You didn't live through those times so how can you possibly know if it was easier.
You mention mortgage rates but most people didn't have the money to buy their own homes and if you think renters are at the mercy of their landlords nowadays, it's nothing compared to the way some renters were treated. In the 50/60 landlords such as the infamous Peter Rachman were able to intimidate and make renters lives a misery because renters had little or no protection under the law.
I was born at the end of the 1940s. Wash day for my mother, was literally that, a whole day of boiling the weekly wash and hanging it sopping wet on the washing line in the hope it would dry. I can remember her bringing sheets in off the line in winter that had frozen into a solid block.
We had no fridge when I was a child so my mother had to shop every other day for fresh meat and fish. No car, so she had to carry everything home herself. Buses were infrequent, and she certainly couldn't get her shopping delivered by those handy vans that come from Ocado.
Yes, she didn't feel the need to make her children the centre of her world, mainly because she had neither the time, nor I imagine, the energy left over between making most of the children's clothes herself, preparing all meals from scratch and all the other housework she had to do and generally caring for her children. Oh, and if children got ill, there was no such thing as antibiotics. When my siblings were young children died from what we call 'childhood illnesses', it was a fact of life.
I was the youngest, my mother was lucky in that unlike most of her generation of married women, she didn't have the additional burden of raising her children on her own whilst her husband was away fighting in a war. My father was too old to go to war and anyway, was in the police so didn't go to fight.
My life, bring up my children in the 80s was completely different as I was living in very comfortable circumstances. But even so I still had stresses and worries about bringing up my children.
My children were pretty much the centre of my life. I was in my thirties when I had them and a SAHM. My children most certainly weren't left to their own devices.
Unlike my mother I had every modern convenience to hand and live in help and I still found bringing up children tough.
Every generation of mothers has different worries and concerns. You can't really understand what it was like for previous generations, in the same way, they wouldn't be able to understand what it's like for your generation.
But you're wrong if you think it's harder now that it was in the past.