To think the past is being misrepresented on here?

I was born in 1968. And this was not representative of my childhood experience. I don't think you can make sweeping statements that this was because of the times. Most people I knew had central heating, cars. I had a shower every morning. Many people went on foreign holidays, only 2 friends of mine lived in council houses etc etc.

I was born in the 50s

Luckily for me we were relatively well off, so yes I had ice inside the windows upstairs but we had a coal fired boiler and some radiators
We also had a car and went abroad for holidays from when I was quite young

I think we had a better education back then. Better behaviour (on the whole)

Children were children for longer

We definitely had the best music (60's/70s/80s) 😁

Better maternal care. Calm, quiet hospitals.

More disposable income.

Easier to work your way up in your job (that you didn't need a degree for)

Less worry about drugs, though they were around

Easier to buy a house

Shops! Busyness, people, life! I hate the working from home isolation. I hate dead town centres

Quieter roads

Less debt (people may have had HP but no credit cards0

Obviously some things have improved. Health (medicinal not care), clean air (I remember smogs) no smoking, technology. Care and education for SEN children.
Ban on drink/driving. Higher standard of living?

There's obviously more

But on the whole I'm glad I was born then and not now

It's easy to get a detention for silly things but very hard to exclude for truly disruptive behaviour. Kids probably just get used to loads of detentions and they don't act as a deterrent. The only people worrying about them are the well-behaved kids.

I managed to buy my first home aged 27 around 1990.. A small flat which took all my savings and my ex had to be a guarantor even though I was working full time. I had a few sticks of second furniture and cardboard boxes with scarves on served as side tables for a good while, I made the curtains. No Central heating and, yes, there was ice inside in the winter. I had a 2 year old and many clothes came from jumble sales and charity shops. Nursery cost a fortune and the mortgage rate was high. After two years my flat was in negative equity and lost a third of its value. Entertainment had to be cheap and takeaways or eating out were not a thing, A trip to the zoo was the big ticket event in the summer holidays and picnics, local parks and beach and playdates were the rest of the holidays. Expectations were definitely lower than now.

Agree @FiveBarGate My Mum worked as did all my aunts. I think of her non working days doing washing in the twin tub, doing the ironing, keeping the home and cooking all meals from scratch each day. They were traditional in their roles but my Dad was a wonderful gardener, did the decorating and could do lots of DIY. Church was a big thing for them and we were part of a great community. I really admire my parents for all they did to make life comfortable and happy for their family.

My school (80's) turned a blind eye to loads of things (uniform, smoking, truancy, bullying), but also had definite firm boundaries (fights, setting off fire alarm).
I get the current theory of setting yourself up as the authority figure by being strict on trivial things that noone is going to bother getting heated about, so when something significant comes up, you're already the authority figure. But it just seems very ineffective!

I was born in 69.
I only knew 2 people who didn't live in council houses.
None of my friends families had a car. Very few of my relatives had a car (we did).
Everyone walked to school ( 2 mile for me).
We had a coke fire,and shared bath water on a Sunday.
Clothes were passed down and mended. We had segs in our shoes to make them last longer.
We had holidays in Scotland, but my friends didn't have holidays.
Punishments in junior school included the cane, the slipper, and the ruler - but we did have books! You had your own copy of whatever novel, play or poetry you were studying. My own DS never sees a book from school!

We had a very rigid uniform and very strict rules!

No it's not, I remember high interest rates and inflation. Strikes, shops closing early, shortages of food.

I agree.

I'd add in all women were SAHM. My mother was at home in the day but she cleaned at 4am and had weekend jobs.

My MIL gutted fish in the morning and worked in the chipper in the evenings.

My granny's generation redded lines for the fishermen, worked in the smoke houses etc.
Again, they often did this around the children but they couldn't be described as not working.

It was easier to buy a house but it wasn't a house with a glass fronted kitchen extension with island. It was a two up two down with multiple kids per bedroom and a tiny galley kitchen.

When I was at school we didn't have the ridiculously rigid uniform rules many schools have nowadays, nor did we have isolation rooms. Somehow we all came out with perfectly good qualifications and went into the world of work without difficulty.

I was in Primary school in the 1970’s. One of my abiding memories is of the headteacher hitting a girl in my class on the head so hard her hair swung up in the air. I’m pretty sure she just didn’t know the answer to her question and it was in front of the whole class.
I work in Education and now it’s the adults that are getting thumped by the children!
But yeh I agree with PP it’s swings and roundabouts..some things better some things worse.

Should say phone in the house

I’m always interested when I read about apparent terrible behaviour, kids causing carnage at schools nowadays, yet the rules are so crazily strict compared to my high school days in the late 90s. We had limited rules and so much less pressure - and loads of totally ignored smoking round the bikes sheds. Can’t work out what’s gone wrong, or if it is the rose tinted specs.

