To wonder how mums of yore did it

I think it’s normal to do work around the house and am not sure after school activities are necessarily better for children. Why is “going to cooking club” better than making something for your family?

@Cyclebabble I'm sorry that was your experience. 😢You and your mum deserved better than that.

By standards I mean what was seen as acceptable by majority.
So eg putting baby in pram alone in garden to nap (and ignoring crying) was the norm.
Eat it or go hungry was very much norm.
Weekly bathing was norm.

I often wonder this too, my paternal great grandfather died young and left a widow and 7 children, there was a 15 year age gap between the eldest and the youngest! My grandfather (the eldest) was at university when his father died and had to take a break for a couple of years to work and support his family, it must've been so tough for them! We've stopped after 2 and that's enough for us, I can't imagine 7!

I was born in the late 50's. Walked to school with other kids from a very young age. Had household chores. Lighting the fire, peeling veg, going to the shops, washing dishes etc. I was left at home supervising younger siblings. All of this was pretty standard. However looking back there was a fair amount of what would now be deemed as neglect.

Older siblings likely helped raise up younger ones too.

I don't think " standards" is the right way to think about it though. You still had recognisably good and bad parents even if it all seems very lax parenting now.

Also whilst children dud look after each other the older kids would be out of the home much earlier. My aunties had left home to become nurses or get married by the time they were 18 or 19.

The big change in the last 80 years ( so that's my parent's generation) is just how much more we have. Kids dying of malnutrition, no shoes or decent clothes was not uncommon whereas in my head that's Victorian Britian.

Despite 9 kids and having no family money my grandparents started their own little business. My grandad left the navy after the war and they had enough money to buy a house, send my dad to private school and to do several transatlantic cruises in their later years. I can't imagine very many starting out with nothing families, could have 9 kids and be able to get their standard of living these days.

I think women of earlier generations were less inclined to burden themselves and each other with unrealistic expectations.

Women dedicated themselves purely to birthing/raising children and running the house. There was no career or life outside of being a mum and a housewife. And as everyone knows, trying to be a mum, run a house and hold down a job/career is very stressful. It's too much really.

Standards were different.
I think what you are describing as differences between you and dh your dh’s ‘good enough’ type approach would have been more in line with the past.
Food was food. One meal for everyone. Eat it or go hungry. The concept of making a separate appetising meal for toddler and a back up if they don’t fancy it wouldn’t have been on my radar let alone my grandma’s.
Babies napped. Put outside in pram. Walk away.
Nappies. You wouldn’t be rushing to change if you had to wash terry nappies. Plus the concept was toddlers should be uncomfortable as they will be keen to toilet train to be clean and dry. Holding over potty to poo was done.
At 34 you’d have older teens and children to help.

Yeah, I'm only 51, but I'm the eldest of a large family, and was a subsidiary parent for my younger siblings from the age of, I'd say, eight. We also lived with extended family, so there were adults other than parents vaguely 'keeping an eye'. There was no really the concept of 'parenting', either, or certainly not in poorer WC families like mine -- you provided basic food, shelter and clothes and put smacht on your children, but there certainly wasn't a concept of lots of individual attention, emotional attunement etc. We dragged ourselves up.

More physical labour, less emotional labour for parents.

It was an unhappy upbringing.

The older children do a lot of the work, a LOT.

Realised all these stories of child-rearing are similar in a few ways to the approach advocated/used by the pronatalists in the Guardian article that did the rounds a few days ago.

Only the goals are different!

I grew up in a large Indian family. Dad was an alcoholic. Mum died young in child birth. My reflection is that life in my environment was pretty miserable. We existed rather than lived and women were treated very badly. Domestic violence driven by alcohol was common and often witnessed by children. There was absolutely NOTHING a woman could do but suffer and get on with things. The days of yore were not good for us.

Presumably they often didn’t have much choice. And expectations were lower.

My GM (died mid 70s in her late 80s, 6 children, one of who died as a baby) once told me she’d asked her own mother, who had 10 (all survived) how on earth she’d managed without a pram.
‘I used my arms.’

This would have been early 1900s, and the family wasn’t even really poor by the standards of the time - GGF was a master craftsman.

