To wonder when everything changed to be in favour of children.

[Pipbin]

Stands back and prepares for a flaming.

When I was little, in the 70s, children were seen as being a pain. Children weren't allowed in pubs and rarely seen in restaurants. If there were 4 seats and 5 people a child was expected to stand up and let the adults sit down. There was no such thing as soft play. If you were bored then tough shit, deal with it. You could be hit at school and be smacked by your parents. A birthday party was 10 friends a cake and some jelly and ice cream at your house. Children's television was 3 hours a day and Saturday mornings.

Now it seems to be quite the opposite, the needs of a child seem to trump all adult needs. Children are treated with kid gloves at all times. Birthday parties are bigger and better every year.

I'm not saying that the 70s was better, far from it, but has is swung too far? Is this why we now have some people who act so entitled? I'm not saying that either is right, I'm just interested to hear the opinions of others.

Lights blue touch paper and retires to a safe distance.

I'll consider that the younger generation are rude and entitled when I stop encountering rude old ladies in the Betty's. Like the ones who stood in the doorway, having a conversation, for several minutes, even though there were people waiting to get in and out. Or the one who rammed her rollator into me several times when I was in a branch chosing some nice things with DS1, last week.

There are rude and entitled people of all ages, including those brought up in the 70s and before then.

I remember it, too. Still don't see what the big deal was. The streets are now full of, well, the auto traffic they were designed for.

Agree ourvye.

My eldest is currently playing out! he spent this morning fishing! can't wait for the baby to be big enough to watch the quiet road and go with him! he will come home ravenous! tell me about his afternoon and sleep well tonight.
He also has a laptop, tv and x box in his room!

I think we need to consider contraceptive choices also.
In the 70s when you got married you had children. Women deciding to delay children for their career were treated even worse than they are today. Most families has two or more children. I was an only child and an oddity.

Today, I guess, that a lot more children are the product of an active choice.

OP lots of women worked in the 70's - women have always worked - and the pill was freely available to married women

My mum worked all through the 70's - she was also a single parent

Our street is the main access to the fire and rescue station, A&E, all the local schools and so many of the new housing estates. The street is tiny but always chokka and people dont slow so not at all safe for playing out. We do however have a communal entry between our back doors and our gardens and i love it because it means all the dc can play there safely with no cars to move out of the way for.

My 70s was largely orange and brown, btw :o

Kids these days are hugely pampered, I quite agree with you OP. The pub I used to work in was used as a creche with kids running all over (and under) the place completely ignored by their parents. On the bus the other day someone actually said to her kid "there's no where for you to sit Darling, unless this nice lady will give you her seat."

I see what you are saying. I think motherhood & babies / children have been fetishised by the media. Consumerism & advertising are big factors. It puts pressure on parents & on kids, that just wasn't there when I was a child in 70s /80s. Saw a picture of North West Kardashian in Chanel this week. That kind of thing is designed to filter down & I don't think it's good for children.

OP my mother worked full time as a teacher first as single parent in 1977 and then carried on once she remarried. She also only had 2 children so I would suspect contraceptives were used.

The 70s were a big breakthrough decade in terms of women working and continuing to work after marriage and children.

Hackmum - those things are not specific to playing in the street though - they can all be found at Soft Play, playgrounds, parks, gardens, after school clubs etc but with less risk of your kid not getting run over by a lorry or introduced to porn mags by your 15 year old neighbour.

Should be:

less risk of your kid not getting run over

I'm not saying that there wasn't contraception. However I think that then it was less common to make the active choice to conceive. Maybe I'm wrong.

And yes some women did work, but less than today. Just watch old reruns of Blankety Blank or Bullseye. Women are rarely asked about their jobs. But may be that says more about the attitude of society towards the value of women working.

I do think especially that a certain sector feel entitled, one woman accused me of cruelty as ds has to earn pocket money, FFs what does a seven yr old need money for!!!!!!

