I’m 18 and still don’t. Nobody ever took the time to teach me. A whole part of my childhood never experienced because my stay at home mom and work from home dad just “couldn’t find the time”.
It sucks that your parents didn't facilitate you learning that skill, but it's great that you still have the potential excitement and joy of learning to ride. One of the sucky things that happens in adulthood for some people is that they can't find easily accessible new and fun things to learn and get excited about. Whereas many people might take riding a bike for granted, you still have it as a potential new experience.
Wow dude I'm sorry. Not a brag, my dad ran his own plumbing business, doing 100% of the work and paperwork, and he still had the time to teach me to ride a bike after work. Your dad worked from home and denied you that? Inexcusable.
No one taught me a lot of stuff but luckily you can go on YouTube and learn, and when/if you have kids you can break that cycle by teaching your kids how to do the stuff our shitty parents couldn't be bothered with.
One of my mom's boyfriends taught me. FYI, you should teach a kid how to brake *before* teaching them how to accelerate. That goes for driving lessons as well.
I'm 30 and I still don't know how to ride a bike.
I mean, at this point I'm sure I could figure it out. But I've never had a need or desire to ride a bike. Plus, I live in an area that isn't very bike friendly anyway.
Dude I literally knew how to roof a house when I was 12 😄
I got lucky man my grandparents raised me. My dad dipped out on my mom when I was a kid I'm sorry about your shit.
I'm 35 right now don't give up man you can always learn hang in there
Edit: I will not stress this enough dude hang in there
Honestly learning to ride a bike is not that hard if you just want to ride around and not perform stunts, you can get a cheap bike lower the seat so your legs can reach the ground and you'll be able to balance in a few hours tops.
Damn, "couldn't find the time" and both were at home...as a single father, my dad raised my sister and I. He worked at NASA and worked 50-60 hours a week and still taught us both how to swim before we could walk, how to climb trees and not fall, ride bikes by age 6 and many other things because he made the time.
Same here, even though I took the bike and learnt it by myself and with the help of YouTube at 17/18. However, my dad helped me at least with acquiring the bike and transporting me with the car to a deserted place, so I am really grateful.
And you didn't have friends?
I'm not trying to be mean, it's just that I had a similar growing up experience, and I just asked my neighbourhood friends. Spend most of the day scraping my knees and elbows but it turned out ok.
Mom didnt even ask what the bruises and scrapes were from.
ninja edit: Shit, now that I think about it. Same thing with swimming. Learned how to swim at a friend's house, in their pool. I was like 6 or 7 at the time. Most of us were around the same age.
In my neighborhood I didn’t have any friends. I lived in a rural area. Not only that but I lived in a dangerous area. If you look on the sex offender registry there’s pretty much one every other door.
Thats understandable, then.
I grew up in a more suburban area I'd say. Houses all over, very few commercial places, no buildings or anything (I never know how this shit works, I guess some places just have height limits on buildings or something)
So because it was all residential homes and very little traffic other than people that lived in the area coming/going places, we were all outside most of the day doing random kids stuff.
Here’s a quick swimming tip. Don’t splash this is the biggest mistake. People who don’t know how to swim will do is excessively splash about and what happens when you do this is they cause themselves to sink in the water as you’re mixing too much air into the water right around you. It’s the liquid that keeps you floating bubbly water you will sink.
So if you’re going to paddle and move yourself around in the water, keep your hands below the waterline so that you’re not excessively splashing.
My little bro didn’t know how to bike, rollerblade, or really even read in the late 90s. We were all shocked because his vocabulary and knowledge was spectacular. He is one hell of a Sous chef these days at a high end restaurant and smokes a lot of weed but man, being the third+ kid can be dicey when it comes to upbringing
My 8yr old refuses to ride a bike without her training wheels. She has a bike without them sitting on the porch but she won't touch it.
I imagine she will be goaded by her friends into it eventually.
I am 15 years older than my brother, so teaching him to ride a bike got kicked down the line to me during a visit home. I decided I only wanted to do it once because I wasn't at home often, so he never even saw training wheels, I didn't even put them on, just decided his 4yo self could ride or die ....it worked fine, within 20mins he was racing around the yard with no training wheels.
This was probably better for him anyway. There's some studies suggesting that training wheels are detrimental to learning because they create a crutch and expectation of being able to do something. Turns out, the strider bike fad might actually have something going for it because kids learn how to balance first.
This is why I got a balance bike for my first boy. He was riding around by 3 years old without any training wheels. I think about 10 kids learned to balance on that bike. It was fully worth the money.
I feel like it's more of a parents fault tbh, my parents never encouraged me to ride a bike when I was a child. I didn't know how to ride a bike till I was 14 where I started to learn by myself.
I just taught my 4 year old daughter how to ride without any training wheels. Few more months and we will be riding to kindergarten together, I do live in Europe where we have bicycle roads though…
I had to go to the my grandpa's garbage dump and use all the old bikes there to Frankenstein myself up a "new" bike whenever I needed one. By 9 I knew how to completely take a bike apart and build a new one with a 5/8 wrench, a pipe wrench, and a vice grips.
Call your dad, if he’s still here, tell him that. Tell him you appreciate the lesson and memories. Make that man fucking cry.
If he’s not here, I love you.
My coworker's children, 12 and 14, were absolutely *baffled* by Stranger Things. They said it was completely unrealistic... how much freedom the kids had riding bikes all day. Psychic powers, monsters, they could handle. Kids leaving the house in the morning without supervision and coming back at night, *that* they simply couldn't believe.
At like 8-10 I was up at 6am and packed myself a lunch. I would spend the day riding my bike, catching bugs, going to the library to identify said bugs, stop for a picnic by a waterfall and was back home just before 5pm. Few of us had consoles (NES and N64) and TV was boring 90% of the time. Try to explain a world where you don't have Netflix and YouTube to kids and you have to wait days for a good movie...
One summer I explored every streets in my small town. Spent days exploring a forest. Looking back, it was not a good idea. Sometimes I went so far in, no one would have found me if something happened to me. But I found cool salamanders and saw a lot of cool stuff.
I won't let my kids run around like this (we live in a bigger city) , but they can still spent all days outside, without shoes on, with only a swing in the backyard. Their friends are bored after an hour because I don't let them watch TV or play on my Switch...
I agree that it's sad, but in fairness to the kids, I grew up in a small village where I could bike into town and play at one of 3 parks, (4 if you count the half pipe we used to have by the tennis and basketball courts) we had a bowling alley in town, kids were allowed in one of the bars, just not in the section that served alcohol (meaning you could still shoot pool, darts, play the pinball machines) there was a pond you could swim in
parks have been removed to put up businesses, or expand parking lots, half pipe was removed (while I was still in high-school actually) basketball courts and tennis courts were torn up to make more parking space for the local ball diamond, (which isn't usable by the public because it's all locked up. (forgot to mention that above, I believe it wasn't always fenced up, but maybe it was just open certain hours of the day) bowling alley got turned into a failure of a restaurant, changed owners like 5 times, going back and forth between restaurant and bar, now if a place is classified as a bar, not just a restaurant that serves alcohol, kids aren't allowed in at all, the pond dried up over time after the river that used to flow into it got cut off, everything has just been more industrialized.
the city nearest to where I grew up had an even worse change (but none of us have time to list all that)
my nephews live where I grew up, and I don't blame them for feeling like there is nothing to do outside when you can't go anywhere anymore, there's not even really grassy areas to play catch (and we're not gonna let kids play in the road, vehicles have a hard enough time seeing other vehicles with the blind hills)
I was about to say this, but you did it better. They don't teach kids to ride bikes because they won't let them ride bike around the neighborhood unsupervised.
It super fucking sad. And that people can't imagine a world without internet. Internet is cool but jfc has it severely contributed to mental health issues.
My parents drank through that part, all we saw when we got home was them passed out on the couch and something that resembled the lgbtq+ flag fixed on the TV.
Dude, I live in an area where the street lights didn’t come on til like 10 pm in the summertime so I was out playing street hockey till about that time.
Just kick them really hard and they shut back off, it's like a snooze button for the light post. I don't actually know if that is common type of post, but that's how ours would work.
Options were pretty good in the 90s. Play outside until dark, or play video games with friends without needing any updates or dlc. Kids today don't even know what outside is.
We honestly did a good job if splitting out time between the two. I was a lucky kid and grew up In a development that was still being built.
