To be shocked at ‘school readiness’

Then how did parents 10 years ago manage? Its a very recent shift. We're not talking decades ago when only 50% mothers worked, and very few full time.

I’m truly astonished by your ignorance.
My mother and father left school before secondary education to work, they could read and write but it wasn’t their world. They were born in 1949.

I would imagine that things were worse in 1926.

Now all children are entitled to an education legally and food, unlike 100 years ago.

There has always been a wealthy class of people, the roaring twenties were very different experiences across society.

@jumpingjohnny i think there were
more stay at home mums ten years ago even. And I think in the 80s/90s people used childminders which is a domestic setting. I don’t know of anyone my age (30s) who went to a group creche style setting before actual school.

I knew it would be our fault! Everything is.

Given that most kids start attending nursery at the age of 9 months/1 year and we are supposedly paying large part of our wages towards nursery 'education' with an EYFS curriculum, this is as much of a failure of nurseries not doing their job as much as parents? Most parents are at work all day and kids are in nursery through the most active, engaged part of the day. Most kids literally come home, eat, bath then bed. Very little time for potty training, learning to write name etc and kids are too tired at night to engage, then parents rushing out of the door to do drop off/get to work etc in the morning. I spend a lot of weekends catching up on cleaning and admin too.

If you want both parents working full time all day and not one at home educating the child, you need to improve nursery provision and accept that some life skills need to be taught there. It's like nurseries are offloading the responsibility of this onto parents and vice versa.

I think it's really odd nobody questions this since we are apparently paying the highest rates in Europe for a high quality early years education for kids that should be setting them up for reception. It's always blame the parents, even though for a lot of families, the nursery spends more time with the children than the parents do.

Apart from putting on their own coat, this doesn't seem that bad to me. Perhaps the school system needs to adjust its expectations of what it wants children to do. Play based learning is shown to work best. School refusal is at an all time high, maybe if they didn't suddenly find themselves in a bootcamp having to follow rules at the whim of a person they've never met before, they would feel more emotionally safe to go to school.

Exactly. Not to mention only around 30% of women owned cars and drove in 1975 compared to around 70-75% now. Using public transport instead of a car for groceries, errands, commutes to-and-from school, appointments, medical visits, social events etc. were much much more time consuming and took a huge proportion of the day for a mother than they do now.

As @user1471429429 says, appliances and conveniences since then are saving us more and more time each cycle - better hairdryers, washing machines, dishwashers, robovacs, heated dryers, vacuums, cleaning products, slow cookers, air fryers, blenders, mixers, baking tools - all of those things have cut down the time it took mothers to use them since 1975.

Nowadays can do anything from order groceries, takeaways, stream a Disney film, open a credit card, bank account, book an appointment, get something fixed, order everything from birthday and Christmas gifts to an pair of emergency sports shorts to arrive the next day on your doorstep in a matter of seconds with a click of a button. Back then you had to handwrite postal letters back-and-forth, attend faraway shops for niche things, wade through paper correspondence and applications from schools or sit through long in-person appointments for virtually anything. You can literally select and buy all your Christmas presents and your family Christmas dinner to arrive the next day all within the space of about an hour.

And as the poster said, generous maternity leave, increased holiday allowance and flexible working patterns which were minimal or non-existent decades ago for women have all helped to make more time for women now. Women who worked back then were far more time-poor doing identical tasks to the same woman today.

Women have always worked throughout history. Maybe some affluent households could afford to have a stay at home Mum and the % of these women as part of the population was higher but there has never been a time throughout history where a sizeable proportion of the female population did not work. And a lot of women who didn’t have formal employment, often did cooking, cleaning, ironing, caretaking for neighbours, friends or the community to gain some more household income. I attended primary school in the 80s and bar one, don’t recall a single one of my friends (upper working class/lower middle class) who’s mothers didn’t work.

@jumpingjohnny i think there were
more stay at home mums ten years ago even. And I think in the 80s/90s people used childminders which is a domestic setting. I don’t know of anyone my age (30s) who went to a group creche style setting before actual school.

