Where children really better behaved in the past or do people remember with rose tinted glasses?

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This is inspired by a video online whereby a toddler was having a massive tantrum on a 8 hour flight.
A lot of the comments underneath basically were how terrible a parent the mother was and how in their day the child wouldn't have dared behave like that.
What is the alleged difference? What are we not doing that we did then? Or do people only remember the good parts and forget their children also behaved like that.
I personally as a mother of a toddler found the comments awful. I suspect the mother was not having the time of her life either.

I think parents / teachers/ society was stricter. I know my grandad was an absolute hooligan as a youth and it wasn't uncommon for him to get "hidings" from neighbours he'd irritated. Imagine a neighbour now smacking a child or teen for being naughty - it would be considered assault and probably end up all over the Daily Fail. I am 30 and know that when I was at nursery (not in the UK), bad behaviour was punished by a smack on the hand or bum. That's not allowed now. Parents aren't even allowed to smack their kids. Equally, when I was little and definitely older generations- if you didn't eat your dinner then you had no dinner, you went to bed hungry. Yet now that is considered cruel, negligent etc.

I'm not saying I agree with smacking and starving your children btw - I don't, at all. But I think it needs to be recognised that children in the past lived a lot of their lives in fear and therefore probably were, overall, better behaved. I'm a teacher and fwiw while I do get sick of kids being rude, I actually love to see them growing into strong-minded, feisty individuals. Most settle down by GCSEs with regards to behaviour. I think it's far better to see personalities shining through, engaging in sparky debate, having a bit of cheeky humour here and there than sitting in silence with children who daren't make a peep in case they get in trouble.

Children are taken to more places now. When I was a child, we went to school, played outside for a couple of hours and almost straight to bed. Weekends would be the park, at our granparents house, or playing outside. Now children are in Waitrose almost daily. possibly public transport to a swimming/music/dance class after school, in coffee shops and pubs at weekends. They are taken on more flights too.

Whilst I have already confessed upthread to some pretty bad behaviour, I would not have behaved badly in front of my Mum or my Grandparents. I was rarely smacked (although it was a possibility) but I just knew it was not allowed.
As a parent, I don't smack, or shout, but discipline I am not short on. My DD isn't perfect, but she's a good kid. She's often shocked when other kids act out as she just wouldn't do that. I have DSC's too, also nice, well behaved and easy to be with children.
What strikes me sometimes, is not just the lack of rapport between parents and children, but the lack of respect. By this I mean the awful way parents speak to their children. Who are then surprised when the children speak back to them in the same way.

Stop using screens as an excuse for poor parenting.

Plenty of us use screens as part of our child's ongoing education and upbringing at home without issues, because we understand how to limit them and balance them with other enriching activities.

The parents that use screens poorly are the same parents that would stick their child in front of a TV, or send them off to play alone 99% of the time, resulting in the same lack of social skills.

Yes, today's children are generally more badly behaved - and sadly, less happy.

I see this all the time:

I've seen so many parents making threats which they never carry out. All the child has to do is scream, roar, abuse/hit the parent, or just generally strop long enough, for the parent to cave in.
And then they shrug helplessly, with that 'What can you do?' eye roll, and wonder why they have so little control

It seems to be such a chaotic world now where a quick fix is the answer to everything. Kids are handed phones and tablets as a way of keeping them quiet. Any request for advice on how to handle long journeys, boring waits, is met with "take plenty of snacks". Kids are ferried from one activity to another, or plugged into a computer game, that means they never learn to manage and amuse themselves, and parents don't have to interact with the children.

@Snuggybuggy
We don't call adults naughty, do we? It it too much of a lazy, catch all word.

In my opinion, children don't set out to be badly behaved-they don't plan it. There is always a reason for it and if we looked at the reason rather than just lazily describing them as naughty, the situation might be improved.

A child might be feeling insecure, be suffering from PDA, want some attention, be hungry, not want to do a certain task, There will always be a reason and it is worth finding out, with gentle talks and gentle hands, just what that reason is.

