. Everything I needed was in my little pink Huffy bike basket.


By the time I was 9, I learned how to put my bicycle on the front of the city bus. I’m pretty sure my parents didn’t know about this. I had enough allowance money for bus fare and could take the bus all the way downtown to Union Station. It was glorious!! Me and my Instamatic camera would spend hours just bicycling around the city looking at everything and taking photos. I wandered all over the park under the Arch. I would spend a few hours in the city, get home in time for dinner, get back on the bus (it took a little while to learn how to read the schedule) and no one was the wiser. I used babysitting money to develop my photos at the Glasers drugstore. I got pretty good at doing street portraits!

From age 11, I went to sleep away YMCA camps every summer for 6 weeks in the Ozarks which was pretty cool. I loved it. Otherwise I was free ranging from Clayton to downtown to Ladue on my bike. I got as far as Plaza Frontenac once and got a ride home from a friend’s mom who had no idea how I’d gotten there!

I miss those summers at Shaw Park pool.
All the cool Clayton high school kids wore ray bans and to me as a middle school student I idolized them. We would go to the Galleria nearby at night after dinner at home and just roam around. My parents said as long as I checked in by 10:30 I was okay.

By 14. I spent a lot of my hours in summer hanging around on the Wash U campus - it was directly across the street from my junior high school. I loved the engineering department and science lab. No one even questioned whether I was a student or if I belonged there. I got to check out fiber optic filaments in the lab and enjoyed watching the summer interns do chemistry experiments. Today I look back and it blows my mind that I got away with any of this.

By 16, summers still revolved around the Shaw Park pool, suddenly it was more about spending time at the cool kids houses (I was not one) and getting invited to house parties with older kids.

A group of Wash U students moved into an apartment building near my house and recognized me from the summer before. This was the year my braces came off. I had my first beer and was hanging around college guys who didn’t know I was in high school.
My mom figured out what was happening and intervened before anything happened and told them I was 16 (I was so mad but today I am grateful)

Those were the days.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What were your summers like in the 80s if you were a kid/teen? Fun? Boring? Both? I was a kid on the 80s and keep hearing about how boring they were. My summers in the 90s as a teen weren't even boring. So what was it like for you? Was I just lucky?

Born 1975. Grew up in St. Louis (Clayton)
Latch key generation with two working parents. It was super normal back then to just let kids roam freely and that’s what we did. I doubt my daughter will ever have this level of freedom in her childhood here.

Free range summers! Age 8 onwards, up and out by 7:30. Wake up, make my bed, eat breakfast, brush teeth, make a brown bag lunch, grab my pool pass, some allowance money for treats, a towel, and my house key on a lanyard. Tell my dad or mom I am going to be at the pool all day. They said, take a quarter to call home if you’re in trouble, be home by dinner time (6:30pm) and off I went to Shaw Park Pool. Everything I needed was in my little pink Huffy bike basket.


By the time I was 9, I learned how to put my bicycle on the front of the city bus. I’m pretty sure my parents didn’t know about this. I had enough allowance money for bus fare and could take the bus all the way downtown to Union Station. It was glorious!! Me and my Instamatic camera would spend hours just bicycling around the city looking at everything and taking photos. I wandered all over the park under the Arch. I would spend a few hours in the city, get home in time for dinner, get back on the bus (it took a little while to learn how to read the schedule) and no one was the wiser. I used babysitting money to develop my photos at the Glasers drugstore. I got pretty good at doing street portraits!

From age 11, I went to sleep away YMCA camps every summer for 6 weeks in the Ozarks which was pretty cool. I loved it. Otherwise I was free ranging from Clayton to downtown to Ladue on my bike. I got as far as Plaza Frontenac once and got a ride home from a friend’s mom who had no idea how I’d gotten there!

I miss those summers at Shaw Park pool.
All the cool Clayton high school kids wore ray bans and to me as a middle school student I idolized them. We would go to the Galleria nearby at night after dinner at home and just roam around. My parents said as long as I checked in by 10:30 I was okay.

By 14. I spent a lot of my hours in summer hanging around on the Wash U campus - it was directly across the street from my junior high school. I loved the engineering department and science lab. No one even questioned whether I was a student or if I belonged there. I got to check out fiber optic filaments in the lab and enjoyed watching the summer interns do chemistry experiments. Today I look back and it blows my mind that I got away with any of this.

By 16, summers still revolved around the Shaw Park pool, suddenly it was more about spending time at the cool kids houses (I was not one) and getting invited to house parties with older kids.

A group of Wash U students moved into an apartment building near my house and recognized me from the summer before. This was the year my braces came off. I had my first beer and was hanging around college guys who didn’t know I was in high school.
My mom figured out what was happening and intervened before anything happened and told them I was 16 (I was so mad but today I am grateful)

Those were the days.

TLDR

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

A group of Wash U students moved into an apartment building near my house and recognized me from the summer before. This was the year my braces came off. I had my first beer and was hanging around college guys who didn’t know I was in high school.
My mom figured out what was happening and intervened before anything happened and told them I was 16 (I was so mad but today I am grateful)

Those were the days.

You guys going to jump over all this one for ruining your nostalgia fun?