When I was a kid, we had to...

Meaning

A common precursor to an exaggerated story about how much harder things were in the past. It is almost always used to make current generations feel soft.

Nostalgic, lecturing

Used in a sentence

• When I was a kid, we had to walk five miles to school in the snow, both ways.
• My grandfather started, when I was a kid, we had to churn our own butter, so I knew a lecture was coming.
• When I was a kid, we had to make do with three television channels and we liked it.