Top 10 parenting principles from the 90s that seem outrageous today

In the 90s there was a lot of normal stuff that would seem strange today and as far as education was concerned it was particularly cotton. We look at it together, hand in hand, foot in foot.

1. Send your children to buy your cigarettes

This does not concern all children of course, but already those who had parents who smoke. Heavy smokers. Like heavy enough smokers to ask their eight-year-old to go buy packs of Benson & Hedges across the street from a salesman who knows you well enough to pass the stuff on to the biggest calms.

2. Leave children free to take off their seat belts in the car

I don’t know about you, but I spent my long car journeys as a child lying on the back seat under a duvet without any form of belt attached to any part of my body. I would like to say that this is a unique case but I think we were a whole generation of survivors of the 90s.

3. Allow them to watch TV 1 meter from the screen and from morning to breakfast

If young people today (= not us seeing that we were children in the 90s and that we are therefore resolutely old) spend a lot of their time on screens of all kinds (tablet, computer, smartphone ) let’s not forget that our younger years were spent watching dodgy TV shows while munching on super-sweet cornflakes.

4. Put them in the sun without putting on sunscreen

Brilliant now we have spots on our face because we have already exhausted our sun capital at 35 banks. Great. Thank you really. So not only do we get into the heat waves, but we can’t even sunbathe.

5. Watch the microwave spin at 3cm

Frankly between the Club Dorothée and the show of the rotating soup, it was the same thing.

6. Smoking in the crate when taking the kids to school

Your only chance to escape the smell was to get sick in the car: for nothing in the world (not even a little cigarette) they wouldn’t have wanted to clean up your vomit on the back seat. For those with strong guts, the smoke had to be endured.

7. Make them drink a little wine during family meals

“Boah it’s just a sip and then it wakes up the kid’s palate” what were they saying. And then we’re surprised that we’re putting boxes of wine on Monday evening.

8. Having cats in cohabitation with your infant

Some hotheads still dare this cohabitation, but rare are the parents who let their cats sleep with their infant (and perhaps somewhere we understand them).

9. Buy sexier toys than the sexiest sexist ad

Let’s face it, we weren’t very woke in the 90s. And if we still fight against gendered toys, we might as well say that at the time we didn’t care.

10. Comparing the kids to each other (we didn’t know it was bad at the time) “look at little Timothy, he knows how to tie his shoes on his own…”

Well you will tell me today everyone thinks their child is HPI and it is not necessarily better.