I think there's a lot of rose tinted glasses about the past. Not just about how well children behaved, but the methods employed by parents to achieve good behaviour.
My mum occasionally mentions that the way my children interact with me wasn't allowed when she was a child. She isn't being negative to me, more that she was utterly terrified of her father in particular and is glad to see our children don't feel like that about me and DH.

I think it's behaviour we should label as naughty rather than the child. Adult behaviour also gets labelled.

Its an interesting comment about screen time.
When we do our initial assessments we talk to the young people and their parents/ guardians separately.
I have noticed it is quite common now for children, especially girls complaining that Parents ( it's usually mum they mention) are always on the phone and never listen.
When i mention this to the parents what has been said they get quite defensive and say well I was only.........( wherever they were doing ) and they are just as bad. I do have to point out that they are the adult in the relationship!!

I am sure that we did have tantrums as toddlers but it was never probably in public as it is now.

Toddlers having melt downs shown on social media

There were no such things as mass coffee shops. You could get a squash as parents had a cup of tea in the British Home Stores cafe on a Saturday morning if you were lucky.

A lot has changed in the way we parent our children compared to the way are parents were. Likewise with their parents etc etc

I do think with older children there is a sense of entitlement. That is not just down to parents but society and successive Governments.

@MrsJayy to me, the 90s ARE recent times people say years ago and I think 60s/70s. I still struggle with the idea there are kids born after 9/11 who can now have jobs and driving licences, it feels like 5 years ago to me 🙈

there was an old letter or diary found from something like the 1600's where the man was complaining about 'the youth of today' so I suspect rose tinted glasses and this stuff is constant no matter what generation or age or century

I am a child of the 50s and I don't remember much bad behaviour at school. Adults had all the power and we were expected to do as we were told. The threat of the cane/slipper seemed very real at school, parents could smack you at home.
If neighbours complained about your behaviour your parents almost always took the adults ' side.
I am sure there were badly behaved young people (borstals existed) but there was a lot more pressure to be respectable.

I don't agree with beating your kids but there is a lot to be said for actual consequences for your actions.

Schools are now restricted in that it's hard to suspend or expel children now as they are entitled to an education. Playtime has been reduced and the workload has increased.

Kids no longer spend several hours after school roaming the streets and getting fresh air and exercise naturally.

Kids have a lot of structured activities and play dates and much less interaction without adults present.

Kids are frazzled by the expectations put on them at school and the teachers no longer have the authority to give them detention or just send them home.

Parents are taught that they can't hit their kids and that kids feelings matter. That there are reasons behind bad behaviour and as parents they have to take the child's view into account.

Kids are pushed into adult environments like restaurants on a regular basis because the adults want to go and their child can no longer wander the streets with friends.

There are a lot of benefits to stopping kids having unsupervised hours of contact such as bullying, harassment and lord of the flies type behaviour, but they have lost the benefit of being outdoors so much and letting off steam.

Being strict but understanding is a hard balance to strike for a steady, calm and patient parent, and we aren't all of that mould.

Each child is different too. My first is chilled, her tantrums were minimal and she's fairly compliant.

My second is highly strung, emotional and anxious which leads to tantrums, throwing and hitting, (at home only) which has improved as he left toddlerhood but has no where near disappeared.

I once lost my temper with him and smacked him. Not proud of it, and it's not the done thing, but... it was several weeks before he tried to hit me again.

The majority of non violent consequences he is not affected by and has no effect on his behaviour. He doesn't care if I take toys or sit him in time out or in his room or no treats or cancelling play dates.

I'm no pushover and I'm constantly told I'm too strict, but the improvements in his behaviour are minuscule and hard won.

I have no doubt that if he knew he was going to get a smack every-time he threw something or hit me, he wouldn't do it.

This holiday we have tried something different, we have barely left the house, save for the park once and a christingle service. The kids have had pyjama days and a lot of peace and quiet, which has resulted in less tantrums and much more peace. My two primary school kids are utterly exhausted from school and have really needed time to switch off.

