To think there'so something very wierd abotu the way people regard the time line of recent history....

[Hakluyt]

Not sure if the title's clear. But what I mean is that people seem to telescope time. So all older people are regarded as having the attitudes and beliefs and tastes were current in the 40s and 50s -even though somebody 70 today was born in 1945, was a young person in the 60s!

There's a thred currently about a grandmother leaving a baby to cry and people are saying things like "Oh, that generation believed it was good for their lungs". It turns out that the grandmother concerned is younger than I am (!) and when my dd was born it was all slings and attachment parenting and co sleeping........

I first to think about it when my ds's choir went to entertain people at Retirement home, and they learned songs from the First World War to sing to people who were probably mostly not even born in 1918!

It's as if history is in chunks, rather than linear.........older people come from the chunk between 1920 and 1940.........

I know, it's strange. I mean, a lot has happened in my lifetime, but for my ds the Beatles are as far away for him as The General Strike is for me.

Mind you, lazy thinking strikes everywhere!

I agree. I read some of that thread and thought the GM must have been in her 80s but she was most likely younger than me. I'm 62 and would never leave a baby to cry, even in the olden days when mine were tiny.

I had to stop reading it when one poster assumed the GM was "either old or nuts" Does one equal the other?

I was a teen in the 60s/70s so don't sing Vera Lynn to me when I'm in a nursing home!

Yes I know what you mean. My parents are pensioners. I see people excusing racist and sexist beliefs on here from people their age. But my parents were part of the generation that really challenged all of those attitudes, and feminist parenting was a big thing.

Yes, the WW1 and WW2 thing is rife!

The baby thing might be because my parents generation followed their mothers advice as there were fewer baby gurus and self help books back then. My mother is 77 and had babies in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and she never picked up a crying baby, weaned us very very early and seemed to have an old fashioned attitude. My mil is much younger but she still followed her mothers advice. I'm only 20 years younger than my mil but my views are a world apart, partly because the generation that I was born into is more questioning and more well read when it comes to lots of things. I am massively generalising here before anyone gets offended. I'm only talking about the people who I know who were wed at 17 and had a couple of kids themselves before they were 20.

I don't get the wartime song thing. My mum was a child during the war and she is irritated when well-meaning people put on tea dances and play Vera Lynn for the old folk. My mum came of age in the 1950s and was more of a rock n roll chick. Still it's horses for courses I suppose. Lots of my old friends already have a nostalgia for the 1980s and had 1980s themed discos at their wedding. I don't get this as we were kids in the 1980s. We came of age in the 1990s and I think of Britpop and the Indie music scene when I relive my youth.

I was having a conversation about the non-linearity of history on Friday, weirdly enough. We were talking about the fantasy of the non-subjectivity and non-linearity of official, monumental history.
We also discussed the fact that history is lumpy and 'mixed': within a time-period you will get aspects characterised as 'futurist' or retrogressive'.
In actual terms, you will get grandparents who have quite early c20 attitudes but also those who are more 'modern'. Actually, you begin to see how those temporal 'stickers' fall apart a bit.
Totally agree about the First World War songs, though. That is just crazy. My parents are 60s children and they are the grandparents now.
It probably has something to do with when mass-market representations of older people became available and the continuing presence of the tropes established then.

Was talking about it with ds. He's studying Virginia Woolf for a level. We don't ways wander along chatting like this. Mostly it's grunts and silence.

"My mil is much younger but she still followed her mothers advice. I'm only 20 years younger than my mil but my views are a world apart, partly because the generation that I was born into is more questioning and more well read when it comes to lots of things"

Could you say a bit more about this?

I do agree. Also people massively over-generalise. I keep hearing people talking about how old people can't manage IT, yet my father at 92 was considerably more computer-savvy than many people in their 20s and 30s.

yanbu.

I find it strange when people seem to think DM/MIL/dc's grandmothers must be elderly ladies with personal experience of (at least one) world war/rationing/Dr Spock child rearing/other cliche rather than a 50/60 somethings, still working full time/maybe even has teenagers at home/ worrying about how they will fund retirement & still have some sort of decent standard of living/good wine/nice holidays.

My mother & MIL were born in the 50s, partied during the late 60s/early 70s, raised their children in the 70s/80s (slings, cosleeping, breastfeeding) ... my dm is still working full time, MIL has recently retired. Both are grandmothers many/several times over. They would be massively insulted if someone started talking about the bloody rationing or how it's okay for 'old' people to be racist/sexist/homophobic! [it's like the 60s never happened]

"It probably has something to do with when mass-market representations of older people became available and the continuing presence of the tropes established then.

They must know hippies, for example, existed. But they must have existed in a window in history and are still there- rather than growing up and old.

My father was considered a bit old fashioned as he liked jazz. His expression when they were murdering singing Vera Lynn in the care home the other day was very telling - and he was 8 when WW2 broke out.

My uncle lived six miles from Chester and they only got electricity in 1923. The experience of the people there would have been very different from the experience of those in London.

Hakulyt, my mil (and my mum) parented their babies in the same way as their mothers did. They had both weaned their babies onto solids by the time they were 6 weeks old because that's what their mothers did. They both had children early as was the norm back then. My generation had children much later and because lots of people my age had moved away from home for work and uni we were less reliant on parental advice and had had time to read more about parenting and form our own opinions. You can't get away from TV programmes and newspaper articles about the latest parenting advice and that wasn't the case 40 years ago.

OP, this is so so true. I have a friend in her 70s, and she is of the generation that came of age in the swinging sixties - sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Her attitudes on most issues (race, sex etc) are very progressive. Yet people of her age are treated as if they are expected to have racist, homophobic and generally bigoted views.

My late MIL had absolute fits with the midwife and health visitor because I wasn't weaning at 6 weeks. The health visitor remembered it years after. I think, though, that it was because she was a feeder and the amount of food she shovelled into her daughter and granddaughter was obscene. I wish she was alive, well and living in Australia.

People are people. I was talking to someone whose mother is 97. This means that she is unlikely to be very young, and possibly nearer the age of my late MIL. The ring tone on her phone is Lady Gaga.

You should read viv albertine's autobiography. It's great, on many levels. But it is also interesting because a. Punks are now old -and I think that that can initially seem quite counter-intuitive b. Iconoclasm, and avant-gardi am, the historically-located acts of vandalism against the particular contemporary moment in the name of a projected future : they always sit awkwardly when relegated to an idea of the past.

"My mil is much younger but she still followed her mothers advice. I'm only 20 years younger than my mil but my views are a world apart, partly because the generation that I was born into is more questioning and more well read when it comes to lots of things"

Sorry, but this is bollocks. Saying that 'the generation I was born into is...' is falling into exactly the same stereotyping trap that is being criticised.

"My late MIL had absolute fits with the midwife and health visitor because I wasn't weaning at 6 weeks"

How old was she? And when was this?

I said that I was massively generalising and I said that I was talking about specific people. Can you not read?

"I said that I was massively generalising and I said that I was talking about specific people."

I'm not absolutely sure you can be doing both of those things at the same time. Happy to be proved wrong................

Ok point taken Hakulyt.

I suspect OP would like a conversation - not need for AIBU super-heated argument + swearing.

People do like to think things were different in the generation before.

I like this quote: "Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers."

From... Socrates!

Interesting.

To me the Falklands war was not that long ago - I was 12 at the time.

To someone my age back then, WW2 would not have been that long ago - relatively recent history.

If my Dad was in a care home, he'd be a child of the 50s and 60s. Very different to a child of the 20s and 30s.