What was it like growing up in the US in the 90s?

32 comments

1. I was very aware of the internet becoming a thing that people actually used, and nobody understood. It was incomprehensible honestly. I remember Googling something for the first time and the amount of stuff it returned blew my mind.

2. Just go play Wave Race 64, and you will see what the 90’s in California was like.

   Seriously, I can’t explain it any better than that. That’s the best visual representation of my memories of the 90’s (without the polygons, of course).

3. Most people dont grow up on farms, then or now. About 1% are farmers or ranchers and it wasn’t as high as 2% back then.

   Farms are usually very large and just over 50 percent of farm workers are immigrants.

   [https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=58268](https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=58268)

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   I think the most American thing from the 80s that many countries didn’t have was kids going to the Mall to hang out.

4. My favorite pastime on the 90s was probably playing *GoldenEye* on the Nintendo 64 at a friend’s house every day after school.

5. Born in 1987. Lived in the suburbs, in a town about 7 miles from the state capital.

   >Were there lots of farms back then and many kids grew up on farms?

   There was a farm in my town that one of my best friends lived on (cows, cotton, and maybe some other small crops). I was also kind of friends with another kid that grew up on that farm (was a family farm and they were cousins or something). I often went to his house, but never really spent much time outside of the house/pool.

   My childhood in the 90s centered around college football (dad had season tickets to University of Alabama), cub/boy scouts (esrned Eagle in 2002), video games (NES, Sega Genesis, PlayStation), playing sports (soccer, baseball, basketball).

6. That part of my childhood was living in the seedy neighborhood of Fishtown in Philly. It’s unrecognizable now compared to then.

   For kid fun we threw things at stuff (glass bottles at trains mostly). On hot days it was setting off fire hydrants and dancing in the water. Street hockey & baseball with sticks. The punk scene made it feel like Seattle of the NE; plus the city was dirty and desolate. You didn’t go out after sundown. Shady characters all over the place.

7. The internet becoming a thing was huge. I remember getting our first dial up connection and then our first ISDN (always on) connection.

   My brother who is 8 years younger does not remember a time where the computer wasn’t always online.

   One very American experience I had growing up was backpacking. I don’t mean the European definition where you go and travel cheaply and stay in hostels.

   I mean honest to goodness backpacking where you walk out into the mountains or desert with everything you need to survive for a few days on your back. You sleep in a tent. You cook on a camp stove. You walk all day. You hang out by lakes. You purify your own water from streams or lakes or ponds. Sometimes you go a whole day with maybe seeing no one or just a couple other people. If the weather is bad you just deal with it.

   Even back in the 90s farming was a very small percentage of the workforce whereas a large majority of the population were farmers in the 1890s. I lived in Indiana where farming was big and had family out in farm country. Even then I didn’t personally know too many farmers. My grandma lived right next to a big corn farm and we knew that farmer. My dads good friend was a hog farmer. But I lived in Indianapolis so meeting farmers wasn’t common.

   https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-in-agriculture-percent-of-total-employment-wb-data.html

   By 1992 the percentage of farmers in the workforce was only 2%.

8. Born in 1991. Nickelodeon, Looney Tunes and cereal in the morning followed by hot wheels and dinosaur time. Then it would be outside time where I would play in the dirt. Maybe a ham sandwich and potato chips for lunch prepared by mom then washed down with some grape Kool-Aid. At dusk it’s time to come inside for dinner and a bath followed by some Super Nintendo time before bed. Better times, I tell ya…

9. I was born in 83 had a beautiful suburban childhood in rural Connecticut. Maybe this is something all children feel, but I don’t remember even a hint of the heaviness I feel now. We were like vaguely concerned about Iraq, but everything felt safe and my community felt good to be a part of.

   We had acres of woods behind our neighborhood to explore and summers were spent taking swimming lessons at the lake. We’d go outside just to be outside and find something to do. NES was always there when we got back. Watching SNICK and weekly wrestling were fun.

