My sister and I had to wait 15 minutes after applying sunscreen before we could go into a pool—to give the sunscreen a chance to soak in. My mom said she had seen too many pools with a greasy sunscreen sheen on the top… And we had to reapply every 1.5 hours I think it was… To this day I wait for sunscreen to soak in before getting wet, although I rarely remember to reapply. (No friend of ours ever went home sunburnt… we can’t say the same for when we came from friend’s houses.)
My mom was very protective of what we were exposed to on the TV, particularly in terms of gore and violence. I can’t say she was mistaken in her judgment—I got so scared that I ran out of the room during Matilda… and another time, after seeing a foot fungus cream commercial that illustrated burning/itching as a foot in flames, I had nightmares of feet getting burned off legs for weeks (I still remember them.)
The other aspect of TV that my mom guarded us against was “mindless” TV… when we were kids, we understood this as “no cartoons,” especially not from Cartoon Network. I never minded. When I went over to friends’ houses and they had me watch Spongebob with them I was unimpressed and bored (I had come over to play!) Now that I’m older and I look back at the various media my mom would introduce to my sister and me that I realize how hard she worked to introduce us to quality storytelling in its varied mediums.
No allowance. We were still expected to do chores—and from what I understood about other families growing up, my sister and I were often doing more housework and yardwork than our peers who were getting paid for it. We were also expected to help with various construction projects. But no allowance. My mom didn’t want us to see chores as a means to some external reward—we did them because it was the right thing to do, and we did them together because we were a family.
In most other respects, my mom was pretty liberal, and trusted my sister and me to stay safe—and probably getting an occasional skinned knee along the way.