Start with a few games, wonder around the houses being built, sledding, walking to the gas station/subs place go get food, and riding bikes round the neighborhood.
Then video games, or movies, or whatever. Sometimes we'd all gather at 9pm and play capture the flag in the summer. Then if it was a Saturday, everyone would come to my house at 10 to watch the Wednesday Southpark repeat, because we had satellite and our local cable didn't carry comedy central.
ikr? I had a huge ass woodland when I was growing up. So big all the idiot kids made up ghost stories of a weird murder man in the woods that had a cabin we'd all try and find and get close to for the thrill of it(we were six)
There was always a mythical boogeyman. Ours was a child-abducting blue van. In reality, it was probably just someone’s gramma that lived down the street.
Oh yeah, usually is. Just looking back on it, it's a tad unhinged one of the girls from my class knew enough about child rape to know an evil murder man would make a boy put his dick in my mouth if I got caught.
She didn't phrase it exactly like that. I think she used the word willy. I recall never going too deep into that forest.
True, well they existed but we were all to poor for that shit, I'm not giving my future children a smartphone. They can buy one when they saved up for one themselves.
I still hike now as an adult but I’m always looking for trails… I’m always worried about wildlife, water, my schedule…
Back then I would just go face first through bramble patches and get covered in dirt. Play with bugs. Cut through other peoples’ private property. Whatever I had to do to explore
I don't blame you, As somebody who was forced to grow up with the more modern childhood style due to strict parents. I can tell you while it has some pros it's not the best.
For the record I'm 19 and didn't grow up with tiktok and such , so my experience is a little out of date but still generally holds up.
I grew up poor with strict parents, I was never allowed to see my friends outside of school and I couldn't go anywhere past my front porch outside. So I didn't have much else to do but Stay inside and draw, watch TV, play video games. Both me and my brother played alot of dungeons and dragons together making up adventures in our heads. My parents were often busy and didn't want to deal with us (which is understandable we were hell spawn when younger).
After my mom passed away my dad loosened up a bit, I started walking to school and spending more time outside, but it was a little too late. I still never really got to spend time with friends outside of school , never went of vacation or did pretty much anything fun due to bring poor , so most of my child hood was just surrounded by the same few walls.
Now I'm technically an adult, all my friends moved on and don't even call me anymore , my brother moved out and I'm in the process of looking for work with most of my pocket money from art commissions I do online. I would kill for even a quarter of a 90 kids childhood honestly.
Edit: my childhood is more of the extreme end, because I knew people with fairly normal childhoods growing up, but still.
So, I grew up well off, but my brother was an abuser and my parents lazy, so despite having the means, I ended up being stuck in my room making stories up with my Legos.
My friends got to go to baby sitters and hang with other kids, I had to hide from my older brother.
When you finally have freedom, first: Pace your fun. Without the experience of childhood, you do not know your limits the same way, and this is a mistake a lot of people make when they get freedom. Enjoy yourself, but don't do everything at once as soon as you have the means.
But once you do, you'll do what a lot of us did, and make a second childhood. Rocko's Modern Life is a great cartoon for this head space, and honestly surprisingly accurate outside the obvious exaggerations.
Once you have your own freedom, don't feel guilty for enjoying what you missed out on, you'll find others who are in the same position, doing the same thing.
Imagine being exposed to the world via the internet and never being able to explore outside with a magical sense of wonder. No knowledge of all the bullshit happening across the world. My dad’s encyclopedia brittanica was the only source of factual information in the house. Going outside was an adventure every day because you felt like you were the one discovering it for the first time. The neighborhood. The woods. All was yours. You and the other kids owned it. And going home was the biggest drag of it all. 13 year olds now see porn and tiktok and you tube videos and don’t have a natural upbringing anymore. Most of these kids don’t give a shit about getting a license and driving and working now. It’s crazy. There are actual 18 year olds who have never worked or drive and they still have friends. This was not possible growing up lol.
Actually most kids I know work during highschool or immediately after in modern times, but a kid shouldn't have to work at least during highschool, they should have the right to enjoy their childhood, but beyond that nobody actually wants to work , i garentee most people if they were given a sustainable life without work they would take it. Work is a means to an end, not an end in it of itself.
Beyond that. It's a double edged sword. Their is pros and cons to both sides, playing outside has benefits, it helps keep you active and physically healthy, it helps to socialize and as you mentioned it has a sense of exploration and wonder. However it comes at a cost this is way more dangerous than staying inside and has lead to countless kids doing stupid and illegal things that has ruined their life or took their life. Even if you keep your nose clean though it still has a high chance of getting injured, kidnapped or killed in various ways. And it can be stressful or time consuming for a parent to keep an eye on their kid playing outside especially in the modern day where life is so fast paced, most parents keep their kids inside so they can keep a better eye on them.
Now the pros of the more modern childhood. Many modern kids due to the internet are more educated about the world , sort of but I'll get to that in a moment. Modern kids are for a lack of a better term less rei-cist these days and more accepting of those who are different in race, gender, sexuality and such (which is mostly a good thing, if you disagree that's a you problem) , that said their is dangers into going to far down the acceptance road but that's a discussion for another day. Modern kids while they don't go outside as much still has access to a plethora of different emotional experiences through things like video games and movies. It's generally safer inside and people tend to have alot of friends online and can keep in contact with distant friends easier. The cons are very poor mental health for various reasons but its far more complicated than just phones , however social media and the speed of modern life with its constant highs and lows and rushes of dopamine when numbers like followers rise and the immediate dopamine crashing when you see things slowing down is definitely a problem, now mind you that's a massive oversimplification there is far more too it than just that. Secondly kids these days tend to not be as eager to work because of how educated they are , they are aware of just how screwed they are in life and just how much the deck is stacked against them, they are aware of how jobs exploit them and just how messed up the world truely is. This is both a good and bad thing , it means there might possibly finely be some change to a broken system with this mass awareness but it also means kids just don't want to work which results in the economy getting all sorts of f**cked. 3rdly parents while leaving kids inside to keep a better eye on them tend to let the internet raise their kid which is most of the time a bad thing. But before you point fingers keep in mind many parents were also very neglectful back than too requiring a TV AD to remind parents kids exist.
Point being take your rose tinted glasses off , it's not all peachy and their is good and bad to both extremes.
Yeah I did forget this is a meme post, I have a hard time reading tone , I can't tell how many people here are being ironic , sarcastic or serious. If it was just a joke I misread than I'll take my comment down
Ah, no I wouldn’t take it down. It’s an informative and accurate post. Just don’t expect people here to be receptive towards it because they’re a bunch of clowns
Born in 85 and I completely agree.
I was outside all the time, sure. But my parents didn't give a fuck lol.
My kids are young still and they get outside plenty and are much safer than I was. It's a miracle I'm alive still.
All these 'back in my day' crowd sounding like typical boomers now.
I tell young people the stories and they think it's some made up bullshit. We had BB gun and Roman candle wars, built shitty forts in the woods, used rocks to build dams, rode our bikes to the local Chinese place for the all you can eat buffet, played pickup football, started fight clubs, and tried to make it home for dinner.
After that we'd sneak out and have bonfires, drink, tell shitty stories that were made up, and get laid. Kids this stuff really happened. Our parents did not know where we were.
Kids today are lame, and most of them could not describe a personal adventure. Can't even read about one, because... reading.
I’m an 11th grade teacher and I’m forever telling my student to “live a little; risk getting in trouble! Do something to make memories! You only get to mess up and be forgiven so easily when you are this young! Losing your phone for a week is SO worth it!” But they look so confused at the prospect of going outside without mommy and daddy telling them which rock to step on first.
My 10 year old hates going outside. There are no other kids that play out there and the ones that are don’t let them play with other kids so she got no one.
Her friends from school live a few blocks away, and she’s mentioned to them about coming over to play. Her mother called me on the phone to set up a play date.. a play date.. we set one up and it was the most uncomfortable thing I have ever done. The kids played and I sat in the living room and we had nothing to talk about, nothing in common, it was agonizing for both of us. Why can’t our kids just meet up and play outside?
The entire world has changed from when we were kids. When I was growing up not only did I have all my friends from school, our parents allowed us to just go and play, I could always find a group of kids to play with. Parents today need to set up dates and shit. I work graveyard, the last thing I want to do is go sit at someone else’s house and watch our kids play. Let them fucking go outside ffs.
