Do you ever get the sense that, no matter what the era, people hold dear their own childhood period? The phrase “back in my day, kids never… (fill in the blank)…” may appear to be a cliché but I’m surprised at how often I hear a variation of it these days.
Truth or Dare?
So, I’m wondering: Were the “olden days” really that much better when it comes to parenting and family or is it just obscured nostalgia?
Depending on your age, your idea of “yesteryear” will vary. For me, those days are the 1970s and early ‘80s where mismatched plaid outfits were perfectly acceptable and then outrageous neon, music videos, and big hair ruled the fashion world.
Honestly, even searching for a suitable stock photo to illustrate this article (see my selection above) makes me melancholy. But, you know what? That wistfulness for those years (though fabulous in many ways) is based on the fact that I WAS A CHILD. Sure, I had increasing stressors and responsibilities as I grew but I wasn’t an adult with a job to keep, kids to raise, a mortgage & bills to pay, meals to make, and a house to clean.
My own experience in the 1970s and ‘80s is based on having the fortune & freedom to be a child and teenager in a relatively peaceful environment where, for the most part, I could focus on school, friends, and my specific needs and desires. I didn’t have to worry about making rent, working in a coal mine - or growing up in a war-torn region.
What Research Tells Us
If you research “the golden age of parenting”, results point to the 1950s and the 1970s as iconic periods. However, like so many people and ideas that are placed on a pedestal, the truth often falls short.
While it’s true that today’s helicopter parenting is now understood to cause adverse affects — parents’ initially good-natured idea that overseeing every aspect of our children’s lives will shield them from pain (when, in reality, this practice actually hinders them from fully developing by preventing natural consequences via risk-taking), the ‘70s and ‘80s were not faultless.
Revered as a period of freedom and discovery for many Western children, early eras also have a dark side. While children developed more self-sufficiency earlier in life in some aspects, leaving kids largely unsupervised caused undue harm by opening children up to abuse, bullying, inappropriate involvement with adults, and little to no agency as individuals.
Indeed, earlier eras also didn’t bode well for minorities and vulnerable people. For instance, this excellent article from The Context Institute tells us that the same issues and problems often creep up no matter what the era or political landscape:
“A more realistic historical look at families, moreover, reveals that many of the so-called modern problems usually attributed to the collapse of the "traditional" family have been around for a long time. Women and children, for example, have traditionally borne the burdens of poverty just heavily (though less visibly) within the family, as they do in single-parent families today. The only route to survival for many 19th-century working-class families, for example, was to send their children into the mills and mines as early as age 7 or 8.”
So, the next time you want to beat yourself up by a thinking about a “parenting fail” or, conversely, fall into a melancholic lull of wishing your children could experience the childhood you had (and perhaps it really WAS a stellar childhood!), remember that no parent or era is perfect. What was considered freedom 30 years ago, may be understood as negligence today. We do what we can with the knowledge we have.
Yours in imperfect parenting,
Lisa