AIBU to wonder how some people coped in former times?

[Flyingfish2019]

When they had 12 children, husband was working down the mines 16 hours a day, no transportation, no frozen/canned food, no fridge, constantly pregnant. No help if somebody suffered a disability (and I think this was likely working down the mines those days).

I just wondered because I have far less then 12 children and dh does not work down the mines and still we are often soooooo tired. Children keeping us awake play a role in this... how would we cope if there was 12 of them and we had to live under the conditions described above?

I think babies stayed in prams until they were about 2 a lot of the time to keep them out of mischief, and then put in a playpen. Put in a pram and parked out in the 'fresh air'. Once they were too old for this older siblings were expected to look after them and they were turfed outside.
I agree that those from privileged backgrounds were emotionally neglected. Sent to boarding school in my mother's case at 8 and only coming home once a year. Her brother was sent at 5. They had a younger brother who was badly burned when he pulled the tablecloth off the table and doused himself in boiling tea. I don't think their mother was the attentive sort really.

Expectancy from life was lower, and therefore less pressure in people to do so much. There was none of this #makingmemories stuff.

Life was hard, but people expected it to be so. Children's lives weren't so structured with clubs and enrichment activities. They sorted themselves out a lot more, and in certain eras poor children would be out earning from a relatively young age too.

Whilst average life expectancy was lower many people, even in poor areas, did infact live long lives. Just the mortality rates for infants was so low it brought it all down a lot. But it wasn't unusual for people to love into their 80s and even 90s. However this also brought its own issues.

... how would we cope if there was 12 of them and we had to live under the conditions described above?

My granddad, born in the early 1890s was one of 11 children. The way his mother coped was by focusing sternly on the practical things: he said later in life that he could not remember her ever having played or joked or cuddled him. The interesting thing is that the lesson my granddad took from this was not that "we were tougher in them days, children these days are soft and spoilt". Quite to the contrary: while he understood on one level that his mother probably hadn't had much choice, he also thought it was very sad and did everything he could to be a hands-on parent to his own children (only 2) in the 1920s and 30s: rushed home from work to play with them, always spent weekends and holidays with them. He'd missed that warmth and attention in his own childhood and wanted to make sure it was there for his children. Probably helped by the fact that his wife had come from a much smaller family, with more time for the softer things in life.

MiGi777 I think that was fairly unusual 42 years ago. I am 60 and we all had bathrooms and central heating. We weren't particularly well off

ExH (now 55 years) lived in a Peabody flat in East London. He remembers sharing an outside toilet with other families and having a tin bath in the front room. He was 10 years old before they got their own bathroom. He doesn’t remember feeling poor as everyone else he knew led similar lives.

*.the kids did a lot.

The kids did baby minding, shopping, cleaning and even fetching coal*

Another friend (also in his 50s) used to play out all day in a gang of children. Aged 8 years, he watched his elder brother (aged 11) drown in a lake - there were no adults around to help.

My DF’s (85 years) had a job aged 6 years selling salt in twists of paper door to door.

I think re fertility issues seeming less common then - I think because of the practice of family members taking in the “extra” children from other parts of the family, it wouldn’t always be apparent. There are virtually no adoption records pre-1928.

I have lost count the number of different ways I would have been dead if I'd been born in a different generation
I would have died in childbirth impart from anything else

Referring to a pp earlier on, I don't know how accurate Call the Midwife is but they seemed to show a lot of toddlers and babies sitting in prams outside houses and flats.

My parents and grandparents grew up without having any bathrooms at all in India. They went into fields (often groups of young women or girls going together for safety). They would tie sheets to bushes and trees to make makeshift bathrooms and then take a bucket bath huddled in there.

I reckon at least two of my gran's siblings had fertility issues but nobody talked about it and there was nothing to be done about it.

Not read the full thread but I have worked in a very poor country in Africa where I imagine conditions similar to olden days in developed world e.g. no access to healthcare, large families, minimal possessions.

I visited several.villages where the kids run round in packs all day exploring, playing and helping out. Even tiny ones of 2yo. Babies are carrird on their mothers bsck in a sling so the mum just get on with their day, breastfeed when needed. The village works together to look after each other. Sadly healthcare is dire and children die from.preventable diseases. Childbirth mortality rates are horrific and if your child has a disability there is little help. I saw adults carrying adults on there backs to get them to hospital. In short they are bloody tough people!!

