Parenting in the 70s and 80s would it be considered abusive or neglectful today?

[CarolineKnappShappeyShipwright]

I'm interested in what people raised then think of how they were parented compared to what happens today. For example I was hit, not regularly and not particularly hard or anything but I wouldn't do the same to my own children. I wouldn't consider my parents to be abusive but I would report similar if I witnessed it today.

In terms of neglect - definitely all my needs were met in terms of food, clothing, activities but I look back and supervision wasn't a priority. I lived rurally and me and friends could easily wander and no one would have a clue where we were and no way of contacting us. That would have been from a fairly young age 7 or 8 often with smaller siblings we were looking after. Not a chance I would have let my kids do anything like that now. Was it neglect or just how things were then?

It was just the accepted parenting style, very normal. I don't think we should judge previous generations if their parenting fell within the societal norms of the day.

I’m not sure about ‘abusive or neglectful’ - but I think a lot could probably be described as ‘emotionally absent’.

I think there is a lot more focus now on understanding and meeting your child’s emotional needs, whereas historically I think this wasn’t really thought about at all - as long as you provided food, clothes, housing and an education that was good parenting.

Regarding being off playing alone without contact… I think we are over-cautious now and tbh you could argue that is damaging too. Children’s worlds have become very small with little independent, and that exploring the world you did now happens with parents close by or online, which isn’t necessarily progress IMO.

In 40 years time, people will consider the parenting approaches and style of the 2020s inappropriate and poor...

It's a different world we live in now, there's no comparison.

I was brought up in that era and it was definitely just the norm. But you can go back a decade before that, and things were different still. Children worked down mines once upon a time.

And even in the period where I raised my eldest daughter, there are things we did that are considered almost cruel and neglectful now, controlled crying and self settling, for one.

Things change, methods change, but at the time it was okay.

Well times change don't they i saw proper neglect and abuse in the late 70s kids at school clearly dirty and hungry, I don't think your occasional smacked bottom and allowed out to play was particularly unusual i am not looking through rose tinted specs though "we" were seen as a nuisance and sent out so not under our mums feet times have changed, however some kids now imo are micromanaged/tracked/over supervised so do not have resilience.

I worked with vulnerable children for 15 years and neglect us very much still around.

Virtually all of it.
For this reason DW and I refused to have anything to do with raising our DGC.
Whether our DGC are better off because of this is a good question.

TBH I regard some of what goes on now as borderline abusive.

In the '80s I fed my DC a pretty much wholefood diet. No artificial anything (now referred to as UPF). My DGC are allowed artificial sweetener, food colourings etc.

Gentle parenting. Boundary lacking IMO. Very bad for children.

The whole restriction of grandparent contact that goes on (I'm lucky I don't suffer from this). Children need a village and a lot of the exclusions are for ridiculous reasons (some are genuine of course).

Allowing children who are not ND to start school not potty trained.

There certainly WERE things about 80s parenting that weren't great. But it's not wholesale 80s awful, 2020s enlightened.

Definitely norms have changed. My parents were really great, but far more liberal than I am. Hitting children was also completely acceptable in the 1980s and before, I think corporal punishment in private schools was only banned in the 1990s? I started teaching in the early 2000s and older staff had been trained to use a belt (although never had).

I think to some extent we parent in response to our own upbringing, my parents were liberal because they had both had a very strict and restrictive upbringing in the 1950s/60s.

It will be interesting to see how the next generation parents, I suspect they will be restricting tech but I wonder if we’ll see kids having more physical freedom? I think schools need to move to more creativity and physical activity.

I was brought up a bit earlier, in the 60s and 70s. I was fed, clothed etc, loved as much as my parents were able, but my emotional needs certainly weren't understood. I think I'm very lucky though, and maybe unusual, in that my sibling and I were never hit or smacked. My DF was never around, always either working or playing cricket, and my DM suffered from depression and struggled a great deal.

There was a definite lack of supervision; we lived rurally, next door to a farm, and I was allowed to go off by myself whenever I wanted. We moved into a town when I was nine, so I was roaming the Lake District hills alone at seven or eight; I can remember scrambling over dry stone walls, climbing quarries and paddling around lakes - no way would I have allowed my own DC to do that and I shudder to think what could've happened to me! It wasn't considered neglect at the time, it's just how it was.

My mum always says we had a lot more freedom because a) they were less aware of the dangers and b) there was little point worrying about our whereabouts as there was sod all they could do to check.

I often wonder about kids that went missing in those days - chances are that the last seen times and locations were untraceable, and it could’ve been hours until the alarm was raised i.e when you didn’t come home for tea.

Anyway, she reckons parenting was a lot less stressful back then.

