Which Generation of Parents had it the Hardest?

An interesting discussion piece on the CBC website today. I know we represent a cross-section of parenting periods and periods of observing parents. The article is worth a read and reflection.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/parenting-stress-generations-1.7311729

Comments

  • BoogieBoogie Heaven Host
    Now - I think it's much harder now than it ever was

    Advertising, social media, online dangers, peer pressure etc are huge just now.

    We had it the easiest I think (1980s). All mod cons but none of the pressure. 🙂
  • I’ll admit I tend to find attempted comparisons like this pretty pointless. Yes, parents today have challenges earlier generations of parents couldn’t imagine, like social media, mental health and, for American parents, wondering if your kid will get shot at school. But parents in earlier generations had challenges we don’t. I doubt there’s been any generation of parenting that lacked challenges. Playing the who-had-it-worse game seems like a complete waste of time to me.


  • BoogieBoogie Heaven Host
    I don't. I find it an interesting thought experiment. 🙂
  • DoublethinkDoublethink Admin, 8th Day Host
    At base, I would have guessed the parental generation with the lowest child mortality is probably the one under the least stress.
  • BoogieBoogie Heaven Host
    At base, I would have guessed the parental generation with the lowest child mortality is probably the one under the least stress.

    I was going to say that, but I thought the OP was more about everyday child rearing.
  • BoogieBoogie Heaven Host
    At base, I would have guessed the parental generation with the lowest child mortality is probably the one under the least stress.

    I was going to say that, but I thought the OP was more about everyday child rearing.
  • I wonder from the point of view of our own childhoods - do we think that parents today would do a better/worse job of bringing us up? 🤔

    Parents in the 50’s and 60’s tended to ‘stay together for the sake of the children’ and so it was rare not to have both male and female parents living with the children. Many now have to struggle in ‘share the children’ relationships.

    All adults were allowed to chastise all children, and corporal punishment was the norm, and so child abuse was rife and ignored - parents just said ‘watch out for strange men’ and let children roam freely. Now it would be seen as irresponsible and so children need to be chaperoned and tracked, not only physically but online.

    Learning was ‘facts by rote’ at school, with homework only at senior school. Now parents are doing homework with children from the start.

    I’m tending to think that parenting is harder now.
  • Today's children seem to have many more options available to them, and each of the options seems to be rather more intensive than anything I remember from my childhood. Whether it's sports or dance or theater or robotics or whatever else - there seem to be many more competing offerings for children's limited time now.

    And the rise of the internet means that children aren't limited to finding a physical community with the peers who live on their street - they can find communities in whatever niche they prefer online.

    Does that make it harder? I think it makes it more complex, which is harder from some points of view.
  • By my estimation the hardest time for parenting was the mid-fourteenth century.
  • Any time pre vaccination and pre modern medicine, when childbirth could routinely be a death sentence, and you had to be prepared a at least some of your children would die.
  • This discussion about parenting is so superficial.

    Which one of us has tried to raise kids in a war zone?

    Which one of us has tried to raise kids in an area that has had famine?

    Which one of us has tried to raise kids in a time of economic collapse?

  • Have people had a chance to read the article linked in the OP?
  • BoogieBoogie Heaven Host
    Gramps49 wrote: »
    This discussion about parenting is so superficial.

    Which one of us has tried to raise kids in a war zone?

    Which one of us has tried to raise kids in an area that has had famine?

    Which one of us has tried to raise kids in a time of economic collapse?

    Can we only discuss things we've had personal experience of?
  • Originally posted by Raptor Eye:

    Parents in the 50’s and 60’s tended to ‘stay together for the sake of the children’ and so it was rare not to have both male and female parents living with the children.

    A generation earlier, my grandfather went to war when my father was 3 and returned when he was 8. Obviously, my grandmother, aunt and father had missed him terribly, made the most of when he was home on leave and were hugely relieved that he got through the war unscathed. However, when he returned, it was a simple fact that they had managed perfectly well without him.

    I think WWII meant that my grandparents had more challenges - my grandfather was a almost a stranger to his children by 1945 and I don't think they were ever able to make up for those missing years.

    The plus side was that my grandfather was determined not to miss out on his grandchildren and was a brilliant grandfather.

    I don't think either my parents, or I had the sort of challenge faced by my grandparents. My grandmother proved herself an extremely capable single parent during the war years, and my grandfather had to fit back in.
  • Nick TamenNick Tamen Shipmate
    edited September 2024
    Caissa wrote: »
    Have people had a chance to read the article linked in the OP?
    Yes, I have.

