Growing up in WI and vacationing near my Mom’s family on the MI Iron range we had the following.

No A/C, except in later years were window units were provided by my dad for each bedroom, but they were only used when occupied.

Oil heat until it died one winter. It would be too hard to replace it, so my mom and dad had pity on us and acquired old electric blankets, one per bed. We would keep the wood fireplace going in the joint living room / kitchen, with several large army blankets over the hallway to keep the heat in. One learned to get everything you needed for the day from the unheated side of the house early, then go ‘pre-heat’ your electric blanked 15 min before bedtime.

Until we had window units, life was a bunch of box fans and sweating during the summer.

There was a heated bus for school, but the heat emanated from a single register on the bus. If you sat in that seat your feet would almost melt. Ideal seating was 1-3 seats away but beyond that you froze.

I don’t think my mom ever dropped me off at someone’s house as a kid, except maybe in the winter time. I would call to see if a friend was home and wanted to play - maybe they answered, maybe not. Or maybe you got one of their siblings who would lie to you and tease you. Either way, if you were going you got your Huffy or Schwin bike and started pedaling. Most of my good friends lived between 3-8 miles away. So I’d ride my bike over there to hang out. If they weren’t home, you could ride to another friends house, or maybe catch up with some of the random kids in their neighborhoods, or ride home.

Oh, I forgot. The family vehicle was an Chevy station wagon that my Dad ordered special while we lived in the UP for a couple of years. He wanted a V8, manual transmission, and Air Conditioning. The dealership said you could only get two of those three, so he chose the engine and the manual transmission, no A/C. But he forgot to add on the optional ROLL DOWN REAR WINDOWS. So us kids in the back had to make due with the small triangular pop out window while sweating on the plastic seats. We had that car from age 4 to maybe 14. Lots of hot summers and sweat.

Good times, somehow we survived.

quote:

What other small hardships are foreign to modern youth through our short-sighted attempts to give them a better childhood than we had?

The SoCal house I grew up in was pre-war built, had no insulation whatsoever, single-pane wood windows, etc. The heat was only allowed on during the early AM. We had no A.C., just a couple of fans during the summer. None of our cars (always purchased used) had A.C. either.

I, along with my siblings, was a latchkey kid for a few years during elementary school.

I never went on a "real" vacation until I was an adult. We couldn't afford them as a kid. Eating out at a restaurant was usually Bob's Big Boys for birthdays, and Carl's Jr, McDonalds, or In N Out for an occasional treat. 98% of our meals were at home.

Didn't have my first car until I was 21 yo. As a teen, the money I did earn went to a stereo set, records, and a guitar when I was a senior. Also paid for my own college costs, but it was far more doable decades ago than now.

Of course my son has lived a more comfortable life simply because I accomplished a higher place in society than my parents. But the "small hardships" have shaped my adult life.

In our old house, before thermal-pane windows, dad made "storm windows" which consisted of 1X2 frames that had visqueen stapled to it. Every fall they went up on all of the windows of the house.

I remember, not so fondly, the bread sacks on the feet to keep them dry.

Brown bag lunches too. We didn't have a lot of money, so we had to bring home the bag and re-use it until it fell apart.

Mowing the lawn, and trimming. Raking the leaves, washing the dishes, take out the garbage. Those are pretty routine but I believe that my niece and nephew do not do these. They do video games a lot.

Regarding eating adult food, my nephew and niece are still eating chicken nuggets and ketchup. Ages 12 and 8, or close.

Challenges are beneficial.

quote:

Mowing the lawn, and trimming. Raking the leaves, washing the dishes, take out the garbage.

Half the parents don't do these things anymore. I was at a customer's house the other day and they had someone come to clean their gutters, rake their leaves, a nanny, and a maid all there while I was there. I just thought wow, is there anything that you do for yourselves?

PS Part of my job that day was to change light bulbs for them, yes they couldn't be bothered to change their own light bulbs.

No bike helmets.

I'm glad I grew up when I did. I wouldn't trade any of the simple things we had for any of the fancy technology of today.

I feel a profound sadness when I see kids stuck to their smart phones.

I learned to drive on a 61 Chevy Biscayne. No power steering or brakes. No A/C. Three on the tree. My old man would not even let me start it until I could name every component under the hood and what its function was. He even put it up on ramps and made me name everything underneath too.
And I remember a neighborhood stampede to one kids house when news leaked out he had something space age in his house..... A color TV!
Worst aspect of growing up in this era: If I pulled any kind of social stunt, the neighborhood warning system was immediately activated and many people took me to task before a full report was relayed to my Mother.

quote:

Originally posted by GA Gator:
Seat belts who the hell used those things?