We have it easy physically compared to them, but we are severely missing community these days and live isolated lives where expectations are high, social media is showing us the highlights if others lives making us feel miserable. I think we are becoming more detached from a healthy life with longer working hours/commutes/ processed food and returning to work so early after having children.

Fluffymullet I couldn't agree more.

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My dad is one of many, born just after the war:

• kids spent all day outside
• It wasn’t unusual to wear the same clothes all week or longer - kids were actually sewn into their clothes with a layer of brown paper underneath to help keep them warm for the winter (stank to high heaven come spring)
• coal was Stolen under Cover of darkness from the coal cellar at the school (it couldn’t shut for a few days) when it had a delivery

Oh, and as soon as you could earn, you did, and when you moved out you still sent money home.

Fluffy this reminds of having someone from a very poor religious community in India to stay with us for a couple of weeks on an exchange programme. At the end of the stay, after being wined and dined and shown all manner of marvellous things, his comment was that he felt deeply sorry for us all because we were all so isolated and lonely. He was shocked by the insular, selfish lives we lead in this country and how little we interact with others. He couldn't wait to get home.

My grandma always used to say she wanted six children but it 'didn't happen' (she had three). It's only fairly recently I realised she must have had a lot of miscarriages or years of TTC disappointment, rather than choosing not to have more as we might now. Not sure how she'd have afforded them though!

I read an interesting book about the life of working class women in London,I think it was post WW1,maybe the 1930s? But the thing I remember most was how poor their health was.The family money,if there was any for medical care,went to the men,who were working,and the children.The women had bad teeth,bad eyes,all sorts of gynae problems,it was just the norm.
The post way back at the beginning of the thread about thrush made me remember,I think thrush would have been the least of their problems.

Infant mortality is being overstated. Huge rise due to Spanish flu post WW1 but even then it was about 8 in a 100 under a year and about 4 in a hundred under 5. From about 1950 the death rate had already plummeted to around 2 per 100 live births. Most children did reach adulthood in the UK.

ONS stats show that infant mortality in 1901 was around 160 deaths per 1000 babies. Around 20% of all deaths occurred at age 65+. Disease and illness accounted for most deaths across all age groups and the biggest drops in infant mortality came with the introduction of vaccines.

My paternal grandmother had ten children spread across the mid-40s to late-50s. Three died in infancy - one of what would now be called SIDS ("sometimes they just slipped away in the night"),, one choked on a piece of food, and the other died of whooping cough. One died in early childhood when she was run over by a car on her way to school, she was 8yo. The others survived to adulthood. I can't fathom losing four children in a relatively short period of time and not going to pieces over it.

I wouldn't have lasted five minutes in any time period that could be classified as "the olden days". DDH would have meant I was lame and if by some change I found a man willing to overlook it, I would have lost DC2 during delivery , possibly DC3 too depending on how good a MW I would have had but definitely would have died a few years later delivering DC4. DC3 wouldn't have survived infancy due to a serious infection needing antibiotics, neither would DC4 who initially needed special care and feeding support for failure to thrive.

Depends how far back you're going. I've spent time living in rural East Africa, where in many ways people's lives are medieval. There was no running water or power; people cooked on wood and had to fetch water. It was very hard work. Those I knew were having fewer children (5-6 rather than 12) as contraception is available, and primary schooling is compulsory.

Women use rags for sanitary protection. It's pretty grim.
Children are in school classes of up to 150 with very few resources (a cane and a blackboard)
The vast majority of people I knew were subsistence farmers. Children would be with them in the fields and helping from a very young age. Those too young to do this would be cared for by older relatives at home.
There's some form of work for everyone, including those with learning difficulties if they can wield a hoe. Which is good, as far more have learning difficulties due to poor medical care leading to oxygen starvation at birth. I would expect that to have been more prevalent here in the past.
Women do work very very hard. However it's dark for 10 hours at a time, which means they do get a reasonable amount of sleep (kerosene is expensive and smelly).
Women tend to have respiratory diseases due to cooking over an open fire in an enclosed room (I was at altitude, so it could get cold, even frosty - you needed to be able to be indoors).

How do they cope? Very different expectations. Religion (mainly Christianity) plays a very big part in people's lives. Systems for dealing with early death (husbands and wives could be 'inherited' by the next unmarried sibling, so if the wife died, her younger sister would be expected to marry her husband). People tend to live with their extended family close by, though not in the same household - a man had to be able to provide his wife with her own kitchen to get married! Close by but not together probably helped a lot judging by the MIL threads on here.