  • Great. And I think the author of the article tends to agree with the assessment you made above.
  • Boogie wrote: »
    Gramps49 wrote: »
    This discussion about parenting is so superficial.

    Which one of us has tried to raise kids in a war zone?

    Which one of us has tried to raise kids in an area that has had famine?

    Which one of us has tried to raise kids in a time of economic collapse?

    Can we only discuss things we've had personal experience of?

    Two things. Whatever we have personal experience about is only antidotal and cannot be applies across any generation. We have no idea what previous generations have experienced, much less what future generations will experience.

    There are current parents that are trying to raise kids in war zones. There are also parents that are trying to keep their kids fed in areas of famine. My grandparents certainly tried to race my parents in a time of economic collapse, and I experienced a few vestiges of that fear. My kids have never experienced that, and I certainly hope my grandkids will not have to worry about such issues.

    And, yes, I read the article.
  • Raptor Eye wrote: »
    I wonder from the point of view of our own childhoods - do we think that parents today would do a better/worse job of bringing us up? 🤔

    We can, to an extent, measure the inverse. Some contemporary children are raised by their grandparents because their parents aren't available for one reason or another.
  • TelfordTelford Shipmate
    edited September 2024
    Although they were not well off, my parents had it easy as far as I was concerned. I went to school by myself the day after my 5th birthday and my mom never had a call to come and get me because I was ill ( we never had a phone ) I knew the score in respect of finances and knew better not to ask for things they could not afford.
  • My great grand-father died in 1911, leaving behind 5 daughters ages 1 to 10 and my great grandmother. She remarried with the (evil) widowed farmer nearby who had 5 more children. Now the mother of 10, she and the children were hauled from their combined productive farms in Arkansas to Oklahoma, where she gave birth to two more children and died bearing a third. Could parenting be more stressful??

    The step father hauled my grandmother and her sisters back to Arkansas and farmed them out as domestic help to relatives and neighbors. The two boys my great grandmother bore ran away as soon as they could fend for themselves. Could childhood be much more stressful??

    This wasn't uncommon. I have nothing to complain about as a daughter or as a mother.
  • Indeed.

    My grandfather was one of 12. They lived in a 'two-up, two-down back-to-back'. He wore an older sister's cast off clothing until he started school at which point he was issued with clothes 'on the parish' which marked him out as a 'pauper'.

    His father drank heavily and spent most of his weekly wage at the pub at the corner of the street. He had still-born brothers and sisters, a brother who died at 16 and a sister at 32. One of his sisters had severe cerebral palsy. His mother used to wheel her across the city in a bath-chair to a hospital once a week where they would strap her into a leather harness in an attempt to stretch her straight.

    I've recently been to Madagascar. There are families there living in wicker huts with no water, no sanitation, not even a door - and with fellas brewing illegal 90% moonshine rum at the side of the road which makes people go blind or insane. The gendarmes take no notice and prefer to 'fine' travellers at roadblocks on trumped up pretexts.

    Some 75% of the population live in extreme poverty.

    Now tell us that we've got it hard as patents.
  • The thing is, if I compare your father’s experience with my father’s experience, they’re not at all alike. My parents grew up in the Depression, but in households where they had what they needed. And my father caught in WWII.

    But all four of my grandparents were college-educated. My mother came from a long line of clergy on both her mother’s and her father’s side, with a few physicians and college professors thrown in.

    Compared to many others of their generation, they did not have difficult lives; they had a number of advantages.

    And that’s just one of the challenges in a “competition” like this one. Not every one in the same generation has the same difficulties or challenges or advantages. Some have it much worse than the average, and some have it much better. There’s just too much variety in every generation, and too many individual circumstances across generations, to make meaningful generalized comparisons.


  • My mom's parents didn't have a difficult time. My grandfather was too young for WW1 and too old for WW2. They married in their early 20s and soon after my mom and her younger brother were born they got a council house which they stayed in for the rest of their lives. My Grandfather was employed throughout the difficult 30s. I loved them both.

    My Dad's parents were about 15 years older and died a few months apart early in the year I was born. They lived a terraced house in a rough area which was demolished just before WW2. My dad had about 6 or 7 siblings but only 4 of them survived to adulthood. My grandfather spent all WW1 on the Western front. Unlike my mom's parents, they had a hard life.
  • Well yes.

    My maternal grandmother's childhood was very different to that of my grandfather. They fell on relatively hard times, but from a position of great privilege compared to my grandfather's family.

    So yes, these kind of comparisons are meaningless even within the same generation.
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