Did boomers get it right?

[GreyGoosehound]

I’ve lurked on several recent posts about deteriorating behaviour in schools, with increasing violence and 4 and 5 year olds who don’t have basic skills.

I’ve also seen threads and SM posts about boomers, mainly negative. But it’s also acknowledged that GenX are quite a hardy, resilient bunch.

I am generation X, and have brought up my genZ children differently to how I was raised. I was more present in their lives, made huge efforts to meet their needs in a way that my parents didn’t, as did many other parents in my age group.

You don’t need to look hard to find criticism of Millenials and GenZ, and GenAlpha (2012+) are commonly discussed as nightmare fodder.

Did the benign neglect and distanced parenting of boomers work better for growing children? Did the freedom that GenX had make a huge difference in their development?

I know there are global issues that contribute - the internet must have made a huge difference to both parenting and in child development, financially GenX had an easier time of becoming independent from parents, all this will have an effect.

I wonder if this is just a blip in human development, or how genZ and future generations will parent their children in response to how they were parented.
Thought this would make an interesting discussion.

Society is far keener now to keep people in their boxes (identity, stereotypes, diagnoses etc) than they ever were.
In the 80s we were far more free to be who we were, and our differences didn’t matter as much. I remember in the 90s things started to change - it was more important that people wore the right shoes or school skirt. I don’t remember this happening as much before then.
The stifling need for people to conform right now must be dreadful for teenagers.

@Vaccances I am not as old, but at primary school I had my own wooden desk. I think it gave a stronger sense of security than shared desks where you can be elbowed or kicked easily and seating plans frequently change.

How amusing! As a Boomer myself (& human being) I was certainly not privileged & neither were any of my family or friends.
Food was still rashioned when I was born, mass rebuilding taking place. Make do & mend still prevalent. All the usual hardships, outside toilets, no central heating, etc, etc. We were probably low Middle Class but suffered from these difficulties.
A different Century & different culture.
Child rearing changes every 20 years or so.
Each generation think the parents before them were wrong. In the case of Boomers, as others have said, they were parented by DP born in Victoria’s reign.
I think the Boomers did their best in difficult & unprivileged circumstances. Sorry if this offends anyone.

I wonder if the old fashioned, one desk per pupil, face-the-teacher layout, with highly structured lessons, suited certain types of autistic children better than shared tables and groupwork?

I hated group work. I used to spend all my time doing the work, getting jeered at and put down by the others in the group and then getting told off by the teacher for not being a team player.

Severely disabled children were not routinely institutionalised by that stage. The government were closing down those places after lots of abuse scandals.

If it was that great why not raise your kids in the same way? After all, it's a lot easier considering how very little parenting it actually involved.

Bringing your children up to be independent does not take less parenting. Initially it takes much more.

Oh amaze me, how so?

Because you have to teach them how to do things.

That's the issue isn't it? A lot of the older generations skipped the teaching part.

Who says SEN kids actually coped back then? They might have looked like they were because they had to find a way through, but it doesn't mean it wasn't doing lots of damage. It's hard to be a kid who isn't coping but has no support, yet you have to find a way through. You keep waking up each day and being sent into the fray, so you just do it. Maybe your ways of coping aren't even healthy.

There's a reason people started doing it differently. I wouldn't want to go back to childhood. I did it differently, my kids say they had a great childhood by contrast. Why are we doing it differently now? Maybe because we know how awful it was?

Being 'who you were' might also have got you the cane or other corporal punishments right through to the 80s, in my experience. Kids learn to 'cope' really quickly then, to avoid that. I think of some of the kids in my class who were likely SEN and the raw deal they got. They might get some support now.

We most definitely had to conform with uniforms. It is more relaxed now. Now there are no teachers with rulers measuring how long your skirt is in relation to your knees, more flexibility on hairstyles and lengths and facial hair, girls have the option to wear trousers in winter while we had to freeze.

The fact that a child has no choice about which school they go to, or whether to go, has nothing to do with my experiences. My experiences merely demonstrate the type of problems that that can cause for the child.

Adults absolutely have the autonomy to change jobs. It might not be easy, but they can choose to do it if they try hard enough without needing another person's permission. Children cannot choose to change schools, their parents have to choose for them, and that puts the child in a very vulnerable situation.

To give a simple example: you have to teach a child to tie their laces before they can put their own shoes on. The teaching of the knot requires effort from the parent. The result is a child who can independently put on footwear.

There are many many skills like that.

Maybe some people who don't understand it never had the experience of feeling powerless for a long time as a child? I'd say I had more freedom and less autonomy than my children have had. Due to how the world has moved, my children have had less freedom (in terms of things like freely roaming the neighbourhood unsupervised) and more autonomy because they had a mother who listened.