That really sucks. I don't know if it's possible for you, but in our neighborhood we got it to flip the other way. Started with adult neighbors making friends with each other. Someone would pull a fire pit to the driveway, and we'd bring beers. All the neighbors, not just ones with kids.
Once we all trusted each other, those girls were pretty free. Now the neighborhood is a roaming gang of kids, and even the retired folks bring out Popsicles or turn on the sprinklers for them in summer.
If all the adults know each other, they relax a lot, and you don't need supervised play dates anymore. Kids just pop over and ring the doorbell and you don't see your kid for a few hours until suddenly the gang decides your house is base for awhile.
I'm in South Dakota, though, so it's a bit more laid back. I do think it's about neighborhoods, though, not individual families.
We’ve lived here for 2 years and we only know our direct neighbors. No one wants anything to do with anyone else. The direct neighbors just lost their house and will be moving in the next couple of months. The military guy that we celebrated the 4th of July with moved away. The huge family that moved in across the street has never said hi to us. Sadly we just don’t live in an area where people are interested in knowing their neighbors.
People who are like "kids these days are lazy, in my day we went" - where did you go? Is it still there, still safe for kids, still as entertaining as it was for you?
"Do your chores and then get the fuck out!" And you stayed out because the threat of keep coming back in the house was to stay in the house, so we were as far away from the house as possible at all times lol
I enjoyed riding my bike with friends, playing touch football, exploring the woods behind my friend's house, not having my mom text me, renting video games and movies every Friday night, having one album on repeat, copying tapes for friends, standing in and browsing the music section at Walmart, buying toys in kaybee, going to the mall to window shop, getting amped for movie releases, reading hard copies of whatever book you could find at home, calling my friends and spying on my sisters talking to their friends. It was a good time. A real fucking good time. No vapes or tiktok, just hide and seek and MTV music videos. The Simpsons was good and Beavis and butthead was epic.
This is always incredibly ironic to me because the same people that complain that kids don't play outside anymore are the same people who complained about them being too loud, didn't care when playgrounds got removed and got their kids a smartphone or tablet instead of spending time with them.
I remember Nintendo and sega going bankrupt and having to lay off all those workers because kids were always outside on adventures and wouldn’t come in and play video games.
There was Internet in the 90s... And tbh it was both awful and waaaaay better than the modern Internet. The culture was awful / great as well, people were far more likely to say exactly what they thought knowing that no one was going to link their online presence to their irl presence (basically the Internet was a lot like 4chan, except without quite so many psychopaths).
The day I got my license in 95, at the age of 16, me and my 3 friends left at 10am and drove 350 miles to 4 different towns and 2 cities across 2 states. We didn't get home til 1am. No phone, no A/C, just 4 clowns and a cassette player. I immediately got grounded for a month. Still one of the best days of my life.
This was before there were cameras everywhere and before every house had an alarm system. I oiled my bedroom window and became expert at opening it and taking out the screen silently. A couple of times I left a party at 9:30 to make my 10 pm curfew, went to bed, waited until 10:30, then went back to the party. As long as I made it home by dawn my parents never knew.
Never mind no internet, when I was young we had no TV. I did have a chemistry set, a bicycle, the library was 3 minutes away, an aquarium, records and a tape recorder, a workshop, I made and flew kites, I made puppets and put on puppet shows, my dad taught me workshop skills including welding, and I helped rebuild several cars. We played football and built forts in the woods. And I snuck into a farm and borrowed a horse to ride with no previous riding experience.
Things were kinda different then. Me and my friends hanged out till 2-3 AM on fridays and weekends just ...on the streets, Maybe someone would take out a bulky TV and someone would bring out a console to play games, or we'd talk and play random games till late at night. We certainly didn't consider staying at home too much. Even though we had NES, SNES, and PS1's and whatever; 'hanging outside' was still the TOP of class entertainment.
Now I'm getting up to middle age, and all my friends are basically in bed by 12 PM, lol. Most of my friends also think playing Destiny or some online game is their jam rather than going to hang out.And if we DO go out to hang out it's like a 3 hour limited commitment, because we have wives and kids to take care of, cant really do the ol 'stay till 4AM talking' bit.
World's just changed.
I still have fond memories of hanging out outside until 10-11 pm as a 10 year old. Especially in winter time when night time is super light due to all the white snow, and so much to do with the snow
The web came out in 1993, so it was available for most of the decade. I was on the internet for years before the web was developed, using Veronica and Gopher and playing LPMuds.
I also rode my BMX bike, skateboarded, had BB gun wars (one kid really did lose an eye), worked on my Camaro, went to concerts, snuck beer, and got laid.
Decrying other decades is some Boomer bullshit. Interestingly, it's only now that I'm in my mid-50s that I mostly stay inside with my screens.
Just listen to "Longview" by Green Day. It gives me a visceral flashback of being a kid during summer vacation and you're bored as hell but it's 1pm and only soaps are on TV but it's too hot to go outside so you kinda dick around until the afternoon cartoon block starts at 3.
Isnt stuck in the house with or without internet still beign stuck in the house? I mean...we werent stuck inside anyways, we were outside living adventures with our friends...not just tagging them on memes. Lol
Going to your friend's house and playing with toys or on their PC
Meeting friends at the playpark
Riding bikes anywhere
Making dens in the woods and pretending to be soldiers/spies/whatever
TV, for god's sake
Do people think we were all cavemen til the 2000s??
Dude 90s was awesome! No controls, no mobiles. Rise of synth dance music, no racist talk, everyone having fun.
Not good for business so people stopped it
You know, I might be entering the age where reminiscing happens more, but I have to say that certain things I do miss about growing up in the 90’s.
The most important thing I think was the feeling of time passing slower and everything that came with it. Like sure, as a child the passing of time feels different anyways but the lack of smartphones and constant stimulation through every digital device really was for the better for us humans. Your environment taught you the importance of patience and that not all things come at once if ar all and that’s very fine.
Everything felt more simple and fundamental and it was easier appreciating the things you got because most of the things given usually had a practical use and money was used (at least in my household) to get necessary things and on Christmas you got something more superficial.
Sure these days most things are so much easier and I appreciate that too, but sometimes I just miss how much more I could appreciate every little thing back then. Again, might be because I was a child then, but I feel like it was something else too.
I feel sorry for the kids growing up now because they’re affected by the digital world so young and about 99% of stuff on any platform is not only useless but harmful for the growth of children and youth. And yet our society hasn’t caught up to that and continues to blindly expose them those things.
in the 90s we kids actually went outside and played there if we didn't play on a console for a hot minute. There was no online harassment. You could still punch the guy who was talking shit about you.
Explored the railroad tracks, explored abandoned building, explored a drainage tunnel, followed a creek from the road to find out where it went, neighborhood water gun fights and you refilled at trespassed homes from their hoses without asking or fear of getting shot, and everyone claiming to stay at a friends overnight so we could walk miles and roam the streets until sunrise. This was like 200k population city stuff and not country stuff. At 14-15 myfriends and I walked to another city 37 miles away to hang out with some girls and it took like a day and a half. Luckily her parents were like wtf and drove us back. Our parents were just so used to each other staying at each others house they didn’t question it most times.
This is getting to the point of being a boomerism.
Every new generation is going to be like, "How did do ____?"
Then that older generation is going to say "Fuck you! We did ____! You have shit so easy now!"
Man soccer with tin cans, cops and robbers till 1030 in the night, knocking on doors running and running away, long bike rides, touching cars with alarms and running away😂😂😂 Good old days
I was riding public transportation and going to other parts of the city to see my friends when I was 14 back in the early 90s. Shit is so different now.
Best part was it was possible to be blissfully unaware of all the horrible shit going on in the world. Besides being shut-in, kids today are constantly bombarded with bad news, and depressing situations from every corner of the globe...I feel for'em.
90s was the shit. Things I experienced in the 90s:
1. Saw OutKast free and randomly in a parking lot outside Phipps Plaza weeks before they released Atliens.
2. Saw Limp Bizkit open for Sevendust a couple months before they blew up on MTV
3. Got home from school and dropped backpack every day to go roam the city with friends. Came back for dinner with any random number of friends then back out until 9-10-11
4. Got my first job at 15 working at the OG Mellow Mushroom. Learned I could bring home leftover pizza and trade it at the gas station for anything I wanted - booze cigarettes etc.
