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.........

The last time I visited my grandma (mid 90s in a care home) their 'music memory corner' was Elvis!

I don't think I'd follow David bowie's 70s parenting example, though. I remember reading Keith Richards' theories on child development and parenting. They were interesting. Along the lines of: you see kids running shops at the age of three in any countries. That cxn fend for themselves. Was thinking of him when reading the other thread about whether we are too child-centric these days (and need to be more husband-centric to save our marriages!)

My Ps & PIL born in the 1920s, coming of age in WW2 felt a tremendous generation gap from their parents. The war gave them the opportunity to travel and mix with different people from different places, social backgrounds and cultures so radically changed their views of the World. No real difference to growing up in the 60s and 70s like me.

I guess it has ever been thus. Going back to WW1 or the industrialisation and emigration of the 1800s being instrumental in social change.

The current generations biggest factor for change is probably social media and celeb culture.

I was born in the late 40s and personally, I'm looking forward to schoolchildren being taught some punk songs to sing to us in the care home in 20 years or so...
Not sure that their parents will like the words though...

Very interesting post OP. Something I have been thinking about a lot recently too.

Dp is older than me and we had DCs late. Kids' classmates' parents are in reality a generation away, or sometimes two. sometimes I find we are in one "camp" as we are included by dint of the age of our kids. Other times we are in another when history/past is discussed and our uni days are considered to be all no sex and no heating. Weird.

I think the 60s and 70s was all black and white, wasn't it?

I think most people today still rely on the advice of the older members of their families. Not everybody reads articles about child-rearing or forums like this. In fact most of the population don't even read a daily paper. I was one of the very fortunate few who went to University, and after I got married never lived near either set of parents. I had my 1st child at 25 and my 4th and last at 30. I am one of your older generation, yet all the advice given in magazines (Parents and Mother) and books (Dr. Spock) was not dissimilar to that today i.e. breastfeed on demand, you are not eating for two. In fact the big difference seems to be when to introduce solids, which was at 6 weeks for my 1st, and 3 months for my 3rd.

It certainly would be easier for someone to turn-up at the old folks home and do a few punk songs, rather than launch into a prog rock extravanganaza.

I'd be up for a bit if pogoing, although the thought of the audience spitting and gobbing on the band losing their false teeth in the process would be a bit of a concern.

My mum and mil are both in their late 50s. They were teenagers into the late 60s and early 70s.
My mum was into the bay city rollers but I think she had a pretty wild time in her late teens. And she shock horror had pre marital sex.
My grandmother who's in her late 80s told me the best thing that ever happened in her marriage was contraception, it meant she wasn't tied to babies and could have her independence and enjoy sex without the worry I love my grandma she's all kinds of awesome!

I'm a 30 year old nanny and I leave the baby to cry! She cries maybe 5 minutes 10 at a push. I settle her in the bed, lots of cuddles and kisses then she's on her own. She wakes up happy and smiling so clearly done her zero harm. That's my opinion and I respect everyone does it different.

I think there are wild variations in the attitudes and outlooks of people even within the same generation. My inlaws and my parents were all born between 1946 and 1951, so a 5 year window.

However, my in laws would by many people be perceived to be a generation older in their ways. FIL listens to wartime songs such as run rabbit run (music that his parents presumably were still playing when he was a child) where as my parents listen to some up to date music mixed in with a variety of the 60s to 80s music of their teens to thirties. PILs are averse to any technology, don't like computers, mobile phones etc, while my parents have kept up with technology and use it just as I would.

So in another 20 years time when they are all sitting in the care home together, my in laws would really enjoy renditions of the wartime songs, while my parents would rather you played a bit of the kinks, jethro tull or tubular bells (the soundtrack of my childhood!)

I have read before that it is typical for people to have a nostalgia for the time when their parents and grandparents were young, as they often hear stories about these periods as children. I wonder if this has something to do with the current trends towards the periods in question. Or perhaps the wars were just such hugely turbulent times in our recent history that they have somehow stuck with us more than other recent history?

My main question though it when will they change to sounds of the 70s or 80s on radio 2 instead of banging on with sounds of the 60s for another 3 decades?!

Oh, and I read a very interesting 1930s baby manual which said not to wean until 9 months! I thought all the early weaning came in post WW2? Though I realise this is not the main point of the thread...

