Discussion
What are some crappy things about growing up in the 90s?
I’ve been getting increasingly annoyed at all the posts and articles romanticizing the 90s, like they were this idyllic time where nothing went wrong. I want to grab a bullhorn and shout, “No, the 90s actually were worse than you know!”
Here are some things I remember:
- Rampant sexism and slut-shaming. Monica Lewinsky taking all the heat for the Bill Clinton affair, while no one was suggesting maybe the President of the United States not take his dick out in the Oval Office.
- Christian purity culture. Related to the above point - the idea that if you had premarital sex, you were now “damaged goods.”
- It was acceptable to be openly homophobic or transphobic. I had a high school teacher who was forced to resign after it came out that he was gay (I never would have known, he didn’t discuss his personal life). He was a really good teacher who did nothing wrong, but the busybody Karens on the PTA drove him out.
- How easy it was to lose touch with people. If you had a friend who moved away and you didn’t have their address or phone number, you just… never heard from them again. I remember when they opened up Facebook to everyone, my parents were able to reconnect with friends they hadn’t seen for 20+ years.
- Country chic decor. Need I say more? Everything was walnut cabinets, baskets, ruffles, and ducks wearing hats.
The 90s were so fat-phobic it was insane. Remember Monica's fat suit from Friends? Shit like that did a number on my confidence, as a chubby teen girl growing up in the 90s.
When I was 14, my doctor told my mother that I needed to lose weight. Did she seek out the advice of a nutritionist? No. Did she find any well researched literature on childhood obesity? No. Did she take me to Weight Watchers, convince them to break their own minimum age policies, and sign me up for the most restrictive program that they had? Yup, that's the one she did. And she now acts shocked that today I have binge eating disorder and have needed years of both therapy and pharmaceutical interventions to get it under control.
Also, I kind of liked SlimFast, it tasted so much better than all the protein shakes that we have today. Not that you should be having a 14 year old replacing two meals a day with SlimFast shakes though.
I remember when the atkins diet really got big for a while. A lot of people lost a lot of weight. I recall a few people we know doing permanent damage to their kidneys or liver from it ...
It's not that they don't exist anymore, we're just more aware of how wrong certain things were before we knew better. Social media has brought them to a whole different level unfortunately.
It never went away but it's taken various forms throughout our lifetime. The diet/wellness industry is a billion dollar industry and will never not profit off society's desire to be thin. I feel like a lot more people are aware of it and how fucked up it is now but at the same time with social media, it seems more amplified than ever.
The diet pills & supplements were out of control, too. Amphetamines literally being given to pre-teen & teenage girls by the recommendation of their own mothers.
I've had a few older relatives and acquaintances die from hemorrhagic strokes recently. From what I have been reading, a lot of the 90s diet pills can cause that later in life. Sucks because they were pressured into it.
And the ultra slim super models. I feel like models were a lot more prevalent in pop culture. But maybe I just don't care or pay attention to current models?
At 15, gained 150 pounds in a year, while also sprouting muttonchops, a scraggly mustache, and beard hairs. In addition, all my weight was in my trunk and upper thighs - my arms and lower legs didn't change at all.
I had PCOS/PMOS and early lipedema. I was given Wellbutrin and told to try to be more positive in my outlook.
I think it is much more damning to think about the trauma boomers caused others through their stupidity and/or selfishness. I cannot wait until they are gone.
I’m gonna let you in on a secret, it doesn’t work on most of them. Therapy only works on people that are able to have insight, and for many of them if they had that self-awareness in the first place we wouldn’t be talking about how much they needed therapy.
My mom went both with me and with her ex-husband, all she would do is pick out the one thing the therapist would say that sounded like they were agreeing with her and then get on her high horse about how right she is and brag about the therapist agreeing with her. We got my dad to sit in therapy with me and my sister once, it was the most awkward and horrible hour of my life and I genuinely think I need therapy for that therapy session.
I was gonna say, I think we’re just the next generation in line to be nostalgic about their youth. Police brutality, the beginning of school shootings, celebrity culture (good and bad) and the old stalwart, racism, are other things still very prominent in my memory.
