This week we’re listing some of the things that we have seen change or develop in our lifetime.
I’m getting on a bit now, and so jumped at the chance to share what has changed since I was a child:
- I remember pre-decimalisation currency – yes, the old pounds, shillings and pence. It took me ages to get used to the new coinage in 1971!
- Colour televisions didn’t really appear until 1973. We had a black and white TV set until I was about 16.
- Microwave ovens were not around until my eldest son was a baby. When I was a child my mum heated up dinners in the gas oven and hoped they didn’t dry out.
- I remember being taken to a room filled with a huge machine in a college when I was about 15 and told it was one computer! Yes, computer technology has improved in leaps and bounds since then.
- Dishwashers – who would have thought that private households would have such a thing? Back in the 1960s Mum washed up dirty crockery at the sink!
- What has also changed is the amount of cars on the road. As a child we played in the roads, because there was much less traffic. Now you’d get knocked over in no time.
- Children’s freedom has declined nowadays because of the increased risk of paedophiles. I played outside for hours in the 1960s with no thought of having to watch out for paedophiles / perverts.
- The proliferation of junk food outlets started in earnest around the mid 1970s. Now we’re paying the price of increased waistlines, diabetes, joint pains, and goodness knows what else.
- Another proliferation – CCTV cameras. The average person is caught on camera about 300 times every day now. Big Brother is watching…
- If I wanted to read a book in the 1960s I’d go to the library or buy one from a book shop. Now you can read books online and buy them without even stepping outside your front door!
- Health & Safety rules at work and leisure have improved over the years, which is a good thing.
- As a music-mad teenager I bought vinyl LP’s or singles for my record player. Now you can buy and download music online and listen to it via CDs, MP3 players, iPods and iPads etc. The downside of this is that many record shops have closed down.
- Treatments for common diseases have improved. We are all living longer. Cancer is no longer a death sentence for some.
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Stevie Turner 
You wrote my list for me! I’d add landline phones – unless your friends/relatives had one too, what was the point? There was always a red telephone box around the corner for emergencies. I wonder what youngsters today make of the Tardis, which is, of course the special kind of phone box used by policemen on the beat and/or any member of the public who wanted to call the local copshop via a direct line.They are long gone, or so I believe. On your point 7, I’m with the person from Alaska. We now know only too well that those things were – and probably still are – more likely to happen in the home. And then all the places where you once thought your kids were safe because they with adults have turned out not always to have been so, with the result that no-one will risk leaving kids with a single adult – there always has to be 2.
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Ah the blue Tardis, yes I remember those in the 1960’s. I never went inside one though.
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Fab list Stevie. Sometimes we get so used to progression we tend to forget what we didn’t have when we were younger. That said, some things were better back in those days. 🙂
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Thanks Debby.
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Welcome. 🙂
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Some of the changes are progress and some … oh, my! We still don’t have a dishwasher (it broke and we haven’t convinced ourselves to spend the money to replace it – Brad’s the dishwasher now). I would replace the microwave if it broke, though!
Alaska is still a fairly safe place for kids to play outside unsupervised … at least in Fairbanks. The wider community’s about 100,000 people. A yell for help will still get people’s attention here and … well, we’re often armed. Which doesn’t mean we don’t have pedohiles, just that they have to be more creative than trying to grab kids in parks because they could end up dead that way. The thing is … from what I learned in working in the mental health industry … there are not probably more pedophiles than there were when I was a child. They just make the news now. So, it’s not an increased danger so much as it is an increased awareness.
It was hard for me to let the kids have their freedom because we had a serial killer operating in Fairbanks and another in Anchorage when I was in high school and college, so that ‘stranger danger’ thing was really baked in, but Brad insisted — age 9 for Bri, age 6 for Kiernan — because we moved to a neighborhood with a park, not because we thought Kiernan was better able to take care of himself, though he has always been much more wary of strangers than Bri is. Having let our kids roam relatively freely (with check-ins and a network of parents reporting on one another’s kids like they did when I was young), I now tend to think that a lot of the fear parents have for their children is over-hyped. Danger exists, but we shouldn’t use it as an excuse to hold our children captive to it. I was afraid and I’m glad Brad forced me to let go of that desire to imprison our kids.
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Yes, I was 6 when I walked to school on my own. My eldest granddaughter is 12 and is not allowed to even walk to the library about a 10 minute walk away. So sad.
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It is sad. The insanity appears to be reversing here in the States. There was a trend of cops arresting kids and charging their parents with neglect or abuse for being “free range”, but they passed a federal law last year that acknowledges kids really aren’t that unsafe when they walk by themselves or with others. https://www.fastcompany.com/3055107/federal-law-now-says-kids-can-walk-to-school-alone Of course, that’s federal level. Some local municipalities and states impose greater limitations. It really is pretty insane. It’s like the whole country needs to be put on anti-anxiety meds so they can stop being afraid of their neighbors.
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Society now is fearful. Kids are frightened to play out. Parents are frightened to let the kids out of their sight. Grandparents are frightened that the kids are frightened – it’s a never-ending vicious cycle…
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Yeah. It’s ridiculous. I blame it on the 24-hour news cycle.
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The world is changing… and your list shows there are pros and cons to those changes!
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Yep.
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You just wrote my list. Except for the English money system.
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