Things that happened to you as a child that would be now considered scandalous

In My Humble Opinion
81

Coming from a totally different country and culture, as a student I never had tuition. Chinese are nuts about academic results (pretty much like the Japanese) and in Singapore today kids would be snowballed with private tutors giving them extra assignments, homeworks and doing mock exams.

During my time as a high school student, I came home, finished my homework and it was play-time for the rest of the day.

The other things - buying grocery alone and running errands for my mum when I was 6, was quite common back then. But now with the kids all being pampered and 1 in 6 household having personal maids, I doubt that happens anymore.

Sorry to crash the party.

82

It seems a lot of these are very common for the times, I was born in 63. My grandfather let me sit on his lap and “drive” the car, walked to school at age 6, often purchased cigarettes for my mom at age 10, no seatbelts, no car seats or bike helmets. In high school around 78-79 male teachers would often bodily pick up a student and throw them into lockers as well as slap them on the head, twist their hair etc.

83

I went to christian school growing up and in to my first college. This was pretty standard.

We also had the 3 finger rule - you could not have more than 3 fingers from your clavicle showing/unbuttoned if you were a girl. And our skirts couldn’t just touch the floor when you knelt, it had to be *resting *on it. And skirt slits could not be open above the knee (front or back). You had to wear pantyhose also. And I don’t think we couldn’t wear patent leather shoes - but you couldn’t wear open-toed sandals or anything like that. (Not that you’d want to with pantyhose anyway.)

Oh, and we had formal checks before any dressy affairs (we didn’t have proms or formals because dancing was a no-no. We had “Artist Series” where we would watch a play or a musical performance. Those were actually quite nice as far as expanding your cultural horizons). You had to put on your formal gown and get it approved before you could wear it. Hundreds of girls lined up on a weekday night waiting for 3 spinster ladies to approve your outfit(s).

And if it was deemed too low cut or whatever, you had to have it altered before you could wear it. And some of the “alterations” looked so awful. Imagine a regular scoop neck prom gown - nothing risque. Only someone had to sew a piece of linen across the neckline so that it wasn’t lower than 3 fingers below the clavicle. And just because it was approved on one girl didn’t mean it would be approved on the other.

Of course, there was no touching between boys and girls. No kissing, no hugging, no hand holding. It was the “6 inch rule.” If you wanted to go on a date with a fellow, it had to be on campus or with a chaperone.

Date options were to the dining common or the snack shop. Other than that, there was “the dating parlor” which was a room full of couches where couples could go and sit and talk - with spinster ladies serving as “chaperones” and guarding the morality of the young ladies. (You weren’t even allowed to play with the couch cushions, as some young people had been known to hold hands or worse underneath them).

Guys could walk girls to their dormitories, but only on the lit walkways and only until 7 PM. They could not walk them inside and definitely could never go to their rooms. After that, girls were not allowed to walk campus alone - they had to find another girl to walk with, or again, stick to the lit sidewalks.

I could go on, but don’t want to bore y’all :slight_smile:

84

I grew up in Taiwan in the 60s and Indonesia in the 70s, but spent a year or two in the U.S. during that time. I’ll skip all the “me too, me too” stuff that seems to have been common experiences for those of us who lived through those awesome times.

Anybody ever play Whip Tag?

Traveling through the American Southwest when I was 13 (mid 1970s), I picked up a leather bullwhip, about 7 feet in length. I got pretty good at cracking the whip. One week, my parents were out of town, and I stayed with my cousin’s family. My uncle, cousin, and I would play Whip Tag.

My uncle stood in the center of the yard with the bullwhip in his hand. My cousin and I would try to run in and tag him and get out of the way without getting lashed by the whip.

I can honestly say that, even when a person is just fooling around and not cracking the whip very hard, that sucker can raise a welt.

We played in their front yard. For hours.

I am pretty sure the neighbors thought we were absolutely nuts, but nobody called the cops.

85

Oh dear.

I just flashed back to some other things we used to do as a kid that I can’t believe we were allowed to do.

Knives and javelins.

My two brothers are 7 and 10.5 years my senior. When I was 5, they had a javelin. The body was made of bamboo, but the point was some sort of low-grade steel. We were living on a college campus in Taiwan, and we had a huge back yard. My brothers got their hands on a wooden crate that was about 6 feet by 2 feet.

We would throw the javelin and a huge hunting knife at the crate. I learned that both the knife and javelin had to be thrown before someone could go fetch the weapons from the crate. Of course, that someone was me. So, at age 5, I had learned the safe and proper way to throw a knife or javelin to get it to stick into a man-sized target.