Fresh air was for kids whose grand parents and parents either didn't smoke because they were not cool or were dead from lung cancer.

DUI, parents with drinking problems "having one more for the road" or driving with a roadie ie one in their lap, and their kids in the back seat.

Yep, grew up with my parents doing plenty of both. Mom used to smoke a pack a day plus, old man was two packs a day at least and more when he was drinking, which was his true calling, so pretty much always except when he absolutely couldn’t. Both smoked in the house, and the car, with the windows up so they didn’t blow ashes all over the car. I have lung problems and always have. But I guess it built character or something.

Mom quit smoking after my grandfather died of lung cancer after smoking since he was in the Navy in WWII. They told him that as cheap as a carton of Lucky Strikes cost a serviceman at the time that he “couldn’t afford NOT to smoke.” He switched to a pipe after he got out because it was “healthier than breathing all that burning paper, thats what’s giving everyone cancer!” he maintained that to the end, a few years of smoking tobacco with cigarette paper and no filters did it, not the pipe that was constantly lit and stuck in his face for the next fifty years.

Brings back memories of cigarette dispenser machines in restaurants, ashtrays literally everywhere and never sitting in the “non-smoking” sections that seemed to a new thing when I was a kid. It was a bad night the few times we couldn’t get seated in the smoking section and the old man had to keep getting up to go have one. A cigarette without the scotch apparently just isn’t the same.

I dunno' guys. My Marine step-dad (who grew up in an unheated cabin in the woods) called me yesterday in a panic because his land line phone, TV reception, and WiFi all died. He literally didn't know what to do with himself. Someone messed with his cabling in his Condo maintenance room, he explained.

He'll be 73 this year...

H&K-Guy

quote:

Originally posted by GA Gator:
Seat belts who the hell used those things?

Used em? Who had em? No seat belts and a steel dash board in some 1964 era car my Mom drove.

Grew up in a house built in 1852. Heated with wood.

Spent many frosty mornings cutting wood and loading it into my dad's 1951 Studebaker.

And that was in the 1980s/1990s!

I offer no comparisons. Just basking in the description.

But our first house had a coal furnace converted to gas and it was convection. No forced air. So the heat would rise straight to the second floor. One gaping 2' x 4' "Cold" air return in the living room floor made for a breeze you could feel.

Sitting in front of the heat registers when the furnace came on.

How about having to heat bath water on the stove because the hot water heater quit and the landlord would not replace it?

My dad hates being cold so that was never an issue, but you worked. Did not matter your age, so you worked at whatever you could do until you were bigger and stronger to do more manual labor.

Manners were also not optional. When you answered the phone, it was: "Hello, Poacher's residence, this Jim." "Jim this is xxx, is your dad there?" "Yes Sir, I'll get him." Failure to follow protocol was not treated as funny.

The rubber boots and bread bags is a memory I will never forget. Beating the snow out of the buckles to open them was epic.

I currently have a OD green wool blanket on my bed right now. Rescued it from my Dad’s before we had his estate sale. Enjoying having it for practical and sentimental reasons.

quote:

Originally posted by 46and2:
No bike helmets.

Not just no bike helmets, they didn't even exist!.

How about the elementary school playground, with monkey-bars made out of leftover steel piping, set into the asphalt? We had several sets of them throughout the recess area. Fear of serious injury or death kept all but the most nimble off the top!

And the steel slide that got so hot you'd burn yourself on sunny days if you didn't get off quickly enough!

quote:

Originally posted by RHINOWSO:
And the steel slide that got so hot you'd burn yourself on sunny days if you didn't get off quickly enough!

It was more fun in the winter-time when it iced up.

We'd go down it on our feet and had contests to see who could slide the farthest once we hit the ground.

Good times!

My parents bought a 19th century farmhouse when I was 5. Heated with a single upright stove on the main floor. The windows were so drafty that the first winter if it snowed, there was snow on top of your covers from it blowing through the window panes. It must have been below freezing in those rooms.

I wouldn’t trade my experiences for the world.

Like many I too grew up in an old leaky house but we had a wood stove so it was relatively warm. A single widow unit in the living room once I got a little older. My “room” the 1/2 story was even hotter than the rest of the house so on the hottest nights I got to sleep on the couch. But probably the thing I remember most, and haven’t seen mentioned, was no weed eater. Of coarse mowing the grass was my job and I got to trim with those little sideways scissors.