Do you feel you have a better quality of life than your parents?

[justponderingalong]

Just pondering really because I can’t get off to sleep. My upstairs neighbors are re arranging furniture 🙄 and I was thinking how lovely it would be to have a house like my parents did when I was a child so I didn’t have to listen to it ! When I think back my mum was a stay at home mum and my dad worked for the council. Me and my husband have what I would consider better jobs but we couldn’t afford a detached with a big garden. My parents deffo had a better lifestyle than my grandparents so I’m wondering if it’s a generational thing ? I imagine the next generation will probably be feeling like my generation won the lottery by having a flat so I know I’m lucky. What changed the each generation doing better than the last thing or is that a myth ?

We have a Much better standard of living even though it seems we were one of the ofdities where both our parents worked full time in the 80s (albeit that was from when I was 7, before that DM was part time)they both left school at 15

They had to take in my mums half siblings so there were 8 of us in a 3 bed house, 5 girls had to rotate the bed sharing with the 1 boy in the box room. We did t have holidays, we didn't have new furniture until i was 10 just hand me downs, no central heating until i was 12 - just a coal fire

we have a 3 bedrooms detached house which we paid off by age 52 and go abroad several times a year. We also have very good pensions

My mum and dad had a similar lifestyle but my dad was (is) basically a workaholic. The biggest difference is that they retired in their late 50s which simply won't be an option for us. I'm not really mega bothered about that though as we have more time together now, as we are both much more chilled about paid work.

We achieved the 'forever home' about 10 years before they did, when our eldest child was 9. I do think that affects our lifestyle too.

Absolutely. My dm left school with zero qualifications, had a few deadlines end jobs, a couple of failed marriages, lives in social housing, always dependant on men for money and security but had poor choice in men. Is facing old age with zero financial security. Had had spells of a good standard of living but it's been transient and ultimately she has very fragile mental health.

I got a degree, a stable career, married a nice man, worked together to provide stability for our children. We don't struggle for money but we aren't rich. I think my life is more stable and my mental health is much better. Ultimately, I have the ability to support myself and my children independently of my dh so have never needed to stay in an unhappy relationship for security like so many women of my mothers generation. Luckily, I've never needed to leave but I suspect my ability to has kept my dh in check to be honest.

it really depends which part of their lives you look at. My parents were bought up very poor and my early life was similar - council house, no central heating until I was a teenager, camping and caravan holidays. But my dad had a trade and carried on working into his 70s, they bought their council house and for the last 30 years of their lives ( both lived until 90s), they had a comfortable life, going on cruises, buying new cars, eating out frequently.

Similarly we were really hard up until about our 40s, when we began to get ahead and we overpaid our mortgage, both got promotions but we still had the same frugal habits from our childhoods.

My own DC got married later, bought houses later but have travelled more and led a much more carefree, extravagant life in their 20s. I was married with a mortgage at 22.

It’s a complicated and varied picture over a long period of time. If we are able to leave my DC any money they’ll be much better off than us. Out of the three generations though, we’ve all worked hard and had periods of real worry about money. That’s just life isn’t it.

I think what would be interesting is if you compared like with like e.g. a teacher today with a teacher of previous generation or a train driver or guard with train driver or guard from previous generations.... I think the challenge in doing a comparison just with your parents might be challenging if you have very different jobs. My parents were farmers whereas I am a civil servant.

I really don't know if my quality of life is better. On the surface it probably looks like it is but scratch the surface and I am not so sure. I have probably had more stress in my life and have more health issues than my mother. My social life is nothing compared to my mother's social life. It's a hard question.

On the face of it, my parents led a charmed life.
In reality, they had remortgaged their huge house again and again. It all came crashing down and the house was repossessed.
My father had a small pension, my mother didn't bother working, she is lazy.
Father died, mother now lives on a state pension and housing benefit in an over 55's complex.
She moans about it but I have little sympathy, she made her bed, now she must lie in it.

My dh and I have both worked in decent jobs and have built up decent pensions. We will be okay in our old age.
We aren't yet mortgage free but will be in 5 years. We live in a farmhouse on the moors, with no neighbours. My (bitter old) mother describes it as bleak, to us it is our little piece of paradise.

Definitely better.

They had a semi detached four bed house in the one of the nicest areas of my home city. Bought in the 70s so mortgage paid off by the 90s. My mum took four years off when my brother and I were under 5. We had two weeks abroad (standard self-catering package holiday) every Easter holidays and a week away down South in the summer. Nice days out to National Trust places and London. Lots of charity shop clothes but I remember my mum buying me lots of nice clothes from Tammy Girl etc. I could go to university and only had to work in the summer holidays. My dad took early retirement after being made redundant at 51. My parents have a decent amount saved and invested. Their annual pension amount is more than I’ll ever earn.