No, not all the time, they use the phones cleverly, whipping them out of pockets and then putting them back there again

Are you sure they are phones? A lot of caring settings use handheld devices for taking notes and accessing records. They might have been recording that Millie has managed to reach the top of the frame, but Archie is still nervous about going higher than the first rung, or checking what time Flora's mum is picking her up for her doctor's appointment.

My grandmother (born about 1920) on my dad's side probably counted as literate. She'd left school at 12yo, and she could write.
Her cards to us would be something like.
"to MAr.
HApP bIrty
LoVe grAn & dog wf xx"

In contrast my uncle left school at 16 (born in around 1950), having got no qualifications and could read and write considerably better.

But on the subject of women and what they had to do. I remember for dm sitting down and doing something for herself was something that she had to carve out time. She used to try and sit down for half an hour in the morning with a coffee and a crossword, otherwise she didn't stop all day - and df did quite a bit round the house for a man in those days.
She'd have done a wash every day, including hanging it out (and in and out, in and out if raining), ironing, baking, cooking dinners from scratch, going up to the shops most days, sweeping the floor, washing windows, mending clothes, making clothes etc etc
She got a washing machine after I was born, the hoover didn't have wheels and was huge so took a lot more work, no freezer etc. When we got home from school she would be busy the entire time until we went to bed with stuff round the house.
Jobs just took much longer and more elbow grease in those days. I look at what she did and I marvel how she did it - and yes she worked part time too.

I just got told off for saying the same. I totally agree with you.

Things like potty training, being able to dress, use cutlery are basic parenting skills. Nursery can reinforce/encourage but should not be teaching these skills

I feel surprised the number is so high but I can believe there are some that meet that description.

I think it’s an easy answer to blame phones but I think we should be looking at society as a whole. The difference with this generation and the last is that generally they had a SAHP, nowadays most families need both parents working to survive. So I can see (not saying it’s right!) how a parent would help a kid into a coat or shoes to hustle them out the door to drop at childcare before going to work because it’s easier and quicker.

My DC are older now (still primary) and I find it astounding how much parents do for their kids that I push mine to do for themselves, like taking responsibility for reading records or water bottles or making their lunches. They get promoted but I don’t do it for them. There are parents still taking their secondary school kids to school, not because it’s too far to walk but because they think their kid isn’t old enough to do it!

But what did the parents do before the children could go to group childcare?

I think parents used to have more time with children and more time to teach them. Children now start in full time nursery very young and parents are so busy when they are with their children they are often just trying to keep them occupied so they can get stuff done or trying to do fun activities with them because they have little time to enjoy as a family during the working week.

Sorry, I see this dedicated staff daily - preschool next to me. To be precise, I see them 'interacting' with the children on the climbing apparatus. Every now and then I am seized with a desire to give them a shake, to shake them off their phones. No, not all the time, they use the phones cleverly, whipping them out of pockets and then putting them back there again, pretending to engage for a few seconds with various children. And who could blame them - the salary is not enviable, they are far too young, those staff members. Children I observe on the climbing apparatus outdoors are always in varying states of undress - even if it is plus 5C outside - some children fully clothed, some are only in jumpers and light shirts. If a child chooses to sit in a puddle in this weather - obviously, it is character-building? I must say, I have never seen a fight in the playground thought - I think children left there, they age before their time, learn all the coping strategies and whatever.

My children didn't go to day nursery as I was a SAHM (decades ago). I would be genuinely interested to know if children who've been at a day nursery or in the care of a childminder are more likely to have these basic life skills than those who go to school without any preschool experience. I find it hard to believe that hard pressed childminders and nursery workers are putting children's coats on for them and not teaching them to do it themselves.

A lot of European countries start their kids at 6/7, have never understood why we wxpect not quite toddlers to manage a full day!

And that was fucking shit wasn't it? Let's not go back there.