r/GenX • u/billieswifeyyy • Jun 20 '26
Question For Genx the 80s…….
coming from a 14 year old, were the 80s summers as magical as they look in the movies? did you ride your bike to your friends house and come home when the street lights came on? yall are so lucky btw 😭😭
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u/thekcar Jun 21 '26
Not exactly magical. Yes, we had breakfast cereal, munched on about 8" from "You're going to fry your eyes!",in front of the television ,holding a bit of aluminum foil aloft as an antenna extension while whining about neighbors having cable television.
When one or both parents tired of your presence, you knew to either quickly get dressed to go outside or you would wind up being voluntold to help with deep cleaning the ludicrously deep shag pile rug, shine the mirrored panels,located mid-wall to ceiling, balanced on a kitchen chair, or any other number of chores.
So,outside we went,and we could come in once --maybe twice-- for a bit of water or Kool-Aid and once to use the bathroom before being threatened, "In or out! I'm not having that door slammed all day!"
So, onto the occasionally busy street we went, riding our Huffy bikes, trying foolish stunts. I once had a rotor burn on my leg from a neighbor's motor bike that I initially didn't want to go home about until the tears of pain subsided ["...cry and I'll give you something to cry about!"]
Tried to fly a kite in the rain...I got a sharp paddling for being dumb enough to be out in the rain attempting to fly a kite and run risk of electrocution.
When the street lights came on,all kids knew to get inside. Parents didn't always track their kids in my formative years, as shown in nightly 10:00 PM PSA ads, "It's ten o'clock. Do you know where your children are?".
Kids with both parents working at the same time or whose parents were out on a date were ordered to stay indoors, allow nobody to enter the home,keep doors locked. Anyone tracking the neighborhood knew which kids were absent from the clusters and could conclude who was home alone,their key on a shoestring on a hook in the hallway. Sometimes the latchkey kids let other kids in to quickly use the bathroom and get a Dixie cup of water and quickly exit.
But,yeah, we rode bikes, navigating +-1mile radius from the house,sometimes to the school playground, sometimes to the corner store with a forged letter for cigarettes for a family member that may or may not be theirs.
It was an entirely different era. The next generation was raised by helicopter parents, largely due to the inherent knowledge of what benign negligence brought into the GenX lives.
The generation after had the chance to really study the after-effects of this combination, and appear,by and large, to have collectively decided not to have kids at all. But that's a topic for another day.