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.........

Also this absolutely nails it: they must have existed in a window in history and are still there- rather than growing up and old.

Italics fail, sorry...

"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."

Exactly this. It is so strange - hippies/punks = stuck in the 60s/70s, current 50/60/70 year olds = war veterans & "old fogies".

I suppose the point I was trying to make badly was that a lot of people in the generation before me had babies very young and they followed the advice of their mothers possibly because there was little information around and possibly because they were only just into adulthood themselves and still under parental influence.

It became more common for my generation to move away from their home town and to have children later which means that it is less likely that we rely on parents for advice. Plus the media is constantly publishing and reporting on parenting issues.

Now we have gone off track and I can't think how this is is relevant to the original question.

Sorry, humanjam, but your post seems to me a classic example of the sort of generalisation OP is talking about. You refer to your mil and mother doing what their parents did because they married early and didn't move away to university as your generation did; as you talk about 40 years ago, that means 1975. Yet in the 1970s plenty of women went to university - by that time the gender balance in universities was at or approaching 50/50. It absolutely wasn't the norm "back then" to have babies early.

Sure, there weren't so many TV channels around 40 years ago, but actually without the internet newspaper and magazine sales were higher, papers and women's magazines were certainly full of parenting advice, and there were a number of dedicated parenting magazines. That was also the era of Penelope Leach and other similar writers. Mothers were encouraged to feed on demand, breastfeed as long as possible, keep their babies with them, you name it.

The fact that you know two women born at the time who had babies early really, does not mean that that was the norm.

Apologies again, humanjam, that post was a slowly composed response to an earlier one from you and I see you have clarified since then. I didn't mean it to sound quite as much getting at you as it does.

I think it's more about generalising an age group and stereotyping. Using Vera Lynn (mentioned above) as an example, my parents and their generation who were in their 20s during WW2 loathed her - she was considered old fashioned and maudling at the time.

I was a teenager in the 70s, loathed Demis Roussos et al. The trouble is lazy journalism and the current generation experiencing something, like being a parent, assuming that their experience and knowledge is somehow new and unique. And yes I never left my baby to cry, because it was counter intuitive, took weaning gradually depending on what he enjoyed/liked (it wasn't called BFW then) and he slept with me at night when he wouldn't settle (wasn't called co-sleeping either).

It's like the assumption that my Ps and GPs generation were prudish about sex and did not DTD before marriage. Totally not true.

thehumanjam your generation is "more questioning and well read"

Really?

Here's a fab expression I've learned on here - gie your head a wobble love.

I'm not saying that it was the norm for the majority of woman, it most likely wasn't the norm for middle class woman who went to university.

I think possibly the previous generation particularly working class women were more greatly influenced by their parents than subsequent generations. Maybe I'm talking complete rubbish and it's just a small sample of people that I am speaking of.

Sorry, posting from my slowphone thehumanjam - I think you've got the message now, no need for me to pile in as well

(bleddy phone keeps changing your name to rheumatism!)

my mil (and my mum) parented their babies in the same way as their mothers did

Yes - things don't change overnight. My MIL was told by family and HV/nurse that it's actually bad for a baby to be picked up too much and they should be left to it if they cry because they're 'just wanting attention', and this was in the late 70s. (She ignored this and picked the baby up all the time, but says she always felt guilty about it )

Completely take my words out of context why don't you Sprouts?

Here's an expression for you.

Oh wait. I can't be bothered to waste my breath.

My dad is 70, (born in 1945 -premature - about 32 weeks he thinks and one of the first babies to be put in an incubator in the UK) he restores jukeboxes to supplement his pension.

If we joke with him about being old - he says he's doesn't feel a day over 25!

He was in the military in the 60s and 70s so was never one of the hippies- but he really doesn't seem old . My mil on the other hand is 79 and I swear she has been an old woman since 1963.

Hakluyt The fits my MIL threw were in 2007 and she was seventy. She was really stressed and angry that I wasn't weaning early. The hcp were genuinely shocked. I don't need to exaggerate.

My MIL died when son was 5 months old but she had already shocked a lot of neighbours/local shopkeepers etc by some of the stunts she had pulled. It wasn't about age, it was about her personality. One day I will have a DIL (I hope) and I am confident that she will find plenty to grumble at about me, but it will probably be a different range of grumbles.

I really think that, after the sixties, the "generation gap" diminished hugely as that decade was so pivotal in changing attitudes. People who were young throughout the sixties were far more different from their parents and grandparents than any generation since. The Pill, massive university expansion and a radical questioning of the class system changed caused a seismic shift in attitudes which still live on today. That's why today's 70- 75 year-olds - born from 1940 onwards still seem so young in many cases. (they invented sex, you know )

It's so variable though - I have a friend born in 1979 who was totally attachment parented (not sure if they called it that then, but all the same principles). My friend has a baby herself now and is less of an attachment parent than her mother was!

Sorry slow typing here too Sprouts.

Anyway I'm out of the discussion here today. I'm obviously incapable of articulating my thoughts today as I seem to rile people up with each post. Therefore I shall step away from the discussion as I'm obviously not adding anything useful.

fatowl that's my experience as well. My father was born in 1931 and his mind is somewhere in its early twenties (including unrealistic risk assessment before his strokes). My uncle was born in 1944 but I think his mind was born somewhere around 1872, and with extra awkward.

There's nowt so queer as folk.

My dad was a teenager and young 20s in the 60s. Sex, drugs and rock and roll. A hippy?

Yeah, right. He wouldn't know sex, drugs and rock and roll if it hit him.

I think he missed out.

Saying that - I seemed to have bypassed the 80s and 90s. If someone in 30 years time tried to stereotype me, I just missed out. Wasn't aware. I was really boring.

I worked in dementia care for years and I kept asking why we kept playing vera Lyn songs etc my mum is 73 and she was three when the second world war ended and those ten years older would have been teenagers crazy!

"Hakluyt The fits my MIL threw were in 2007 and she was seventy. She was really stressed and angry that I wasn't weaning early. The hcp were genuinely shocked. I don't need to exaggerate."

Sorry, I wasn't suggesting you were exagerating -I shouldn't have put this in AIBU should I? I was interested because my first child was born in 1995 when my mother was 75- and she hadn't done any of the weaning early, feeding to a routine, leqving to cry stuff that everybody says women of her generation did. I remember her being worried that I left weaning so late (6 months) because she was worried about me, not the baby!

It's odd speaking to young adults when you get to my age (38). I was giving a lecture to post-graduate students the other week about stuff to do with education and culture that had its roots in the 1997 labour "education education education" speech.
For these young people that was history. They were about 22/23 so born in 1992. They were five years old when tony Blair became the prime minister!
I don't think of myself as old but realistically there's a whole generation between me and today's post-grad students!!!

Yes. We're talking about David Bowie, iggy pop, patti smith. It's ridiculous really.

Really interesting point OP.

I guess my example would be the assumption that no women over 50 could possibly know anything about computing. Which is bizarre because most early programmers were female, and the percentage of women studying computer science at Uni were actually much much higher in the 80s than today.

Sorry posted too soon - meant to say that I have a small baby and so do lots of young women in their early 20s. But we're still not the same generation and probably neither are our parents. So although the HV and hcp and media advise and context are the same, our experiences of raising our babies in 2014/15 are not the same.