Nah, in 2007 they could have married in a civil partnership two years previously. Not perfect, admittedly, but better than things were in 1977, or 1957, or whatever.
glee - okay, glad my clarification made you realise I wasn’t being a twat. However being gay and someone who suffered quite badly at school for being out (thanks to the glorious clause 28, thankfully now RIP everywhere except Kent) I’m quite aware of how crappy it is to be gay in education, whether as a student or as a teacher.
I accept that my “can’t imagine it happening here” comment was a bit too casual, and you were right to make the point that I was in fact wrong. I reiterate, however, that I said what I did based on my own experiences (personally and professionally), although if what I said seemed to be me citing myself when I was in fact saying “IMHO” then again you were right to call on me.
I’m going to guess that he is saying the tone of the post, which is that kids are babied and there are no consequences, “these kids today with their music,” and that sort of thing, is bullshit.
We’ll have to disagree on the point of the glurge, then. It’s totally possible to compare the past and the present, but particularly the beginning and ending of the glurge are written to suggest that adults today are better off for not having some safety considerations:
The idea is that the people who advocated bike helmets and non-lead based paint are basically a bunch of prudes and nannies. There’s some truth to the topic, but most of it isn’t in this e-mail.
Agreed.
Marley got to it before I could, but as he said, the idea that a 70s childhood is somehow “better” than a childhood today because all the kids were Evel Knievel is bullshit.
Not to mention the fact that you’re preaching to the choir for the most part as no one here is under the age of 8 and has any idea what all these “restrictions nowadays actually are”
My childhood would have been 10 years after the 77 glurge in grand old 87 and it doesn’t sound all that different. Hell, I even agree with some of them. But the vast majority of the list is pure crap.
I left the house around noon and didn’t amble back until dinnertime too.
I never wore a bike helmet.
I love dodge ball.
I walked to my friend’s house and just walked right in too.
And Little League has always let everyone play. Didn’t you ever watch (the original) Bad News Bears?
But being proud of the fact that your cribs were filled with lead paint, not having cell phones (that weren’t invented yet) and picking fights with kids smaller than you is a joke.
And pegging video game players as friendless losers is just beyond the pale. Especially today when the average age of a game player is in the early 30s.
And you should all be ashamed of yourselves because it’s your fault kids don’t get to do any fun stuff anymore. I imagine kids today would love to do all the stuff you did, but their parents (who were kids in 1977) won’t let them.
I repeat, what a load of crap.
I dunno…there WERE differences back then, that, IMHO, were an improvement over some of the coarsening of society we seem to be experiencing today. I’m 38…and we were taught to respect adults as figures of authority…as teenagers, we cursed, but only if adults weren’t around, and the “f-word” was the nastiest thing we knew to say, and we almost never used it, even amongst our peers.
Today, most kids have zero respect for adults because they didn’t earn it, is my guess. It’s hard to find a specific way that parents were different then than now, except that we perhaps are a bit more over-protective in some areas, and too permissive in others. What those specific areas would be, I can’t say…I don’t know exactly what’s wrong, I just know something is wrong…
Hmmm. I didn’t claim any of this. Never picked a fight in my life (except with my husband). I didn’t peg gamers as losers–but I have 2 boys who’d rather play WOW than dodge ball–they do not “love the stuff I loved.” My daughter won’t watch black and white movies (or wouldn’t when a child. She’s now 18, so there is hope, since she likes French cinema).
It is not my “fault” at all that society and expectations have changed. I have talked to the principal about the lack of outdoor recess–I am in a small minority of parents who actually want their kids to get dirty. I know waaay too parents who won’t let Junior ride up to the corner store on his bike to get gum. It’s a cultural shift of some kind, in my lifetime and it’s sad.
No way do I want to go back to lead based paint etc. But something has changed and not for the better, IMO, so I identify with the feeling of loss expressed in the “glurge”. I don’t think that we should go back. Why can’t we have safe toys and carseats, but also monkey bars?
