To think the people have a romanticised view of the last few generations?

[safari111]

Whenever I bring up my mental health with my dad or husband, especially since having kids, instead of support or understanding I receive a speech on how my grandma or my husband's grandma "coped with so much, had so little, and were SO HAPPY. Everyone was happy, blah blah blah" that's all I get. That no one had the mental health issues and neurological problems that people have today and all of that. It enrages me that 1. My mental health is invalidated. 2. Everyone else's mental health problems are invalidated and 3. Everyone romanticises the fact that people were absolutely happier a generation or 2 ago, despite poverty, war, poor health etc.

What are your thoughts on this? Have you experienced similar?

Most kids in my parents generation never went to secondary school at all. School refusal wasn’t a thing because school wasn’t a thing.

They weren’t happier, they were repressed. Children were invalidated and shamed for showing emotion, and “discipline” came in the form of physical violence.

I definitely think that the past wasn’t as rose tinted as people think, and agree that people still suffered with mental illness but just didn’t talk about it. However, I think it’s more the narrative that’s forced down our throat about how we are so lucky as we now have all this technology, we are so liberal, everyone has all these rights, medical advance, we have so much stuff, religion is on its way out, etc etc…we are expected to believe that all this means life nowadays is GREAT and so much better than the old days. This simply isn’t true…life is as shit for most people, maybe even worse, than before 🤷‍♀️

I really don't think society is more tolerant of mental illness nowadays . Seen it so much on here .People can't get away fast enough from friends/family with mental illness . Society wouldn't care that much if we brought asylums back .

I don't think anyone sees the past as 'rose-tinted', do they, unless they know absolutely nothing of history? Even in almost living memory there has been a world war, and at least 4 genocides (that we know about) etc???

But whether people were tougher, more resilient, less whiney...that's an interesting question. Of course their expectations of life were generally much lower than ours - they were contented with smaller, simpler things, I think - a healthy attitude and one which isn't doomed to lead to disappointment.

I'm as anti-war as any sensible person but I did think, when I saw the young Ukrainian men rushing to enlist and defend their country - how many of the UK population would do that now? I just couldn't imagine it. Of course it's utterly horrible - but I think it's something that marks the current generation from past ones - for better or worse*. I hate to think of what happened to those brave young people.

I think many of us are spoiled now and behave like children. The number of threads on MN with people wailing that they haven't got the present they wanted, that someone has 'offended' them, that they can't deal with envy of others who have more holidays/better car/bigger house. That really depresses me - for God's sake, people gave their lives 2 or 3 generations ago - sometimes we need to get a grip.

*I'm not talking about aggression here - I'm talking about a situation where your country is under an existential threat, as in Ukraine.

People do run a mile from other people’s problems. I think some people are busy dealing with their own though. Life is rarely easy for anyone and when it is difficult times are always possible.

You're right @XmasPartyhat and @Lalalanding - I do think that for some children, making them remain in some form of education till they're 18 now (and thus allowing the government to 'massage'the unemployment figures of course) is very detrimental to some children, not just those who don't cope with an educational environment. There are those who really need to be able to leave home but can't because they don't have a job that could support them so they have to stay in (at the very least) unpleasant situations at home.

Surely there was a lot of school avoidance? It was probably quite easy to set off to school, even register, but then bunk off?

Yep they most definitely had it, they were just labelled the naughty kid or the weird one

Different times, different pressures.
It’s not any easier now than it was back then. Just different.

Don't forget about Barnados - plenty of children, particularly boys, would be given to them around the ages of 3-5 and sometimes brought back after another baby had come, sometimes only when an older sibling got a job/married and took them on, if at all. Two exes' fathers, completely different location, completely different lives socially, both dropped them off one day and effectively ran away whilst they were distracted with a toy. One went on to do exactly the same to their son who had undiagnosed ADHD, only with boarding school instead. Another ex's mother put her son into boarding school at six and didn't have him back until he left at 16 when her inheritance from his father ran out, but as she was very wealthy, that was seen as OK.

Then there were far more adoptions and children unofficially adopted or fostered by relatives, not necessarily even knowing what had happened or why - being told 'they're dead' was common if they knew the person they were with wasn't their mother or father. Often this was when they weren't, they were living a few miles away.