I recall being smacked for what I now know was and autistic meltdown. I'd piss on that headmistress's grave if I knew where it was.

@VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia yes, however that poster forgot there was little to no teaching in the "sink or swim" style of parenting and that's why it was easy. Because it was barely parenting.

Doing it today, in a healthy, loving and supportive manner is indeed, very hard. But that's not what the posters that look back with rose tinted glasses are advocating for , though, is it?

I’m gen x and remember being hugely bored a lot of time as a child. Visiting elderly relatives and just having to sit quietly as it would have been rude to read a book. Dragged round DIY places. But there was a lot of freedom and fun - we lived near the river and used to swim in it from a young age. Building camps in fields, long bike rides to visit friends. My Mum worked part time. Her Mum and Gran worked full time in the family business and she and her siblings were left to their own devices - she remembers setting and lighting the fire when she got in from school, aged about 7, and having to start getting dinner ready. Her school holidays were spent schlepping stuff from the factory in the East End to the office in Holborn or home in West London, with her siblings and cousins.

I made sure I got the last word in with the head of our school. I didn't tell my parents about it till I was an adult and they actually were supportive of it and approve. I'd rather they'd listened to me at the time though. I was quite broken by the end of primary school but I suppose it doesn't matter because I was resilient as heck and coping outwardly.

Nail on the head.

I absolutely loved the classrooms with individual desks in rows, and always did a lot better in those subjects.

I really struggled with group work, desk clusters, etc., mostly because of disruption and bullying, etc. And yes, being told off for not contributing which is hardly surprising when the kids I was supposed to be working with would beat me up at the break or burn me with their fag ends. It's not really a good environment to work collaboratively! Worse was that my worst bullies were either side of my alphabetically by surname, so all the lazy teachers who just allocated groups by name forced me to work with bullies. And they were the ones who knew I was being bullied and did bugger all about it!

I think parenting was infinitely easier for the boomer generation and required a lot less effort, self regulation and self sacrifice.

back then-
-colicky crying baby? Leave it in the pram parked in the garden for “fresh air”

• toddler tantrum? Smack them or shout at them, ignore them. Don’t worry about teaching them how to self soothe or emotionally regulate. It’s just naughtiness.
• picky eater? Go to bed hungry
• bullied at school? Hit them back/ stand up for yourself
• no ferrying children around to clubs or activities, boomers aren’t a taxi service.
• very little involvement with school at all really, get on with it.

etc etc.

I don’t think their lives were easier, just different.

My mum was at the mercy of a brutish husband and couldn’t leave him because she had no money and/or family support. All the washing was done by hand. Other than a Eubank (remember them!?) and an electric iron, everything was done by hand. She’d walk miles to the shops every day and back to buy dinner. Everything was cooked from scratch. Her life/marriage was infinitely harder than mine. It’s no wonder children didn’t get a look in.

I remember by Grandad telling me that when he was a child in the 1930s, that his friends would often die from TB or infections etc. I wonder whether that’s a factor in why parents were more emotionally detached. If there’s a 10% chance your child will die before their fifth birthday then it’s understandable that parents would try not to get too attached. Cold parents breed cold parents.

@Menomeno maybe the older boomers or the generation before, but most boomers were parenting in the 70s-90s … don’t think most of them were washing by hand then.

and to be fair, I did say that parenting was easier, not their lives in general. But I do truly believe that there was less pressure on parenting and less emphasis. Kids were “lucky” if they were clean/ fed and watered. Standards of parenting were a lot lower.

I bought the birth and death certs for my about 40 great aunts and uncles. Each of my 4 great grandmothers had between 11 - 9 babies last one born about 1916. One had 9 children and only 3 survived to age 21. I think I remember my father taking me to their graves in Tyneside - all those babies named in the graveyard in their case (presumably because they could just about afford a headstone). IN another case 10 of the 11 survived. I definitely think people had to start in those 1800s times and early 1900s assuming babies might well die.

I worked full time until I went into labour and was back full time 2 weeks later which was usual in the 1980s and 90s but even less usual today as maternity rights are a bit better. We had a full time daily nanny who looked after 3 children under 4 at one point (cheaper than 3 full time nursery places). Back to the 1800s and none of our family was rich enough to employ a nanny and in about 1917 my granny and 2 of her sisters were living in in service of some kind or other and the UK had a million live in servants, plenty looking after children under 5. So I suppose it depends how well off you were if things were harder or not on the hours of childcare for under 5s score anyway.

PPs are right that infant mortality was higher back then. Nowadays, some women grieve eight week miscarriages. Parents are more attached to kids a lot sooner than has been the case historically.