I am a single parent in a terrace house in an ok area. I own my house outright but it needs loads of work. I work part-time (I having caring responsibilities for my parents now) and am also on UC. I can afford a 6 night holiday abroad this year for me and my child but can’t afford another holiday. I’ll have a shit pension and minimal savings. I feel like I am rungs down on the ladder compared to my parents. This is partly due to retraining in my late 20s and then ending up in two consecutive shit relationships, the latter I was the breadwinner and I ended up having to take loans out to cover my maternity leave, do some home improvements and get a car.

I was a bit of a drifter and a party girl in my 20s. I think if I had come out of uni and got a really well paid job and either bought a house myself or with a decent partner, I’d be much better off than I am now. But c’est la vie.

All such interesting answers. Seems the main thing that is harder now is housing and also childcare due to both parents needing to work to pay for the housing.
When I was at school I would say the majority of mums didn’t work so there was never the childcare problem.
@QuirkyHorse doesn’t sound bleak at all sounds absolutely flipping amazing !!!!

My parents both worked although dad in particular had lots of unemployment

he studied also to get himself the best chance of employment which paid off in his later years

they do have a larger detached house - which they bought around my age now. They moved out of a 3 bed terrace to something more suited to their age. We could do that but prefer to save some money towards travel and earlier retirement. Dad still worked a bit in his 70s because he was doing what he loved

so similar standard now but they have a much rougher time when I was a kid compared to how my child has lived. They ( and me as a child ) had much smaller terrace homes, homes with mold, no car, no holidays, we were behind our peers in getting a TV even.

I do feel house prices and rents need to be rebalanced however as on average people are paying a much larger share of their income to get a home unless they get inheritances. However other things - such as food and holidays - are noticeably cheaper so the whole life picture is more nuanced than just house prices suggest

I got lucky with a do-upper at the right time and , having lived quite simply as a child, I was happy with a smaller 2-bed terrace for most of my adult life which saved me thousands over the decades in interest payments

so yes there is a housing problem although most people didn’t grow up in large detached homes but people who did seem to
struggle with becoming more “normal “ in their living standards

so people who move down the social scale feel particularly aggrieved - but if you have gone down the rankings someone else has gone up

and current house prices mean that rather than the bottom 10% really genuinely with no choice struggling , it’s possibly the bottom 20% in that situation which is that bad

so if you have moved down the scale from the top 20% to the bottom it much be such a huge shock

My quality of life is good and whilst not the same in lots of ways, it's overall comparable to my parents, I think.

However my quality of life is what it is thanks to financial help from them. And because of that help, we should be in a position to ensure that my DS's life is comfortable too when he reaches adulthood. I would be worried about DS's quality of life if not...mostly in relation to housing.

My parents life’s were in two halves.
When we were young they had not the housing, appliances, holidays that they had later in life. When they were young mum was not expected to go to work and didn’t. And liked it that way. Her work was us, and the home. Dad earned money and his work was outside the home. His working hours were set. And everyone pretty much had a weekend. He left the house at 6am and got back at 6pm daily, all weathers. His commute was long before he even got to his place of work.

I honestly think if mum had had to go to work when we were young it would have driven her off the hinge.

When we got older, mum went to work part time. She didn’t need to. Dad felt he had failed her. She didn’t need money, nor for social reasons. It was an ordinary job she wasn’t seeking a professional career.
Politically life was up and down later in their lives. And in peoples lives too. Less stability somehow. They moved less often than I have done. Dad never changed his job. They stayed where they lived.
They had by later stages of their lives better housing, appliances, more holidays, and Dad took retirement and immediately got another job at a school. It kept his mind busy. Mum had retired ages ago and pottered with her hobbies and friends. They had a comfortable life financially.

They lived in rented when young. But dad moved us out to buy a home. Compared to his wages it was not cheap, although seems it now. It took ages for him to save for a deposit. And filled him with a lot of stress as it was a new thing to do. Buy your home. But he was meticulous with money so made it work. He didn’t earn a lot at all. And it meant a much longer commute for him to do so. He did it for us, for a better way of life.

Compare and contrast my experience.
Work full time. Long commute like Dad. Decent housing, appliances. Assumed life would be peachy.
Then a financial drop. No holidays for ages. Smaller flat. Then a recession. Life was erratic. Then several house moves. Several moves around the country and different job moves. Loads of stress in doing so.
You kid yourself you are doing something important in work. You realise later in life you aren’t at all.
You retire. And move again. A very unsettled life looking back. One where I was expected or had to work. Long hours too.

Who was better off ? In some regards I have been. In some they were. I think they had more stability. They had different stresses. But less frantic lives. They didn’t spend their lives going around shopping at the weekends. Nor driving us as children here there and everywhere. Nor entertaining us in holiday times. Things were simpler generally.
Oh. There was no minimum wage either in their day. No zero hours contracts ( except on the docks). No dropping your child off at childcare and who picks up conversations.