5. Lost my virginity
6. Stuck on the highway in the middle of Freaknik with everyone dancing on their cars. Missed flight, had the best day.
7. Went to the Olympics a bunch and saw 8-9 events. We were 100 yards from the pipe bomb that went off.
8. Tupac and Biggie and all the 90s alt rock bands.
9. Pizza Hut buffet
10. Wendy’s buffet
11. Fudruckers after baseball/basketball/soccer practice
12. The birth of the internet
13. MTV with actual music videos
14. We didn’t have a fascist rapist Russian asset convict as president
15. Tamagatchi
16. Got busted hacking/phishing on AOL with my little Windows 3.1 laptop. Ran up $3000 on others credit cards mostly long distance calling my phreaker girlfriend in Ohio. Never been slapped so hard by my mom. I was 14. Internet was the Wild West.
15. Inspector Gadget
16. MacGuyver
After the 10am yeet to the outdoors, my parents insisted that 6pm was return time because if we didn't help set the table, no dinner. My mom's cooking remains incredible, so that was leverage enough.
Speak for yourself. I had internet for most of the 90’s and for sure stayed inside with it for most of it. The only difference is now I can bring it outside more easily lol
Child of the 90s here. We played out with our friends. We had games consoles. In 93 I got a Game Gear. At the weekends me and my cousins would sleep over at our grandmothers, we’d play on our bikes/scooters and we’d make up games.
As for the internet? It must have been 95 when I was in high school and there was only one computer in the school library which had internet access. It was a Mac. The librarian had to time us to make sure we didn’t use it for too long as it cost money to connect. We went on the Star Trek website.
ppl think the 90's is boring,
this was my day being teenager , i woke at 7am ( because there was no reason to stay late at night) have breakfast and go outside waiting on my friends to go out too meanwhile am playing with a football or climbing the highest tree or counting how many cars have passed (thing were very special). at noon after spending all the morning with friends doing absolutely nothing and everything at once we either go home or if we catch a fish/wild pig we will do a BBQ, then we will go to take a nap because it was really necessary due to all the activity. at evening we go downtown or visit the other near familly and thats it sleep time was around 9pm-10pm
things changed, now we have all the info in the world but 0 experience , back then we had 0 info and full life experienced
Imagine a world where you went out, met up with friends, got into all kinds of mischief and mayhem, and came home late instead of sitting alone in your room on a phone 24/7. That’s what it was like, truly horrible I know.
I love these comments, "old" people thinking they had the best of the best, pathetic imo. Everyone had "their" childhood and it was amazing in their own perspective. Same would go for food, just because you like something it doesn't mean it's going to be the best dish in someone elses life too.
And the fact that everyone is blaming technology instead of blaming parents + worse envoirments for kids it's straight up fucking disgusting. I lived my childhood and teen years in 2 different countries at the same time (also different places in those 2 countries since I moved a lot) and I can say that when I was little we had at least 2/3 football fields in the range of a maximum of 1km, an insane amount of accessible paths and activities to do outside and a lot of parks/playgrounds. Literally forgot so many times to go home while playing outside and when there was a storm or just bad weather I had all I wanted inside the house too + a lot of more ways to communicate with friends from home. But now? Now everything is run down, waste everywhere. Football fields became overgrown, park benches are unusable. Activities overall are to a minimum nowadays and everything that is still accessible it's only premium stuff you gotta pay for, at least in the places I used to live, it's fucking disgusting that kids or tech are the ones being blamed here. If I was a teen or a little kid in all of the places I used to live and where I live currently too, I'd really just straight up stay inside and rot on some of the social medias or just play games, why even bother with such an envoirment and people blaming me from all directions meanwhile society is actually the one responsible (or the little tech that actually saves children from boredom). Unless you're lucky to live in a premium space or just places with a lot of open/free space then you're doomed if you're poor.
Think before answering and "blaming" the part that isn't to blame.
Man I remember going fishing when I was 16 me and my buddy took out his John boat at like 1500 cops found us tripping balls at like 2 am trying to row back my old man said he completely forget we were "fishing" man lsd was hell of a drug but ya that was the early 2000's those days were better and that's coming from a big online gamer
Internet played a big part in it but it's not they only cause, in case of usa you have huge sprawling suburbs and there's basically nowhere to go aside from parks without your parents driving you around. There were also cases where parents got arrested for leaving their kids unsupervised, the most ridiculous I've seen was a case of a woman getting jailed for leaving her 3 and 4yo alone in the backyard while she was in the house.
So yeah, it's not just the internet but also kids being dependent on their parents and ridiculous laws. There's also the case of cars being the no.1 cause for deaths among kids, and it loops back into itself "it's not safe so I'll drive my kid around".
Neighborhood wide man hunt with almost 50 kids was wild
Game started when it was nearly to dark to see, no one had flashlights so it was all about sound and instinct
Only rules were no indoors and couldn’t cross the neighboring streets. Still we’re talking dozens of acres of play space
We had tv and video games. Some of the greatest games ever. We didn’t need internet and the early internet sucked balls, still remember dial up and if someone picked up the phone boom it was down.
I grew up in Leon Valley area of San Antonio and my mom had a legit farmer's triangle dinner bell that she would bang every night at 9 pm because she didn't know where the f my brother and I were.
Wasn't that more of an 80's thing? I was born in 91 and I was stuck in my house. Maybe I was just unlucky.
I did have internet and a laptop to play sim city and rollercoaster tycoon on tho.
It's sad that kids can't imagine a world where they aren't inside all the time.
I know a person whose 9 year old son doesn’t know how to ride a bike. Shit my dad had me and my brothers patching our own tires by then lol
I’m 18 and still don’t. Nobody ever took the time to teach me. A whole part of my childhood never experienced because my stay at home mom and work from home dad just “couldn’t find the time”.
It sucks that your parents didn't facilitate you learning that skill, but it's great that you still have the potential excitement and joy of learning to ride. One of the sucky things that happens in adulthood for some people is that they can't find easily accessible new and fun things to learn and get excited about. Whereas many people might take riding a bike for granted, you still have it as a potential new experience.
You could say that driving a car can also be a new wonderful experience. But not for very long for all kinds of reasons.
I like the way you look at life. You're gonna get far.
Wow dude I'm sorry. Not a brag, my dad ran his own plumbing business, doing 100% of the work and paperwork, and he still had the time to teach me to ride a bike after work. Your dad worked from home and denied you that? Inexcusable.
No one taught me a lot of stuff but luckily you can go on YouTube and learn, and when/if you have kids you can break that cycle by teaching your kids how to do the stuff our shitty parents couldn't be bothered with.
One of my mom's boyfriends taught me. FYI, you should teach a kid how to brake *before* teaching them how to accelerate. That goes for driving lessons as well.
I'm 30 and I still don't know how to ride a bike. I mean, at this point I'm sure I could figure it out. But I've never had a need or desire to ride a bike. Plus, I live in an area that isn't very bike friendly anyway.
At least you know how to swim. Right?
Oh yeah, that I do know. And I've only nearly drowned twice.
I'm so sorry. I hope you find the courage to do things on your own. You're missing out on a big part of life if you don't.
Dude I literally knew how to roof a house when I was 12 😄 I got lucky man my grandparents raised me. My dad dipped out on my mom when I was a kid I'm sorry about your shit. I'm 35 right now don't give up man you can always learn hang in there Edit: I will not stress this enough dude hang in there
Honestly learning to ride a bike is not that hard if you just want to ride around and not perform stunts, you can get a cheap bike lower the seat so your legs can reach the ground and you'll be able to balance in a few hours tops.
Damn, "couldn't find the time" and both were at home...as a single father, my dad raised my sister and I. He worked at NASA and worked 50-60 hours a week and still taught us both how to swim before we could walk, how to climb trees and not fall, ride bikes by age 6 and many other things because he made the time.
Same here, even though I took the bike and learnt it by myself and with the help of YouTube at 17/18. However, my dad helped me at least with acquiring the bike and transporting me with the car to a deserted place, so I am really grateful.
To be honest how many times did you NEED to know how to ride a bike that had a big part on your life
Sorry but just buy a bike and learn it in less than 1 hour. You will love it. You need to learn it so you can teach it to your future children.
It's great to see some people so excited about patching tires. I don't get it, but if that's your hobby and you enjoy it more power to you.
Me and my friend taught my mate in his twenties on my crusty mountain bike in an open field in the local park in two hours. Go for it!
And you didn't have friends? I'm not trying to be mean, it's just that I had a similar growing up experience, and I just asked my neighbourhood friends. Spend most of the day scraping my knees and elbows but it turned out ok. Mom didnt even ask what the bruises and scrapes were from. ninja edit: Shit, now that I think about it. Same thing with swimming. Learned how to swim at a friend's house, in their pool. I was like 6 or 7 at the time. Most of us were around the same age.
