to ask how most of our mothers coped?

[ItalianScallion]

I was born in the 70's. My mother was a SAHM and there were three of us kids. My father worked night shifts.

The youngest of us was born when I was four and the oldest was 7. My mother got us up, took us to school, took us to after school activities and sports whilst maintaining a ridiculously clean home, and doing all the laundry etc with no help or family support.

My DH has a similar upbringing except his mother and father were living abroad and travelled to several different countries to live because of the nature of FIL's work. My MIL worked nights and so they would literally hand over the kids to each other as one came home and the other went to work.

I feel that we were all raised pretty decently and I have a huge amount of respect for my parents and PIL.

Which brings me to my AIBU to think that we are getting softer? My mother and MIL shake their heads in disbelief when they hear of mothers who SAHM, have a nanny/au pair and a weekly cleaner and still talk about how they're not coping.

Don't get me wrong, parenting is a hard job but it seems that popular parenting ideas and methods are allowing us to make rods for our own backs.

Please understand I'm not referring to women with PND or any MH issues. This is MN so I know I'll be flamed by people with their anecdotes of difficult babies and their specific struggles, and I agree that there will always be exceptions to the rule. Still, I can't help but feel that we don't 'just get on with it' the way our mothers did.

I'm surprised at how some people depict the 50s childhood. I grew up in a rough inner city area, most of us were the children of immigrants. I remember mothers being very invested in children's education, I was in a class of 48 at 11 and 23 of us passed the 11 plus, one child had English parents. Not a bad result and we didn't have tutors but all had books of verbal reasoning, non verbal reasoning etc and were tutored at home by mothers who probably left school at 14, mine certainly did. My mother also cooked an evening meal for us every day, a tin of soup for an evening meal would have been a scandal and my granny thought not having fresh baked bread for breakfast was the sign of a poor housewife. A very big one upmanship thing was having a washing line full of white nappies, anything short of brilliant white was again the sign of a poor housewife.

Being seen outside scrubbing your doorstep was another sign of a good housewife, by the 70s that had stopped where I lived.

I used to work with a woman who had her baby under the kitchen table while bombs were dropping. She was hilarious when she talked about it but I don't suppose it was funny at the time.

You came shopping and socialised with all the shoppers and shop keepers.

Pretty much what my children do in Italy now! I am giving them a 1970s childhood!

Children were not ignored to the point of neglect (unless they were neglected) roomster.
If they were we would have seen much bigger rates of developmental delay and asfaik there is nothing to suggest that.

In didn't say that they were ignored to the point of neglect. They were in general given less attention than they are today, partly they didn't need as much supervision (few cars on the road vs. today) but also because there was less appreciation of the fact that adult attention/mental stimulation can benefit children in the long term. There is more awareness of that nowadays, I think.

You cannot force a child's development. You can only support it.

A child's development is supported by giving them attention at a young age though. Whilst lack of attention/support may not lead to developmental delays (unless severe and neglectful) a child that is supported well will generally do better academically and in life than one who isn't.

My memories of my SAHM mother/childhood in the early 80s is that she was pretty much absent. My major memories are her ironing and watching soaps on the tv. I would complain I was bored and just get sent to play in my room. Still bored and lonely. If I misbehaved I got hit and sent to my room. The house was tidy. She had plenty of time to do it as she prioritized it over her kids. I think this was pretty standard for most SAHMs in the past?

I keep all my housework for a blitz when the kids are in bed. We are together all the time unless they want to do their own thing, which the eldest (3) does from time to time. Open plan living/kitchen/dining makes that easier. Most of the toys are in the living room.

I get annoyed at the "kids need to be bored" brigade. My childhood was nothing but boredom and it certainly didn't result in me being creative and comfortable in my own company. Quite the opposite actually. I would do anything to avoid being alone and bored, to the extent of spending time with people I didn't like and engaging in risky behaviours. Anything but be alone feeling the hours of my life ticking by.

I think being a SAHM is way easier if you ignore and hit your kids.

Odd - my mum tells me that she doesn't know how i do it. the difference is that I work FT and she was a SAHM. She thinks it was easier for her generation because one wage was enough for a family to live on.

still, i do agree on the practicalities aspect: my mum couldn't drive, didn't have a washing machine for ages and still doesn't have a dishwasher. modern technology has definitely made my life easier.

I dream of stuff my parents had raising children in the 70s. Affordable housing. Houses with standard gardens to throw the kids in after school. Extended family living close by to lighten the load.Affordable public transport. Simple free school trips to the pond down the road. Great community playgroups where you could actually leave the children without a mountain of paperwork.
I think my mums life as a sahm in the 70s 80s was a bit easier, and she agrees.