   Thing just seemed really simple, calm and kind of quietly joyful. Not sure how to describe it.

   If I had to point to two terrible things that disrupted that way of life I’d say 9/11 and social media/cell phone addiction.

10. I grew up in San Francisco in the 1990s.

    There were large swaths of the city that were no-go zones for families after dark due to gang violence. Homelessness is worse today, but violent crime is far better. The Mission District, for example, is far safer but also far more depressing.

    There were hardly any children in my neighborhood – still the case today. Raising a child in SF proper was and is rare. But I had a handful of friends within a few blocks. I’d walk over there on my own to hang out and play N64 and stuff. I still know their home phone numbers by heart, all these years later.

    We ran around the streets on our own, skateboarded, etc…

    I was in a few city-run baseball leagues.

    Field trips were frequent and great. We’d go to Alcatraz, Angel Island, all the world-class city museums, the aquarium, etc…

    My favorite toys were my HO-scale model railroads. I had [this HO-scale Muni Metro light rail car](https://www.modeltrainforum.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,onerror=redirect,width=1920,height=1920,fit=scale-down/https://www.modeltrainforum.com/attachments/ihc-boeinglrv_001-2-jpg.563258/) and I’d run it in circles around the Christmas tree every year.

    Christmas in SF was great. My parents would take me to F.A.O. Schwartz, the world’s greatest toy store (RIP). They’d never let me buy anything too expensive though. Before it closed, we also did the [Christmas fair on the roof of the Emporium department store on Market Street.](https://www.sfchronicle.com/chronicle_vault/article/When-S-F-gave-Emporium-and-its-Santa-a-final-6715879.php)

    The best time of year, though, for me, was Fleet Week, when the Blue Angels did their air show over the city. The teachers would try to keep the students in the class and focused on learning, but trying to keep a couple dozen pre-teen boys from running outside to watch F-18s fly overhead is a Sisyphean task.

11. It was pretty great.

    I suppose everyone thinks the time they grew up in was the best time to grow up and I’m no exception.

    I was born in 1983 and got to experience all the pre-internet stuff and the rise of the mainstream internet. The leap in technology from about when I started high school till I finished college was truly insane and I count myself lucky to have really gotten to experience it. I miss how amateurish the internet used to be. It used to be for hobbyists. I was really into web design and taught myself Photoshop, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, etc.

    I guess in a lot of ways I had a very traditional middle class American upbringing. I was a Boy Scout and played Little League, football, and basketball. Kids were outside a lot more back then but I grew up on Nintendo, Super Nintendo, and PlayStation. One thing I find interesting is how N64 is so representative of the ’90s despite it actually being a relatively poor performing console. PlayStation outsold it by a mile. “Blockbuster nights” were a very real thing.

    I grew up around the water. Basically everyone I knew had a boat and we spent a ton of time at the beach. Kids also had a lot more freedom back then. My friends and I were probably about 15 or 16 years old the first time our parents let us take their boats to [Sailors Haven](https://www.nps.gov/fiis/planyourvisit/sailorshaven.htm) to anchor off and have a sleep over. My parents had a 1-800 number to their house and we’d check in using a payphone.

12. Lots of 90s kids probably remember two big transitions: going from dial-up internet to broadband and going from 2D pixel art games to fully 3D polygonal games. In fact “pixel art” wasn’t really a phrase back then — it was just *graphics*.

    And for some reason [this TV commercial](https://youtu.be/4rqZZgVxnCk) was ubiquitous.

13. Yep, back 25 years ago there were no cities in the US, it was just farms as far as the eye could see.

14. I grew up in the suburbs in a quiet part of the country. Went to a high school with about 3700 kids. Some of the kids were farm kids, but by no means all or even most of them. The internet was becoming a thing but you basically would set the computer to making the godawful dialup noises for a few minutes while you went and did something else to wait. And you hoped that no one needed to use the phone because the internet and phone were on the same line.