I’m Gen X and my parents are ‘Boomers’ and I’d say I have a much better quality of life than they had. I went to university, they didn’t, I have a larger house, more holidays and a higher disposable income.

When I was a baby my dad worked 2 jobs to scrape together a deposit on a tiny terraced house with no carpets or central heating and it stayed that way for several years until my mum went back to work. I didn’t have a cot as a newborn, I slept in a drawer as did my mother when she was a baby.

I do think that my kids will have a different life to me though: university debt, high house prices and fewer good jobs. I’ll be able to help them start out when it’s time, by down-sizing our current family home. I hope it’s enough to get them started.

Yes my (millenial) lifestyle is immeasurably better than that of my parents. In basically every metric I can think of aside from probably community socialisation, that's definitely overall worse for us now, but that's just change.
And their parents had a world war to participate in so no contest there.

I most definitely do. Grandparents were delighted to move into council housing in an estate built in the 1950s working as a hospital porter and a cook. My parents were able to buy a small terraced house on one wage. I went to university but with no loans just grants. I own a detached house, earn well. Hard to imagine when I was eating my free school meals this is where I would be.

Yes and no. Yes because I'm not an alcoholic in a horribly violent relationship with seven children, and no because I'm on minimum wage in a council flat instead of a nice middle class job and living in a big house with orchards and stables.

I'll take the council flat over the horribly violent bit any day though.

Well, for a while people did do better thsan their parents, especially when the Welfare State/NHS came in, and the massive housebuilding etc after WW2. Families that previously lived in vile slums were moved into much better housing, health improved, stuff like mass radiography screening made TB very rare, vaccines eliminated polio. There was plenty of employment at all levels, due to having a big manufacturing base and big retail sector.
A family could live comfortably on one reasonable wage, and pension schemes were well-funded.

I rode in on the coat tails of that wave, born in 1953, by the time I came into the work market in 1971 it was still easy to find a job, but our heavy industries were struggling and starting to go, so the job market shrunk a lot. We bought houses cheap, and their value then rocketed over the years. I consider I've had quite a comfortable life, but my mother (though she was a business owner, not just a housewife) thought my life was hard, as I needed to work to support our lifestyle, I've never had a cleaner or a gardener, and we did our own decorating/DIY as much as possible.

Nowadays I think the price of property and just life in general is horrifically out of step with average incomes, and it seems to be gettin worse, not better. My first priority with a lottery win would be to get each of my extremely hard-working children a decent house, as I don't see how else it will happen before my death.

I don’t know, it’s a difficult one. I know they didn’t appreciate what they had and didn’t feel lucky about anything. But factually speaking my mother worked a job she loved regularly doing extra hours at no pay disregarding the small kids she had at home, my father hardly ever worked which is what he loved, they had a house with a big plot, healthy at the time kids, very few domestic holidays but weren’t bothered about that. It seems what they didn’t have they weren’t bothered about and what they did have they didn’t appreciate.

Where I’m going with this is that happiness to me is in the mind, not in physical form.

I definitely have a better standard my childhood is so unfamiliar to me now, my children hopefully will have an even better one than us. By means of generational wealth planning. We build for us now and for the future bloodline.

I grew up on a council estate in Hackney, East London so yes I have a much better standard of living than my parents. We live in a nice suburb of north-west london and fortunately we were able to help my parents as they got older and they eventually moved to live very near to us. However, they gave us everything we gave our children - lots of love, a respect for education, good manners, appreciation of the arts and a desire to help others.

They’re already shit now and have been for the best part of two decades. Instead of snarking about how awful everything is, what improvements would you like to see.

Apologies. Posted incorrectly.

My parents had better quality 100% they had several detached houses. Good jobs. Private schooled kids.
Ours is semi detached. Oven in simmer and fridge in winter.

They had final salary pension etc.

In some ways. Neither of us have a physically demanding job or work shifts. We've got 24 hour supermarkets, the internet, and a reasonably low mortgage interest rate.

In the main we've never had the money worries that our parents had (think 17% interest rates and unexpected pregnancies) or had to uproot our children and hoik them around the country because of work.

For all that, I have a feeling that overall they were more content.

Yes we do, but we both have much higher paying jobs that are professions vs our parents who had unskilled roles (but were still able to give us a lovely upbringing!) Thankfully they have good pensions so are doing ok now. If my parents did what we do I suspect they’d have got a lot more bang for their buck than we do! But I’m grateful for what we have.

Born 1970s. Materially we are a lot better off. Their stresses would have been money related (and very real at times.)
However, we have different worries - work stress and just modern life - higher expectations on parents, no break from communications / news. Maybe that’s of our own making but it can be hard to escape.