Bad Parenting
What was the deal with parenting in the 80s? It wasn’t really “parenting,” was it? It was more like… loose supervision. You look at these photos now and you think, “How are any of us alive?” We were riding in the back of pickup trucks, no seatbelts, rolling around like loose change. The car seat was basically a lawn chair hooked over the back seat with a metal clip. If you hit a bump, the baby went flying!
And the freedom! Parents just opened the door at 8 AM and said, “Good luck! Try not to die!” We were out there drinking from hoses, buying candy cigarettes, playing on playgrounds made entirely of jagged metal and concrete. If you came home with a scraped knee, your mom just sprayed some Bactine on it and sent you back out. There were no helmets. No GPS trackers. Just vibes and tetanus.
It is absolutely wild to look back at these things. The smoking areas in high schools? The dangerous toys? It feels like we grew up on a different planet. But there is something funny about the collective survivor’s guilt we all share. We look at these rusted deathtraps and think, “Yeah, that was my childhood.”
It’s good to laugh about it now because, honestly, we can’t change it. We are the generation of lead paint and second-hand smoke, and somehow, we made it. These photos are a badge of honor. We survived the era of negligence, and we have the funny stories to prove it.
If you enjoy this trip down memory lane, you might also like our content on vintage nostalgia, funny history memes, and retro pop culture fails.
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Priya Coleman is a viral content specialist and meme analyst with over six years in digital publishing. Her past roles include viral content editor for PopSugar's humor vertical and meme correspondent for HuffPost’s comedy section. Priya specializes in spotting trending meme moments just before they peak—like the chaotic delight of the Ever Given’s Suez Canal mishap or the existential comedy of This is Fine. She brings her sharp wit and instinctive knack for viral content to Thunder Dungeon, always keeping the community a step ahead of the latest meme craze.
