Best Time to be a Child was the 70s and 80s???

According to a report recently released, women in England believe that the 70s and 80s were the best time to be a child. I would be interested in seeing the stats on this; you know socio-economic breakdown of the selected survey group, age and region, that kind of stuff. I would suspect this is further evidence of the government propaganda machine...was the survey conducted in an office in Whitehall? In eras where we go without, children have better childhoods! Because I would suspect that those questioned were either living in Surbiton, enjoying the 'Good Life' or well, not actually children in the 70s or 80s!
I make this sweeping statement as I was, a child in England during the aforementioned era. My childhood was quite happy...ok I never got the Sindy playhouse or a Cadbury's Dairy Milk chocolate dispenser...but it wasn't the stuff of nightmares, but the best times to be a child? No way!
There were some positive elements to a 70s & 80s childhood - no school was really that bothered if your attendance slipped below the 95% mark (or in my case the 40%)...it was BAD parenting to send children into school with illnesses then due to those old myths that infections could spread with close contact and cause a school wide epidemic. Teachers would tut if you returned with a sniffle or the remnants of a chicken pox mark, I regularly took in note saying, 'Lisa was off school last week because it was snowing,' no-one thought much of this - it made a class more manageable and you never missed much anyway.
I suppose if you consider widespread neglect, ignorance of emotional well-being and an apathetically lack of interest to be a great childhood, then I suppose it would score 'Number 1' in any league table!
It wasn't considered bullying to call someone 'Mong' or 'Spack' and racially motivated taunting was considered to be an imaginative use of vocabulary. Try complaining to the Head teacher because your 70s class teacher was calling you, 'a Mong-Spack-Minging-Ginger,' and you'd get the strap for being a tell-tale, so bullying issues were obviously non-existent.
 As for behaviour management, well that old teacher who collapsed in the playground while hitting a row of children's bare backsides with a cricket bat and died on the way to hospital was a positive role model for all. The way he used to scream at the lines, 'Stand straight and shhhhuuuutttt up, girls and boys backsides look no different to me at your age, I'll whack them all. You'll pull down your pants and I'll whack each and every one of you..' well that was inspirational public speaking that has shaped my own mothering methods to this day. As for that dinner lady who used to call me a slug and throw cutlery at children? She inspired love and respect from all.
Bland, blank concrete expanses called 'playgrounds' created a wonderful enhancing environment and when the school divided en mass into two camps so all children could play 'war' we required no teacher input until the nose-bleeds started.
Life at home was also idyllic. Children wandered the streets evenings, weekends and school holidays with no supervision or parental input, Lord I wandered everywhere. It was a perfect time for flashers, paedophiles and weirdos everywhere, perhaps they were really the core group of people surveyed?
By seven I used to jump on my bike and go, although I did stay within a five mile radius, mainly due to the fact that I did get hungry and would need to return home for dinner, children in 70s and early 80s England didn't carry money, especially girls as those flammable, nylon dresses never came with pockets. I have a vague memory of wandering into the records room in my 'local' children's hospital with a girl from school who lived at the 'edge' of the hospital grounds (a couple of miles for me, maybe a mile for her). We spent ages routing through old wooden filing cabinets looking for the names of 'dead' children...we just found loads of x-ray pictures but created fantastic stories about how these unfortunate children had met such gruesome ends. However, I don't think any of our stories featured two unsupervised seven year old girls who had ridden a couple of miles across the middle of roads before climbing over seven foot spiked railings and entering a hospital site through an open back door and wandered through the old-ramshackle building for several hours without anyone noticing...other than the local psychopathic paedophile obviously.
We lived near a block of flats and discovered that the 'key' on corned beef tins could be used to access the stairwell, and because our childhood was so full of enjoyable and enriching experiences, we elected to spend large sections of our days going up and down these and sitting on the roof sharing out fags we had stolen off our parents - it was great to exist in a pre-cancer awareness era and have all of your clothes smell of that lovely stimulating odour de stale tobacco. That combined with the wonderful living environment that was pre-central-heating-houses-where-damp-ran-down-the-walls-in-winter ensured that we always had great coughs which meant we could spend lots of days off school which meant we could get bored sitting in a toy free house which meant we could spend all of our time outdoors breaking into to the local tower block and smoking on the roof...it was great to be a child back then!
When I say 'toy free' this is an exaggeration, although the rest is 100% truth...we did have toys. A bucket of lego bricks, an etch-o-sketch, some board games and some Sindy dolls oh and obviously, colouring books...but as all the great commentators will tell you, we didn't need these as we were outside all day, keeping our Mother's houses tidy.
Instead we explored the great outdoors and spent our days nicking flowers from the cemetery, playing knock-a-door-runaway or skidding bikes down a gravel hill because the OAP who lived next door would hang her head out of the window and threaten to throw buckets of water at us...what stimulating entertainment. Children today don't know what they are missing!
Of course childhood obesity was unheard of, there were children named, 'Fat Git', but the rest of us enjoyed the health benefits of getting our '5 a day' from jam, lemon sherbets, strawberry jelly, marrow-fat peas and tomato ketchup. School holiday lunches of tomato ketchup butties or half a packet of 'nice' biscuits kept us trim, while essential vitamins and minerals were given from the school canteens serving of stewed liver, chewy mash and reconstituted veg. We were quite posh, we had both fish fingers and arctic roll.
If that's the best childhood ever, then I believe as a nation we lack both ambition and imagination. The one area though that I genuinely believe it could be argued was better, was that as children were not really considered to be people, no-one really had any expectations of them so I guess in a strange way, it did mean that they existed without the pressure to achieve that today's children suffer from. The pressure to be polite, or to have an ambition or to brush your teeth. Obviously, at school we were given lessons as to how to 'sign on' because, to be honest, what else was anyone ever going to do? No actually, now I think about it, that was crap too.

The idyllic childhood of the 1970s - those pre-console and mobile phone days, when opposable thumbs were used for lighting matches, and pinching siblings...please note the lack of pockets. However, clothes were multi-seasonal, in winter you'd stick a home knitted cardigan on, corn-beef legs were an essential fashion statement.