I looks like somebody expanded and rendered in prose the Bucky Covington song A Different World:
*We were born to mothers who smoked and drank
Our cribs were covered in lead-based paint
No childproof lids
No seatbelts in cars
Rode bikes with no helmets
and still here we are
Still here we are
We got daddy’s belt when we misbehaved
Had three TV channels you got up to change
No video games and no satellite
All we had were friends and they were outside
Playing outside*
Or perhaps that list came first and inspired the song.
It sure seems to be along the same lines, but like I said, I have no idea who penned this. Just passing it on, that’s all.
Now everyone get off my lawn !!! 
My impression of the biggest difference is:
1977: “go out and play”
2007: “You’ve got soccer at 8:00, violin at 10:00, gymnastics at 1:00, and three hours of homework to do.”
I hope I’m not being nostalgic here, but I think too much structure can inhibit a kid’s ability to explore.
It’s also my impression that the amount of homework today is ridiculous.
That’s because a great deal of time in school today is spent on remedial discipline, IMO. And I think that kids are overly structured in their time (although my best friend in the 70s had ukelele, gymnastics, ballet, riding lessons, and something else, M-Friday every week). I had Girl Scouts and …that was it.
I went down to the corner store (alone!) to buy my mom cigarettes. I fell off the monkey bars many times, once requiring a trip to the hospital. I’ve never worn a bike helmet, and my HS had a smoking lounge open to all.
And I’m not a Boomer, either.
Wearing seatbelts is a great idea- and I always do- but the level of Control kids are subject to these days is creepy and unnatural AND ISN’T WORKING. I see these stressed out, obese kids who have a fear of everything. Not being allowed to run around…yike.
Done now.
I was ordered to “shake hands” or even “hug” whenever I got into a fight (even if I’d been one of the people separating the fighters, not one of the fighters). That we did do the touchy-feely thing accompanied with lots of rolleyes doesn’t mean we ended up friends. Heck, I still can’t stand some of those people 30 years later.
I like this part.
It’s a good thing you only put out many eyes, rather than very many, is all I can say 
RNATB, who had the crap kicked out of him almost daily at a variety of UK boarding schools and two US high schools and thinks a little more regulation might have been alright - but who, on the other hand, can take a world-class beating without spilling his beer.
Selected Causes of Death, Ages 0-19, per 100,000 Population (2003)
Cause Number of Deaths Mortality Rate
Natural 36,364 44.8
Perinatal Conditions 14,364 17.7
Congenital Anomalies 6,771 8.3
Neoplasms 2,466 3.0
Respiratory Disease 1,625 2.0
Circulatory Disease 1,713 2.1
Nervous System Disease 1,626 2.0
SIDS 2,162 2.7
Unintentional Injury 12,035 14.8
Motor Vehicle 7,677 9.5
Drowning 1,062 1.3
Fire/Burn 551 0.7
Poisoning 650 0.8
Suffocation/Strangulation 910 1.1
Firearm 151 0.2
Homicide 3,001 3.7
Firearm 1,844 2.3
Suicide 1,737 2.1
Firearm 810 1.0
Suffocation/Strangulation 724 0.9
Poisoning 112 0.1
Source: National Center for Health Statistics
Rates based on 20 or fewer deaths may be unstable. Use with caution.
My only ever visit to an emergency room was in the '50s due to a splinter in my leg. When I’ve been recently (for worse things than a cold) I haven’t noticed anyone sitting there for hours with scraped knees. In fact when I was a kid the doctor would actually visit when we were sick - today you call the advice nurse, who can usually figure out what it is (since it is going around) and recommend treatment without a doctor ever getting involved.
Remedial discipline? 
Not that I’ve ever seen. The reason for this is that parents are convinced, somewhat rightly, that the only way to get into college is to have all these experiences. There are also a lot more options available than when I was a kid. There is some truth to this, since colleges have pushed it, and there are 2x the number of people applying to MIT as there was when I went there.