I grew up in the 60s in a typical middle class home. Mother was a SAHM until the youngest was about 10 then went to work part time, she also had a cleaner (who was really more than that as she helped out with childcare too)

We were comfortably off but I suspect that the house was a lot easier to keep clean a tidy as we had a lot less "stuff". I never felt deprived of toys but i didn't have so many that they spilled into the living areas. Toys mostly were played with in my room, or at least put back there afterwards.
I got myself to a from school on my own from about 8 years old so no school run to do after year 3.
My mum cooked, but only one meal for all of us. Fussy eating was not tolerated. We were also expected to keep our rooms hygienic even if not tidy if we wanted pocket money.

My mum struggled as she had me at 40, with two teens and i had a dad who was very much ' thats women's work, i go out to work 12 hour days to pay the rent' and only did gardening and DIY at weekends, so no help for her there at all.
she- only purchased an automatic washer in the early 1980s and they didnt have a car either, so life wasnt great really - money was always an issue ( would have been better off not having me really , at least my mum could have gone to work) and although they didnt have any debts or anything, treats were not on the agenda much for any of us! saying that, it wasnt an unhappy childhood, i was allowed out with friends up the park or out on a push bike ( secondhand thing that was always being fixed) and had a hot dinner every night and a roof over our heads. it could have been worse i suppose. Everyone had similar childhoods on our estate, although friends whose parents had a car, i thought they were rich. lol.

I've read the full thread and there hasn't been much mention of the fact that MOST FAMILIES DON'T GIVE CHORES TO THE KIDS.

This started in the 70s when labour saving devices became popular, so instead of the SAHM spending her time on laundry, scrubbing and mopping or trudging to the shops every day to buy basic fresh ingredients, some bright spark has come up with the modern idea that children, not parents, should be the ones to benefit by having more time to play, watch TV and have supervised creative activities.

My parents were born in 1932 ane we 4 were born between 1957 and 1967. The oldest was literally our babysitter (with DF) when DM had her Saturday job. We were all fully expected to wash the dishes, hang out the washing, do the gardening, help cook and clean and help with DIY. NO MONEY was involved.

And attitudes changed in that period. DSis was very embarrassed when a party game she'd invented (Who can peel the longest strip off a potato?) fell flat because nobody knew how to use a peeler. At my own 9th birthday party one little madam girl exclaimed "Oh, you made your own birthday cake, how quaint!" . In some ways it was child labour but my childhood was pretty idyllic.

I'm not saying modern hands-on parenting has gone too far in the opposite direction. But I am saying that SAHP are expected to spend a lot more time parenting than one or two generations ago.

My SAHM experience isn't tooooo dissimilar from my mum's experience in the 80s. I have a dishwasher (though didn't for a long time) and microwave, which she didn't, and have just acquired a tumble drier but managed without one for years. I've also made shameless use of CBeebies, which she couldn't. But then she could chuck us out to play in the nice enclosed garden of the house she owned, which wasn't there in many of my (endless series of) rented houses.

Mum's house was pretty messy, my house is too. Mum cooked, I cook - we have more convenience food now, but there were definitely lots of baked beans, fish fingers and oven chips in my childhood, and the odd takeaway. She didn't drive, I don't drive. Dad helped out sporadically, DH helps more or I'd have brained him by now.

If there's a big difference it's in the cost of various things. My parents owned property from their early twenties on, in a pretty town within commuting distance of London - v v desirable these days. When I was little we moved into a four bed house near a good school in a leafy suburb of said town, all on my dad's average salary. Our lifestyle was basic but we didn't want for anything and housing was very affordable.

We now run our household on DH's well-above-average salary, but we didn't manage to buy a house until our mid-thirties, and that was a frantic effort with a tiny deposit - and we had to move a hundred miles from 'home' to afford it. OTOH my DC have eaten in restaurants that just didn't exist when I was a kid, seen more theatre productions already than I'd seen by the time I left home, tried activities that weren't on my parents' radar at all. (No, skipping the meals out and theatre wouldn't have helped us save enough to buy property in my home town - only a lottery win would pull that off. My grandparents paid cash for their house in the centre of town, it's now worth a million quid. Might as well be on the moon for us.)

I think things were very different for my grandparents. AFAIK my dad's parents coped by having a cleaner and my mum's parents coped badly. :(

Odd - my mum tells me that she doesn't know how i do it. the difference is that I work FT and she was a SAHM. She thinks it was easier for her generation because one wage was enough for a family to live on. Oh that we could all have been SAHM as one wage was enough to live on. Just because it was true in some families don't assume it was in all. I never had longer than 6 months off with any of mine.

No need to be roomster but thanks for the tips on child development.
WTF would I know hey?

My mother and MIL shake their heads in disbelief when they hear of mothers who SAHM, have a nanny/au pair and a weekly cleaner and still talk about how they're not coping

Don't we all? It's not like that is the norm.