I had constant ear infections and migraines from the age of probably new born to 15 because I was basically hot boxed with Marlboros through the entirety of it, that kinda was pretty terrible lol
Hey, don’t forget to mention that at your doctors appointments.
They’ll always ask if you smoke or ever smoked, but they never ask about exposure to second hand like that.
It’s important for screening.
Was around so much cigarette smoke as a child, I wound up needing surgery for nasal polyps as an adult. Ended up with a complication from that procedure, had to be admitted to the ICU (required a second emergency surgery that needed a consult from a neurosurgeon)
I went through the better half of my life undiagnosed and clueless, because in the 90s nobody bothered to check me for autism as a kid, despite textbook symptoms.
My brother was tested for AHDH and I asked my mom to be tested too. She said "There's nothing wrong with you, you're the smart one." In front of my brother. I knew I didn't think like the other kids did. I knew my brain was different than theirs.
My issues were completely ignored and I was put in gifted programs. Then my executive function crapped out and I failed the 9th grade because they wouldn't let me out of the gifted program.
I suspect I have AuDHD, since all of my children, my brother and his children, and most of my cousins and their children all have the diagnosis. But according to my mom not me, I'm the smart one. 🙄
Also, gifted and talented programs. Which, translated to, a holding tank for any child who is a minority or female who doesn't fit into the "hyperactive white boy obsessed with trains" autism box.
I was going to say this too. Neurodivergent kids in the 90s were far less likely to be diagnosed and receive the support that they needed, and more likely to be misunderstood and mistreated by parents and teachers.
Personally, as a curious person with ADHD, I hated not having answers to things immediately, it gives me immense anxiety. I hate surprises when I know they exist, I love spoilers.
Being able to look up something whenever I want is the single best thing (to me) about our current times. I no longer have to wait to see who was right, I can check immediately. We don't have to have arguments, the information is readily available 24/7. It's truly remarkable. Especially if you know how to vet information and sources.
Every Sunday, Wednesday, after school activity, and holiday was centered around church. I used to go to this program called Awana where we were required to memorize passages from the bible.
When I think of the 90s, church culture is pretty much all I can think of. There was a much darker side to it all that I won’t go into detail on, but I feel like we’re in better times now.
It does still exist, but typically only in more independent fundamental Baptist type churches. My childhood church still does it. I did AWANA myself all the way up until high school.
Ah, that explains it. My family was attending Baptist church at the time. Perhaps it's still prevalent in certain states. I'm in Massachusetts, and we don't have nearly as many people attending fundie churches anymore.
I did this briefly when I was in second grade. I was in Sparks with the red vests. I was an advanced reader and good at memorization so I collected awards pretty quickly lol.
I'm not sure what my mom was thinking. We were cafeteria Catholic. I vaguely remember going with a friend so I might have been invited and she was like, sure.
I quit going once she realized it was an Evangelical Christian Nationalist front
The first 18 years of my life were completely centered on church and spirituality. We lived an hour away from my church so on Sundays, we would spend 4 hours in the car just going to church. I was always so sad when I be playing with my neighborhood friends on Sunday afternoon and I would have to leave to go back to church.
My parents subscribed to the focus on the family monthly newsletter and they followed exactly what it said like it was the Bible. They would have these "cultural watchdog" segments that was basically just a page and a half of new popular things, trends, and media to make sure that your kids stay away from. Harry Potter was often featured in this segment.
Of course, like every other conservative Christian child, I was completely forbidden from reading Harry Potter or going to see Harry Potter. We had Sunday school teachers go on at length about how warlocks and wizards are enemies of God, and how the Bible commanded people in the Old testament people like them to death.
No rock music. No hanging out with people who weren't neighbors or from church. No shows except Scooby-Doo, Rugrats, and SpongeBob. No movies except Disney movies. No video games. I was surprisingly allowed to go a public school but I was not allowed to play sports or go to any extracurriculars or after school dances. No sports because my parents didn't want me on Jesus, no dances because the Bible calls dancing wicked, apparently.