I’m sorry your school is so rigid. I live across the street from an elementary school, in the Bay Area, and they have outdoor recess and things to climb on. They have wood chips to fall on instead of asphalt, I trust you’re not objecting to that. The playthings (thanks to the inspiration of Robert Leathers) look a lot more fun than the bare metal monkey bars I had in the '50s and '60s.
One good thing about being old (HS class of 1969) is that I can say what BS the OP is, joke or not.
In 1977 (and even 1967 in New York) no kids got hit in school. That’s in the north, I can’t testify to more conservative areas. Hitting students seems to be an old English tradition, so over there I might believe it.
In 1960 or adults were convinced that most kids were juvenile delinquents, and that kids today were going down the crapper. In 1965 there was a study showing that kids knew nothing of geography, and didn’t even know where Vietnam was. (We learned.) By 1977 people were already nostalgic for Leave it to Beaver - that’s why Happy Days caught on.
I can’t wait for the first message like this bemoaning that good old year when all kids listened unlike today, and wishing it were 1968 again.
Having spent my youth dodging NF skinheads in the Abbey Gardens of Bury St. Edmunds, I’d agree with this. It took my best mate and me a while to discover that “slanty eyes” and “jungle bunny” were racial epithets. :eek:
Me too. Class of 1969.
What most of us old farts are saying is that, yeah, things were different back then, but they weren’t better. Life was always tougher then than we think it is now, but here’s a little perspective from my great-grandfather, who homesteaded in eastern Colorado in 1893, lost everything in the Great Depression, and proclaimed to his dying day that life was always better than the alternative:
“Some guys complain that a good steak dinner that used to cost a dollar now costs five dollars. Well, sonny, back then, I didn’t have the dollar for a steak dinner, so I ate beans. Now, I have the five bucks, and I eat steak at least once a week. So I don’t miss the old days much.”
Neither to I, Grandad. Neither do I.
Never heard the term “helicopter parents” before, but the description in the linked article seems quite apt.
I’m not a rosy-glasses-wearing daydreamer, and I don’t think that school in the 70s was perfect. The OP exaggerates. However, things have gone much too far.
In 1977 (well, I actually graduated in 1976, but I’m close here), if I got a headache in school I could get a couple of aspirin from the teacher or another student.
In 1997 my daughter got sent to the principal’s office and I got a phone call at work because my daughter was on her period and she had shared one of her Midol with another girl who had cramps.
In 1977 one of my buddies got a .22 rifle for Christmas and brought it to school for show and tell. The teacher made sure it was unloaded and kept it behind the desk all day, but let him take it out for show and tell.
In 2000, that buddy’s son did his chores before going to school. Said chores included feeding cattle & horses, so he had a knife to cut the baling twine on the hay. He drove his pickup to school, and when he put his keys in his pocket, he realized he still had his knife. Knowing he couldn’t take it into school, he tossed it on the front seat of his truck, locked the door, and went into 1st period. He was called out of class to find the principal, a security guard, and the SHERIFF waiting for his father (my buddy) to arrive. The truck, you see, was parked on school property and there was a weapon in it…
In 197x, a friend of mine got suspended for calling another student a “shithead.”
In 2007, a girl in this school told the principal to “fuck off,” and the school board chose not to discipline her because she was the star of the basketball team.
Certainly it had. It had been around (as the Arpanet) for over a decade, and the term “Internet” first appeared in an RFC in 1974, so there it most certainly had been invented then.
I assume you hadn’t encountered copy machines, then? Photocopies of stuff like this were stuck up on bulletin boards all over the place in 1977.
Technically, the bolded part is true (I think it was 1979 when the first cellular phone network was rolled out), but since I’m nitpicking anyway, there certainly were mobile phones in 1977. I knew people with car phones in the early 70s, and the military had them in the 40s.