To think raising a child was much easier for previous generations?

[wondering7777]

For my parents and certainly my grandparents’ generation, bringing up children must have been so much easier.

Mortgages were a hell of a lot cheaper for starters, but now the average home costs something like ten times the average salary. As a result, in most cases both parents have to go out to work whether they want to or not, and pay extortionate childcare costs to keep a roof over their heads. In the “old days” mothers were far more likely to be able to take time off work and the family could pay the mortgage on one salary.

In addition, my grandparents’ generation were much more likely to have family living nearby and a more close-knit community to help raise the child.

Judging from what I read on Mumsnet, there’s also a lot of competitive parenting these days, and a lot of parents feel they have to put their child at the centre of their universe, which causes stress. Children from my grandparents’ era were left to their own devices and would play out for hours.

There was no technology then so no angst about children accessing the internet and the reams of inappropriate content that is readily available at the click of a button.

Uni was free so parents didn’t have to save up to send those kids who did go, and jobs were far more readily available when children left school.

Also, the cartoons were better

AIBU?

Uni was irrelevant for most because only the brightest went. Most kids left school and either got a job or did a course at the local college.

Not fun trying to raise a family when you had regular power cuts, bin men always on strike, dead bodies piling up because the council grave diggers were on strike. Always worried about jobs - on TV nearly every night a list of thousands of job cuts at major employers, such as car firms, mines, ship yards, etc.

Having to get up an hour earlier in the morning to set up and light the coal fire in the kitchen which powered the hot water (no central heating in those days).

Having to go out shopping for literally everything you wanted, multiple trips on the bus if you didn't have a car because you couldn't carry much.

But yeah - great days compared to now where you can buy everything you need at the click of a mouse and get it delivered tomorrow, where your house and water is already warm because you set the CH controls to come on 20 minutes before you get up, etc etc.

Actually the only thing is that life today is different - not necessarily better, not necessarily worse.

As ever with these threads, people are mixing up lots of different times and experiences.

FWIW, my MIL got married in 1953 at the age of 36 and had to give up her Civil Service job which she'd had for over 20 years, ever since leaving school, as married women were not employed. She found another job in the City quite easily, though, but gave that up when my husband was born. Later she went back to the Civil Service part-time because in the late 60s/early 70s there was a recruitment drive targeted at those former female employees, after the policy changed.

My mum gave up her teaching job in the early 60s when I was born. I'm not sure if she would have been allowed to carry on if she'd wanted to. I think it would have been hard to find childcare. She went back to teaching within a few years, doing a bit of supply work first and then taking a part-time job in a school. This was possible because my brother and I were at the same school, so no childcare needed. (Different times for teachers then! They worked much the same hours as the children, with maybe a bit of lesson prep/marking in the evening.)

All of this seemed similar to what was happening in other families we knew when I was growing up. There were women who never worked again after marriage, or at any rate after having children, but they were unusual.

OP - yes, life was so easy :) I do think you are looking through rose tinted spectacles though.....

No central heating, no disposable nappies so I scrubbed all the dirty nappies by hand and then boiled them in a Burco boiler, rinsed by hand, wrung them out before hanging the nappies on the washing line.

If you wanted a coil contraceptive device fitted, as a married woman, your husband had to sign the consent form.

When you left work to have a baby, you left work. No benefits or pregnancy cover were available.

Competitive parenting was definitely happening then.

Every generation has its problems and difficulties.

To be fair the past does look jolly nice in Peepo! The fittie dad giving the baby a bath by the fire, mummy snoozing in the armchair in her floral frock and fabulous shoes, a gorgeous vintage brass bed with a patchwork quilt that would cost you an arm and a leg in Anthropologie these days, bit of homey clutter, grandma keeping an eye on the older kids; lovely.

Oh yeah and the education thing.....it might have been free but in the 60's only 6% of the population went to university. There's little chance someone like me who was brought up by teenage parents in one of the most deprived areas of the country wound have gone to uni never mind ended up with a PhD and working as an academic.

Yes, It was easier to get a mortgage in the 70s.
For much of the 60s and early 70s you could only get a mortgage from a building society - you were expected to have a record of saving with them and there were often waiting lists as they were very cautious about the ratio of savings to lending.

Here are the actual figures for Interest Rates -

www.bsa.org.uk/BSA/files/5c/5c180498-5e52-4a41-b022-5821c25f3cbd.pdf

Would have swapped my parenting days for my mothers or grandmothers? Absolutely not.
My grandmother (children in 1920s) worked as a housekeeper for very long hours. She had to give up work on marriage and lived in poverty afterwards. She had four surviving children. Four children died under five years of age. That’s eight children and the consequent toll on her body.
Of the four surviving children, two died during the war. I can’t begin to imagine the pain of one of my sons being lost in action after his ship sunk off Malta. The younger two were evacuated and suffered significant abuse. I wouldn’t like that much either.
Then no washing machine, no television, no NHS when your children were ill, no obstetric unit to help with complicated births.
No benefits if your husband was ill or you were widowed, you just survived without money. A diet of winkles, tripe and onions and homegrown veg wasn’t entirely appealing. Particularly since you had to pick the winkles and grow the vegetables alongside all the other work.
Regardless of how bright you were, your life was pretty much ordered from your birth. There was limited social mobility and people were expected to ‘know their place’.
But hey, they all sang ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’ at Christmas.