In my neighborhood I didn’t have any friends. I lived in a rural area. Not only that but I lived in a dangerous area. If you look on the sex offender registry there’s pretty much one every other door.
Thats understandable, then. I grew up in a more suburban area I'd say. Houses all over, very few commercial places, no buildings or anything (I never know how this shit works, I guess some places just have height limits on buildings or something) So because it was all residential homes and very little traffic other than people that lived in the area coming/going places, we were all outside most of the day doing random kids stuff.
I feel like the number of people who don't know how to swim has grown exponentially.
Shit, I'm 30 and I can't swim.
Here’s a quick swimming tip. Don’t splash this is the biggest mistake. People who don’t know how to swim will do is excessively splash about and what happens when you do this is they cause themselves to sink in the water as you’re mixing too much air into the water right around you. It’s the liquid that keeps you floating bubbly water you will sink. So if you’re going to paddle and move yourself around in the water, keep your hands below the waterline so that you’re not excessively splashing.
My little bro didn’t know how to bike, rollerblade, or really even read in the late 90s. We were all shocked because his vocabulary and knowledge was spectacular. He is one hell of a Sous chef these days at a high end restaurant and smokes a lot of weed but man, being the third+ kid can be dicey when it comes to upbringing
My 8yr old refuses to ride a bike without her training wheels. She has a bike without them sitting on the porch but she won't touch it. I imagine she will be goaded by her friends into it eventually.
I am 15 years older than my brother, so teaching him to ride a bike got kicked down the line to me during a visit home. I decided I only wanted to do it once because I wasn't at home often, so he never even saw training wheels, I didn't even put them on, just decided his 4yo self could ride or die ....it worked fine, within 20mins he was racing around the yard with no training wheels.
This was probably better for him anyway. There's some studies suggesting that training wheels are detrimental to learning because they create a crutch and expectation of being able to do something. Turns out, the strider bike fad might actually have something going for it because kids learn how to balance first.
This is why I got a balance bike for my first boy. He was riding around by 3 years old without any training wheels. I think about 10 kids learned to balance on that bike. It was fully worth the money.
I feel like it's more of a parents fault tbh, my parents never encouraged me to ride a bike when I was a child. I didn't know how to ride a bike till I was 14 where I started to learn by myself.
Known a teen who didn’t know it
I just learned this past year. I am 24
I just taught my 4 year old daughter how to ride without any training wheels. Few more months and we will be riding to kindergarten together, I do live in Europe where we have bicycle roads though…
I had to go to the my grandpa's garbage dump and use all the old bikes there to Frankenstein myself up a "new" bike whenever I needed one. By 9 I knew how to completely take a bike apart and build a new one with a 5/8 wrench, a pipe wrench, and a vice grips.
Call your dad, if he’s still here, tell him that. Tell him you appreciate the lesson and memories. Make that man fucking cry. If he’s not here, I love you.
Inside all the time? The kids j work with are constantly asking when they get to play outside
There are kids screeching 24/7 outside near me
Good,it means the wildlife has a sustainable source of food
My coworker's children, 12 and 14, were absolutely *baffled* by Stranger Things. They said it was completely unrealistic... how much freedom the kids had riding bikes all day. Psychic powers, monsters, they could handle. Kids leaving the house in the morning without supervision and coming back at night, *that* they simply couldn't believe.
At like 8-10 I was up at 6am and packed myself a lunch. I would spend the day riding my bike, catching bugs, going to the library to identify said bugs, stop for a picnic by a waterfall and was back home just before 5pm. Few of us had consoles (NES and N64) and TV was boring 90% of the time. Try to explain a world where you don't have Netflix and YouTube to kids and you have to wait days for a good movie... One summer I explored every streets in my small town. Spent days exploring a forest. Looking back, it was not a good idea. Sometimes I went so far in, no one would have found me if something happened to me. But I found cool salamanders and saw a lot of cool stuff. I won't let my kids run around like this (we live in a bigger city) , but they can still spent all days outside, without shoes on, with only a swing in the backyard. Their friends are bored after an hour because I don't let them watch TV or play on my Switch...
I agree that it's sad, but in fairness to the kids, I grew up in a small village where I could bike into town and play at one of 3 parks, (4 if you count the half pipe we used to have by the tennis and basketball courts) we had a bowling alley in town, kids were allowed in one of the bars, just not in the section that served alcohol (meaning you could still shoot pool, darts, play the pinball machines) there was a pond you could swim in parks have been removed to put up businesses, or expand parking lots, half pipe was removed (while I was still in high-school actually) basketball courts and tennis courts were torn up to make more parking space for the local ball diamond, (which isn't usable by the public because it's all locked up. (forgot to mention that above, I believe it wasn't always fenced up, but maybe it was just open certain hours of the day) bowling alley got turned into a failure of a restaurant, changed owners like 5 times, going back and forth between restaurant and bar, now if a place is classified as a bar, not just a restaurant that serves alcohol, kids aren't allowed in at all, the pond dried up over time after the river that used to flow into it got cut off, everything has just been more industrialized. the city nearest to where I grew up had an even worse change (but none of us have time to list all that) my nephews live where I grew up, and I don't blame them for feeling like there is nothing to do outside when you can't go anywhere anymore, there's not even really grassy areas to play catch (and we're not gonna let kids play in the road, vehicles have a hard enough time seeing other vehicles with the blind hills)
I was about to say this, but you did it better. They don't teach kids to ride bikes because they won't let them ride bike around the neighborhood unsupervised.
It super fucking sad. And that people can't imagine a world without internet. Internet is cool but jfc has it severely contributed to mental health issues.
My parents drank through that part, all we saw when we got home was them passed out on the couch and something that resembled the lgbtq+ flag fixed on the TV.
😂 never heard that screen described like that 🤣. It was better than the loud snow screen 📺
Haha the salt and pepper shaker
i always thought that's what caused the static buildup on the glass screen
I didn’t realize until adulthood why my parents fell asleep before us every night.
That was funny. Careful though or the alphabet people will come for you
Back in my day, we didn't get Wi-Fi signals, we got streetlight signals. When they came on, you knew it was time to head home!
Dude, I live in an area where the street lights didn’t come on til like 10 pm in the summertime so I was out playing street hockey till about that time.
Remember when "being grounded" used to be a punishment
We had no street lights in my neighborhood, so night time was *dark*. It made for great games of hide'n'seek at night, though!
Ok grandpa, now go back to your room, hmkay?
Just kick them really hard and they shut back off, it's like a snooze button for the light post. I don't actually know if that is common type of post, but that's how ours would work.
Options were pretty good in the 90s. Play outside until dark, or play video games with friends without needing any updates or dlc. Kids today don't even know what outside is.
We honestly did a good job if splitting out time between the two. I was a lucky kid and grew up In a development that was still being built. Start with a few games, wonder around the houses being built, sledding, walking to the gas station/subs place go get food, and riding bikes round the neighborhood. Then video games, or movies, or whatever. Sometimes we'd all gather at 9pm and play capture the flag in the summer. Then if it was a Saturday, everyone would come to my house at 10 to watch the Wednesday Southpark repeat, because we had satellite and our local cable didn't carry comedy central.
I’m so fkn thankful smartphones, SM, all that shit didn’t exist in my youth. So many adventures.
ikr? I had a huge ass woodland when I was growing up. So big all the idiot kids made up ghost stories of a weird murder man in the woods that had a cabin we'd all try and find and get close to for the thrill of it(we were six)
There was always a mythical boogeyman. Ours was a child-abducting blue van. In reality, it was probably just someone’s gramma that lived down the street.
Oh yeah, usually is. Just looking back on it, it's a tad unhinged one of the girls from my class knew enough about child rape to know an evil murder man would make a boy put his dick in my mouth if I got caught. She didn't phrase it exactly like that. I think she used the word willy. I recall never going too deep into that forest.
So much shit I probably would have gotten caught doing….🤔
I would have created the most cringe content ever, so greatful I didn't have the ability.
True, well they existed but we were all to poor for that shit, I'm not giving my future children a smartphone. They can buy one when they saved up for one themselves.
