If you lived in an area where there were no parks nearby, or your backyard wasn’t big enough for games like hide-and-seek, hockey, stickball, and Marco Polo, then the streets were your only choice.
Kids would also play with marbles, aiming them at small street manhole covers. Many little girls would also make hop-scotch boards on the streets with chalk. Miraculously, all kids were safe from oncoming cars.
Sugary Cereals
Cereals like Cap'n Crunch or Trix were considered a decent breakfast back then. Unsweetened corn-flakes generally had about a tablespoon of sugar. These sugary treats made of corn, wheat or oat, were endlessly being fed into the mouths of young kids. As you can probably imagine, the results were not great.
It was belly and toothaches galore. The sugar was causing these kids a lot of harm. While there is certainly an abundance of sugary cereals today, there are at least healthier options too.
Sugar Loaded Bubblegum
Blowing bubblegum bubbles was all the rage then. Often times there were even bubble-blowing competitions. This was seen as pretty sneaky as bubblegum was not even allowed in class in those days, so it was always up to one of the brave kids to smuggle some in.
Of course, with all that sugar, swirling around their mouths, cavities were endless and teachers and parents started clamping down even harder on the sugary treats after all those painful visits to the dentist.
Swirlies
Another thing that has evolved, is the bullying culture. Not that kids have gotten kinder, we all know that kids can be pretty cruel, but their methods have certainly changed over the years.
It wasn't uncommon for kids to take the school's biggest nerd and dunk him in the toilet. Thankfully, that is safely in the past and in some outdated teen films.
Everybody wanted to be a Smoker
Those days, in just about every piece of media, whether it was in film, TV, billboards, magazine ads, not to mention, just on the street, you would see a cigarette in everyone's lips. Even ads featuring babies would be seen alongside a smoking mother and father at the dinner table
When it came to the older kids, the depiction of teens smoking cigarettes was seen as a sign of growing up. Just ask anyone from that generation. It's highly likely that they were sent to the corner store to buy smokes for their folks.