The 80s was a pretty good decade to be a kid.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I feel bad for kids these days. It seems to me like there are so many more problems for them now than the people of my generation had.

One of my coworkers sends his two kids (ages 4 and just over 1 year) to a very swanky daycare in our area. They’re learning Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. Some of these children have their very own laptop computers. Their parents are already beginning to talk about getting into the “right” colleges. It seems a bit excessive to me. Not to mention downright scary at times.

When I was 4 years old, I went to the pre-K program at our local YMCA. We didn’t learn Mandarin Chinese. We learned how to make homemade applesauce and peanut butter. We put on incredible, heartwrenchingly dramatic productions of “The Little Train That Could.” But mostly, we just played with Legos and Tinker Toys and Lite Brite and Fisher-Price Little People. Because isn’t that what the crux of being a kid is? To play all day long and not have to worry about the real world?

Now I admit that learning Spanish makes sense to a point—after all, I watched a whole lot of Sesame Street when I was a kid and learned how to count to ten in Spanish, along with other random words (“agua” was a big one, if I recall). But Mandarin Chinese? Exactly how will these kids practice speaking Mandarin, anyway? I don’t get it. Maybe the daycares are teaching this now because they believe that someday the Chinese will own all of us. Hee.

Another thing—what’s up with designer clothes for first graders these days? Not to mention those repugnant message t-shirts for little girls. The day I dress my hypothetical kid in a shirt that has “Spoiled Brat” emblazoned in pink sequins across the front is the day I’ll die. I wasn’t even decked out in clothes from The Children’s Place—they were too expensive.

(That was the one store in the mall I used to BEG my mother to take me to. They had a really neat playhouse with a sliding board and a closed-circuit TV that played episodes of “Steampipe Alley” on an endless loop. Yes, that show was hosted by Mario Cantone, way before he was Charlotte’s flamingly gay wedding planner on Sex and the City.)

No, my clothes came from stores like Jefferson Ward (later Bradlees), Clover, and Burlington Coat Factory. I didn’t have pint-sized versions of designer jeans. I didn’t have my own laptop computer. I didn’t have a VCR, or even a television, in my bedroom. I did have a Speak-n-Spell, though. And Alphie. Remember those?

My friends and I didn’t sit around inside all summer to play video games. We were outside playing from the minute breakfast ended until the streetlights came on. Our parents didn’t have to watch us like hawks because it was (or seemed, at least) so much safer back then. Child molesters were something that we saw on after-school specials—not something we had to contend with every day of our lives. The most we worried about was who was going to be “It” when we started an impromptu game of Tag.

Man. I loved being a child of the 80s. You can read a couple of essays here and here that bring back some terrific memories of those times.

Happy Friday!

Labels: childhood, fashion, friends, memories, nostalgia, school, technology