Born Before 1986?

Got this via email today and thought i would share it, lol really its kinda true when you read it, how life has changed for kids,



Subject: BORN BEFORE 1986?

According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 60's, 70's and early 80's probably shouldn't have survived, because our baby cots were covered with brightly coloured lead-based paint which was promptly chewed and licked.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, or latches on doors or cabinets and it was fine to play with pans. When we rode our bikes, we wore no helmets, just flip-flops and fluorescent 'spokey dokey's' on our wheels.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or airbags and riding in the passenger seat was a treat. We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle and it tasted the same.


We ate chips, bread and butter pudding and drank fizzy juice with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing.We shared one drink with four friends, from one bottle or can and no-one actually died from this.

We would spend hours building go-carts out of scraps and then went top speed down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into stinging nettles a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We would leave home in the morning and could play all day, as long as we were back before it got dark. No one was able to reach us and no one minded.

We did not have Play stations or X-Boxes, no video games at all.

No 99 channels on TV, no videotape movies, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no DVDs, no Internet chatrooms.

We had friends - we went outside and found them. We played elastics and rounders, and sometimes that ball really hurt! We fell out of trees, got cut, and broke bones but there were no law suits.

We played knock-the-door-run-away and were actually afraid of the owners catching us. We walked to friends' homes. We also, believe it or not, WALKED to school; we didn't rely on mummy or daddy to drive us to school, which was just round the corner.

We made up games with sticks and tennis balls. We rode bikes in packs of 7 and wore our coats by only the hood. The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of...they actually sided with the law.

This generation has 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.

And you're one of them.

Congratulations!

Pass this on to others who have had the luck to grow as real kids, before lawyers and government regulated our lives, for "our own good". For those of you who aren't old enough, thought you might like to read about us.



Source: email forward,

[edit on 13-6-2006 by asala]

Thats pretty nice.
I remember all that stuff !
Playing outside, kick ball or dodgeball or CTF was the best times i have had.
I also remember my bmx bike. I would ride that from sun up until sun down.
All of my cousins now stay inside and play video games. Wonder what they will
end up like ?

AH!

The good ole days..

That go-cart thing cracked me up..I had so many of those. Even had one with a sail! really a sail (ok, I ripped off Moms table cloth), and no brakes.
And my bicycles..all of them from the dump..My parents let me scavenge the dumps!
I think I had about 15 custom built bikes..riding down "king-kong hill" as we called it then.
It was really giant dirt pile. But it had some full sized trees growing on it..so it hade been around a while. So many broken arms...LOL

ll Yes i loved my first roller skates, they where metal with wheels on and litle straps that you tied up like a belt,

and yup my BMX was my life too, and my old racer lol pile if metal

[edit on 13-6-2006 by asala]

Aw man, I'd leave the house at sunup and be gone till dark. Ridin' bicycles around in the woods without helmets!! What were we thinking!!!. We used to walk into the corner tavern and buy quarts of Dr. Pepper with nary a thought that it may be unsavory or wrong.

We used to take the legs off of junk ironing boards and construct new front forks for our bicycles. Made some of the craziest and most dangerous "choppers" you ever saw. I watched a kid "pop a wheely" and his front wheel came off and rolled away....it was a mess when those long forks came down and dug into the asphalt.

Evil Knievel

Bike Ramps. line up the littler kids, talk them into lying next to the ramp.
then Jump them, Knievel style. I think my record was jumping over 5-4 year olds.
Or was it 4-5 year olds..I don't remember now. but I remember that hardly anyone was injured often. LOL

Seriously I was only born in 1984 but this article pretty nearly describes exactly how my childhood was....Broke my arm and collar bone on my bmx doing jumps....but it seems like today no one goes out and does anything other than play on the CPU(as he types on one) or console....or watch TV...A new skte park just got opened and hardly anyone ever goes to it in my neighboorhood....if I wasnt working all the time I would be there...but these lil kids just go tout oschool and yet the skate park is almost allways empty, go figure?

Oh yeah, I was born way before that. I remember when big wheels were the in thing and so was sesame street. Actually am curious to know what some peoples earliest memories were. Mine would be the last moon landing and the bicenntenial celebration of the country. Trees, boxes and sticks were the in thing, or going out and teasing the native wildlife in Texas and gettin into trouble for doing it, ok mom was not happy I was out messing with wild snakes at that time frame, and that was at the age of 8.