Hmm.. I'm not convinced it's more kid centric than it used to be (90's kid), as far as I remember people have always been waving their children around in an attempt to bend the rules. Cut in line, get the last whatever, etc.. You should have seen the shameless child waving when it came to getting beanie babies.

But businesses are opening up to families because it makes sense to bring in a bigger customer base. Marketing is cashing in on kids because now that women work, and assuming their still more child centric than the fathers, they can buy all the pointless stuff in the name of a good childhood.

DD won't be getting elaborate birthday parties. I'm not sure I know anyone that really does to be honest it must be a rich person thing. I look at friend's face book feeds and their child's first birthday is a cute cake, a handful of family members, and the obligatory child making a mess of their cake and ice cream shot. Even older children, it's a fun and quaint sleep over. Nothing elaborate.

I will make sure that as a parent DD has plenty of time to be bored, because that's where the most creative ideas come from. I don't want her to be some screen junkie that can't think for herself.

Leaving the 70s comparison aside, because that's not really the point, I think that a lot of parents have become too focused on putting their children at the centre of their world and are forgetting to be people first.

I find the incessant shutting between activities, play dates, classes, parties etc to be overwhelming and totally unnecessary. Children need to be able to learn by themselves, entertain themselves etc and parents need time to focus on things they enjoy and their relationships, or everyone suffers. I think this myopic view of the children as the focus of family life is problematic as it gives children the impression that it's all about them and that their parents are there to facilitate everything and anything for them. That's not healthy.

IMO children need to grow up understanding that they are there to give, not just to receive: to do this they have to be allowed to be themselves, and be by themselves, without the constant interference of a parent.

For the family this means not living in a child-centric bubble, but trying to make sure that no one part of your life, including being a parent, overwhelms the others. Parents don't need to be at the beck and call of their children all the time. Children need to understand that they are part of a family and that everyone has needs that they must adapt to. For me this means teaching children to engage with adults, to be civil and polite, to understand that their needs don't take precedence over everyone else's.

A constant cycle of self-sacrifice creates unrealistic demands. Children should be given the room to potter about to figure things out for themselves. By all means parents should give 100% to their children while they are together, but parents need time to be off duty, to be people catering to their own needs and relationships.

I remember reading an MN post a good while ago in which someone said that they had never let their 7 year old spend the night with their grandparents because "what would happen if they needed me during the night?" This really stuck in my mind because I find it such a horrifying idea - that at 7 years old this child hasn't had the chance to learn that if they need someone during the night, they will be ok if its a grandparent who is. Or a friend's mum etc. It's a crucial lesson in self-reliance.

I think that guilt about how much time we should be spending with our children, the push for children to develop and excel academically at a young age, and stranger danger have played a major part in the way parenting has changed, and not always for the better.

Contraception was'nt as easily available if you werent married. I was able to get the pill but had to put up with being quizzed about whether or not I was in a 'steady relationship'. It was hard to carry on working once you'd had children - very little childcare or reduced hours. Most women I knew gave up work at least for a while and some are now facing old age with a shit pension as a result. These are some of the things I don't miss.

I see what you are saying. I think motherhood & babies / children have been fetishised by the media. Consumerism & advertising are big factors. It puts pressure on parents & on kids, that just wasn't there when I was a child in 70s /80s

That's nonsense though Ally

Advertising has featured children/ motherhood/ impossibly "perfect" families for as long as it has existed - take the Bisto twins for example, who were used from about 1919 onwards and in full strength and popularity in the '70s...

Bisto

Is some of it because children are rarer and very often, if not most of the time, a very definite choice by parents. Not that seventies children were unwanted but it was much more what you did or it just happened.

Children were a much bigger proportion of the population in the seventies. I remember playing out with huge gangs (as in large numbers) of kids.

This is what I'm thinking Northlight.

Like I said above, the sizes of families have got smaller. People are now only having one or two children, where as in the 70s to have 4 children was not unusual.
I remember my mum saying to me that if you didn't have a baby within a few years of getting married people would start to ask you if everything was alright.