Too hate the “never did me any harm” brigade

[lastqueenofscotland]

You know the type
“I drank through all my 72784 pregnancies and all my children are fine.”
“I never vaccinated my kids and they are healthy”
“My Nan smoked 749298492838 a day and had the lungs of an 18 year old.”

Personal anecdotes do not outweigh often decades and decades of research. There are always outliers.
And if people want to engage in risky behaviour that could potentially harm their unborn child or increases their chances of developing diseases, crack on. But don’t try and justify it by arguing with the science

This is really interesting! My son was born forty years ago - we co slept - carefully of course but there were no guidelines, it was generally frowned upon; he had a cot bumper....I never knew cot bumpers were dangerous! Oh well - hee hee - it did him no harm :-) (I had to say that). Nobody said I shouldn't eat peanuts whilst pregnant, didn't like them anyway so that was no hardship. I smoked in those days but cut down considerably and went on to low tar cigarettes (or low something, think it was tar) - everyone said, "Well done 'Bluerussian'!". That seems funny now. I didn't drink but if I'd wanted to, I probably would have, just didn't fancy it.

How times have changed.

I hate those comments scout depression too. I think a lot of it comes from people who secretly struggled with it and now feel jealous and resentful thar they did not have access or opportunity for the help we now face available and the freedom to say openly how we feel.

Totally ignoring the huge problem we had in this country with 'housewives' and valium.

If you are at home all day with a good supply of drugs no you are not going to be signed off but it doesn't mean you are not depressed.

My mum had one that I think beats all these. She used to say they shouldn't tell pregnant women not to smoke as she 'didn't know' and it made her feel guilty for smoking when pregnant.

Dd is anaphylactic, has severe asthma and allergies. All her life I’ve had comments of, “nobody had allergies back then” / “all these allergies never used to exist in my day.” Then, through my work, I met the man who invented allergy testing, a chap in his 90s. I asked him why so many more kids have allergies these days and he said there were just as many in the past but they died very young; cause of death being usually attributed to choking.

It seems clear that the ‘never did me any harm’ brigade choose the easier/preferable options.

You go for the best option, not the option you want. Drinking in pregnancy is a choice not a necessity. You like alcohol so don’t want to give it up. Same for smoking.

Smacking is lazy parenting (teaching fear is not the same as teaching respect) but the short term gain is there. Long term impact is awful but they can bury their heads in the sand about that.

I hate this too. On pregnancy groups there are so many Americans saying “I ate deli meats/raw steak/something else....and my first baby was fine”.

Fine, but my husband was born with one working eye, and another shit one, due to toxoplasmosis. So dangerous to dismiss doctors advice as scaremongering.

@TheLittleDogLaughed omg I am so so so with you on that.
My DC2 has multiple food allergies, one of which is anaphylactic. I’ve had my own grandparents say “we didn’t have all this back in my day”
Urrrrmmm yes you did. They just weren’t diagnosed. So tons of babies were just left to scream in pain with “colic”, were labelled as “failure to thrive” or “difficult babies” or just outright died. I’m not restricting my child’s diet and spending twice as much on food shopping purely for the fun of it
Funny old thing, my Nan didn’t have an answer for that.

ThePolishWombat I also had accusations that I caused it because us new-fangled mothers don’t eat nuts whilst pregnant. Weird thing is that dd is allergic to nuts (which I didn’t eat) and sesame ( which I lived on as constantly craved humus). So not sure how that works either!

My DC2 is allergic to dairy, eggs, soya, tree n it a, peanuts, grapefruit and mango... I ate all of those things in pregnancy except grapefruit (the devils fruit )

My dh had asthma ( born early sixties) and allergy tests showed a multiple of other allergies mainly animal fur / dust rather than food. It's not a new thing and it was only because his mum kept on at the doctors and used his asthma medicine properly that he survived and thrived.
More is known these days and this is a good thing!

My mum was born in the '50s and she was anorexic as a teenager. It's not a new thing at all.

As for smacking, she smacked me once and never did it again, and tbh she didn't need to, a good bollocking from her was enough to make me behave. Although she did throw things at me a couple of times. I hate the whole 'it never did me any harm' thing, because actually it did, it makes you think violence against a child is OK. And we're not talking the odd slap on the leg here either, I saw a video on Twitter of a woman hitting her son with a belt IN PUBLIC and someone was like 'oh it's just a whooping, it's perfectly normal'.

Wow, the anaphylaxis mistaken for choking idea is very sad.

The thing is also, that 'fine' doesn't mean it didn't do you any harm.

My husband was severely premature - it was an absolute miracle he survived. He's fine - more than fine. He has escaped all but the mildest hemi-plegia (from what I understand, this in itself is highly uncommon).

But it doesn't mean it had zero effect on him - the best guess of doctors is that he should have been taller and his physical coordination is affected.

Totally with you, it annoys me SO MUCH!