Got 6, dh has always worked away for days to months at a time. Fortunate he earns enough for me to be SAHM and we have workout equipment at home (cheaper than a gym membership long term anyway). Doing so much on your own is not so hard if you are organised, take a day off and it can get stressful as you're playing catch up. Social life is not a thing, lucky if I go out out once a year.

We have babies too old!

Women used to be having their babies in their early twenties. You recover faster and have far more energy.

Then add in - younger grandparents and a community where it was expected people would help - a neighbour mind a toddler, an older child take a younger one with them to play.

People also had lower expectations! You left kids to get on and play without your input, or better still, you had them helping out. A four year old shelling peas, an 8 year old plucking a chicken, an 11 year old helping cook, a 12 year old minding a toddler.

One thing I remember vividly from my 1950's/1960's upbringing was my DM's mending basket. She always had a basket of socks and stockings to darn, buttons to sew on and repairs and alterations to clothes. The mending basket and knitting were her evening activities. Her darning was beautiful but she had a lot of practice!

I can't remember the last time I saw a member of my family mend any clothing

I imagine my great-grandmother, a 'mum of yore' coped with her 13 kids by a) ignoring their crying most of the time, b) getting the older kids to help with the younger ones, c) not knowing where they were a lot of the time and not being worried about that, d) not sending them to clubs and activities or schools that set homework, had uniforms etc, e) feeding them primarily on bread and jam, f) not having any time at all for herself, ever, g) bathing them, at most, once a week, h) washing their one set of clothes at most, once a week and i) just generally not really doing any of the stuff considered normal parenting today. She wasn't taking the kids to baby sensory or bounce and rhyme, or ensuring they had tummy time or doing baby-led weaning or 'wait until they're ready' potty training. The younger ones were weaned by having the older ones feed them mashed-up bread from a spoon. I don't think she was really concentrating on getting her figure back between babies, not least because she was usually pregnant again very quickly anyway.

Her life was a million times harder than that of pretty much any modern parent, bearing in mind that in addition to having 13 kids in a slum, she also took in laundry and piece work, had an alcoholic, mostly unemployed husband who beat her up and raped her on a regular basis, lived through two world wars, and had all her kids pre-NHS.

All of her children had to leave school at 14 and find jobs and/or help with the other kids. My nan worked in a factory from 14 onwards.

Yeah my grandmother had 16 children and it only dawned on me when I had my own child how crazy that was. My mam told me basically the older ones helped with the younger, everyone had chores and were out working by 14 and the majority married before they were 20.

My mother's generation left school and went to work at 14

And helped look after the babies/did housework when they got home.

In the past most mothers of large families did not work outside the home so that meant they weren't juggling a career and family commitments.
Expectations are huge these days - it's very difficult to live on a single income so the vast majority of families have both parents working but on top of that we are expected to progress in careers, to look good, to exercise, to give the children all kinds of opportunities - ie. extra curricular activities.
It wasn't like that in the past.
Also older children were expected to look after the younger ones. My mother pretty much brought up the three kids younger than her. Her mother died when the youngest one was 5 (I think) and she became the mother.

I live in the countryside in a central European country and there are some large families around here - ie. 4 children or more. All of the larger families I can think of have the mother at home - it's usually the farming families. The mothers who work tend to have 1 or 2 children and that's it.

My MIL parented in the 1960s/70s. She would have spent majority of the day on housework and chores and just done the basics with DC.
When my DC were little I would spend majority of the day doing stuff with them and only the very basic housework (albeit with mod cons)
I think partly down to necessity (housework took longer, shopping more frequently etc) and possibly expectations from others

Looking at my own family, I think a few of the women kicked their husbands out as they were sick of having babies. Others had to work and looking at census records, kids seemed to get farmed out to family a lot: I found one household where a cousin had something like 6 kids there from various extended family? Of course, I'm making assumptions, but it doesn't seem unlikely. I can't find any records of my great grandmother living with her parents at all.

I'm surprised how few families opt for the DH to be SAHP.

We did and to me it makes sense. Men on the whole are stronger. DH was perfectly fine doing housework and simultaneously toddler wrangling etc. He also had energy left to do DIY.

Left to me DCs would have ended up living in a midden eating what the cat could catch.