    I remember playing in the backyard with friends. My parents didn’t allow me to get into video games until middle school and only then because I developed a health problem that required me not to move much for a while. The plan had been to hold off until I was in high school. So me and my friends climbed trees and played make believe in the back yard until then.

    I was in a number of extracurriculars like dance, girl scouts, and a religious education class that my parents made me take. When I got older (and post the health issue) I went into marching band for school. So that took a lot of my time outside of school since we’d practice for 10 hours a day in the summer and until well after dark once school started. Then I’d go home and do homework.

    Basically the big differences were: more running around outside. Less phone usage because phones were still generally attached to the wall and only functioned as phones. And fewer video games.

    It also felt more politically peaceful, even taking the Clinton fiasco and y2k into account.

    Though there were definitely people who stocked rations in their basement for the y2kmageddon.

15. Pre 9/11 was the best

16. >Were there lots of farms back then and many kids grew up on farms?

    There are a lot of farms now.

    I live in the most densely populated state and the most densely populated large metro in the country and am surrounded by farms.

    The 90s were awesome fun, but I really grew up in the 80s.

17. You could just walk into an airport and go meet someone at the gate as they got off their plane and Blockbusters were magical with rows and rows of movies on tape and tons of Super Nintendo and SEGA games. Porn was found in hedges or scrambled for a second when you flipped the tv to that one channel available on cable. What a time to be alive.

18. I’m only 40, so I’m not *that* old. I grew up in that era where we got together with friends and rode our bikes, it wasn’t just a movie trope ha ha. The internet came around when I was in my teens and it was cool, but it didn’t rule our lives like it does now.

    There was an innocence back then (now I do seem old) that is lacking today. Not in the idea that *we* were more innocent, but you could get away with being a dumb kid and it wasn’t plastered all over social media.

19. If you wanted to watch the Simpsons or whatever, you had to be at home at 7pm, and you’d only get to watch one episode. None of this binging entire seasons at any hour of the night.

    We had rules. Society had order. I wore an onion on my belt, it was the style at the time.

    Postscript: and god help you if you liked two shows that aired at the same time on two seperate channels.

20. Ok, so I was a teenager in the early 90’s, so I am not sure if I am your demographic (born in ’77), but things I remember a lot are 1)only having one phone in the house to make phone calls from, so you had to take turns using the phone with your siblings/parents. If it was a girl calling for me, I got a like “ooh, its a girl…” comment which really brings out the confidence in an early teen,

    ​

    2) Cruising on a Friday or Saturday night uptown with my friends in my car, or I was in theirs. Cruising (at least where I was from) entailed driving around about 4 square blocks of my small town or the neighboring small town while others went the opposite direction while we all were trying to show how cool we were with our music blaring and our amazing cars, and

    ​

    3) my parents left me home a lot…like, left town for business trips for a week at a time with no cell phones, and no way to get a hold of them/me if there was an emergency except for if you happened to be at home when they called. Usually, I had to make sure I was home around 5 to answer the phone from my mom’s phone calls to show her that I was alive and had not burned the house down.

    Those are just some things off the top of my head.

21. Things I remember about growing up in the 90s that is uniquely 90s include:

    * Telling my mom I couldnt pause my Battlenet Starcraft game so she could use the phone because we had dial up internet.

    * Seeing Star Wars Episode 1 in theaters on release night and remembering how impossible it was to get tickets.

    * Living through the release of the Matrix and the media buzz around how revolutionary it was.

    * Bop It, Twist It, Pull It / You’ll get caught up in the….CROSSFIRE!

    * Watching cartoons like Scooby Doo, Looney Toons, TMNT, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and it being an exciting time in my life when I found out that the Jetsons met the Flinstones.

    * JNCO jeans and skateboarding culture

22. I can’t explain it to you, but I think it’s pretty telling that most people feel like there is a “pre 9/11” and “post 9/11” America. The 90s heavily factor into that feeling.

23. Ohhhh man.

    A typical day….

