13 Things All ’80s Kids Did When They Stayed Home Sick From School
Staying home sick from school in the 1980s was a totally different experience than it is today. Without cell phones or the Internet to whittle away the hours until your parents came home, Gen X children got creative.
What children home sick in the 1980s did have instead of social media was an Atari 2600, VCR, comic books, Walkman, and an early version of MTV that actually played music videos. We also might catch up on a soap opera such as General Hospital or drink a generous amount of ginger ale if our stomachs hurt.
As someone who was a kid in the 1980s, I can attest that these 13 things are how it was done when we stayed home sick from school.
Watch The Price Is Right
The Price Is Right always seemed to be on TV around lunchtime on weekdays, meaning that children of the 1980s were cruelly denied seeing Bob Barker invite guests to “come on down” to win cash and prizes because they were usually in school.
Unless you set your VCR to record the game show daily, being home sick was the only way to see some tourist lose their marbles after winning a new Chevy or conquering the Plinko board. If you were home “sick” often, you even got to learn the names of the “Barker Beauties” giving away prizes.
Have You Played Atari Today?
One of the best gifts I have ever received is my Atari 2600 video game system and all the cartridges associated with it — even the much-maligned E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial video game. I still have the 44-year-old Atari 2600, but now it’s attached to an OLED instead of a TV with rabbit ears, but I digress.
If you were home sick from school in the early ’80s, you definitely played Pac-Man, Yar’s Revenge, and Pitfall after your parents told you to rest. If you stayed home in the late 1980s, you played different games on your Nintendo. Either way, your parents disapproved.
Read Comic Books
There were two types of parents in the 1980s: those who thought comic books were the Devil’s work, and those who were too busy to think about them. My parents fell into the latter category, so being home sick from school served as a great time to catch up on Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Superman, Batman, and all of the other superheroes.
Today, every superhero has their own movie and several sequels, reboots, or remakes. If you saved any of those comic books that you enjoyed during your sick days in the 1980s, check online to see if they are worth some serious lunch money now.
I Want My MTV
Although it’s difficult for the youth of today to imagine, MTV started out in the 1980s as a channel that played music videos around the clock. While your classmates were dissecting frogs in biology class, your sick self sat home and watched new videos by Eurythmics, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, Prince, and Michael Jackson.
If your parents didn’t yet have cable TV, my condolences for your childhood experience. It was hardly worth staying home sick from school if you couldn’t zone out on MTV for hours.
Play Grown-up by Watching General Hospital
Admit it: at least a few of you out there stayed home sick as a kid to watch the wedding of Luke and Laura on the soap opera General Hospital. Whether it was General Hospital or some other daytime drama, watching a soap opera felt like something only adults did, which gave an ’80s child a cheap thrill for being “bad.”
Today, only three soap operas still exist on broadcast TV: General Hospital, The Young and the Restless, and The Bold and the Beautiful. Modern-day school kids would probably rather go to school than watch one.
Eat Chicken Noodle Soup and Ritz Crackers
If you stayed home from school and one of your parents stayed home with you, it was almost a guarantee that lunch would consist of chicken noodle soup and a small stack of Ritz crackers.
Some of you will remember saltines instead of Ritz, but my memory is that saltines were something you got at a restaurant or as part of a school lunch. At home, Mom knew to get the buttery, golden, flaky good stuff.
Drink Ginger Ale
In the 1980s, we were conditioned to believe many things, such as the imminent threats of quicksand and sleeping gas. We were also told the old wives’ tale that drinking ginger ale helped an upset stomach, so our parents served us lots of it when we were sick.
Today, we know that although real ginger helps with nausea, there is hardly any real ginger in most ginger ale. It was the carbonation and Mom’s insistence that you drink gallons of it that made you believe the fizzy drink was a magical elixir.
Organize Scratch-and-Sniff Stickers in Album
One of the forgotten childhood activities of the 1980s is the collecting of scratch-and-sniff stickers. Kids would love getting them from their teacher on a test or would buy them in an office supplies store with their parents.
We organized the stickers in three-ring binders on pages by category, like “fruit,” “flowers,” and “stinky” for easy trading at school. Do you want to trade a fried chicken sticker for one that smells like gasoline? No problem!
Being home sick was an opportune time to stay on top of your scratch-and-sniff sticker stockpile.
Watch Ferris Bueller’s Day off on VHS
Although it seems on the nose, what better way to spend your day home from school than watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on VHS and learning from the master? The VCR allowed children to watch what they wanted whenever they wanted, and families usually had shelves holding their collection of VHS tapes.
After watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or some other movie, you could do your parents a solid by programming the VCR to record a show for them like they had been asking you to do for weeks.
Make a Mixtape
Making a mixtape was a time-consuming, labor-intensive process that required patience, precision, and a pencil. If you don’t know how the latter was used, then you didn’t grow up in the 1980s.
Most audiocassettes were limited to 45 minutes on each side. When making a mixtape, you had to make sure that you paused your recording of a song at the exact time it ended while trying to fit as much music as possible on one side without running out of tape. If you messed up and the song didn’t fit, you had to rewind, pick a shorter song, and record again until you found one that worked.
Many mixtapes came together during days when kids were home sick from school in the 1980s.
Simon Says…
Simon is an electronic game that became a pop-culture phenomenon in the 1970s and 1980s. The circular memory game has red, blue, green, and yellow buttons that each light up. Simon produces a sequence of colors (e.g., red, green, green, blue, yellow) and plays a corresponding musical tone for each key. You have to repeat the sequence to win the round, knowing that Simon will make it harder each time.
Although light-years away from the video games and AI we use today, in the 1980s, Simon almost felt like someone else was in the house with you when you stayed home sick. Almost…
Vicks VapoRub
One of the horrors of having to stay home sick from school in the 1980s was Vicks VapoRub. Yeah, you got to stay home from school, but not without Mom slathering this menthol ointment all over your chest.
If you weren’t sick before, the Vicks VapoRub fumes that seemed as if they could peel paint off the walls would make you feel like something was radically wrong with you.
Perfect Your “Sick” Act
If you had fun staying home sick by watching MTV, making a mixtape, organizing your stickers, and playing some Atari, why not double down and go for two days in a row?
You already watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, so you know the key is to make your forehead feel warm before your parents take your temperature and to wince about some mysterious, nonspecific stomach pain. If you played your cards right, who knows what you could get up to tomorrow while home sick?
