Yes, the 1970s and 1980s Were the Best Time To Grow Up
No social media, no Internet and grownups minding their own business is a recipe for success
Nostalgia for the 1970s and 1980s childhood is all over Instagram, and I'm here to tell you that it's just as great as advertised.
This is not to say that it was perfect—of course, it wasn't.1 There's no such thing as perfect, but there are much better ways to live than the way we do today.
I have Gen X friends who grew up in working or middle-class families in small towns and big cities and who are of different races and different religions. We all have essentially the same memories of that period when it comes to lifestyle: riding our bikes everywhere, drinking out of garden hoses, playing kick the can, and listening to Casey Kasem countdowns with our cassette players at the ready so we could record our favorite songs.
Perhaps most importantly, we lived mostly out of sight of our parents except when we were called home for meals.
Cynics will say that everybody remembers their childhood as idyllic, but I can tell you that my parents did not. Based on the Millennial and Gen Z writers I read, they believe—correctly, in my opinion—that they were dealt a pretty bad hand in terms of the time period in which they were raised.
My parents felt they had very oppressive childhoods with controlling parents and lots of rules. They wanted to be different kinds of parents, and you could argue that the parents of Gen X kids engaged in a kind of over-correction. But I would take that kind of hands-off parenting over the alternative. If I had had my parents tracking me on an app, which is commonplace for Gen Z kids, I would've felt trapped, controlled, and extremely anxious.
I have intense nostalgia for my childhood and teen years, even though I had a fairly turbulent home life. My parents divorced when I was five, which was very unusual for the time, at least where I lived. Additionally, I had a lot of conflict with them, and like many parents of that era, they weren't great at healthily handling conflict.
Still, I remember my childhood and teen years as a really happy time.
I think it speaks to how radically different life was during those years as compared to today, mostly because it pre-dated the technology that has taken over our lives. I haven’t always felt such strong nostalgia, and I suspect it is more intense now because life today feels so much harder and more complicated for everyone, including children and teenagers who suffer from historic levels of anxiety and depression.
It seems correct to blame social media and the Internet for much of the unhappiness that Millennials and Gen Z have experienced. Their brains were inundated with too much stimulation and information before they were fully developed, and that's bad enough. But it's not just that they spent (and continue to spend) their time on apps comparing themselves to other people and jacking up their nervous systems with nonstop bad news from around the world.
It's also what they were not doing as children.
In hindsight, I can see how spending so much time outside (and not using electronics) was important in regulating my nervous system as a child. My father lived on three acres of land, which meant my brother and I were pushed out of the house right after breakfast. We didn't return until it was time for lunch, and then we went back out until dinner. In the winter, this usually meant sledding for hours on end. At my mother's house, we were in a neighborhood, which meant going outside and riding our bikes or playing games with other kids.