Growing up, I can still smell the mix of Virginia Slims and vinyl seats whenever I think about family road trips.
My siblings and I would pile into the back of our wood-paneled station wagon, windows sealed tight against the winter cold, while smoke created a hazy cloud that made my eyes water.
Nobody thought twice about it, and that was just how things were.
If you’re nodding along right now, you probably survived the same wild west of parenting that would make today’s parents gasp in horror.
We’re talking about an era when seatbelts were optional, bike helmets were for “sissies,” and nobody had heard of organic anything.
Yet here we are, raising our own kids and trying to make sense of how different things have become.
1) The safety standards that didn’t exist
Remember riding in the back of pickup trucks on summer evenings? Or sprawling across the backseat during long drives, no seatbelt in sight?
My older brother used to call shotgun and actually sit on my dad’s lap to “help steer” when we were driving through empty parking lots.
The thought of letting Ellie or Milo do that now makes my heart race.
But here’s what gets me: Our parents were just following the standards of their time.
Car seats? Those flimsy things were more like elevated chairs.
My mom tells stories of holding babies on her lap in the front seat because that seemed safer than putting them in the back alone.
The playground equipment we grew up on would fail every safety inspection today.
Metal slides that burned your legs in summer, merry-go-rounds that flung kids off at high speed, and monkey bars over concrete.
We got hurt, sure, but we also learned our limits through actual experience rather than bubble wrap protection.
2) When independence was the default
At seven years old, I’d leave the house after breakfast and not return until the street lights came on.
My mom’s only rule was to stay within biking distance and come home if I heard her distinctive whistle.
No cell phones, no GPS tracking, no scheduled playdates; just kids figuring things out.
Can you imagine? I get nervous when Ellie plays in our fenced backyard without me watching.
The shift from that level of childhood freedom to today’s structured, supervised everything is staggering.
My parents think I’m overprotective, and honestly, compared to how we grew up, maybe I am.
We walked to school alone, even in kindergarten if you lived close enough, and we settled our own disputes without adult intervention.
If someone was mean, you either figured out how to handle it or avoided them.
There wasn’t a committee meeting about hurt feelings.
3) Discipline that would horrify modern parents
Spanking wasn’t just accepted, it was expected.
Teachers could paddle students, neighbors could scold you and march you home by your ear, and heaven help you if Mrs. Johnson down the street called your mom about something you did.
You’d get in trouble for the original offense and for embarrassing the family.
The phrase “wait until your father gets home” carried real weight.
Timeouts didn’t exist in our house.
You got grounded, lost privileges, or faced immediate consequences.
No gentle parenting scripts, no validating feelings first; you messed up, you paid for it, end of story.
What strikes me now is how fear-based so much of it was.
We behaved not because we understood why certain behaviors were wrong, but because we were afraid of getting caught.
Matt and I talk about this a lot, how we want our kids to make good choices from understanding.
4) The complete absence of emotional awareness
“Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.”
How many times did we hear that?
Boys especially got the “toughen up” treatment but, even as a girl, showing too much emotion was seen as weakness or manipulation.
Nobody talked about feelings in our house.
You were fine, or you went to your room until you were fine.
Therapy was for “crazy people,” and depression was something you snapped out of.
Anxiety? That was just being dramatic.
I watch Ellie navigate big emotions now, and I’m grateful she has words for them.
When Milo has a meltdown, we talk about feeling frustrated or overwhelmed instead of just sending him away.
My parents are slowly warming up to this approach, though my dad still mutters about “all this feelings talk” sometimes.
5) Health and nutrition in the dark ages
Tang was a breakfast drink, fruit Roll-Ups counted as fruit, and vegetables came from cans, swimming in sodium.
My mom cooked with Crisco and considered margarine a health food because it wasn’t butter.
We drank from garden hoses, shared sodas with five other kids, and ate birthday cake that definitely sat out too long at summer parties.
Food allergies were basically unheard of unless you were that one kid with the EpiPen, and even then, people were skeptical.
Sunscreen was for the first day of vacation only.
After that, you were supposed to have a “base tan” that protected you.
We’d lay out with baby oil to get darker faster.
The idea of reapplying SPF 50 every two hours would have seemed insane.
6) The blessing and curse of less information
Our parents didn’t have Instagram making them feel guilty about not doing sensory bins.
They didn’t have twenty different parenting philosophies to choose from.
Dr. Spock’s book was about it, and even that was considered pretty progressive.
In some ways, this made parenting simpler.
You did what your parents did, maybe with small modifications.
There wasn’t constant second-guessing or information overload, but it also meant harmful practices continued unchallenged for generations.
Now, I find myself overwhelmed by choices.
Should we do Montessori activities? Is two hours of screen time too much? Are we validating feelings enough?
Sometimes I envy the simplicity our parents had, even while being grateful for what we know now.
Finding our own way forward
Here’s what I’ve realized: We’re all doing the best we can with the information we have.
Our parents weren’t trying to harm us any more than we’re trying to harm our kids by probably being overprotective by their standards.
Each generation gets some things right and others wrong.
Maybe our kids will look back and wonder how we could have been so strict about screen time or so worried about organic produce, or maybe they’ll think our gentle parenting created a generation that couldn’t handle real-world challenges.
What matters is that we’re thinking about it, questioning it, and trying to take the good from how we were raised while leaving behind what didn’t serve us.
I want my kids to have the confidence that came from independence, without the emotional suppression, and the resilience that came from working things out, without the neglect.
We survived an era of parenting that seems almost unbelievable now.
While I wouldn’t recreate it wholesale for Ellie and Milo, I’m grateful for the perspective it gives me.
Maybe that’s the real lesson: Kids are more resilient than we think, parenting doesn’t have to be perfect, and love covers a multitude of mistakes.
