I've been thinking about this a lot. My experiences of growing up are set in the 90s in the UK.
Entertainment
I remember spending a lot of time bored. We had to "make our own fun" which often meant lying upside-down on the couch channel surfing or wandering around the house. At some point the family had a super old windows PC which had solitaire and paint - no internet connection or other games.
I remember asking my parents to buy me toys when we went for the weekly shop and spending ages in the toy aisle picking them out. I remember having a toy from an Alien spin-off with big plastic wings and a second mouth that ejected pneumatically by squeezing the head. There were big revolutions in gaming at the time. You'd walk up and down the toy aisle hoping for something new and cool that you could champion in the playground. There was a boy's section and a girl's section - the girl's section was usually bright pink and pastels, and the boys were reds, blacks and exciting neon colours. Hand-held digimon games that ran on watch batteries were one of those toys, but I remember begging and begging for a gameboy and it being one of my most cherished items. Imagine: a piece of delicate, expensive, digital technology that was your very own that could fit in your pocket containing all your adventures. The N64 was a massive dive into new gaming, with Super Mario 64 being on of the first games I'd experienced where you could move in all directions. We used to be able to play those games on demo consoles at tech shops like Curry's, which mostly sold white goods like washing machines. Telephones were rudimentary and nowhere near the gleaming iphones. Sometimes my dad let me play with his phone which was not as exciting as you'd imagine - you could use a simple editor to make basic pixelart or simpler-than-midi tunes. Imagine the interface for that and then realise that the screen was maybe 25 pixels tall and 40 pixels wide and black and white.
The lego was much cooler back then too - it was simpler, with awesome dioramas on the front, with basic themes that you could adjust to whatever situation you wanted. I played games with my sibling and we'd make huge convoys of toys that would go from one room and visit another.
Education
I hated every minute of school. The primary school classes were maybe 20-25 kids, which in England has grown larger. There was a diverse mix of races - mostly Muslim Pakistani, British white, British/Carribean black, and Sikh. Race didn't seem like a thing that bothered us as kids, but as we got older we started being wary of it and tried to over-police ourselves against saying anything even potentially racist like talking about skin colour. In secondary school race became weaponised by minorities and Ali-G's "is it cos I'm black?" was heavily based on race relations at the time.
We got taught a lot of things that have never again been relevant in my life. Most of chemistry was a waste and I've never had to work out electron bonds or how to synthesise chemicals. We didn't even cover the lymph system in Biology which I've now come to understand is really important for basic human anatomy. Secondary school felt like advanced babysitting where kids could tear at each other for fun. There were a few incidents of knife crime that I can remember, but nothing where anyone got hurt. I have never been exposed to more human savagery and depravity than being at a secondary school.
Pornography
We didn't get the internet until I was almost sixteen, which meant access to pornography came in the form of the porn fairies who would leave torn porn magazines in bushes at parks. Sometimes you'd get lucky and be able to glimpse the page three of the SUN newspaper where there were topless women, or someone would bring a deck of adult playing cards to school. Pornography was a precious resource. If you wanted to see moving images you'd have to stay up until 1am with the TV turned down low and hope that there was some "art" film that glipsed boob for all of three seconds. Relying on your imagination and memory was important.
Food
Culturally we ate less meat becaused it was expensive and we often had a lot of leftovers which would last us through the week. My mother would prepare large meals that would feed the whole family on a very low budget - usually something like lasagne or pasta or a layered potato dish. We would buy vegetables from a vegetable shop at the local park.
Going to McDonalds was a "special treat" and it was widely accepted that all kids love mcDonalds and would eat it all the time if they could. There wasn't such a drive for healthy eating back then, and you would get awesome toys in the happy meals - including lego which I was suitably excited for. Back then there was a "girl's toy" and a "boy's toy" - I can't imagine that lasted long after the 2010s. Back then McDonalds were allowed to advertise directly to children and they took full advantage of that (Ronald McDonald is your friend!).
View: https://youtu.be/OWf3Tpdqh8M?t=213
(Also see the starting of the video to see how a e s t h e t i c old McDonalds layouts used to be. I'm coining the term burgerwave right now.)
World issues
There was no pressure of an imminent end of the world. Climate change was being played off as a hippie theory and not the looming reality it is today. We consumed plastic without a second thought about it, drinking from single-use, dense plastic bottles - but you had to be sure you didn't litter and threw your rubbish away in a bin so it could be magicked away somewhere invisible. We didn't have recycling for a long time. In the 90s the big thing was about how we had to plant more trees, and I participated in a few tree plantings. The rules were simple then too - more trees = everything fine. The world was very naieve to the damage being done by industry and personal consumption.
War seemed like something that happened far away in imaginary lands which sometimes came up as blurry footage on the evening news. It didn't feel like something that could just appear on your doorstep tomorrow, but that changed after September the 11th.
I hope that was helpful for you. Feel free to ask questions if you like.