YANBU however I do agree with pp that someone people follow 'guidelines' to the detriment of their own mental health, finances and happiness. Ultimately we as parents should be able to assess and make sensible decisions around our own children without judgement (thinking cc, forward facing car seats when technically safe even if not best option, formula feeding). Things for which there is no benefit (e.g. smoking around kids) seems fairly cut and dry but plenty of other things have to be considered on a wider basis rather than just guidelines, guidelines, guidelines.

Agree that grapefruit is the devil's fruit.

Think everyone does the best they can with the knowledge at the time, and it can be hard to accept that maybe in retrospect it wasn't the best.

I really find the memes of "we did this and that and survived" tiresome, or course you did, none of the dead are posting on Facebook.

Most annoying one I saw recently was along the lines of slagging off all the environmentally conscious millennials and children because they have mobiles, go to McDonalds etc - when it's boomers, gen X, Y that have created that world.

The80sweregreat allergy testing was devised in the 1950s, before that little was known about the connection with allergies and asthma or anaphylaxis. I was a child asthmatic and we lived with 3 dogs but oddly nobody made the connection that I had a dog allergy.

I'm ok with dog fur but cat fur is a different matter. It's easy to avoid cats of course but food allergies must be a nightmare. I'm glad I don't have those.

My grandma always goes on about the ‘elf and safety brigade’ and constantly rolls her eyes whenever I take a sharp or dangerous object away from the kids. She tells me things like stair gates are a waste of money.

She also has a massive burn on her arm from where she pulled a pan off a stove when she was a kid. And she always tells a story about how her sister set her hair on fire from a big fireplace without a guard. So it sounds like they could have done with a bit of bloody health and safety in the good old days!

Interesting info about the allergies. My mum is a boomer and thinks more people have more allergies nowadays because everything is too clean. She’s also a nurse.

I do wonder whether survivor bias or selection effects were even understood as real scientific things 40-50 years ago, given how much greater the ignorance of them is among older generations. The only thing to do is educate (my parents have well and truly given up the 'never did me any harm' train of thought!), and once you know about selection effects, you'll see them bloomin' everywhere.

YANBU because science.

Bloody rednecks.

There's an element of self-defence too.

My friends aren't ignorant, but every single one of them in a friend group has sadly suffered fertility issues and miscarriages. And every single one of them smokes 10-20 a day.

None of them know either way if smoking had anything to do with their fertility issues or miscarriages, but they are all confident to say that it didn't have an effect. They've all given up now they have children - because they know all about the issues and don't want to pass on the habit.

I don't think it's generational as such the more I think about it.

Older generations who had different guidelines / less knowledge seem less likely in my experience to be in the "did me no harm" brigade.

The people I would say offline who are in the "did me no harm brigade" are those whose parents ignored fairly clear advice on reasonably straight forward advancements, or ignored the guidance themselves and so will keep the "didn't harm my kids" going because it backs their choices.

E.g. We used to travel without seatbelts in a family friend's car. The car had no rear seatbelts. But I never heard my parents say "seatbelts ... Nanny state gone mad ... You all survived". Equally, people smoked around kids lots when I was a child, but I've never heard my parents or their friends say "aye but we smoked around you lot and only some of you have asthma, didn't do you any harm" or pushing to hold grandbabies with a fag in one hand. They know we know more now and that's just part of advancing knowledge.

But I do know people in their 30s who will argue they're fine drinking throughout pregnancy because their mam got pissed when pregnant with them, or who'll defend smacking because "a good hiding never did us any harm". Some even seem to call their parents hypocrites for challenging their behaviour, as whilst their parents have accepted the world has moved on, the 30-something isn't interested and wants their actions validating.

That is an interesting point @LolaSmiles
My late parents had their children relatively late in life, and so did I, hence they were rather old grandparents and they were far less likely to say "never did us any harm" or hark back to the "good old days" than my ILs or most of my friends' parents. Of course this might just have been their personalities, but having been born in the 1920s they had experienced growing up during the depression of the 30s. My dad used to talk about how his politics were influenced by seeing disabled WW1 veterans begging in the streets as a child and by the number of his classmates who didn't make it to adulthood because of iill health and malnutrition. And he lived in comfort compared to my mum who was brought up in real poverty even by the standards of the time. Plus of course they lived through/served in WW2. They didn't have the rose tinted views of the past that I often notice amongst Baby Boomers and seemed more willing to embrace modern ideas than other parents/ grandparents I knew who were 30 years younger than them.

Elbow, my dad was born in 1922 and he did ' the back in the day thing ' ( before he was diagnosed with dementia) but my late mum didn't! She loved her central heating and an indoor loo and having affordable rent from the council and just some stability and home comforts. They didn't have much , but she admitted they had more than when she was a young child and loved going to the Library as the idea of free books to read was brilliant. She realised that things had moved on a lot for the working classes from the 1930s and rarely moaned about things.
Makes you appreciate things more when you come from having nothing even if they had s modest life compared to a lot of others.