I think people do this with all sorts of periods of history, not just the recent ones - they flatten out bits, and other bits become incredibly vivid and well-known, and everyone thinks they can identify with them.

Most of my generation (born in the 80s) studied WWII until it was coming out of our ears. So we think we 'know' what went on. Personally I am much more vague about, say, the events of 1962 or 1927 than I am about 1945. I can picture what people were wearing in photos of the war, for example. I totally agree about feeling as if 70s hippies were not growing up but 'disappearing', too.

But this mixture of identification with/ignorance of history goes way back. I always notice on here how people feel they really 'know' what Henry VIII's wives were like, and they talk as if there were representative attitudes of that time, that we're all quite familiar with. But then, maybe the 17th century feels quite distant and unrecoverable.

I remember when Chris Evans took over the r2 breakfast show from Wogan - he joked that the first song he'd play would be by the sex pistols (when it was thought he'd lose loads of listeners).
Then it was pointed out that if the average listener age was mid 50s to 60s, they'd have been mid 20s when punk was breaking through...

Hakluyt - sorry, didn't mean to sound snippy. It wasn't really a generational thing, just a people thing. That's the interesting thing about this thread, so thank you for starting it. People are people.

I wonder if it's that we tend to carry forward what was 'old' when we were children?

I am in my 40s. 35 years ago, when I was a young child, people who were then 60, or 70 or so had been born when? (I can't do the maths )1920s? 30s? certainly lived through the war. Were adults themselves in the 50s, etc.

So maybe it could be argued that someone my age has simply absorbed that as their idea of 'old' and remembers those days and those behaviours?

I am aware I am not really expressing myself very well but I am hoping it's clear enough that you can help me out a bit

When my children, who were born 99 & 00 are older, they will remember older people as being say my parents who were born in the mid 50s, children of the 60s and to them, what they saw as children will become 'old' and as they grow up they, like we, will retain that perception and fail to adjust it to factor in their own increasing years.

I keep trying to say-no generation is an homogeneous group. Today we have Gina Ford fans and baby wearers.
I read the continuum concept in the late 70s and breastfed on demand, some mothers were bottle feeding 4 hourly.
It is not a generational thing.
In another recent thread on MN there was a suggestion most people 60+ are racist .

i'm tired of reading all the stereotyping.
Young people under 25 get the same too.

As others have said we tend to lump history into events rather than time.

We can see that the second w. war was "a long time ago" and can lump it with black and white films, certain music styles, lack of freedom, rationing etc.

The idea of the fifties housewife is regularly used as an insult on here as someone outdated and irrelevant.

We can't easily accept that rationing, the end of the war and the 50's housewife was happening at the same time as cool mid-century design, the establishment of the Welfare State and the NHS and the fight for a more equal society. The two "ideas" don't go together in our heads as one is "old fashioned" and one is "modern"

This leads to the " all grannies are racist and like Vera Lynn" type of thinking.

I think the point about musical nostalgia is quite an interesting one. My DD liked music (as well as stuff that was current for him) from WW1, brass bands and the musical hall. I like Big Band music from the 40s as well as much more contemporary stuff. My son born in the early 90s is also interested in electronic synth rock from the 80s.

Lots of people seem to think that pensioners of my dads age (88) 'fought a war for us' whereas he spent the whole time running about in short trousers with evacuees, and my Mum's generation (75) can't even remember the war, let alone fought in it.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=lqOPsHH4dCs. This is what I will be singing in my care home, a la Doris. It is a weird thought, OP, you're right.

I think it's widely acknowledged now that the ( little wartime children:evacuees did " fight a war for us" . They endured immense hardship and rationing and loneliness from family, all in the name of war and freedom. But also watching the Benefict Cumberbatch film also made me realise Turing invented the computer more or less so there's no reason seven decades later elderly people shouldn't be computer literate.

Very interesting thread. I too get very irritated by mumsnetters who seem to think that if you're over 50 you can't help but be sexist, racist or homophobic.

I was mainly coming on to make Fenella's point that your image of what is old can sometimes become set in your childhood and never updated - but she's beaten me to it

David Cameron likes to defend his party's protection of pensioners' perks by saying they were the generation who fought for our liberty. Anyone who fought in the war would be 88 this year, which must be a very small percentage of existing pensioners.