Let's take a moment and get honest about why 80's kids are so messed up. But first,
@BarrelProof and
@Fiddlepiper , jeez guys go get a room.
The reason 80's kids are so messed up is because they're primarily the children or '50's and '60's kids, and that was a very strange period from McCarthyism to Woodstock. Few of us escaped that even remotely intact.
Then along comes parenthood after a night of drunken fumbling around. Most 80's kids are screwed up because they got stuck with the kind of loser parents who, realizing that raising kids is an unending horror story of demands and responsibilities for which they have neither interest nor ability to fulfill, lacked the nads to dump them somewhere on the way home from the delivery room.
Instead, they stuck their progeny in front of the glass teat endless hours of the day, watching whatever deranged crap that was on the tele, subjecting them to the whims of monsters whose real intent was to train them to be consumers of crap.
I suppose I was lucky in some respects. It was difficult to get too engrossed in watching a small, round greenish black and white screen. And my mother had strict rules about TV. We were exiled from the house while the sun was up, so we did things that California kids did in the '50's, playing "army", building forts, riding horses, swimming, playing various sports, climbing trees, peeing in the community swimming pool, shooting stuff and blowing stuff up.
Back then, a broken arm didn't require mortgaging the house to pay for treatment. What a racket.
There were a few shows that weren't complete crap, like Captain Kangaroo, and there was a kids show that was like being in kindergarten. The rest was largely crap. The '60's was marginally better after PBS went on the air. Sesame Street wasn't lethal. But it couldn't compete with the commercial pooh that was children's programming.
Parenting requires a level of devotion that most people, like me, lack. My son begs to differ on this point. He says I'm a great parent. Hah! Got him fooled.
I know what real parenting looks like. My sister-in-law was hugely dedicated to her kids, and her daughters follow in the same path. Their kids have amazing lives. It exhausts me to think about it.
So there it is, '80's kids, it's the Boomers fault. Now go screw off.
