SOCIAL media has been blamed for strange behavioural tics in teenagers. Here’s why you were fortunate to avoid today’s social advances while growing up in the 80s.
You got bullied enough anyway
School provided ample opportunities for every type of bullying from throwing your bag into someone’s garden to mild beatings. Nowadays you can get home for more bullying on Facebook – except much worse things like being told to kill yourself, which makes smashing your protractor set into tiny pieces look like a kind and generous gesture by 80s bullies.
Internet cheating
The modern pupil augments their studies with the wonderful learning resource that is the internet. They don’t, of course, and just cut and paste stuff that’s obviously cribbed or wrong. You’d have done exactly the same, emerging from years of schooling without remembering any facts whatsoever, not even utterly useless information about motte-and-bailey castles.
School councils and other earnest wankery
Children are self-important little tossers anyway, so you shouldn’t be giving them a formal way to drone on about school life. Like work, it’s fundamentally dull and tinkering around the edges won’t change that. And they’ll soon learn that pushy twats get an ego boost from taking charge of boring admin the second they start work.
Multiplayer online gaming
A huge investment of – basically – wasted time, but also another bullying opportunity. 80s kids were obsessed with calling each other ‘benders’, and repeating it at least 20 times just made this Wildean witticism more hilarious. Today’s kids can enjoy this too with hours of being called a ‘faggot’ by shrieking idiots on Call of Duty. You’d welcome graphic discussions of your mum’s sexual perversions just for some bloody variety.
Healthy eating
An 80s childhood was already full of grim experiences, from mumps to watching Threads. The last thing you’d have needed was having more joy sucked out of it by an earnest parent sending you to school with carrot dips and hummus instead of a bag of sodium-laden Space Raiders and a unfeasibly large Mars bar that was 97 per cent sugar.
Paedos
Or rather hysteria about them. A serious issue, but too many immature adults have got carried away with the drama of protecting their ‘little ones’ from perverts lurking in every changing room. In the 80s you were free to worry about innocent things, like whether the disfigured, child-slaying ghost of a mass murderer lived in the school boiler house as your mate Colin claimed.
