"Name a struggle"

One of those silly internet things: "Name a struggle you had growing up that kids today wouldn't understand"

Okay. I'm old, so these are going to be technologically-related:

- Phones only existed as items tethered to a wall, you rented them from A T and T. They had rotary dials so wrong numbers were a PITA. There was not call-waiting, no call-forwarding, no caller ID, and very, very few answering machines - so if you called someone and they didn't pick up, you had to keep calling. If they were on the phone, you got a busy signal. If someone called you you had to answer not knowing who they were. (For a while, my mom was getting a heavy breather who escalated to ruder comments. She took to keeping a whistle by the phone....)

- Televisions: we had two, one in the kitchen, one in the family room. The one in the kitchen was in black and white. To  change the channel you got up and turned a knob. You also had to adjust "rabbit ears" to improve reception.

(That said - sometimes on summer evenings, you could play a little with "atmospheric skip" and get stations from farther away than you normally would. It was like dxing on a radio, but with a television)

(And for that matter: do kids today even know what dxing is? It was a thing my dad taught me about and it was kind of fun in that geeky way - "Oh, hey, I'm picking up St. Louis!")

So, one tv that was "comfortable" to watch, so you had to bargain with the rest of the family when you wanted to watch something. A few times my brother and I watched the black and white tv in the kitchen if what we wanted conflicted with something one of our parents wanted.

Much later, we inherited another tv from my dad's grandmother; it went in the "office" (an unused bedroom). I often used that tv....I remember one of the indy channels in the area used to re-run the old 1960s-era "The Avengers" and I would watch that. I think I watched part of "The Day After" (which my parents forbade us from watching on the grounds that (a) it was propagandistic and (b) it would needlessly worry us) on that tv.

But yeah - only five channels; we did not have cable until I was a college student. And we didn't have a vcr until I was in high school - and if you wanted to watch something and missed it when it was on, too bad. Woe unto you if you got banned from tv (a common punishment) the week something you really wanted to watch was on.

- Audio - we had a record player and an 8-track player. Many years later I got a cassette "boom box" and I think I had to save all my birthday money and my chore money and my measely allowance money for MONTHS to do that.

And woe unto you if you scratched one of your parents' records (or worse, one checked out from the library)

- also allowances - I got $2 a week from about age 10 until I left home. Granted, my parents paid for my clothes and school supplies (but then again: I had limited choice in that). And once in a while, for example if we were going somewhere, they might give me a little extra to get ice cream or something. But I remember NEVER having money as a kid, never being able to buy very much of what I wanted.

- Computers were by and large nonexistent. When I was a late tween/early teen we got a TI44, and I learned a little BASIC on it (almost none of which I remember). We also had a typing tutorial cartridge and one that you could use to play something like MIDI-style music after you painstakingly typed in each note on a staff. (There were also games, TI's own knock-off versions of arcade games). There was no internet, though I think if there had been we probably would not have been allowed on it without heavy parental supervision (which is probably a good idea anyway, these days)

- Microwaves - I think I was 10 or 11 when we got the first one we had. I remember when my dad tried to fry an egg in it and blew up the egg because he didn't want to puncture the yolk. I remember my brother and I doing "Will It Melt?" with leftover halloween candy in the microwave one evening when our parents were out and we were left to watch ourselves. (We thought we were being SO bad).

We did have a convection oven before that though - and they are good for many things.

I think in many ways the time I grew up in was a LOT simpler. We had fewer entertainment choices, but at the same time, I think some bad things - like cyberbullying - hadn't started up yet. (I am sure I would have been cyberbullied, given how the "mean girls" treated me....I could see them doing things like surreptitiously taking cell-phone photos that were unflattering, and things like that). 
-