Nah. I would rather be who I am. My mum had over 10 siblings and 3 pairs of shoes. Wake up late? No shoes. No money either. As in - some days she had no food. So no. I don’t want to like like that.

Yabu
Different times, different problems

The OP referred to raising children being easier, not to being a woman in general. I see her point; expectations of parents, especially fathers, seem to have been a lot lower. My grandmother, born in 1917, told me once that having children was easy, that they only took a lot of looking after in the first few years. She didn't bother mentioning that they were all sent to boarding school later on, which my mother was strongly against doing to her own children. Mum said they were chronically hungry at boarding school.

In letters to her brother, grandma wrote that she would have liked to have more children (they had five), and that it was exasperating that my grandfather, who was a history teacher at that point, insisted on having all his clothes made for him by a tailor when they were worrying about covering other expenses. They were different times, all right, with different priorities.

Life in poverty has always been tough. Austerity has seen life get harder again compared to 15-20 years ago. At least basic standards have risen and all have access to a decent level of healthcare and education even if outcomes vary.

Socially, life is more flexible. It is socially acceptable to be divorced or a single parent. That might not make life easy, but at least young unmarried mothers aren't sent off to institutions anymore. Life with disabilities is still tough, but there is a better chance of opportunities and independence. Until the 80s/ 90s, people were institutionalised possibly for life despite being capable of independent living.

Today, luxuries are cheap but basics have got dearer. The list of what is considered basic has grown which puts much more pressure on people. That's a big factor on putting pressure higher up the social ladder.

The boundaries of upper working class/ lower middle class have become more blurred and there is probably more social pressure at this level compared to before. Regulation and child welfare means childcare has become more expensive (plus people living away from family networks). Two incomes are often necessary to maintain a pleasant standard of living which requires more working hours from parents.

I don't think this is an easy era to be a child. Constant supervision, a child-unfriendly curriculum, testing, advertising, online-stranger danger. Little freedom to develop yourself, free from structure. There were plenty of hazards in the past, poorer living conditions, having to put up and shut up with abuse, poor healthcare, but we are openly seeing poor mental health in young people and the system is poorly provided for and often exacerbates it.

Would I go back in time? No more than 20 years!

@Mummyoflittledragon

Yep and then they’d be darned and patched and put on the next child. You’d get your money’s worth and it’s far better for the planet! Definitely not easier though, modern parents have it so much easier.

Modern parents have it so much easier, and I’m saying that as a young modern parent who makes and mends my kids clothes and chose to use traditional terry nappies instead of modern cloth nappies! I suppose the difference is that I chose that lifestyle instead of it being the only option.

Re thread title ...
Bollocks.
That’s from someone born in the 1950s.

I had a fabulous childhood in the 60s. We didn't have masses of stuff but I wouldn't swap with today's pressures of social media for all the tea in China.

Lots of people saying there was no or very limited TV - I’m not sure why that’s a bad thing!

I think I have it easier than my parents and grandparents ever did. I'm 49 and grew up on the 70s.

My mum and dad had two jobs each to be able to pay the mortgage. Dad did a manual job all day and then did a window cleaning round at the weekends. Mum would do work from home type jobs during the day( Avon first and then a provident round) and then bar work every evening. We had a babysitter for an hour every evening for the crossover period between mum going out to work and dad getting home.

They were constantly worrying about money and Dad lived in constant fear of redundancy.

It as only when we were older and at senior school that mum was able to get a better paid job and start to have a better standard of living. She ended up earning far ore than my Dad and they now finally have a very comfortable life in retirement.

My grandparents really struggled. They both worked in low paid jobs and were never able to buy property. My grandad is still alive and still rents a council house.

At one point my mum was sent to live with her grandmother because money was so tight.

I've had a much different life. I worked for 20 years before giving up to be a SAHM and have never had any financial worries. My sister has had the same experience as me and is also now a SAHM with a very comfortable life.

I had a fabulous childhood in the 60s. We didn't have masses of stuff but I wouldn't swap with today's pressures of social media for all the tea in China.

I know - I regularly thank my lucky stars that I grew up before social media took off.

I've had a much different life. I worked for 20 years before giving up to be a SAHM and have never had any financial worries. My sister has had the same experience as me and is also now a SAHM with a very comfortable life.

That sounds good - I would prefer to be a SAHM if I could but sadly we can’t afford it. It’s great that you had that option.

It may have been "easier" one or two generations back if you had family nearby and could just hit your kids if they disobeyed you but the generations before the welfare state not so much. I'm sure my Great Grandmother who was pregnant with baby no. 5 when her husband died in the 1930s would have happily swapped a life where she didn't have to work FT with a baby cared for by its older siblings so she could keep a roof over their heads and dread the doctor's costs.

no I think we have it easier in some respects. I wouldn't have liked to be my grandma bringing up 4 kids during the miners strike tbh.