I agree with you @Ficklebricks we shouldn't judge. I don't blame them for doing things differently as that's what it was like.

@MidnightPatrol I think the emotionally absent is right. I don't feel especially strongly about this but talking to my siblings one of them definitely does. She feels our emotions were just inconvenient at times and so ignored.

I struggle with not micromanaging @Coffeeishot I get anxious about it. For example we live on the edge of a common and I really am not very happy with my daughter walking there alone. My parents wouldn't have thought twice about it.

You see lack of supervision, others might see an ability to develop independence and confidence. Will be very interesting to see how children parented today fare in adulthood and independence.

Kids sitting on screens and not interacting with the world, junk food readily available, processed foods, so much talk of boundaries that kids and teens aren’t nudged to sort out differences, figure out problems or help in the community- I don’t think this generation is a shining beacon either, Id say there’ll be the same thread about us in ten years time!!!

I remember all the banging on about TV! Square eyes etc. Screen time then (literally the TV) was very judged as bad. So different to now where there are multiple uses (gaming, tablets, TV, laptops, phones). I read loads as a child. I think children that read though choice now are much more of a minority.

I remember once we were at a New Year’s Eve party, I would have been about 11, and a man who was part of the group at the table kept asking if he could massage my feet. I told my mum and she just laughed and did nothing to get rid of him or keep me safe! I couldn’t imagine being so flippant about some dodgy bloke wanting to massage my tween’s feet.

Wanting your children to be safe is a good thing @CarolineKnappShappeyShipwright and not wanting your Dd to walk alone is sensible but I do think we have to teach them age appropriate independence, even if its walking somewhere with friends is a big step.

I think most of us got along fine with what might be considered benign neglect and we were more ready for the world when we approached our late teens. Some children were spectacularly failed by this approach because the lack of oversight led them into the kind of trouble that is hard to extract yourself from.

Nowadays the typically cared for child wouldn't find themselves in those situations but they have probably lost out on a wealth of near misses to cut their teeth on and self reliance.

Kids these days have too much supervision.

many of them could do with a little more opportunity to develop independence.

i grew up in the 80s and there were aspects of parenting which weren’t great but there are aspects now that are also not good.

i suspect generations yet to come will regard letting children have access to the internet unfiltered from an early age as very neglectful.

I think some of it was neglect AND just how things were. Definitely there were basic emotional needs not met for many children during those years, because of the culture. I think there’s a bit of a pendulum on this though; at that time, emotional needs like support with fears and worries, were neglected, but nowadays there is perhaps now an over focus on emotional needs, to the point children are less resilient and don’t learn all the required skills to manage problems themselves. I think many children now, mine included, think the world and everyone should stop, when they have an unpleasant feeling!! And I think this is a big part of the current MH crisis for young adults (social media and phones being another large part of spreading this culture).

I think it’s similar with the supervision issue. Back then kids were given too little supervision and less was understood about the risk of sexual abuse within and outwith the family, leading to real harm. Now the pendulum is the other way with parents hyper supervising kids and seeing abuse risk everywhere, leading to anxiety for kids and difficulty developing required independent skills.

I hope we are starting to move to a middle way between both extremes, understanding that our children need to face some risks to grow, but need appropriate adult support to navigate their developing emotional and practical skills to cope with what they face.

I enjoyed my 70s and 80s childhood - but my parents were very good people and we were very wanted kids.
I had loads of freedom from a young age, as did all my friends. We had a homecooked meal every night. We had problems and stresses, of course, and the expectation was, in general, that you'd find the solution yourself.
It was great, to be honest.

Something isnt working with modern parenting as we have a generation of young people struggling more than ever, and its not just down the Internet age.

Playing without adult supervision is vital for children's development. They learn how to judge risks, and how to negotiate and get on with others, without adults intervening. Jonathan Haidt writes a lot on this.

So not, it's not neglect at all.

I grew up in the subtropics and we would go out fishing on the family boat. Me and my sister would be dropped off at an island to swim, snorkel and sunbathe. No way to communicate with anybody if things went wrong.

My happiest childhood memories are of roaming with friends my own age. I wish my kids could have had that.

I grew up in the 70s. Yes I was smacked, no one knew where I was for hours on end. Bath once a week. No such thing as gentle parenting. Phrases like ‘don’t come crying to me if you do x and x’, ‘I’ll bloody kill you if you jump off that and break your leg’. Probably would be considered poor parenting today.

However, it was the best childhood I could have had. I’m resilient and happy and healthy. I knew I was loved and cared for.

I feel so sorry for children born today. Social media is brutal. Many have zero survival skills, no resilience, there’s a mental health epidemic. I think we’ve gone too far as a society and become over protective and I believe this is causing harm.