We also played a knife game called “Stretch”. This is where my brother and I would face each other, standing only a foot apart. Taking that same hunting knife, one player would flip the knife into the ground, and the other person would have to stretch his leg to the spot. Then, he got to pick up the knife and flip it for the other person, making him stretch.

If you didn’t get the knife to stick into the ground, the other player got to stand up straight. The object was to make the other guy stretch so far that he couldn’t reach the knife.

The knife had to be thrown by holding the knife by the blade tip, and had to make at least one revolution before sticking (so, more like a one-and-a-half).

Of course, we played barefoot.

I distinctly remember playing this game in California, but we didn’t have our trusty Chinese hunting knife, because it was in our barrels back in Taiwan, so we used one of Mom’s steak knives.

86

When I was four or five years old I got frustrated because I had already read all the books on some subject or another from the children’s section, and was then given free reign to explore the adult section, and check out any book I wanted. Like aruvqan, I was allowed to read anything in the house and instructed to ask my parents if there was anything I didn’t understand.

My preschool teacher (it was an Episcopalian private school) scolded children for crying, saying that “God doesn’t want you to cry unless you’re bleeding”. I was a sort of quirky and nerdy little girl, and I often got picked on and had blocks thrown at me by the boys in my class, which was okay because “boys will be boys”. I smacked a boy once for teasing me and had to sit in ‘time out’.

I have two younger brothers and one of our favorite games when we were small was ‘potions’, where we would go around the house and mix together all the liquids we could find. Of course we didn’t drink the potions, so we were allowed to use anything we wanted.

When my mom went shopping, I would wait in the car if I was being too fussy to go into the store. I had a toy that was given to me for the purpose of playing in the car (a stuffed Philly Phanatix doll which I thought was a dog), and so I would entertain myself that way while waiting.

My favorite playground when I was really small later got closed because it was considered unsafe, but it was great back then. It had a huge jungle gym and a wooden see-saw, and one of those merry-go-rounds where you hold onto the bars and someone spins you around. Similarly, my other favorite playground got closed because the slide was too big, and after that nothing really seemed like a good slide in comparison.

My best friend had a brother who was seven years older than she was; he used to torment us by chasing us around the house. I think he once locked us in the cedar closet for an hour. To be fair, their mom was not pleased when she found out.

Thing is, I wasn’t born in the 1960s, I was born in 1990… :smiley:

87

Awesome. Sounds like something out of a Truman Capote story.

88

“Stretch” was a pretty standard game in Boy Scouts. Though it would always change from “make your opponent stretch,” to “see how close you can get to your opponent’s foot.”

Interestingly, the only time I remember someone getting hurt playing stretch was when I, a spectator, threw a lit firecracker at one of the players mid-game. It popped at the exact moment it him in the ear. I got my firecracker stash taken away.

89

I don’t remember exactly when it was, but at some point before the age of nine I was taught to shoot a 9mmP pistol (Browning Hi-Power), fire an accuratized .308 Rem rifle at a man-sized silhouette target at >300m, fuse and place explosives for demolition and excavation, pick tumbler locks, rig traps and snares, construct certain types of destructive devices (mortars and projectile/shaped charge mines), SCUBA diving, and several other skills probably ill-advised for a nine-year-old to possess. I guess my parents were either tacitly okay or completely unaware of this, as it happened while spending a couple of summers with the grandparents. As a result, I gained an appreciation for what is and is not possible with these devices. On the downside, I found that nearly everything portrayed about firearms, explosives, and mantraps in mainstream movies is complete and utter bolsh.

Like Mister Rik, although I went through a phase where I did some competitive shooting, I’m not really interested in firearms collecting or shooting as a hobby; to me it is basically a tool, and one that I don’t have a lot of need for these days, though I do like to calibrate occasionally and make certain that I can still hit the broad side of a barn. You never know when the zombie uprising or Soviet paratrooper invasion may happen.

Oh, and I went all over the place on my bike (first a cheap dirt bike, later an adult frame 10 speed that I had to mount from a slope or fence post), going at least 20 miles away from home without supervision. I also started working (seasonal) at the local apple orchard at 11 or 12, lumping crates of picked apples on and off of trucks.

“You’re good, kid, but as long as I’m around, you’re only second best.”

Stranger

90

Is this really scandalous, even these days? We learned how to play draw poker very young (although a bit older than that), same as checkers, chess, solitaire, etc. Of course we never gambled for money, we used beans or something. It wasn’t racy, it was just a card game.

