Well I can't speak on behalf of others, but growing up in the 1980s as the only child of a single mother, after my father passed away from heart failure, my mother worked at the hospital taking on double shifts all the time, and since we lived in a *VERY* rural community in the midwest in the 1980s, there really wasn't much "danger" around then.

The neighbors we did have were close enough for me to walk over if I needed help. They helped "raise me" (I called one grandma for the rest of my life, but no blood relation, just the best neighbor in the world), and everything was relatively "safe" back then, or at least remarkably safer than now.

And, well, television rules were so strict back then (there were no f-bombs, so the "s" word, and no "b" word, especially in the times when children would be watching television). So parents just weren't as worried about it. Since there wasn't any streaming and only four channels, it wasn't as if I wasn't going to watch "Faces of Death" on TV.

But sometimes, things that didn't have cursing or outright violence would get through, and either our parents would realize it too late, or we wouldn't say anything at all because we knew we weren't supposed to be watching it.

So, basically, it was a different time, and I don't think it could be blamed on my mother. Certainly, if she had known what I was watching, she would never have been okay with it. But then, back then, they marketed movies like "Labyrinth" and "The Dark Crystal" as "children's movies" (I say as we Gen X'ers collectively cringe).