Cat and Nat and #MomTruths Friday — ’80s Moms Had it Made!

Lol. I was born in the 80s so my mom was 80s mom. I am free range, but have to say we do eat very healthily in my family (including the kale) so the first part could have been talking about me. The rest was a little hyperbolic, but funny. Thanks for sharing.

What a gas!

Great video, but the dates are off. According to the book “Last Night in Paradise” 1980 was actually the beginning of the mass hysteria over sex (daycare satanic abuse, kiddie porn, stranger kidnapping). The tide turned in the 1990s with the research sponsored by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, followed by the publication of the Rind et al. (1998) study that did NOT support the hysterical belief that early sex abuse is “usually” seriously harmful (subsequently subject to a vote of censure by the U.S. Congress). Although there is still resistance (Free-Range parenting, slut-walks, topless freedom, and scholarship critical of so-called “sexualization”), Western culture is still in the grip of anti-sex hysteria.

Ha.

That was great. As a parent that grew up in the 70s and 80s, I can say that these ladies were spot on. Thanks for sharing this.

>>Not a mom, but funny
Raised in the 80’s and 90’s i think the kids were the ones that had it made.<<

I was raised in that same time period, but my parents were on the more helicopter-y end of the spectrum–I was allowed to walk to school starting in grade three or so, and come home alone from school starting on either my twelfth birthday, or the beginning of grade seven (I can't remember which), and take the bus to the YMCA for Leader Corps when I joined that in grade seven. However, I couldn't leave the yard unsupervised for a while; beyond the age that most kids were allowed, and my radius was pretty small until high school, when I'd just get around the rules by going where I wanted to go after school, and then joined multiple extra-curricular activities, so my parents figured that if I was responsible enough for band and student government (my big two), I was responsible enough to be free-ranged. My brother wasn't a joiner, and he was helicoptered more than I was. Still, some of the things that my parents did without thinking twice, like letting us wait in the car, or browse independently at the library at elementary-school age (with or without a parent in the building), wouldn't be allowed now.

As for nutrition, though, this video is sort of accurate. My mom would sort of hop back and forth between not caring, and feeding us utter crap in our school lunches (chips, Cheetos, snack cakes, and Sunny D, which wasn't a healthy beverage, but played one on television), and health kicks, where she banished all junk food from the house, forced me to write down what I ate (sometimes with calorie counts), and dragged me along to the gym with her. Needless to say, I had some issues for a while, and I'm fine now (long story), but I don't think it's awful to teach kids to eat a mostly healthy diet, as long as you allow treats once in a while. A cookie for dessert after dinner (bonus points if you made the cookies yourself, so you know what's in them), a slice of cake at a birthday party, a Popsicle after a Little League game, fine……but kids (and adults, for that matter) shouldn't be eating Twinkies and Cheetos every day. As for me, I'm not saying that the jumping between the two extremes of junk food and "health" food, was worse for me physically than if I'd just been allowed to eat straight junk, but it did take its toll mentally and emotionally. I think people are finally catching on to that now; hence why it's become "cool" to eat healthy. The competitive bento boxes may be a bit much (really, who has time to sculpt Elsa or Olaf's face out of rice?) but proper nutrition in itself isn't a bad thing, within reason. It's not for the school to police either, but if people want to do it on their own, I don't really see the point of making fun of them for that.