When you hit 80 years old, if you’re lucky, your mind becomes a bit like an attic. Some boxes are dusty, and many have been forgotten for decades. But there’s one labeled “The 1980s” that stays remarkably bright and most memorable.
Back then, I was a stay-at-home mom in my late 30s and 40s, which means I was right in the thick of the seemingly never-ending parenting marathon. My kids were navigating their school years and growing up in a world that felt like it was shifting from black-and-white to full neon technicolor. Looking back now, with the benefit of a few decades of perspective, it was a wild, wonderful, and occasionally terrifying time to raise a family. Today, the years seem short, but many of the days were long. But things overall seemed easier. Let’s take a minute and go back then together.
The Joyful Chaos of an 80s Household
If I close my eyes, I can still hear the soundtrack of our house in 1985. It wasn’t just the music…though heaven knows I heard enough Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Bon Jovi bleeding loudly through bedroom doors and on the radio transporting kids to last a lifetime. I’m thinking about the sound of the screen door slamming open and shut. The refrigerator door slamming shut. The rhythmic clack-clack-clack of an Atari 2600 video game joystick as they tried to save a princess, shoot alien invaders or eat dots. The complaining about the always-tangling 15 foot phone cord attached to the rotary phone on the wall. The absolute chaos of Saturday morning cartoons while I tried to enjoy a quiet cup of coffee. With children in the house in the 80’s, there was no such thing as a quiet anything.
As a parent, the 1980s brought a brand-new kind of joy, one that my parents would not have understood. We watched our kids step into a technological digital frontier that we didn’t fully comprehend, yet their excitement to learn was infectious. I still remember the look of pure triumph on my kid’s face the day they finally mastered the Rubik’s Cube, or the way the whole living room filled with laughter when we tried to learn whatever dance move was popular on MTV (I can still barely “Walk Like an Egyptian”). There was such energy to everything they touched, from the neon clothes and sneakers fashions to big hair, to the scratchy vinyl records and plastic cassette tapes they packed into their Walkmans and played at maximum volume. How any of my kids can hear a word today, I’ll never know. And at a certain age, you know your kids can hear, but it took an act of Congress to get them to LISTEN.
The Good Stuff: Freedom and Connection
When I think about what my kids had in the 1980s, the biggest thing that stands out is their mostly uninhibited freedom.
Once the weekend hit, they vanished. The rule in our house, and every house on the block, was simple: Be home when it gets dark out and the streetlights come on.
They spent their days riding bikes through the neighborhood, building questionable forts in the woods, and organizing games of kickball, dodgeball, or the sport of the season at the park. They learned how to negotiate, how to share, and how to resolve a fight without a parent intervening, mostly because no parents were around to see it. They developed a fierce independence that kids don’t get today in quite the same way. Because there wasn’t such a thing as cellphones, we HAD to trust our kid’s judgement and let them make mistakes on their own, so they could learn. And we’d hear about it at the dinner table.
And I can’t forget about the pop culture of the 1980s…those kids were so lucky! It was a golden era for them. They had Star Wars, Back to the Future, Miami Vice, The A-Team, and Saturday mornings dedicated entirely to sugary cereal and cartoons. There was a shared cultural experience back then. Because there were only a handful of TV channels, all the kids were watching the same things and talking about them at school the next day. Mostly because we couldn’t figure out how to get the VCR to stop flashing “12:00” all day and record the shows for playback at a later time.
The Not so Good Stuff: Growing Pains and Hidden Fears
Of course, it wasn’t all leg warmers and quarter-a-play arcade games. As a parent, you worry in every decade, and the 80s had its own distinct challenges we don’t like to remember as much.
For kids, I think the rise of peer pressure felt incredibly intense for them. The booming consumer culture of the 80s meant that if you didn’t have the right brand of sneakers, the specific designer jeans, or the newest electronic gadget, you felt it. I remember the heartbreak of watching one of my kids struggle to fit in because we couldn’t (or wouldn’t) buy every single trendy item they wanted that flashed across the TV screen. It impacted their confidence and self-esteem, and every denial ended in a shouting match and felt like the end of the world for them. For 15 minutes. Then, they accepted it and moved on.
There were larger anxieties, too. The threat of ‘mutually assured destruction’ still hummed in the background, and even if they didn’t fully grasp geopolitics, the kids caught the tail end of that lingering “nuclear anxiety.” Then there was the sudden appearance of missing children’s faces on the back of milk cartons. It was a stark, daily reminder that the world wasn’t quite as safe as their free-roaming afternoons made it seem, forcing us parents to place the ideas of suspicion and awareness of this kind of serious danger into our kid’s minds.
Lessons Learned from the Rearview Mirror
Now that I’m 80, looking at my grown children, who are now older than I was during that crazy decade with kids, I realize a few things, and I think they have too.
- Boredom is a gift. In the 80s, when my kids complained they were bored, I told them to go outside. That boredom forced them to be creative, to invent games, explore, interact with friends, exercise, and to use their imaginations.
- You don’t need to curate every moment. We didn’t schedule every second of their lives with organized activities. The unscheduled, messy, unstructured time is where they figured out who they were, as it gave them time to fill in the blanks in their own minds and establish their passions and personalities in the world that was constantly evolving around them.
- Change is inevitable, but connection stays the same. We worried back then that computers and video games would ruin their brains. Today, my grandkid’s parents (which I call my own kids on occasion) worry about smartphones doing the same thing. The technology changes, but a kid’s need for love, attention, boundaries, time, and space to grow remains exactly the same.
The 1980s flew by in a blur of cassette tapes, neon windbreakers, mall visits, and the smell of Aqua Net Pink. It wasn’t a perfect time, but it was our time. It was their time. And if I could turn back the clock just for one day, I’d gladly sit on the porch, watch those bikes pile up in the front yard, then head to the kitchen to stir up a pitcher of Kool-Aid and make half a dozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and open a bag of Cheetos. And once they were fed and out the door off on their next adventure, I’d do another endless load of laundry and a sink full of dishes, prepare a casserole, and wait for the streetlights to come on.
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