Youve set up a false dichotomy to argue. Most of us are just the same as our parents were, just normal parents getting on with shit.

I don't understand why she would need help or family support? She was a sahm. You say she got you up, to school and after school activities all on her own? Is that not what millions of other people do?

Both my Mum and my Grandma say they think it's way harder these days.

It's all relative. And every has different circumstances. This is a pretty silly argument really.

What I find odd is that virtually everyone on this thread claims that they don't have hired help or cleaners, and no-one they know has one. Yet on another thread the other week, around 3 out of 5 of the posters claimed they had a cleaner, and that everyone they know has one.

Maybe it's just a coincidence that hardly anyone from that thread from the other week is posting on this thread.

Also, re the person who said her mother had 14 children (page 3,) and struggled really bad. I do wonder why she had 14 children? Surely she must have figured it was 'hard work' after the first 5 or 6???

I think it's ludicrous to suggest that women had it much harder then and have it much easier now. It's entirely subjective, and anecdotal. As I said earlier in the thread, I feel life is waaaaay more stressful for women these days (and has been since the 1990's actually!) Because a lot more is expected of us, we often have to go out to work, (as a family can no longer live on one wage,) and we have very little help; if any, as many women have mothers and other female relatives who work too. In addition, some families are fractured, and some live 100's - or even 1000's of miles away from each other.

I know my life has been harder than my mothers ever was. She even said that herself at one point.

Where I grew up (not London), many families were able to do very nicely on a single salary (always the dads) with a semi, newish car, package holidays to Spain, possibly even private schools. On a teacher's, solicitor's or doctor's salary. Dads got home at 6pm.

user149 perhaps the difference is that this thread focuses on SAHMs?

We're one of the only families I know where both parents work full time and don't have a cleaner but although I live in an area with lots of well off families with a SAHM/SAHD it's still not that common to have a cleaner when one partner is at home all day.

User, where I live almost everyone I know has a cleaner once a week. If I look at my circle of friends even the ones without kids have cleaners. It's a reasonably affordable luxury if you hate cleaning. Quite a few families around me have nannies and au pairs but many more share a nanny so the cost is reduced. I'm also surprised by the number of posters that don't know anyone in this position as the subject seems to appear a lot on MN. I don't live in a particularly affluent area either, at least by London standards which I accept are different to the rest of the UK

I'm not sure your comment about the mother with 14 children holds water. My grandmother had 12 children and I'm pretty sure she worked out how hard is was after 3, but unfortunately being the wife of a drunken bastard and a good Catholic, she had little say in the matter. She died young and I can only assume she was grateful. Her life was wretched. Women then didn't have the choices they do today, or rather the support to leave abusive relationships that is available now. Perhaps the mother of 14 mentioned upthread was in a similar position. Also the level of support and understanding we have now for substance abuse and mental health didn't exist back then.

Working class families always had 2 working parents though. My mum wasn't a SAHM, nor my Nanna, nor her mother before her. It's not worse now for everyone because many of us never had that luxury!

As to the numbers of children, presumably that is related to the availability of birth control...ok maybe not my mum's generation but my Nanna's certainly, she had 6 children but at least double that number of pregnancies due to no birth control, she wasn't a fan of children so I am sure would have preferred one or two.

Clothes dried faster - my mum still comments jockingly that I buy 'too high quality' when cotton tshirts and pyjamas are taking a while on the line. We're taking M&S or Next stuff nothing unusual.

Life was naturally a bit healthier to less 'exercise time' required - it's hard to recreate this even if you're aware of it and the will is there.

Increased car ownership means the temptation is there to fit more in and be more 'efficient' - even if true efficiency would be not doing the probably optional running around in the first place.

Less guilt about kids not achieving - I can't really swim properly - my mum didn't drive - she didn't beat herself up about it but would shrug 'you can't do it all' if I complained.

Schoolwork - I feel I have to do extra at home as the pace is glacial in school - we were definitely pushed more in the 80s.

My mum didn't wohm and I do which is probably the biggest difference though. And both DHs and my jobs cut into our spare time severely.

Working class families always had 2 working parents though. My mum wasn't a SAHM, nor my Nanna, nor her mother before her. It's not worse now for everyone because many of us never had that luxury!

Same , well going back to my great granddmother who was born 140 years ago I can say we never had SAHM in the family. Women worked, often working anti social hours so husband's could look after kids or older kids doing it after school. I knew many women who went out to cleaning jobs at 5 in the morning and got home to get kids to school, went to another job and then picked up kids. Knew some who worked in the local chippie in the evening or in a pub. I well remember women who really did do an 18 hr days between work and home, no wonder they looked old and worn out by 40.

Also environmental guilt is a new drain of small but regular amounts of energy and time - sorting out recycling, running to charity shops, finding suitable outlets for outgrown toys, trying to avoid using the time-saving gadgets we worked to pay for...