The other night, my husband was telling my parents and me the story of how when he was a kid his parents forgot to pick him up from the airport after he had spent a month in France with the family of a former exchange student. No one at the airport could reach his parents (who turned out to be at a party — WHOOPS!), and his poor grandmother, who refused to drive the expressway, had to navigate her way to the airport on back roads only (which, in case you don’t know, is easiest to get to FROM THE EXPRESSWAY), an endeavor that took approximately two hours longer than it should have for her to complete.
By the time she arrived to pick him up, it was just my husband, the guy who vacuums the waiting area carpets, and the flickering fluorescent light bulbs. You couldn’t have found a sadder scene in a Nicholas Sparks book turned movie.
His mother swears to this day she had the wrong return date written down on her calendar. Sure she did. 😉
We all had a good-natured laugh at my husband’s and his mother’s expenses, trading ideas about what we would have done were we in both his and his parents’ positions, until suddenly my mother blurted out, “It was funny then, but you’d get arrested and find yourself on prime time news for something like that today!”
We heaved a simultaneous, group-wide shoulder shrug and muttered, “It was the ’80s,” as if that was explanation enough for having forgotten and left one’s child alone in a crowded airport.
But the thing is, that was explanation enough. It was the ’80s. And the ’80s were a much different time, both for parents and their children.
We didn’t live every moment in a constant state of hypersensitivity and fear in the ’80s. Parents let their children wander neighborhoods and small towns unchecked, requiring only that kids return home from their day-long outdoor activities by the time the street lamps came on. And kids were actually playing outdoors in the ’80s, riding bikes without head-to-toe padding and building forts and scraping knees and, on rare occasions, breaking a non-life-threatening bone, igniting their imaginations, discovering their physical capabilities, and getting into just enough trouble and danger to build character.
We didn’t feel the need to overly sanitize or censor everything kids encountered in the ’80s, either. Kids’ movies carried with them what my husband and I call a “hard PG rating,” something we marvel and, if we’re being honest, sometimes gasp at whenever we let our kids watch one from time to time. They featured adult actors smoking the occasional cigarette and sipping on the inconsequential glass of scotch and child actors getting into mischief and calling one another “butthead.”
Even television portrayed families differently. I’m betting there are few children of the ’80s out there who didn’t watch The Wonder Years without batting an eye every time Kevin Arnold’s father muttered, “Goddamnit!” and yelled at or threatened his kids for something or another. Nobody automatically assumed the man was abusive. Chances are those kids did something to deserve it anyway, didn’t they?
And few kids, if any, suddenly developed a 2-pack-a-day habit, raided their parents’ liquor cabinets, and laced their vocabulary with profanities simply because they’d seen it on the big screen once or twice.
And not everybody suffered from some kind of condition in the ’80s. Sure, there were kids with allergies and adults suffering from depression and anxiety, both very real and very dangerous illnesses if left untreated, but those were few and far between. Not everyone carried with them an RX of restless leg syndrome or acute social awkwardness or chronic fatigue malady or excitable hair follicle disorder. There was a certain, immeasurable comfort in not knowing you had tingly skin complex or that tingly skin complex was even a thing in the ’80s.
Perhaps most importantly, minding other people’s business was not a national pastime in the ’80s, and even if it was, it wasn’t as rampant and obvious as it is today.
For one, there was no internet for concerned citizens and judgmental parents to take to with their proclamations about how people should be raising their children and conducting themselves in society and their witch hunts dedicated to publicly shaming those who don’t conform to some ideal standard.
Furthermore, nobody had to worry about a do-gooder smashing through their car windows with a brick or reporting them to the authorities if their elementary-aged kids wanted to wait in the back of the car for 5 minutes on a perfectly mild day while Mommy ran into the service station to pay for gas and pick up a soft drink.
I’m not saying the ’80s were necessarily better. Heck, I remember rarely being required to wear a seat belt and even flying up from the back seat of my father’s Chevrolet Blazer and smashing my face into the front dash when he rear-ended somebody while driving. And there were some people whose entire lives would have been more pleasant and even saved had they received adequate medical attention and diagnosis for their particular illnesses or had a stranger or acquaintance taken a moment to report potentially abusive parenting measures.
So better? Not necessarily. But also not without merits. The ’80s just seem like a simpler time in retrospect — a time when kids could be kids without being tied to electronic devices or having to ride in rear-facing car seats until they’re 17 and parents could make mistakes and accidentally forget their kids at the airport without worrying about winding up in a jail cell or on the 6 o’clock news.
It’s just that…well…{shoulder shrug}…it was the ’80s. And there was something kind of nice about that.