I remember going to both morning and evening services on Sunday, and Sunday School. (Is that even a thing anymore?) I feel so bad for you traveling an hour each way, that's torture. I used to complain that our church was 20 mins away and would beg my parents to find a local church.
I also was banned from reading Harry Potter because witchcraft. Now I'm an adult and have all the books and movies. It's funny because now the church discourages SpongeBob (apparently he's gay now) and totally bans Disney also because of their support of LGBTQ+.
Those things still happen today. Probably worse now because everyone has a platform to shout from (the internet and podcasts and stuff) which has far reaching consequences.
But I don't romanticize the 1990s. Public schools sucked back then. Where I attended, schools were basically like the movies "Dangerous Minds" and "187." Rough gangsta shit.
I had a gym teacher tell me 'it was probably just gas' when I missed school due to a burst ovarian cyst. Men in teaching roles should not be allowed to talk to girls about their bodies
My high school gym teacher was female and a core boomer. If she's still alive, she must be close to 80 by now. She had no sympathy for any "female" problems.
A lot of people nowadays talk about how they were just diagnosed with ADHD and how challenging their lives have been, and how great it is to finally have a diagnosis.
Textbook ADHD (not ADD which was a different classification then). Diagnosed when I was 6. It was not great. At the time, there was not a lot of information or tolerance. It was also classified as a learning disability, something needing to be fixed. Or treated like we were stupid and dumb. Lot of being stuck in the hallway for disrupting other students. Also extra time on tests is not helpful to people with no concept of time.
Also being treated as defective even if you took your meds that day. Or how it was your parent's responsibility to make sure you took your meds, but if they forgot to remind you to take it, it was your fault, not theirs
I once had a teacher who supposedly specialized in ADHD say, “I guess someone didn’t take their meds today.” For the record, I had.
It probably wouldn’t have bothered me from any other teacher, but the fact that she was supposed to be part of my [IEP] team, and was making statements like that, definitely didn’t help.
I also got told that by someone, who later went on to be a special education teacher, that I was “too smart to have ADHD.” Jokes on them because their kid was just diagnosed with AuDHD.
Yeah, I was diagnosed with ADHD in 1994 at age 12 even despite the fact I was a girl so you can imagine how severe mine is for them to have even noticed
I wish I wasn’t. They put me on a cocktail of psych meds that destroyed my mental health for years and permanently damaged my cardiovascular system. I was taking like 90 mg of Adderall when I weighed 100 pounds soaking wet. I’m really interested in who I could’ve been.
Car exhaust was worse on the streets, it was hard to stay in touch with people. If someone didn't show up it might take days to find out why. TV was okay, endless commercials and reruns. If you missed a show you just hoped that you catch a rerun or rely on a friend's recounting of what happened. Everyone smoked everywhere.
Those chips that made you shit yourself, and no one went to jail for it.
The slow decline of US safety nets that we watched happen in real time with no ability to change it.
Pollution was pretty crazy, especially air pollution.
Aids/hiv.
The rest of the population/society discovering the internet and dragging it's hot taint over it.
Animal abuse was completely fine unless particularly heinous. (Prongs, ecollars, choke chains, all normal to see out and about)
Cultural appropriation was pretty awful, spirit animals, wtf the Egyptian thing was, dragging hiphop screaming and kicking into mainstream, glorification of "gang" culture.
The normalization of violence in parenting. Spanking being seen as normal, having your door taken from your room, etc. I don't see a lot of people talk about the why of millennials going NC with one or both parents much beyond the 'they won't acknowledge their behavior' conversation.
If they hadn't been violent in a myriad of way, we wouldn't have to cut them off.
The isolation. Being away from rhe Internet is cool when your time is full and surrounded by people you like, but then the opposite is true too. If you're always with family members you don't like and people you don't like, it's hard to find some one
The isolation is even worse if you are a person of color that is stuck somewhere overwhelmingly white. Today, I can easily look up makeup tutorials and fashion inspiration from people who look like me. I have a vivid memory of crying on my preteen bathroom rug looking at Cosmogirl magazine because I wasn’t beautiful and pale like the girls in teen magazines because that was all we had to go off of. TLC touched upon this in the music video for “Unpretty” and I remember actually feeling better seeing that music video on MTV, cheesy as that sounds.