Ideally we would have been outside a lot more, but they just don't want to, so I've let it go.

We've stopped taking them to coffee shops and restaurants because sitting still for two hours isn't that fun for them. There's plenty of time for that when they are older.

Parenting is a hard job at the best of times and now it is a total minefield of putting the child first while maintaining good behaviour which is a hard balance to strike.

I'm 59 and remember well what it was like in school, plus I have done bits of supply teaching throughout my life. In my view behaviour in schools has massively declined.

Several factors are at work. When I was a kid, any bad behaviour in school was punished with the kind of punishment kids would try to avoid (caning for boys, lines and detention for girls). For repeated or serious bad behaviour, the parents would be spoken to by the teachers and it was unheard of for parents to side with their kid (unlike today where parents often won't accept the teacher's view). The teachers had more respect from parents and more severe disciplinary options at their disposal. My sister gave up teaching (and she was seriously good at it) because the disciplinary options still open to her were not severe enough to keep the children in order.

Diet is also a biggie. Most of us grew up eating real food, freshly cooked, which didn't put us into a tailspin of tantrums and screaming. I see a lot of problems with kids who are allowed to eat sugary food and rarely eat a real meal. Junk food has a real effect on kids' attention spans and behaviour and anyone who doesn't believe me is welcome to try an experiment of putting their children on a whole food fresh diet for 2 weeks. Many see transformations in behaviour within days.

You behave yourself in life for fear of consequences.
Fuck no. I really hope not, that would be an awful way for people to be living. I behave myself in life because as a pro-social mammal I have a pronounced sense of empathy and I do not want to cause other people to be hurt or make their life needlessly more difficult and unpleasant. I would never drive drunk or speed through a housing estate, not because I'm afraid I'll get caught and be in trouble, but because I don't want to hurt or kill someone. I don't act the dick in a cafe because I'm worried about the consequence of anything other than making an often thankless job more unpleasant for the staff and because I don't want to spoil the enjoyment of other customers.

So when I started taking my DS to eat out as an older toddler and he wanted to run about, I explained to him how that would impact other people in ways that he could understand. He was never going to get in trouble with me for acting like a toddler but I made sure he understood that he had to act in a way that took other people into consideration or we would leave. If he couldn't manage that, then he wasn't in trouble but it was my responsibility to avoid putting him into situations he couldn't handle. (ie, once he got mobile at around 6-7mo until he was 2, I avoided restaurants/cafes unless we could eat outside with him in his buggy because he couldn't understand that he couldn't trot about and he was a messy eater.) I also had to recognise that even once he was capable of being well behaved in a cafe, that it was unfair and confusing for him if we went for a meal with friends who let their kids run about. Tbh, he's 6 now and there are friends who I avoid going on a lot of outings with because the difference in the behaviour we expect from our kids are incompatible and I can see that it's my DS who is left feeling like he is missing out. But it's not about fear, it's about helping your child to empathise when they can't do it fully by themselves and also empathising with them about whether or not they are capable of expected behaviours and not putting them in situations they can't handle.

and children could leave school earlier - 30% of 15 year olds were in full time education in 1950 - well 76% of 17 year olds are in education now. Maybe all the naughty children had left school and were in work.

I wonder if a lack of delayed gratification is part of it?
As a child there was little kids tv for half an hour in the morning, then maybe an hour or two after school. No hundreds of channels and 24 hour streaming.
I got breakfast, lunch, and tea; maybe school milk at break, and a snack after school as tea wasn’t until 6.30 when my dad got home.
Trips to the cinema or a restaurant or even a drink in a cafe were rare treats, not regular things. And the rest of the time you entertained yourself. You couldn’t just veg on screens, as they just weren’t around to be an option, so you had to use your imagination more.
I think even as an adult I have less attention span now, since smartphones and WiFi, so it must be even more so for the children.

I also agree with the poster who said now that smacking isn't allowed, many parents simply don't know how to discipline their children in other ways.