Things are very different. I was born in the early 50s. I remember us getting a TV when I was four. We got a fridge when I was 12, a home in the house when I went to university at 18 so I could phone home. Parents never had a car. It was easier for my husband and I to buy a house than it is for people now and there were grants and no loans for students. There were 42 people in my class at primary school and no TA, just one teacher. It was very structured. We sat in order of our position in class from end of term tests. Not good for children with additional learning needs. We were hit with a ruler for making mistakes or talking. There was more sense of community and things for kids to do locally. We played out and had fun. On the other hand with the sense of community came judgment and nosiness. It was just very different. Easier in some ways but the adults had a lot of hard hysical work. The 60s/ early 70s were a fun time to be a teenager. The past is often misrepresented on here, yes. I don’t recall people being well off, more likely hard up but I grew up in a Lancashire cotton town and the industry was starting to decline.

IMO the world is so utterly different now than it was 30 or 40 years ago.

I'm in my late 40's., but truly awful food (cabbage stuffed with porridge oats and onions with an oxo cube mixed in, served with plain boiled potatoes) - not much temptation to put on weight - being absolutely freezing, no daily hot showers... a "two car family" was a Big Thing - nobody's parents had a car each! People didn't eat out (except for adult birthdays if you were fancy), takeaways and ready meals and premade sauces and throwing food out and sweets cakes crisps, bought drinks... these were all things I knew existed, but in the same way 8-year-olds know Antarctica exists. current events were on the 9 o'clock bbc news. I had a pen friend, ffs. People got annoyed if the second post was late.
There wasn't the constant barage of advertising. If it wasn't on the TV (3 channels, then 4), then you'd not really know about it, and the TV just wasn't interesting enough to watch constantly. We didn't have the same exposure to extreme views or the echo chambers of internet. But we weren't as well informed, obviously:
Far fewer people went to university.
Moving to where the jobs were was divisive. You'd think nothing of giving a neighbour a lift, doing shopping for the old dear round the corner, asking next door for something you'd run out of.
Massive social divisions (heavy industry being sacrificed to free up exchange rates to allow London money markets to flourish).
Disabilities were either "the mothers fault" or a"tragedy".

It was such an utterly different world. I dont think you can really compare.

When I think back, it seems to me that people became more affluent through the 80s and into the 90s. Suddenly, a lot of kids seemed to be involved in more extra curricular activities, they had more toys and holidays, they stopped working at after school jobs like delivering papers. Kids had treats all the time, people ate out a lot more, there were a lot more clothes in closets. Many many more kids went to university, people had two or even three cars, people had VCRs, multiple tvs, teens had their own phone lines in their rooms.

Parents were a lot less involved in education in the 1980s when I was at secondary school. My parents' parents were even less involved.

I think a lot of things changed when the national curriculum and school league tables. Published school results. This was not a thing when I was at school. Then with the expansion of higher education and then fees for universities parents are now coming to open days with their kids to check out the value of the courses. Especially as parents often have to pay, help with fees and rent etc.

I do think people were maybe happier? I know I'm biased but I think the 80s/90s/early 00s were quite a good era to grow up in. I think the balance was better. We were more centrist I think.

Before then it was a bit extreme right wing. After then (now) it's perhaps a bit far left.

I was a child in the 70s. We lived in a council house, no central heating, yes ice on the inside of the single glazed metal framed windows. We didn't have a car, I walked 3 miles to school, it was the only Catholic so that's where we went. The teachers thought nothing of hitting us, that was considered perfectly normal. We didn't have a fridge until I was 11 years old. Most of my clothes were second hand. We did have a holiday each year to visit our grandparents in Ireland. Life was hard in many ways, but I think there's more pressure on kids these days, and I actually think social mobility is harder to achieve now.

I'll add this: when my mother was expecting me, my dad got word that his mother was dying. He couldn't sleep from worry.

A workmate told him to go see the doctor to ask for sleeping tablets.

The doctor told him to start smoking instead.

Snap!

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,"

Notwithstanding the fact that "the past" could mean many different decades - even the past of many Mumsnetters will be different decades - when their childhoods were; people's experiences of "the past" is not just some homogeneous history that everyone had.

Some things are better now. Medicine for example is so much more advanced now. But, conversely, the NHS is even more stretched than it was 20, 30, 40, 50 etc years ago.

Children definitely played out more at a much younger age, without parental supervision. But often children were not believed if a stranger or relative harmed them.

Swings and roundabouts maybe.

Tbh the old adage about the past being a foreign country (they do things differently there) holds true.

Housing costs have gone up hugely in relation to salaries so it's likely that fewer people are living in very large homes, or that if they are it's because both parents work full time whereas it was more common in the past to have a parent at home or working part-time.

I can only compare my DC's secondary school to mine but I think my DC have it tougher. I think the biggest difference is the curriculum. So dry, so dependant on rote learning and often overly complicated. Eg, for English Literature GCSE I took copies of the text liberally annotated into the exam with me. Now kids have to memorise huge quantities of quotes. Children are learning things in maths in Year 5 or 6 that I didn't learn until Year 8 or 9. There is more pressure to achieve high exam grades than there used to be. Not to mention the ridiculous rules - detention for not taking your coat off before you walk into the building or having the wrong colour pen. As for primary school, I think I did little more than make junk models for 7 years whereas there is almost no time for fun in today's primary curriculum.

I'm not surprised young people find it harder than I did, especially coupled with a generally poorer outlook.

I was born in the 70s, at school in the 80s and 90s and things were definitely easier for kids then than in my parents' childhoods in the 1950s.