You don't want to now, but they did. I remember taking aspirin as a child. Johnsons Baby Aspirin - it dissolved in your mouth and had a slight orange flavor.
Oddly enough, my mom never wanted us to associate medicines with candy, so my brothers and I were given a portion of an adult pill and told to chew it up. Aspirin was bitter, but Tylenol was worse.
Brutal, but effective I suppose. Hopefully she never had to give you anything time released! You do not want to chew them if you plan for them to work in their properly metered delivery.
Fun fact, OxyContin was deemed "impossible to become addicted to" because it incorporated a time-released design that everyone just started chewing up anyway.
Good point, I hadn't thought of that. "Back in my day," there were no time release medicines that I'm aware of. When caring for kids of my own, the kiddie medicines were mostly liquids.
I remember enjoying those as a kid - I even chewed a few without my parents knowing! In the early 80s, a lot of over-the-counter medication bottles still had minimal to no child-proofing.
It's kind of mind boggling to me that it took until 1982 for that change to be made. It also makes me wonder how many more poisonings might have slipped under the radar for the same reason...