Do 12-year-old boys still act like this?

Yes they do. Still rambunctious and energetic as ever. My son loves to play in the woods behind our house.

When I was 12 my friends and I were into clothes, nail painting, makeup if we could get away with it, and what boys we thought were cute.

I think some boys still "played" but got made fun of for it. Others were into just hanging out. Maybe playing video games, but not with transformers and toy trucks.

No 12 and 13 years old boy would play with transformers and toy trucks in any era.

I was 12 in about 2005 I believe. I definitely remember my guy friends being like this. I remember them goofing around and running around and being imaginative still. I think it just depends on the kid.

I was 12 in 1988 and I'm 40 today. I will tell you that I thought this movie's portrayal of 12 or 13 year olds was a very mixed bag. The kid character of Josh and even his friend didn't act as goofy as Tom Hanks did. Tom Hanks over-exaggerated how real 12 year olds are.

The only thing that was perhaps spot on was maybey how he decorated his apartment, with the soda vending machine, pinball game machine, video games, and mini basketball hoop...that stuff was more real to what a 12 or 13 kid would like in the late 80s or even now I would think. But how he generally acted was more like an 6, 7 or 8 year old, 10 year old tops, rather then a 12 or 13 year old middle school kid.

I was 12 in 1985 and it was all about playing and watching football, basketball & track & field, Atari, Vectrex, King's Quest games (The melt Ice Wizard game he plays in the movie is like the old King's Quest games I love), Transformers (my obsession at the time), Star Wars movies and toys and all the outside activities my friends and I would do. I lived by a gully, a huge 200 foot deep, 10 miles long by about 300 foot wide hole in the ground. My house was on one side while other kids I knew lived on the other side, we lived right by the end where it stopped and didn't go any further. We were down there at least a few times per week in the summer, pretty much anything you could do in the wilderness / mountains we could do down there. It had a small creek running through it, in the spring the run off was high so you could sometimes tube down it. In the winter you could sleigh ride down the hills and we used to ride our snowmobiles down there. 84 / 85 were probably some of the biggest snow fall years I ever saw so when I was 11 to 12 it was like a winter / summer wonderland. I felt I did all the normal kid things back in those days, 1988 was right around the corner and the kids portrayal in the movie are about kids who lived in an entirely different part of the US then I did. I'm sure it was different for kids my age all depending on where they lived.

When Big came out I was 15 so I could still relate to 13 year olds (Isn't that how old he said he was in the movie?) and they seemed like normal 13 year olds to me. I have to be honest, girls back in 1988 were the same as they are today. They were obsessed with gossip and it was all about them. They all worried if boys liked them or not and would get upset with other girls who like the same guy they did. Girls tried to grow up quicker, girls were into guys while guys were still trying to enjoy being boys. It's always been that way and will continue to do so.

I was 12 in 2003 and I felt like the kids in the movie were more immature than the kids I grew up with. As for comparing them to today, post-internet and social media 12-year-olds are even more different. More mature in the information they know and "adult" behavior but less mature socially.

I was 12 in 1998, and that year was very rough for me. I was entering junior high and had a lot of emotional problems. I wasn't your average teenager. I didn't have a cloud of girlfriends to gossip with, I didn't go shopping for clothes every 5 seconds, I didn't go to concerts and scream at the sight of my favorite boy band, and I most certainly didn't bother with dating. The guys in my school (even when they were old enough to date) were idiots and losers. That was one of the more inaccurate things I saw on tv: 12-year-olds dating like they were in high school and having romantic feelings for each other. Even at 12, I could tell it was BS. Plus, I was stuck in boring-as-hell-Illinois, the land of cornfields and stupid, narrow-minded Townies.

During that time period; I spent most of my time at home, spending time with family, playing computer, surfing the web, watching movies or tv, reading, studying science, writing my own stories, playing with toys, playing with our dog, going to the youth group at church, and maybe once in a blue moon, having a friend over. I only went to school because I was forced to by the law.