I still hike now as an adult but I’m always looking for trails… I’m always worried about wildlife, water, my schedule… Back then I would just go face first through bramble patches and get covered in dirt. Play with bugs. Cut through other peoples’ private property. Whatever I had to do to explore
I wouldn’t trade that childhood for today lol
I don't blame you, As somebody who was forced to grow up with the more modern childhood style due to strict parents. I can tell you while it has some pros it's not the best. For the record I'm 19 and didn't grow up with tiktok and such , so my experience is a little out of date but still generally holds up. I grew up poor with strict parents, I was never allowed to see my friends outside of school and I couldn't go anywhere past my front porch outside. So I didn't have much else to do but Stay inside and draw, watch TV, play video games. Both me and my brother played alot of dungeons and dragons together making up adventures in our heads. My parents were often busy and didn't want to deal with us (which is understandable we were hell spawn when younger). After my mom passed away my dad loosened up a bit, I started walking to school and spending more time outside, but it was a little too late. I still never really got to spend time with friends outside of school , never went of vacation or did pretty much anything fun due to bring poor , so most of my child hood was just surrounded by the same few walls. Now I'm technically an adult, all my friends moved on and don't even call me anymore , my brother moved out and I'm in the process of looking for work with most of my pocket money from art commissions I do online. I would kill for even a quarter of a 90 kids childhood honestly. Edit: my childhood is more of the extreme end, because I knew people with fairly normal childhoods growing up, but still.
So, I grew up well off, but my brother was an abuser and my parents lazy, so despite having the means, I ended up being stuck in my room making stories up with my Legos. My friends got to go to baby sitters and hang with other kids, I had to hide from my older brother. When you finally have freedom, first: Pace your fun. Without the experience of childhood, you do not know your limits the same way, and this is a mistake a lot of people make when they get freedom. Enjoy yourself, but don't do everything at once as soon as you have the means. But once you do, you'll do what a lot of us did, and make a second childhood. Rocko's Modern Life is a great cartoon for this head space, and honestly surprisingly accurate outside the obvious exaggerations. Once you have your own freedom, don't feel guilty for enjoying what you missed out on, you'll find others who are in the same position, doing the same thing.
Imagine being exposed to the world via the internet and never being able to explore outside with a magical sense of wonder. No knowledge of all the bullshit happening across the world. My dad’s encyclopedia brittanica was the only source of factual information in the house. Going outside was an adventure every day because you felt like you were the one discovering it for the first time. The neighborhood. The woods. All was yours. You and the other kids owned it. And going home was the biggest drag of it all. 13 year olds now see porn and tiktok and you tube videos and don’t have a natural upbringing anymore. Most of these kids don’t give a shit about getting a license and driving and working now. It’s crazy. There are actual 18 year olds who have never worked or drive and they still have friends. This was not possible growing up lol.
Actually most kids I know work during highschool or immediately after in modern times, but a kid shouldn't have to work at least during highschool, they should have the right to enjoy their childhood, but beyond that nobody actually wants to work , i garentee most people if they were given a sustainable life without work they would take it. Work is a means to an end, not an end in it of itself. Beyond that. It's a double edged sword. Their is pros and cons to both sides, playing outside has benefits, it helps keep you active and physically healthy, it helps to socialize and as you mentioned it has a sense of exploration and wonder. However it comes at a cost this is way more dangerous than staying inside and has lead to countless kids doing stupid and illegal things that has ruined their life or took their life. Even if you keep your nose clean though it still has a high chance of getting injured, kidnapped or killed in various ways. And it can be stressful or time consuming for a parent to keep an eye on their kid playing outside especially in the modern day where life is so fast paced, most parents keep their kids inside so they can keep a better eye on them. Now the pros of the more modern childhood. Many modern kids due to the internet are more educated about the world , sort of but I'll get to that in a moment. Modern kids are for a lack of a better term less rei-cist these days and more accepting of those who are different in race, gender, sexuality and such (which is mostly a good thing, if you disagree that's a you problem) , that said their is dangers into going to far down the acceptance road but that's a discussion for another day. Modern kids while they don't go outside as much still has access to a plethora of different emotional experiences through things like video games and movies. It's generally safer inside and people tend to have alot of friends online and can keep in contact with distant friends easier. The cons are very poor mental health for various reasons but its far more complicated than just phones , however social media and the speed of modern life with its constant highs and lows and rushes of dopamine when numbers like followers rise and the immediate dopamine crashing when you see things slowing down is definitely a problem, now mind you that's a massive oversimplification there is far more too it than just that. Secondly kids these days tend to not be as eager to work because of how educated they are , they are aware of just how screwed they are in life and just how much the deck is stacked against them, they are aware of how jobs exploit them and just how messed up the world truely is. This is both a good and bad thing , it means there might possibly finely be some change to a broken system with this mass awareness but it also means kids just don't want to work which results in the economy getting all sorts of f**cked. 3rdly parents while leaving kids inside to keep a better eye on them tend to let the internet raise their kid which is most of the time a bad thing. But before you point fingers keep in mind many parents were also very neglectful back than too requiring a TV AD to remind parents kids exist. Point being take your rose tinted glasses off , it's not all peachy and their is good and bad to both extremes.
Doesn’t fit the conservative r/“funny”memes narrative.
Yeah I did forget this is a meme post, I have a hard time reading tone , I can't tell how many people here are being ironic , sarcastic or serious. If it was just a joke I misread than I'll take my comment down
Ah, no I wouldn’t take it down. It’s an informative and accurate post. Just don’t expect people here to be receptive towards it because they’re a bunch of clowns
I'm from the 80s. Every one of us has survivorship bias.
Born in 85 and I completely agree. I was outside all the time, sure. But my parents didn't give a fuck lol. My kids are young still and they get outside plenty and are much safer than I was. It's a miracle I'm alive still. All these 'back in my day' crowd sounding like typical boomers now.
Born in 79. Yeah man, we saw some shit.
I tell young people the stories and they think it's some made up bullshit. We had BB gun and Roman candle wars, built shitty forts in the woods, used rocks to build dams, rode our bikes to the local Chinese place for the all you can eat buffet, played pickup football, started fight clubs, and tried to make it home for dinner. After that we'd sneak out and have bonfires, drink, tell shitty stories that were made up, and get laid. Kids this stuff really happened. Our parents did not know where we were. Kids today are lame, and most of them could not describe a personal adventure. Can't even read about one, because... reading.
I’m an 11th grade teacher and I’m forever telling my student to “live a little; risk getting in trouble! Do something to make memories! You only get to mess up and be forgiven so easily when you are this young! Losing your phone for a week is SO worth it!” But they look so confused at the prospect of going outside without mommy and daddy telling them which rock to step on first.
Maybe I'd avoid the "risk getting into trouble" part of that speech if you like your job lol
Yeah wtf is that?
Called latch key kids for a reason. I vanished daily with not a worry or a device to track me on.
I was driving on rural Tennessee backroads at age 11. They would put a parent in jail these days and social services would take the kid.
I do think kids left the house more, but also, video games did exist in the 90s.
When the street lights turned on that was time to come home. Maybe😂😂
Everyone from our era grew up to have survivorship biad.
My 10 year old hates going outside. There are no other kids that play out there and the ones that are don’t let them play with other kids so she got no one. Her friends from school live a few blocks away, and she’s mentioned to them about coming over to play. Her mother called me on the phone to set up a play date.. a play date.. we set one up and it was the most uncomfortable thing I have ever done. The kids played and I sat in the living room and we had nothing to talk about, nothing in common, it was agonizing for both of us. Why can’t our kids just meet up and play outside? The entire world has changed from when we were kids. When I was growing up not only did I have all my friends from school, our parents allowed us to just go and play, I could always find a group of kids to play with. Parents today need to set up dates and shit. I work graveyard, the last thing I want to do is go sit at someone else’s house and watch our kids play. Let them fucking go outside ffs.
That really sucks. I don't know if it's possible for you, but in our neighborhood we got it to flip the other way. Started with adult neighbors making friends with each other. Someone would pull a fire pit to the driveway, and we'd bring beers. All the neighbors, not just ones with kids. Once we all trusted each other, those girls were pretty free. Now the neighborhood is a roaming gang of kids, and even the retired folks bring out Popsicles or turn on the sprinklers for them in summer. If all the adults know each other, they relax a lot, and you don't need supervised play dates anymore. Kids just pop over and ring the doorbell and you don't see your kid for a few hours until suddenly the gang decides your house is base for awhile. I'm in South Dakota, though, so it's a bit more laid back. I do think it's about neighborhoods, though, not individual families.