Some men travelled for work, but it was a minority. There were few conventionally paid jobs, and no factories, so families were at least together (if not always happily).

Oh, and the vast majority of women had lost at least one child, often in infancy, but not always.

The the pre-NHS days, my grandmother and mother would have died during labour so I wouldn’t even exist now.

My paternal grandfather was one Of 11 children, 22 years between the oldest living child and the youngest born (the youngest born sibling is two years younger than the first born nephew). 10 lived to adulthood. My paternal great- grandparents were born in the 1910’s. My paternal great grandfather was also one of 10, the youngest and one of two of those 10 to survive beyond the age of 10, there was quite a large gap between the older 8 and the youngest 2. He would only have known one or two of those eight other siblings, all the others were dead before he was even born.

It is unimaginable, to us as we live now, to lose 8 children.

I often think of this. And how lucky I am to live in the Britain of the nhs, welfare state, and social housing. I was also shocked by something I read recently about the lack of rights women had.. The woman’s husband had died and he had left guardianship of their son to someone else, and that was it, she had no rights at all to that child any more. And of course domestic abuse was legal, rape in marriage was legal, beating your children was legal. I think the poor would have been hungry, cold, and miserable; but the children of the rich were raised by servants, sent away to boarding school, and pretty emotionally deprived too. I guess your best bet was to be somewhere in the middle.. enough money not to go hungry, but parents who loved each other and you.

My nan was born in 1912 and was the eldest of 10 siblings. From about the age of ten she was second in command in the house, she went to school in the mornings when they did the three "r"s but in the afternoons it was needlework and she wasn't allowed to stay for that. Her mother claimed there was plenty for her to learn about sewing and cooking at home. I think she left school altogether aged 12.

My nan lived to 100 despite hardship, I think she was tough as nails looking back.

Therewillbeadequatefood
My great grandma was basically euthanasiaed by the GP. She had cancer and was in so much pain. He admitted to my grandma he gave her an overdose to end her life (she had at best a week of agony ahead of her). The whole family were so grateful for that act of kindness

This really resonated with me. Exactly the same thing happened to my Great Grandma. The poor woman had a huge leg cancer (presumably untreated as although the NHS offered the miracle of free healthcare, there wasn't much that could be done then anyway).

My gran remembers the terrible cries of pain from her mum's bedroom. The doctor gave her a 'painkiller' which essentially euthanised her. It was definitely a common but unspoken thing. This was in the 50s.

Despite the stresses of modern life, I thank god that I live in a UK with free healthcare, education and support if I am in need. I only hope this continues for the next generation .

This is very sobering and moving... www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/10/hunger-filth-fear-and-death-remembering-life-nhs?amp

Looking at my family history, there's not many who had more than five or six children (obvioisly there's the odd ones who had eleven or there abouts) and very few who seemed to have fertility issues. Not that that's a trait that can be passed down, just that we seem to be a very fertile family. And it was often the men who died before the women. Our women are hardy things.

As for how they coped; a lot of children, once they got to 12 or a bit older, would go and work as servants. Or become an apprentice, or occasionally sneak into the Navy by pretending to be older (got a few of those in my ancestry). The women would be helpful amongst themselves, the children would either be at school or outside playing, or helping in fields.

As for sanitary pads... They had a sort of belt where they would then have fabric wrapped around and held in place. They didn't have crotches in their underwear in the early 1800's at least.

People helped each other more- community spirit. Religion may have been comfort to some. Expectations and aspirations much lower. Big families - older ones looked after the little ones, kids played outside and made their own amusements, they wouldn’t be under the parents feet all day.

I've recently moved to a small island community, and this is exactly what it is like here. Most people work 2 (or more jobs) happily, but it's just because that is what you do, not for any particular materialistic gains. The concept of making lots of money just doesn't seem to come into their minds. Everything gets repurposed or reused because anything new comes by ship and it's expensive and a long wait. My neighbour knows she can go to her night job and leave her 10 and 12 year olds home because they leave doors unlocked and they know they can come over here for anything if they need. Food is shared around, and it's not uncommon to come home and there's a basket of fresh fruit and veg on the bench, or some homemade jam or a cake. There is no aged care facilities, so everyone keeps an eye on the elderly and makes sure they are looked after. Teens are pretty much free range, and all head to the beach to hang out after school or on weekends together. No wi-fi in any public areas, so the kids aren't constantly on phones.

It's a completely different pace of life, with different expectations and priorities.