Whenever we take our kids out to restaurants, half of my bag is usually filled with stuff to entertain them. Crayons and paper, stickers, Hot Wheels cars, fidget spinners, and a pre-meal snack – anything to keep toddlers cheerful and calm. Apparently, dining out in a bustling eatery full of noise, different smells, the dizzying dance of servers and patrons, and sometimes even TVs blaring sports games is not enough to “entertain” children.

Sometimes, if service is slow and dinner goes longer than usual, my husband or I will begrudgingly cue up an episode of Blippi or Bluey on one of our phones. That always buys us just enough time to down our drinks, pay up, and gather every toy and crayon that’s fallen under the table. Plus, are they truly iPad kids if they’re not watching it on an iPad?

Of course, going to restaurants in the ‘90s looked very different. For one, there was a smoking section that was barely partitioned from the rest of the dining room. But also, parents never packed anything to “entertain” us at the table, and if we really wanted to bring something along – a book or maybe a small notepad and some crayons – it was up to us to carry it ourselves.

Like so many family restaurants today, some offered crayons with the kids’ menu. Then, there was a whole trend in the late ‘90s where restaurants would cover their dining tables in brown Kraft paper and servers would introduce themselves by writing their name on the table in crayon. (Here’s looking at you, Romano’s Macaroni Grill!)

Meanwhile, fast-food joints in the ‘90s swung to the other side of the…

Almost every parent has a similar memory: buckling their tiny newborn into a car seat, walking out of the hospital to the parked car, and carefully securing the car seat into its base in one of the back seats. Driving home with your baby – whether it was 10 minutes away or an hour – felt like the most nerve-wracking ride of your life.

I remember picking out the car seat that would carry our babies safely home. My husband and I did a bunch of research online, asked friends and family for recommendations, went to a speciality baby store to see the various makes and models in person, and watched a YouTube video to confirm we had, in fact, installed the rear-facing car seat correctly.

Following all these steps felt like an important rite of passage into parenthood. After all, if we weren’t taking our child’s car safety seriously, what else would we let slide?

Born to Drive – Or At Least Sit in the Front Seat

Times sure were different growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Of course, my parents brought me home from the hospital in an infant car seat, and they buckled that car seat into the back seat of their car. But that’s where the commonalities seem to end.

For one, it’s questionable whether my car seat even had a five-point harness, and it was padded with extra blankets and a ruffly pink skirt (to signal to other cars that I was a girl, of course). My car seat was about as unsafe as an ‘80s crib, which was filled with blankets, lined around the edges with a pillowy bumper, and a Fisher-Price Busy…

My toddler’s behaviour around food can only be described as fickle. Some nights when I make spaghetti bolognese, he laps it up at the dinner table, shovelling the noodles into his mouth with joyful energy and staining the skin around his lips with red sauce. Other times, he looks at his plate with suspicion and mild disgust, poking around the meaty chunks before declaring, “I don’t like spaghetti.”

These words often trigger a response by me and my husband where we’re awkwardly dancing between encouragement (“But you liked spaghetti last time you had it. Why don’t you give it another try?”), trying to play it cool (“You don’t have to eat it, but that’s what’s for dinner”), and masking our frustration and annoyance.

Pour Some Sugar on Me and My Lucky Charms

Of course, the ‘90s were a very different time when it came to views of feeding your family. Parents regularly pressured their kids to clean their dinner plates, “or else, no dessert,” they’d say. Sometimes, that warning would escalate to, “You’ll sit at the table until you finish your plate,” or “You’ll go to bed hungry.” And then if all else failed and you were still pushing around that broccoli: “There are starving children in Africa!”

Did these threats work? Often. Did they leave many of us with weird guilt – or worse, eating disorders – over “wasting” food, even if we were full, for years to come? Absolutely.

Yet, the ‘90s were also a time when so much of what we ate was unhinged. Refined sugar consumption was at an all-time high. From technicolour cereals like Fruit Loops, Dino Pebbles, and Cocoa Puffs for breakfast, to popular…

No swearing. No violent toys. No sleepovers. No mature topics. These are just some of the common rules that a lot of Millennial parents have in their households. It’s not that we’re overly strict. For many of us, we’re simply keen on preserving what’s left of childhood innocence in the digital age. Kids will inevitably learn about a word or a topic on YouTube (hopefully not YouTube 🙏, but likely), and be exposed to online porn 🙈. Preventing or at least delaying that, to some extent, gives parents peace of mind.

But this wasn’t the case when we were growing up.

A Less Innocent Analog Time

For better or worse, parents in the ‘90s were more relaxed when it came to censoring aspects of “real life.” They didn’t have to worry about their kids getting bullied on Instagram, or learning about something they shouldn’t on ChatGPT. There wasn’t a fear of young boys being radicalized by the alt-right on YouTube.

So it wasn’t unusual to overhear dads swearing at Monday Night Football on TV, or telling a crude joke to uncles after a few drinks at Thanksgiving. Moms in the ‘90s regularly gossiped to friends about the latest local cold case, without worrying how that might affect little ears. Everyone knew the names Jaycee Dugard and Michael Dunahee, and parents relied on these kidnapping cases to scare their own kids straight about wandering off in public – or at least my mom did.

There was less concern over kids playing with “violent” toys, too. Every kid tormented their younger siblings and cousins with Nerf Guns, and Super Soakers went hand-in-hand with Slip N Slides. Everyone knows that slap bracelets were…