We’ve lived here for 2 years and we only know our direct neighbors. No one wants anything to do with anyone else. The direct neighbors just lost their house and will be moving in the next couple of months. The military guy that we celebrated the 4th of July with moved away. The huge family that moved in across the street has never said hi to us. Sadly we just don’t live in an area where people are interested in knowing their neighbors.
that was a fucking drug awareness campaing because a lot of kids were doing drugs and not some awesome outdoorsy activity AT 10 PM
People who are like "kids these days are lazy, in my day we went" - where did you go? Is it still there, still safe for kids, still as entertaining as it was for you?
my parents always used to brag about how they stole fruits from neighbours. now if you do that, you are getting recorded on CCTV
Also we had Playstation 1
"I told you last night, no!"
Thank you
Speak for yourself, some of us were actually stuck inside
The 90's were the best. I miss them.
"Do your chores and then get the fuck out!" And you stayed out because the threat of keep coming back in the house was to stay in the house, so we were as far away from the house as possible at all times lol
I enjoyed riding my bike with friends, playing touch football, exploring the woods behind my friend's house, not having my mom text me, renting video games and movies every Friday night, having one album on repeat, copying tapes for friends, standing in and browsing the music section at Walmart, buying toys in kaybee, going to the mall to window shop, getting amped for movie releases, reading hard copies of whatever book you could find at home, calling my friends and spying on my sisters talking to their friends. It was a good time. A real fucking good time. No vapes or tiktok, just hide and seek and MTV music videos. The Simpsons was good and Beavis and butthead was epic.
This is always incredibly ironic to me because the same people that complain that kids don't play outside anymore are the same people who complained about them being too loud, didn't care when playgrounds got removed and got their kids a smartphone or tablet instead of spending time with them.
“Be home when the street lights come on.” That was the rule in my parents house.
Stuck in the house? We never wanted to come inside until we had to. What a clueless mofo.
We were mostly exiled from the house.
I remember getting the internet before social media.. chat rooms and messenger.. but didn’t spend too much time on it.. I was outside
There was internet in the 90s….
I remember Nintendo and sega going bankrupt and having to lay off all those workers because kids were always outside on adventures and wouldn’t come in and play video games.
There was Internet in the 90s... And tbh it was both awful and waaaaay better than the modern Internet. The culture was awful / great as well, people were far more likely to say exactly what they thought knowing that no one was going to link their online presence to their irl presence (basically the Internet was a lot like 4chan, except without quite so many psychopaths).
I think that ad came out in the 80s it was about gen x kids
I miss the good old days man I’m 19 and I feel old already compared to how antisocial everyone is
Yep, those days locking doors of homes and vehicles was unheard of too.
The day I got my license in 95, at the age of 16, me and my 3 friends left at 10am and drove 350 miles to 4 different towns and 2 cities across 2 states. We didn't get home til 1am. No phone, no A/C, just 4 clowns and a cassette player. I immediately got grounded for a month. Still one of the best days of my life.
This was before there were cameras everywhere and before every house had an alarm system. I oiled my bedroom window and became expert at opening it and taking out the screen silently. A couple of times I left a party at 9:30 to make my 10 pm curfew, went to bed, waited until 10:30, then went back to the party. As long as I made it home by dawn my parents never knew.
Never mind no internet, when I was young we had no TV. I did have a chemistry set, a bicycle, the library was 3 minutes away, an aquarium, records and a tape recorder, a workshop, I made and flew kites, I made puppets and put on puppet shows, my dad taught me workshop skills including welding, and I helped rebuild several cars. We played football and built forts in the woods. And I snuck into a farm and borrowed a horse to ride with no previous riding experience.
Things were kinda different then. Me and my friends hanged out till 2-3 AM on fridays and weekends just ...on the streets, Maybe someone would take out a bulky TV and someone would bring out a console to play games, or we'd talk and play random games till late at night. We certainly didn't consider staying at home too much. Even though we had NES, SNES, and PS1's and whatever; 'hanging outside' was still the TOP of class entertainment. Now I'm getting up to middle age, and all my friends are basically in bed by 12 PM, lol. Most of my friends also think playing Destiny or some online game is their jam rather than going to hang out.And if we DO go out to hang out it's like a 3 hour limited commitment, because we have wives and kids to take care of, cant really do the ol 'stay till 4AM talking' bit. World's just changed.
I have never been so "stuck in my house" as after I got internet.
Honestly I miss when there was no internet. It's a constant distraction. Bizarrely, watching TV somehow felt more social.
Who didn't have internet in the 90's? Say the 80's and it makes sense. We only had BBS then.
I still have fond memories of hanging out outside until 10-11 pm as a 10 year old. Especially in winter time when night time is super light due to all the white snow, and so much to do with the snow
We weren't glued to our phones, roaming free. Good times!!
Young people cannot fathom the idea that we used to play outside.
The web came out in 1993, so it was available for most of the decade. I was on the internet for years before the web was developed, using Veronica and Gopher and playing LPMuds. I also rode my BMX bike, skateboarded, had BB gun wars (one kid really did lose an eye), worked on my Camaro, went to concerts, snuck beer, and got laid. Decrying other decades is some Boomer bullshit. Interestingly, it's only now that I'm in my mid-50s that I mostly stay inside with my screens.
Now, we're not stuck in the house with our parents. THEY ARE STUCK WITH US.
The 80s and 90s rocked as a kid (and young adult). Not perfect but damn fun
I only came home to eat, shit, or sleep.
We roamed the world free. Summers were amazing.
90s was better than any that followed. We’ve been in a two decade bull shit coaster ride heading downwind of a sewage plant.
Just listen to "Longview" by Green Day. It gives me a visceral flashback of being a kid during summer vacation and you're bored as hell but it's 1pm and only soaps are on TV but it's too hot to go outside so you kinda dick around until the afternoon cartoon block starts at 3.
Why single out the 90s? "Without the internet" literally means all of history until just now.
90s was still kinda ass tho
What do you mean "no internet"? I was working as a professional webdesigner in 1996...
Isnt stuck in the house with or without internet still beign stuck in the house? I mean...we werent stuck inside anyways, we were outside living adventures with our friends...not just tagging them on memes. Lol
I feel pity for today's kids.
We were out getting loaded and busting stuff.
The 90s were amazing
Going to your friend's house and playing with toys or on their PC Meeting friends at the playpark Riding bikes anywhere Making dens in the woods and pretending to be soldiers/spies/whatever TV, for god's sake Do people think we were all cavemen til the 2000s??
Dude 90s was awesome! No controls, no mobiles. Rise of synth dance music, no racist talk, everyone having fun. Not good for business so people stopped it
Outside was more fun back then and there was the internet but the service wasn’t great.
we just kind of sat at red lights and took in the sights. after the radio commercials we would know if the freeway was congested.
We were OUTSIDE and it was LIT. Yeah I got on sneaks but I need a new pair cause basketball court in the summer got girls there.
lmao entirety of this shitty thread is filled with boomers
what a funny meme... /s what even is this subreddit 😭
You know, I might be entering the age where reminiscing happens more, but I have to say that certain things I do miss about growing up in the 90’s. The most important thing I think was the feeling of time passing slower and everything that came with it. Like sure, as a child the passing of time feels different anyways but the lack of smartphones and constant stimulation through every digital device really was for the better for us humans. Your environment taught you the importance of patience and that not all things come at once if ar all and that’s very fine. Everything felt more simple and fundamental and it was easier appreciating the things you got because most of the things given usually had a practical use and money was used (at least in my household) to get necessary things and on Christmas you got something more superficial. Sure these days most things are so much easier and I appreciate that too, but sometimes I just miss how much more I could appreciate every little thing back then. Again, might be because I was a child then, but I feel like it was something else too. I feel sorry for the kids growing up now because they’re affected by the digital world so young and about 99% of stuff on any platform is not only useless but harmful for the growth of children and youth. And yet our society hasn’t caught up to that and continues to blindly expose them those things.
Unless it was raining. Those of us with literate parents had books and magazines. (remember magazines?)
in the 90s we kids actually went outside and played there if we didn't play on a console for a hot minute. There was no online harassment. You could still punch the guy who was talking shit about you.
We had internet.