Do you remember how fricking starving hungry you were after swimming all day? And I mean ALL DAY. It was a certain kind of delicious hunger that in itself, was always more fullfilling than the food.

'Those were the days my friend'
we thought they'd never end
we'd sing and dance, forever and a day
we'd live the life we'd choose
we'd fight and never lose
for we were young and sure to have our way.

La La La La La La...

'Those Were the Days'
Lyrics, Mary Hopkins.

Great Thread, Loved the e-mail.

.....and then we got cable TV for the very first time, and it was amazing that we had 45 some odd channels for $20 a month - including HBO. You could turn on MTV anytime and actually see a music video or a VJ.

Brilliant post mate,

oh how long ago it seems and so true!

where have we gone wrong?

I think life just got politicaly correct, and in some ways safety went bonkers,

I remember coming in black and blue from playing, cuts all over my legs and i dont think i ever complained once, lol i remember being scared to show my dad a big cut i had in case he said i had to stay in lol,

I was reading an artical the other day il have to try and dig up,
there thinking this is why there has been an alergy increase as the kids dont get exposed to enough germs now, like when we where young we would eat soil 9Mud cakes)

put worms in our mouths for dares,


One more memory i love is pockets full of stones to throw in the river, Hours trying to get the stone to skim the water,

gosh i never thought i would look back and say those where the days, but they are and it makes me sad to see whats happening now,

We had lived imagination,

That post is such a great comment on todays society and its molly coddling attitude and *bonus* it rekindled many happy memories of growing up in Rawmarsh in the 1970's

Jak had got the same email and posted it, It really took me back.

It was a while back, that he posted.

gosh i never thought i would look back and say those where the days, but they are and it makes me sad to see whats happening now,

so,so true mate, i want my daughter to know those simple plesures, which probably means getting her out of europe?

a blink of an eye it seems doesnt it, since we were there.

want my daughter to know those simple plesures

I think its a case of just focus more on things like playing, dressing up,

to many moms and dads today worry more about the mess a kid makes rather than seeing it as a part of growing up,

Let them get dirty, let them make camp in the living room even if you have people coming over, I bet it makes them smile lol

maybe buy toys that use the mind more or allow the child to really think,

watch hook! then make wooden swords lol





[edit on 14-6-2006 by asala]

Originally posted by ben91069
.....and then we got cable TV for the very first time,

That cracked me up because I remember when we got our first TV! We didn't have a bathroom in the farm house where I was born. I remember my mom giving us baths in a big metal tub in the kitchen!

And I have all the same memories that you guys do. After moving into the suburbs, riding my bike with the banana seat and butterfly handlebars ALL DAY LONG! I could go around the whole block without touching the handlebars and who ever heard of a bicycle helmut???

We used to swim in the local swimming hole and get out and pick the leeches from our legs! Ack!

Oh, and I ran with scissors!

Yeah that's my time-frame and nostalgia-aside that's a pretty good descritpion of how so much has changed. (I just mean nostalgia-aside as in it's not like it was always that fun by any means, there were a lot of problems then too - but those problems all still exist also)

Better to have public phone boxes than mobile phones, but true, they were often vandalised (ie - not to steal the money in them, just to stop them from working). I think though that the kinds of people that do that - who are still allowed to do what they do today - could easily have been caught. Especially back then cause so many people would know exactly who were the ones doing all that. I think stuff like that is allowed to happen so that people are more easily driven into accepting things like cellphones.

Oddly, videogames and computers were a big part of my childhood too though - didn't get in the way of all the other cool stuff like riding bikes around and wearing your coat by the hood only, I loved that one. Tie around the head too (we had school uniforms).

Things these days are a mess - if you use war stuff in games with people you know when all are aware of what's going on and who is all playing then you can run the risk of being put on meds and expelled from school, but if you use actions of war against strangers in the street then the law protects you and helps you out and claims that what you are doing is ok.

We built forts underground and tunneled out rooms a few feet down. My dad joked that he wouldn't have to pay for a funeral if it caved in on us, just a headstone.

We would skinny dip in the river without adult supervision and no kids drowned.

Mom would shake the asbestos out of dads work cloths without worrying about mesothelioma.

And doctors would recommend certain brands of cigarettes on TV.

Ah the good old days, I'd love to go back to the 60s again.........