Yes, they have a lovely house now with thousands in equity which they bought for about £1500 which lets face it, is great for her, but those years must have been really hard.

Equally I cant imagine post war time being much fun.

Maybe theyre all equally shit times to bring children up in different ways.

Education is complicated. Essay follows, sorry!

OTOH, the 1947 Education Act gave all children a free education from age 5 to 15, with the last four years in a secondary school. (Previously the school leaving age was 14 and most children had their entire education in an elementary school with no specialist facilities or teaching for science and so on.)

The idea was to divide children at 11 and send the ones with the most academic aptitude to grammar school, the ones with a more technical bent to technical schools and the majority would get a sound, broad-based education in a secondary modern school.

In practice the technical schools never materialised (lack of money, I suppose) so we ended up with a two-tier system. Private schools still existed too, so the great class divide was not eliminated by the new system, as many had hoped.

Middle class children had a huge advantage because of the way the 11+ test was worded. Even so, many working class children did pass it and get the chance to go to grammar school.

But:

1. It wasn't easy being a working class child in a grammar school and many children who did go left early because they hated it.

(a) Many were bullied from snobbery - patronised at best.

(b) In many families there were tensions as children were taught that they needed to move up in the world and leave their working class roots behind.

(c) Even for those who did go and do well, there was family pressure to leave and start earning so they didn't always fulfil their academic potential by staying on to do O and A levels.

Also, of course, it was more expensive for children to go to grammar school because of the uniform and travel costs. Not all local authorities reimbursed those costs so some families just couldn't afford to take up the place.

1. It wasn't wonderful for middle class families either. (This is the clincher, and the reason why we no longer have the 11+ in most of the country - there was political pressure from the middle classes to abolish it. It's amazing how quickly people have forgotten this now.)

(a) Social mobility means some people go up and others go down. Middle class families have more means at their disposal to avoid going down. Children who didn't pass the 11+ would go to the secondary modern, and those schools were rarely as well-funded than the grammar schools, with very limited opportunities to do exams. A few kids were able to transfer to grammar schools at 13, but that wasn't easy. So middle class families often sent their children instead to private schools. This undermined the whole aim of the 1947 Education Act.

(b) Many middle class families were very angry about this because of the cost, or because they were middle class but couldn't afford fees, so they lobbied MPs to change to a comprehensive school system. It was of course especially painful when one child passed the 11+ and another one didn't.

1. Secondary moderns weren't great, but to be brutally honest neither were a lot of grammar schools. Some of them were marvellous, many individual teachers were great, but there was so much snobbery! Many of them slavishly imitated the public schools, for no good reason. Their teaching was often very old-fashioned and rigid. Narrow curriculum.

The great hope when comprehensive schools came in was that every child would get an education that suited their particular talents. The child who was brilliant at English but hopeless at Maths, so would never have passed the 11+, could now be in the top set for English and get support to do better at Maths. The child who struggled with all academic work could now get support and not have the stigma of being an 11+ failure. The super-bright child who would have sailed through the 11+ could still get a good academic education but if she chose to could end up doing vocational qualifications that the grammar school wouldn't have offered. (And if all those children were from the same family, they'd all move on to the same school.)

In practice, that proved to be a huge challenge, of course, and in the last 20 years in particular we do seem to have moved in the opposite direction. One size fits all, target-driven. Not great.

Just as an aside - I don't have central heating now. It's not a universal right, you know.

There are pros and cons. More time with the children, but less money to spend on them in the past. Cheaper housing but less work (my mum's generation had to give up work when they got married, in a lot of jobs). Housework was a full time job (we had a gas 'copper' for washing clothes, and a mangle, 'washday' was Monday, when I was small). But kids had more freedom, we used to play in the woods all day when not at school, no relentless clubs and sports and drive to be the most successful all the time.

Swungs and roundabouts. But, yes. Some people still live like that now.

The thing is though, there’s a massive difference between the 1930s and the 1990s and threads like these don’t ever seem to acknowledge that. People talk about this misty “back then” like it’s one homogeneous time when everyone was exactly the same, no one had anything and everyone lived in poverty. It’s just not true.

I was born in the 70s into a solidly working class northern family and I think my kids’ childhood was much more similar to mine than mine was to my parents’. When I was a kid we had a washing machine, a telly (albeit rented) and a car, we we far from rich but both my parents worked. My grandparents lives were very different, hand washing nappies and filthy work overalls, making fires to do all the cooking and heat the house and the water, growing as much food as possible because there was little money to buy it.

Given the torrent of constant moaning about absolutely everything from people in their 50s and beyond i.e. this thread - i'd take issue at that generalisation.

I take issue with all generalisations.

I think my mum had it much harder than I have. Lots of reasons have been listed and there are many things to add but I've no doubt it was harder for my parents than it is for DH and me, particularly my mum.

Conversely, I think it's much harder to be a kid now than it was for me. They've got all the 'stuff', but they've got all the shit that goes with it too.