Much more concerned about the gang showers we had in grade 6 (that was horrible), and about the math teacher in grade 10 who threw chalk (this was in 1996). There was also the chem teacher who made me drink dilute hydrochloric acid and sweep up mercury with a broom, but I think that was just him being an asshole. I got in trouble when I told the principal, too.

91

About going to the store and buying cigarettes for the folks. Think back. That was really no big deal. Buying it from the counter just meant you saved a dime or a quarter. Cigarette machines, with the pull handles, loaded with several varieties of smokes, were pretty much everywhere. If you weren’t somewhere that sold them over the counter, the odds were very high that there was a cigarette machine somewhere in the building.

My 1 year older brother and I grew up in a semi-to-mostly rural area. No street lights etc. Be home by dark. Nobody ever really cared where we went or what we did. “Just don’t do anything that will get your name in the paper and embarrass your father and me”. Made our own gunpowder, with added accelerants. Melted lead in the basement with a propane torch. Played with gasoline (to burn ant hills and such). Dug caves into the ravines. Built our own rickety treehouses. Shot firearms and arrows.

Around these parts, I don’t think any of that would still be all that scandalous even today.

92

My uncle was a commercial fisherman. Us kids would take turns crawling into his crab traps which were shaped like a wheel. Then the other kids would push it down a hill with the kid inside holding on for dear life as they spun head over heals down the hill and crashed at the bottom.

One of our favourite “toys” was this sort of spear gun thing. It was a 3 foot long spear that you would set in the gun then fire it off. We mostly shot at trees with it but it’s amazing none of us ever died.

93

I found out a few days ago that my parents went to see my first grade teacher over something she did to me. See, my teacher was fond of telling me and a couple other kids “we write with our right hands” which even at age six I knew wasn’t going to work very well. Given that my mom was “retrained” by nuns to write with her right hand and now can’t write legibly with either, she was rather pissed that a public school teacher was trying to convert us. In 1983!

No one would dream of telling a left-handed student that these days. Right?! God, I hope so.

Two years later, I was in another public school, and their policy was to keep fair-skinned kids inside on sunny days rather than trusting parents to put sunscreen on us; I still remember how upsetting it was for those of us sent to the nurse’s office instead of out to play. The policy didn’t even make sense, because I’m milk pale and even I take twice as long as recess was to burn at all - and as far as I recall this wasn’t put into place after someone got a sunburn, either.

These days it’d make for an interesting discrimination case, don’t you think?

94

I went to a pretty iffy preschool in retrospect. I vividly recall having my mouth washed out with soap by the head teacher for saying a bad word. I believe the word was “stupid.” On another occasion another preschooler hit me. One of the assistant teachers held her against the wall and told me to hit her back. I refused. Even at age three I had more moral sense than this lady.

In line with stories of riding in pick-up trucks, I was allowed to take several rides in the back of a moving van along with my friends and younger sister when we were all less than six. When the van turned, I fell and came less than an inch from impaling my head on the blades of an old-fashioned push lawnmower.

95

In high school I made a foot long knife in shop class. Solid walnut handle with brass fittings. Used it as a book marker between classes while working on it. that was in the 70’s. Also walked 4/10 mile each way to kindergarten.

96

I’m left handed and my handwriting has always been bad. I really tried hard too. I’ve often wondered if it would have improved if I was forced to write with the other hand or write with a modified style by drawing the tip instead of pushing it like I’ve seen other left handed people do. I see no advantage to using my left hand beyond that is what I learned to use first.

97

When we were growing up, if we misbehaved in a restaurant or store my parents would send us out to sit in the car. I can remember being sent out at age four!

98

Um…we did this with our son when he was as young as four or five. (He’s 12 years old now.)

On the other hand, when he got sent to the car, I never let the car out of my sight. I’d stand where he couldn’t see me, somewhere behind the car. I’d let him stew in his car seat (buckled up) for 5-10 minutes, which was his typical time-out time, then go retrieve him.

We thought it was better than spanking, and was the only real option if you have a kid throwing a tantrum in a store or a restaurant.

99

I used to amuse myself by riding the city buses all the way around their route until I got back off at my original stop. This was early 60s, and I was probably in the 7th or 8th grade at the time.

100

This is the first anecdote I can identify with. I didn’t have a ton of friends, and didn’t do a lot of “roaming the 'hood playing all day” stuff when I was a kid (born in 73), but I remember sitting at the bar with my dad. The Grog Shoppe in Trenton, NJ. He’d have a few, I’d have a Dr Pepper, a few Slim Jims, maybe some fries with brown gravy. Good times. I was about 10-12.

Joe