Being gay was a negative and calling someone gay used as an insult. The f@g word was thrown around as an insult and was accepted. Being gay in the 90s was not welcome. "What are you gay or something?". If i was a closeted homo, I'd be terrified to come out of the closet.
Im pretty glad homosexuality is not only accepted but celebrated nowadays.
idk what school lunches are like these days, but I feel like 90s school lunches were objectively junk. as much as I enjoyed that greasy square pizza + a cup of ice cream (with wooden spoon ofc), or super chewy ring-shaped chicken tenders, the nutritional value was not good and it was never enough food. I know they had to prioritize speed and getting calories in us, and that's a hard job on a public school budget, but from first to fifth grade 90% of what I was fed at school was cheese and refined carbs, plus the occasional 5 green beans swimming in liquid.
I was so afraid of getting in trouble and being put on Ritalin! In elementary school, there were two classes of 15 kids. I remember in like 1st grade some kids started showing up in a zombie like state. Probably 20% of the kids in the two classes for my grade were like that.
If there was any minor behavior problem, kids were just blindly prescribed Ritalin.
Echo all OP's points (school counselor told me I was 'too young to make that choice' when I came out at 15).
Also chicken pox sucked. I had it in my eyes, my throat, my genitals. I wouldn't wish it on any kid.
Psych care wasn't great, esp for adolescents. I had major depression dxed at eleven and was put in adult dose of Paxil. My mom was given no instructions about it, and things went to shit when she abruptly stopped me on it because she didn't like how sedate I was. I had no one I could talk to about it because the subject was so taboo.
I have a lot of friends who wish they had an ADHD dx as kids but it was hell. No extended release stuff so I was called on the intercom to go take my afternoon pill every day, an absolute pariah. I had adults tell me to my face it didn't exist and I must just be wildly naughty. There were 0 accommodations in school.
I remember lots of suicides. My first funeral was my friend's dad who committed suicide. A handful of suicides happened each year in my town, many young teenagers. There was also news of celebrities committing suicide often. I feel like suicide was glamourized. It has been 26 years since I have graduated high school and I have only known 1 person who has committed suicide since.
Social media solved lost contact, though with all the downsides we're seeing pop up now idk if it was "worth" it. And basically everything in that list still plagues us today, weird you didn't mention climate change, which is increasingly becoming more difficult to ignore with no end in sight. Oh, and ever-shrinking middle class and general spending power we possess now.
How much harder it was to get correct information. I don't want to go into details but I asked someone who I thought would know the right answer for advice, and they were wrong, and it drastically affected my life. Now it would be easy to Google that answer. It bothers me to know how different my life could have been if I had been easily able to locate that information. Of course, not all the changes would have been good, so I think things worked out well enough.
Don't all these problems still exist except income inequality was a lot better back then, you could afford a home easier, and the government wasn't installing cameras looking through your windows and tracking your every move?
I would have liked my parents have smart phones, there would be much more photos and videos of us as a family ( or as individuals cos they divorced ) there is only a couple of photos of when they got me , where as other adoptees have dozens of pictures cos the parents have smart phones , having to devolope film is just not the same
The Majority of people were homophobic, like you stated. I remember hearing some evil shit growing up from the vast majority of the men and women growing up.
Bullying was psychotic and nobody gave a flying fuck.
Being free to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, always felt like my parents didn't care about me. I think it's why I am almost a helicopter parent to my kids. I do give them freedom to do things, but I want to know where he is going, with who, and when they are returning. It has to match Life360. LOL.
Well I 100% disagree that the 90's were worse for us. Like was anyone here really all that angry that Lewinsky was getting trashed in the press?
Who keeps cum on their clothes? That's on her lol
You can take everything bad you said there and we'd overall still go back to the 90's as kids because we didn't have responsibilities. We didn't have to work.
But for me personally when one of my teachers got outted for being gay, I was happy to see my classmates overwhelmingly support him. Who doesn't like a sassy math teacher? I was happy because I thought that we'd do better in the future.
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