And lest we be tempted to believe those who say that children cannot be prevented from acting badly, eg running around screaming, in a restaurant or other public place, just try going to countries where children are brought up to respect their elders and behave with good manners. India, Thailand, and most areas of France come to mind. In those countries I have often been struck by how well children are able to behave and how calm, smiley, and happy they seem a lot of the time in comparison to the horrible mental and emotional states that a lot of British kids seem to be in for too much of the time.

Of course there are exceptions to these generalisations but they are just trends I've observed.

Life now Is very different to even when I was a child 20 years or so ago!

At 9 I was allowed out on my bike, would
Be out for half the day, no way to contact parents. I would never dream of allowing my 9 year old out alone like that now and would probably get in a lot of trouble if I did!! Everything was more relaxed and kids left to it a lot - didn't mean we didn't get into trouble just parents didn't know about
It.

In regards to eating out etc I think a lot of it is time, we always ate at the table as kids, this is less normal now, people having to work full time etc so kids don't know how to act. We didn't really eat out much when you get either it only became more normal the older we got, days out etc were less frequent.

My brother was awful, at 10 he still had tantrums and was vile to my parents but according to parents we were very well
Behaved so I think rose tinted glasses too!

I agree about increased pressure at school. We were streamed, but it was not a big deal. I was in the A class at Primary school, but the children in the lower streams seemed to have nicer teachers.
The 11+ year was stressful, but not as bad as the pressure put on my grandaughter over SATs.
We didn't have homework at Primary school either.

What a lot of self righteous twattery on this thread. Everyone else's children are always the badly behaved ones, never our own.oh no, we are perfect , it is all the ' other' parents who are crap

Am I the ONLY one willing to admit my child was a nightmare and I was pretty poor at dealing with it. Probably my inability to deal with DS made hi behaviour worse sometimes. I did my best but often it wasn't/ isn't good enough. Partly because how we judge ' good enough' has rocketed. No one trusts anyone else any more, if another adult speaks to another person's child, let alone admonishes them they are likely to be arrested

Parents can't win they really can't. Children and teens and their behaviour have always been complained about in the past but there were fewer expectations of how hey had to behave in public mostly because they weren't seen in public or expected to mix in adult places

We have taken away all of the ways people controlled children in the past ( fear, hitting, authoritarian rules, other people/ strangers also telling children off) and offered very little in their place, certainly not support and compassion for parents struggling to ' control' their children. They have no help and support, just blame. I despair of the whole human race I really do

My dad was born in 1917. As a child he used to play knock a door run, tie all the front gates on their block of houses together with string, light fires at the local (now much reduced) warren etc. But his parents never witnessed it because he was out with friends not them. The kids got the belt if they were reported by anyone they knew but evidently it didn't stop them, I think it was just an occupational hazard. Interestingly I think my dad may have had Aspergers (evidence suggests it) and he certainly didn't care what people thought. (I'm aware that SEN is not the explanation for all misbehaving.)

As recently as the 80s toddlers were often left to their own devices playing on street corners with other kids for the day and only coming in as needed; so most ‘olden days’ parents have no idea how well (or poorly) their kids behaved. It was acceptable to leave very young kids home alone (mum used to lock us in a room) so public tantrumns never occured. It was considered okay to hit or punish your kids by locking them in the cellar or withhold meals even though kids didn’t snack back then. It was also considered normal for elder daughters or neighbours or grandparents to raise siblings instead of mums who often focussed on housework and shopping.

So no, I don’t think parents back in the ‘good ol days’ actually knew how to raise kids. If they had well adjusted kids it was because of other people’s support — support that now has been stripped away. People don’t know their neighbours any more because landlords no longer provide long term rents. A lot fo Grandparents who used their parents to help raise their kids now want to travel and ‘live their lives’ thus removing the support structure for their kids and making them rely on paid for care . A lot of people forget this.

In my day, people didn't take toddlers on a flight as a matter of course because it was so bloody expensive.

How the hell a baby not being able to cope with being cooped up on a plane is down to lack of discipline, I've no bloody idea.