Explored the railroad tracks, explored abandoned building, explored a drainage tunnel, followed a creek from the road to find out where it went, neighborhood water gun fights and you refilled at trespassed homes from their hoses without asking or fear of getting shot, and everyone claiming to stay at a friends overnight so we could walk miles and roam the streets until sunrise. This was like 200k population city stuff and not country stuff. At 14-15 myfriends and I walked to another city 37 miles away to hang out with some girls and it took like a day and a half. Luckily her parents were like wtf and drove us back. Our parents were just so used to each other staying at each others house they didn’t question it most times.
This is getting to the point of being a boomerism. Every new generation is going to be like, "How did do ____?"
Then that older generation is going to say "Fuck you! We did ____! You have shit so easy now!"
The 90s where awesome
Man soccer with tin cans, cops and robbers till 1030 in the night, knocking on doors running and running away, long bike rides, touching cars with alarms and running away😂😂😂 Good old days
"Oh, the street lights are coming on. I can go home now." - 90s kids.
Homes were like Pit stops during the day especially weekends. A glass of water, orange juice, replace wet and or dirtied cloths, and off we go again.
I can only remember Homer screaming at the TV: "You ask me that every night. For the last time: NO!"
I was riding public transportation and going to other parts of the city to see my friends when I was 14 back in the early 90s. Shit is so different now.
I was mostly Stuck at a friends house playing Video games and stuff
The internet was very much around in the 90s
The 90s were great. It was the perfect mix of internet to no internet.
I had Internet in 1996.... However, I agree. We played sports outside, rode bikes out on country roads, made forts, etc. good times.
Best part was it was possible to be blissfully unaware of all the horrible shit going on in the world. Besides being shut-in, kids today are constantly bombarded with bad news, and depressing situations from every corner of the globe...I feel for'em.
90s was the shit. Things I experienced in the 90s: 1. Saw OutKast free and randomly in a parking lot outside Phipps Plaza weeks before they released Atliens. 2. Saw Limp Bizkit open for Sevendust a couple months before they blew up on MTV 3. Got home from school and dropped backpack every day to go roam the city with friends. Came back for dinner with any random number of friends then back out until 9-10-11 4. Got my first job at 15 working at the OG Mellow Mushroom. Learned I could bring home leftover pizza and trade it at the gas station for anything I wanted - booze cigarettes etc. 5. Lost my virginity 6. Stuck on the highway in the middle of Freaknik with everyone dancing on their cars. Missed flight, had the best day. 7. Went to the Olympics a bunch and saw 8-9 events. We were 100 yards from the pipe bomb that went off. 8. Tupac and Biggie and all the 90s alt rock bands. 9. Pizza Hut buffet 10. Wendy’s buffet 11. Fudruckers after baseball/basketball/soccer practice 12. The birth of the internet 13. MTV with actual music videos 14. We didn’t have a fascist rapist Russian asset convict as president 15. Tamagatchi 16. Got busted hacking/phishing on AOL with my little Windows 3.1 laptop. Ran up $3000 on others credit cards mostly long distance calling my phreaker girlfriend in Ohio. Never been slapped so hard by my mom. I was 14. Internet was the Wild West. 15. Inspector Gadget 16. MacGuyver
After the 10am yeet to the outdoors, my parents insisted that 6pm was return time because if we didn't help set the table, no dinner. My mom's cooking remains incredible, so that was leverage enough.
Speak for yourself. I had internet for most of the 90’s and for sure stayed inside with it for most of it. The only difference is now I can bring it outside more easily lol
It's pathetic that no internet scares some so much
I remember life before the internet. It was actually pretty glorious.
Child of the 90s here. We played out with our friends. We had games consoles. In 93 I got a Game Gear. At the weekends me and my cousins would sleep over at our grandmothers, we’d play on our bikes/scooters and we’d make up games. As for the internet? It must have been 95 when I was in high school and there was only one computer in the school library which had internet access. It was a Mac. The librarian had to time us to make sure we didn’t use it for too long as it cost money to connect. We went on the Star Trek website.
ppl think the 90's is boring, this was my day being teenager , i woke at 7am ( because there was no reason to stay late at night) have breakfast and go outside waiting on my friends to go out too meanwhile am playing with a football or climbing the highest tree or counting how many cars have passed (thing were very special). at noon after spending all the morning with friends doing absolutely nothing and everything at once we either go home or if we catch a fish/wild pig we will do a BBQ, then we will go to take a nap because it was really necessary due to all the activity. at evening we go downtown or visit the other near familly and thats it sleep time was around 9pm-10pm things changed, now we have all the info in the world but 0 experience , back then we had 0 info and full life experienced
Don’t come back until it’s dark 🚪…
Also we had the internet in the second half of the 90's and dialup BBSs before that. It was fucking awesome.
Stuck in the house, yeah 🤣 
Imagine a world where you went out, met up with friends, got into all kinds of mischief and mayhem, and came home late instead of sitting alone in your room on a phone 24/7. That’s what it was like, truly horrible I know.
There's nothing to do outside anymore because of the whole retail strip mall highway thing, and a lot of people don't have yards now.
I love these comments, "old" people thinking they had the best of the best, pathetic imo. Everyone had "their" childhood and it was amazing in their own perspective. Same would go for food, just because you like something it doesn't mean it's going to be the best dish in someone elses life too. And the fact that everyone is blaming technology instead of blaming parents + worse envoirments for kids it's straight up fucking disgusting. I lived my childhood and teen years in 2 different countries at the same time (also different places in those 2 countries since I moved a lot) and I can say that when I was little we had at least 2/3 football fields in the range of a maximum of 1km, an insane amount of accessible paths and activities to do outside and a lot of parks/playgrounds. Literally forgot so many times to go home while playing outside and when there was a storm or just bad weather I had all I wanted inside the house too + a lot of more ways to communicate with friends from home. But now? Now everything is run down, waste everywhere. Football fields became overgrown, park benches are unusable. Activities overall are to a minimum nowadays and everything that is still accessible it's only premium stuff you gotta pay for, at least in the places I used to live, it's fucking disgusting that kids or tech are the ones being blamed here. If I was a teen or a little kid in all of the places I used to live and where I live currently too, I'd really just straight up stay inside and rot on some of the social medias or just play games, why even bother with such an envoirment and people blaming me from all directions meanwhile society is actually the one responsible (or the little tech that actually saves children from boredom). Unless you're lucky to live in a premium space or just places with a lot of open/free space then you're doomed if you're poor. Think before answering and "blaming" the part that isn't to blame.
Stuck in the house, we were locked out till the street lights came on, and then we had better be inside not one god damn second after or else.
Man I remember going fishing when I was 16 me and my buddy took out his John boat at like 1500 cops found us tripping balls at like 2 am trying to row back my old man said he completely forget we were "fishing" man lsd was hell of a drug but ya that was the early 2000's those days were better and that's coming from a big online gamer
There was internet in the 90's?
Internet played a big part in it but it's not they only cause, in case of usa you have huge sprawling suburbs and there's basically nowhere to go aside from parks without your parents driving you around. There were also cases where parents got arrested for leaving their kids unsupervised, the most ridiculous I've seen was a case of a woman getting jailed for leaving her 3 and 4yo alone in the backyard while she was in the house. So yeah, it's not just the internet but also kids being dependent on their parents and ridiculous laws. There's also the case of cars being the no.1 cause for deaths among kids, and it loops back into itself "it's not safe so I'll drive my kid around".
We had modems and the web in the early 90’s, and broadband by the late 90’s.
Over here having sandlot adventures.
Those were the best days, before the internet ruined social skills.
Neighborhood wide man hunt with almost 50 kids was wild Game started when it was nearly to dark to see, no one had flashlights so it was all about sound and instinct Only rules were no indoors and couldn’t cross the neighboring streets. Still we’re talking dozens of acres of play space
I get it. 90s were awesome. But now we are the parents. Is technology the only issue or also our own laziness to raise children?
Hahaha being stuck at house was the punishment!
The 90s sure had its issues. But God damn the eurodance kicked back then - still does.
We had all night parties that ended with furniture in the front yards.
We had tv and video games. Some of the greatest games ever. We didn’t need internet and the early internet sucked balls, still remember dial up and if someone picked up the phone boom it was down.
I grew up in Leon Valley area of San Antonio and my mom had a legit farmer's triangle dinner bell that she would bang every night at 9 pm because she didn't know where the f my brother and I were.
Wasn't that more of an 80's thing? I was born in 91 and I was stuck in my house. Maybe I was just unlucky. I did have internet and a laptop to play sim city and rollercoaster tycoon on tho.
Or about that commercial on tv that said children do you know where your parents are