If the 1970s would get you arrested, the 1980s would get you sued.

The decade was a kind of victory lap for American carelessness. We had learned a few things -- lead paint was out, seatbelts were starting to catch on -- but the basic operating principle was the same: kids would figure it out, adults had things to do, and the lawyers hadn't gotten busy yet.

Here are 15 perfectly ordinary things from the '80s that would land you in front of a judge today.

1. Being a latchkey kid at age eight. Key on a yarn loop around your neck. Walked home alone from the school bus. Let yourself in. Made yourself a snack. Watched cartoons. Did your homework. Your parents got home at six. Today this is a CPS investigation in roughly 30 states.

2. Smoking sections in restaurants. Every restaurant in America had one through most of the decade. The smoking section was usually a single row of booths separated from the non-smoking section by a planter of fake ferns. The smoke went everywhere anyway. Nobody cared.

3. Tanning beds, baby oil, and a tinfoil reflector. The skin cancer rates of an entire generation were being quietly written in 1984. Teenagers used tanning beds twice a week and laid out in the yard with baby oil. The reflectors were optional but popular. SPF was for people who didn't want to look good.

4. Aerobics classes that destroyed your knees. Step aerobics, jazzercise, high-impact everything, on a concrete floor, in shoes that offered roughly the support of a dress flat. A whole cohort of women in their fifties now needs knee replacements they earned at a strip-mall studio in 1987.

5. Dodgeball at point-blank range. A red rubber ball thrown from twelve feet by a sixth-grader with a grudge. The teacher watched and laughed. The kid who got hit in the face went to the nurse, got an ice pack, and was back in class within the hour. Today, dodgeball is banned in many school districts, and the lawsuit would name the teacher personally.

6. Riding standing up in the back of the family van. The conversion van, with the captain's chairs and the table in the middle and the bed in the back, was peak suburban transportation. Kids stood. Kids slept on the floor. Kids climbed over the seats while Dad did 70 on the interstate. Nobody died. Most of us, anyway.

7. Walking to the mall alone at ten. The mall was a babysitter on Saturdays. Drop the kids off at noon, pick them up at five, give them a $10 bill. They spent three hours in the arcade, the bookstore, and the food court, and no adult had any idea where they were. Today, leaving a ten-year-old at a shopping mall for five hours is a phone call to the police.

8. Hairspray clouds that punched a hole in the ozone. A 1986 high school bathroom in the ten minutes before homeroom was an ecological disaster. The hairspray cans were enormous. The hair was enormous. The aerosol concentration in a single restroom would now violate three OSHA regulations and probably a treaty.

9. Trampolines with no nets and no padding. The trampoline went in the backyard of one kid on the block. Every kid in the neighborhood was on it within the hour. There were no nets. The springs were exposed. The ground was concrete or hard-packed dirt. Broken arms, broken wrists, broken collarbones. Nobody sued. The trampoline stayed up.

10. The metal slide in August. The playground had one. The slide was steel. The slide faced south. By noon in summer, the slide was 140 degrees. Kids climbed up anyway. The burn was part of the experience. Mothers watched from the bench, smoking. Nobody intervened.

11. Trick-or-treating until midnight, unaccompanied. You went out at six. You hit every house in a four-block radius. You ate candy from strangers, including homemade popcorn balls and apples (which were briefly suspect, then forgotten). You came home at ten, eleven, sometimes later. The youngest kid in the group was usually seven.

12. Lawn darts. They made it to 1988. Steel-tipped projectiles you threw underhand at a ring of plastic on the lawn. Children played with them. Children died from them. The Consumer Product Safety Commission finally banned them in 1988. Until then, they were under every American Christmas tree.

13. Cigarette vending machines in restaurants, gas stations, and laundromats. Quarters in the slot, pull the knob, out came a pack of Marlboros. The machines were unattended. The age limit was theoretical. A ten-year-old with three dollars could buy his father a pack of cigarettes and a Pepsi from the same wall.

14. Babysitting at 11, overnight, for actual money. The going rate was a dollar an hour. An eleven-year-old put two younger children to bed, made them dinner, handled bath time, and stayed alone in the house until the parents got home at one in the morning. Then she walked home alone. Or her father drove over to pick her up, half-asleep.

15. School buses with no seat belts and the driver smoking. The yellow school bus had no belts. The bus driver smoked Marlboros with the window cracked. The kids in the back smoked too, sometimes, on the way home from the high school. The bus shook on the highway. Nobody had any expectation of anyone being safe. Nobody was. Most of us got home anyway.

---

The 1980s were the last decade of the figure it out yourself American childhood. The lawyers showed up sometime around 1991. The helmets came in. The car seats got serious. The school zones got slow. The trampolines got nets. The dodgeball got banned.

Most of it is good. A lot of those changes saved real lives, and the parents and children of 1989 paid prices we don't have to pay now.

But there was something in that decade -- the casual trust, the freedom, the assumption that kids would handle themselves -- that we should probably stop pretending didn't exist. The 1980s child grew up. They are running the country now. They are mostly fine. And they remember.

We made it. Most of us, anyway. And we remember every bit of it.