30 Things My Kids May Never Experience

A Facebook Friend recently posted an article entitled, “100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About”.

When I read the title, I immediately thought of all kinds of things from my childhood that my own children will probably never experience, simply because of all of the changes in technology and society since the 1970s and 1980s. I decided to make my own list before reading the article, just to see how many things I could bring to mind.

30 Things My Children May Never Experience:

1. Putting a key in the car door to lock and unlock it.

2. Using the hand crank to manually raise and lower the car windows.

3. Sitting on Mom’s lap in the front of seat of the car.

4. Getting out of the car to raise the garage door by hand.

5. The record player as a piece of furniture in the living room.

6. 8 track tapes. (My Dad listened to 8 track tapes until his car was stolen at a restaurant on my 13th birthday. I don’t think he could have found a car with an 8 track tape player in 1986, if he had tried, so he finally “converted” to a cassette tape player.)

7. Making mix tapes for your best friend or boyfriend.

8. Telephones with rotary dials.

9. Stretching the phone card into another room and closing the door for privacy.

10. Going up to the TV to change the channel.

11. Having only four channels to choose from—CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS.

12. Reading the comics in the Sunday newspaper.

13. Renting a VCR for birthday parties. (As another testament to my technology-deprived childhood, my parents didn’t get a VCR until after I went to college in the 1990s. When we were young, Mom would rent a VCR from Blockbuster so my friends and I could watch movies during sleepovers!)

14. Going to Blockbuster to rent movies.

15. Stovetop popcorn or a popcorn popper on the kitchen countertop with the rest of the appliances.

16. Tearing the edges off paper after it comes out of computer printer, then tearing the pages apart at the perforations.

17. Chalkboards in the classroom.

18. The flickering and clicking of reel-to-reel filmstrips.

19. Card catalogs at the library.

20. Having a set of encyclopedias on the bookshelf.

21. Waiting to get photos developed to find out if any of your pictures “turned out”.

22. Putting film in your camera, and worrying that you will lose pictures when you open the back of the camera.

23. Worrying about your film getting ruined when you went through security at the airport.

24. Roller skates you strap onto your shoes.

25. Prank calls (I can’t imagine kids make these in the current days of Caller ID).

26. Riding under the grocery cart.

27. Waiting for paper plane tickets to arrive in the mail before your trip.

28. Greeting relatives at the gate of the airport when they first get off the plane.

29. Starting over with a fresh piece of paper to type your second draft in the typewriter. (My Mom and Dad had a plan worked out when we were babies: In case of fire, they knew who would grab the kids and who would grab my Dad’s dissertation!)

30. Using correction tape in the typewriter.

Those of you who are older than I may have additional items to add to the list. My husband, just 8 years older than I am, recalls having a black and white television when he was a kid.

What can YOU add to my list?