11 things teens did in the '80s that today's kids won't understand

For kids in the '80s, cruising was a rite of passage. Every weekend, teens would pile into cars and drive slowly around their town's main street to find friends to hang out with. Before cell phones, cruising was the hub for every teen's social life. It's how they found out where the big party was, met their romantic partners, and listened to brand new music.

But these days, with gas costing an average of $4/gallon and with the invention of smart phones, cruising isn't necessary anymore. Additionally, across the country, cities have passed anti-cruising laws, making it illegal for the same vehicle to pass a designated traffic point multiple times a day.

The mall was where all the teens in the '80s all hung out. Many were latchkey kids – teens returning to an empty home after school – so they headed to the mall to loiter and waste time until dinner. The mall was so beloved, it became the topic of several hit films. From Fast Times at Ridgemont High to Valley Girl, the mall was quintessential to the '80s.

Teens today don't hang out at the mall anymore. Many malls across America have closed as online shopping has become more accessible. And, like cruising, many privately owned malls have passed youth curfews or parental escort policies, not allowing kids under 17 to be at the mall by themselves.

Years before smart phones were invented, teens had to call their friends' houses and…talk to their friends' parents before getting your friend on the phone! Telephones were shared among the household and were corded, which meant teens faced absolutely no privacy. In fact, your mom could pick up the phone and hear your conversation with your BFF.

This would simply never happen today. If a teen has a phone, it's a cellphone. Basically no family has a landline phone, cords have all but been cut across the country. If parents have a worry these days, it's that their teens have too much privacy.

Not only did teens in the '80s have to call their friends' homes, they had to memorize their friend's home phone numbers. My mom, who was a teen in the '80s, still remembers her best friend's phone number 40 years later!

Kids these days just have to click a button and they can get their friend on the phone. Everyone lives inside the contact list and there is simply no need to remember phone numbers. But, some forward thinking parents are working with their toddlers so that in case of an emergency, they could dial their phone number.

In the '80s, distance actually mattered. Teens had to memorize phone numbers and call friends from the landline, but if one of their BFFs moved out of their city, contacting them was a big no-no. Long-distance phone calls cost between 25 cents and $1 per minute, even if your friend just moved to the next county over!

By the mid-2000s, long-distance calls became a thing of the past as internet calling became effectively free. Teens today can call anyone, anywhere across the globe. If their friend is traveling in Paris for the summer, they can FaceTime and see the Eiffel Tower in the background.

Teens in the '80s didn't have Spotify or Apple Music. To find their music taste and what the top hits were across the country that week, they listened to the radio. Each teen had a favorite radio station, radio show host, and even called into the radio to win prizes.

In 2026, the radio is basically prehistoric. With access to Spotify, teens have every artist's entire discography at their fingertips. And while I'm sure they could, most teens aren't calling into the radio to win any prizes.

Another relic of the '80s are mixtapes. When teens wanted to share something special with a friend or a romantic interest, they used a dual-cassette deck to add their favorite songs. This took work! Teens often added custom drawings and thematic titles for the recipients of their mixtape.

Teens today are still sharing music, but through Spotify playlists. These are still thoughtful gifts, but there is something about the physical tape that adds a little something special.

Kids in the '80s learned about music on the radio, shared it with friends on cassette tapes, and had to stand in line to buy tickets for their favorite musicians. This was before the digital age. Teens often camped out for hours, sometimes even days, to get a chance at buying a ticket. 

Lines are not non-existent for teens today, they just aren't physical. To buy tickets, teens wait in line on Ticketmaster, which is often just as frustrating as lines in the '80s. In 2022, millions of Taylor Swift fans waited in multi-hour digital lines experiencing multiple website crashes before landing a spot attending the Eras Tour.

In the '80s, you were one lucky teen if you had more than four channels on your TV. Most homes had old school television sets, without remotes, that lived solely in the living room. And if you missed your favorite show, you were out of luck. Many Americans planned their evening schedules around their favorite TV shows, referring to it as “ appointment viewing." Teens often watched reruns of their favorite TV shows during the summers, because that was the only time they repeated.

This is so far from the reality of teens today. With streaming platforms, kids can choose to watch their favorite TV shows at any time of the day. They can rewatch Gilmore Girls as many times as they please. And there is no "missing" your favorite show, because it will be on a streamer the very next day.

Before video games became ubiquitous, teens in the '80s headed to the arcade after school and on the weekends to play video games. And these weren't the modern video games of today. They were large, boxy, standalone games, where teens fed quarters into a slot on the game console to play a game for about two to five minutes, before feeding another quarter in.

Teens today still connect over video games, but from the comfort of their own home. Many teens chat while playing games like Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite. And kids have access to multiple types of consoles, like the Wii, Xbox, and Playstation.

Teens still had to write papers in high school, but they either wrote them by hand or on a typewriter. Which meant that mistakes were very difficult to correct. If teens wanted to rewrite a line, they would either have to start over from the beginning, or use a fault correction tape to fix the error.

Teens in school today have access to Google Docs and Microsoft Word, where mistakes are caught as they happen and they can always go back to make changes to their papers.