    My sister would wake me up in the morning by throwing a stuffed animal at me. Refusing to get up she’ll put in Backstreet Boy’s “Backstreets Back” album. I would then panic because the cd I was burning on our computer was left inside and I totally promised two friends for my mix. I shrug it off for a minute, get ready and meet up with two neighborhood friends in the open grassy quad between our apartments. We walk to school, had a typical day. We practice using different computer programs on our Apple computers, the logo is rainbow colored and the massive computer is beige in color. I look forward to the end of the day where half of the class gets a free period to play one of three games, Oregon Trail (which I always died in), Zoombinis (which was my sisters favorite) or Eye spy?? I don’t get it. I just want to play some Carmen San Diego but my school doesn’t have it.

    We finish school by staying an hour after school for kids club. All the little teeny boopers have a huge crush on one of the volunteers Richy, with his cool yellow Corvette. We play soccer on the field, play cherry cherry on the park set. (Its like the floor is lava game)

    We walk home, hand out in the quad of grass, exchange Pokémon cards some days, climb trees, debate wether our neighbors dad was a vampire (turns out he was just a raver), why our friend Vicky had 6 pet rats and on nice days ride our bikes to the water park just down the street where they had not just a giant pool but also a mini golf in a mini mountain/hill.

    After a long day, sometimes friends would come over, we’d munch on French toast with our Swedish friends or stuff our faces with Korean pears with our Korean friends, we would play Nintendo 64, play Mario cart and try to pop everyone’s balloons or try to master Bowsers Castle and Rainbow Road. On certain weekends my dad would drive my sister, best friend and I to Blockbuster and pick out a movie. We would sometimes get ice cream afterwards but not all the time. We would try to trick our parents into getting rated R movies. My dad didn’t care but my mother always always checked the movies to make sure they were kid friendly.

    On hot summer nights we would be out in the neighborhood a lot. (This is the Midwest) We would catch fireflies in the grassy quad, sometimes go across the street to the creek to collect weeping willow reeds and make crowns. We were always up to something. Life was good and I look back on my childhood fondly. Not a cellphone in sight…

    Man… I just hope my Neopets are doing okay. X[

    Born in 1991. All these memories were childhood/preteen years 1998-2003 years.

    Edit: alllll the grammatical errors. Live with it.

24. We rode our bikes all over to go play video games or basketball. It was pretty great.

25. My dad worked for universal studios in Orlando fl, and I was at the first sliming. My husband remembers tuning into nick that day and time specifically to watch the event on tv.

26. Lots of hanging out in the mall as young teens, which graduated to hanging out in parking lots and then whoever’s parents were out of town for a keg party, yea with the red cups. Lots of driving around getting high and listening to The Wu Tang Clan or Rage Against The Machine, and pretty much an unsupervised childhood and teen years. I remember the internet being introduced to peoples homes, the OJ Simpson trial, and the clothes that are now in style being in style.

27. I grew up in Chicago in the ’90s so watching the Bulls win the NBA finals was practically an *annual holiday*.

    Once in the ’90s my dad got so fed up that we couldn’t find the last hidden level in Super Mario World that he called the Nintendo hotline to have some guy at a call centre tell him that we had to fly *under* the goalposts. idk if they had the hotline in other countries but to me that memory is the absolute essence of the nineties.

28. The Dennys Grand Slam breakfast was $1.99. We’d eat and drink endless cups of coffee while chain smoking Marlboro Reds.

    It was awesome

29. I grew up working and hanging out on a farm, and beside a bunch of farms, and had a sizeable garden. Does that count?

30. It seems like every day was sunny and we had no serious worries about the future.

    I miss those days.

31. Went to public school. Road my bike all the time. Had a swing set in the yard. The “cool kids” had trampolines. The rich ones might have a pool. I don’t think we played inside unless it was really bad weather. The best fun we could have was wondering around a wooded area by the house building things out of sticks and branches. Pokémon was the first video game I owned because my mom didn’t approve of video games but my aunt got us game boys.

32. Honestly the one thing I remember was that people in general were more on time, less toxic, and we could actually talk about things besides politics.