@NeverDropYourMooncup I hadn't heard about that but will definitely look into that history now!

I think there’s some interesting research out there that says that inequality is a bigger cause of overall malaise than objective standard of living. I do also think happiness = reality divided by expectations is a thing, and I’ve lived it. Finally, there loss aversion - much more depressing to lose something than never have it.
I think people “these days” have the same capacity for suffering and stoicism, and there are actually a lot of aspects of modern life that are more difficult beyond “keeping up with the Joneses” - absence of community and the looming threat of climate change spring to mind. But particularly in regard to the equality point most people live less materially difficult lives but in particular younger people have “perfect” lives SHOVED in their faces 24/7.

Smash was great!

And Angel Delight.

People might not have been diagnosed in her day. But she is still probably autistic.

If there are loads of people like that, and they got on and lived their lives without a clinical diagnosis, is it impossible that the normal range of human personality encompasses people like this? And that's fine?

I wasn't frightened of my parents. It was just there was no option but to go to school and they didn't care how you felt about it. We weren't given the kind of power that would allow us to refuse or, believe me, I'd have refused. I asked to change schools and it was NO.

I had every intention of leaving school at the earliest possible legal leaving age (lower than it is now). I suppose you could call the school refusal of a kind. At that age my mother did listen because she was concerned about the consequences of leaving so early and sent me to a school that was more suitable. I saw school through. Well, I didn't actually, because I was able to get early entry to university, but at least I didn't just leave.

Not really. You might have a day or two bunking off in your high school days (few did) but your parents would get a call because every class had a book that went around. My brother was caught out because they noticed the names that were absent were part of the same friendship group.

Something I notice now which was unknown when I was growing up , was "school avoidance" . We went to school and that was that - big classes, my school photos show about 40 kids in a class. I never knew of kids getting to avoid school or be home schooled, even though everyone's mother was at home . It just didn't happen. You were expected to get on with it .

School avoidance was certainly not unknown when I was growing up (70s), but it was usually known as 'truancy' or more colloquially 'bunking off'. And once you were 16, it was simply known as 'leaving school'. A few years earlier, people could and often did leave school at 15. Even in my time, there were some who did; it wasn't really legal, but schools often ignored the absence of pupils who were unlikely to pass exams anyway.

Attendance was often just not taken as seriously then as now. Far fewer pupils intended to go into higher education; and, although a lack of exam qualifications certainly restricted your job opportunities, there were jobs that you could do without such qualifications.

It's a question of scale. There was very much two Britain's in Thatcher's time for example.

The 80s were very different if you grew up in a mining town (or Scotland or a northern city) than if you were in the south east making 'loadsamoney'.

The 80s were extremely grim for large parts of the UK. They're grim now but long term Tory rule will do that. We love our Tories in this country.

There were truancy officers who would round up children if they were loitering in shopping centres. Adults would also intervene if teens were hanging around in school day - why aren’t you in school.
There was definitely a tolerance to children leaving early, I can remember a girl getting a job in a factory and missing 5th year (yr11) and teachers viewing it as a positive thing for her as she wasn’t academic. This is early 90s.

I remember skipping school and being too afraid to go to the shopping centre because the truancy officer would go there and round kids up. There was far more harsh intervention.

And I agree the 80s were divided. Trainspotting highlights that well. The grim housing estate in Edinburgh awash with drugs versus loads a money well off London.

I totally agree with you OP.

And all this gibberish about “In my day we just got on with it” usually, in practice, meant they ‘got on with it’ at an enormous personal expense - usually for women.

I see it on MN - posters being sneery because someone used a parent and child parking space. “ha! When mine were babies we managed fine without them”. Yeah thanks for that but car seats are now a requirement , they’re basically the size of an arm chair and it’s no fun squeezing one out a tiny space.

There’s a special place in hell for people who want other people to suffer when life could be easier instead. And the kind of people who think “I didn’t get that help so why should they?”

Also, the post war years were shit. Men could legally rape their wives, sexism was insanely rife in the workplace, the glass ceiling couldn’t be broken, people stayed in loveless marriages and everything was very, very brown.