Someone on Reddit recently posed the question, “What toys did you have as a child that would be considered too dangerous to be given to a child today?,” and over 10,000 people couldn’t help but chime in. Of course obvious answers included toy guns and fake cigarettes, but there were some that seem more than a little outrageous.
- “My dentist used to give me Vials of Mercury to bring to school for show and tell,” one person wrote, addng, “My parents bought me a rock collection at a natural history museum that included a chunk of asbestos from which you could pull fibrous material. We also had metal trucks with extremely sharp edges and lead based paint jobs.”
- "My parents were cleaning out their garage a few months ago and found the lawn darts my mom had when she was a kid," another person added. "If you thought they were dangerous originally, just imagine rusted-out lawn darts from the '60s."
- On the subject of those lawn darts, another person shared, "My brother sharpened ours to an even more deadly, lethal, point
- "We would use (M-80 explosive firecrackers] to literally blow stuff up — like sending garbage cans into the air or blowing street signs off their posts," another person shared. "They were really a lot of fun for us early teenage boys!"
- "As a kid in the 60s, my uncle looked up ‘gunpowder’ in the family encyclopedia and headed off to the pharmacy with his pocket money," someone offered. "He could barely reach up to the counter, but they were happy to sell him a pound of each ingredient.”
And it wasn’t just toys that were dangerous, with many noting just how unsafe children’s playgrounds used to be. “Playgrounds were plunked down onto asphalt and concrete," one person shared, with another noting, “"With metal slides that caused third-degree burns on hot summer days.”