Cut to a few decades later, and most people think that the way it’s been done for about two or three generations is the way it’s always been done (it isn’t)
As possibly one of those people myself, can you give a few examples of what specifically is being done differently now? Are you talking about things like using lots of adderall?
I wasn’t thinking adderall, although that’s a plausible example.
I’m thinking of things like “it’s not safe to leave ten-year-olds alone in the house, or have them walk a few miles or run errands on their own.” It’s demonstrably more safe now than it was in the past, and in the past ten-year-olds dying from being unsupervised was not a major cause of death.
(More safe because crime is lower, more safe because medicine is better, more safe because more people carry cameras and GPS at all times, etc.)
Up until three or four generations ago, people routinely got naked to swim in creeks and ponds and quarries, casually and easily, and it was fine and not a major vector for sex crimes or moral corruption.
Up until three or four generations ago, people (in America) weren’t insanely terrified of cosleeping and didn’t erroneously believe that it was putting your infant at irresponsible risk (it isn’t; the data are clear and cosleeping is done in the majority of the world, including many nations with lower infant mortality than the US).
Up until three or four generations ago, kids would rub shoulders with way more adults, in way more contexts, rather than today, where lots of people think that kids should never be around adults who aren’t currently doing a professional kid-oriented job (and should restrict their interactions to the domain of that job).
It wasn’t even three or four generations ago that our system of taxation (in the US) was wildly different, and now many people act as if wanting to increase taxes on the wealthy is an affront to the Founding Fathers.
These are just off the top of my head, and they’re skewed in the direction of some of my areas of interest; apologies for that. The main point is, it doesn’t take very long at all for people to forget—if your parents raised you insisting that X was commonplace, and the people around you largely got the same programming, it’s hard to know (unless you check) whether X was actually brand-new at the time, or maybe just a generation old.
EDIT: The “nuclear family” is baaasically an invention of the twentieth century; the term wasn’t even coined until the 1920′s iirc and it didn’t become the assumed default until post WWII.
EDIT II: Suburbs! Levittown.
EDIT III: the number of foods that people think we’ve had forever (bananas, broccoli) but are actually quite recent additions to the human diet.
My mom (who had children starting in 1982) said that doctors were telling her (IIRC) that, when a baby was crying in certain circumstances (I think when it was in a crib and there was nothing obviously wrong), it just wanted attention, and if you gave it attention, then you were teaching the baby to manipulate you, and instead you should let it cry until it gives up.
She thought this was abominable; that if a baby is crying, that means something is wrong, and crying for help is the only means it has, and it’s the parent’s job to figure out how to help the baby. Furthermore, that if the parent’s response was to not help the baby, that would be teaching the baby something extremely bad about the parents’ relationship to it. And generally she was in favor of mothers listening to their instincts.
I believe she said that, as time went on, some actual research was done, which generally favored her views.
In April 1971, Sylvia Bell and Mary Ainsworth presented a paper at the Society for Research in Child Development. Using data from Ainsworth’s now famous ‘Baltimore Study’ of 26 mothers and their infants, they reported that infants whose mothers responded more quickly to their cries in the first 3 months of life were less likely to cry at 9–12 months of age than mothers who responded more slowly. The following year, a paper including these data was published in Child Development and in the nearly 50 years since it has been cited more than 1,500 times. The paper challenged then the dominant view of behavioral theory, which held that responding to crying reinforced the behavior and fostered dependence.
I guess the “behavioral theory” was what my mom found abominable (and what the doctors she complained about subscribed to), and the Ainsworth study favors her views.
The linked study seems to say that further evidence looks ambiguous. Not gonna dig into it now, but I would lean towards trusting my mom’s opinion.
As possibly one of those people myself, can you give a few examples of what specifically is being done differently now? Are you talking about things like using lots of adderall?
I wasn’t thinking adderall, although that’s a plausible example.
I’m thinking of things like “it’s not safe to leave ten-year-olds alone in the house, or have them walk a few miles or run errands on their own.” It’s demonstrably more safe now than it was in the past, and in the past ten-year-olds dying from being unsupervised was not a major cause of death.
(More safe because crime is lower, more safe because medicine is better, more safe because more people carry cameras and GPS at all times, etc.)
Up until three or four generations ago, people routinely got naked to swim in creeks and ponds and quarries, casually and easily, and it was fine and not a major vector for sex crimes or moral corruption.
Up until three or four generations ago, people (in America) weren’t insanely terrified of cosleeping and didn’t erroneously believe that it was putting your infant at irresponsible risk (it isn’t; the data are clear and cosleeping is done in the majority of the world, including many nations with lower infant mortality than the US).
Up until three or four generations ago, kids would rub shoulders with way more adults, in way more contexts, rather than today, where lots of people think that kids should never be around adults who aren’t currently doing a professional kid-oriented job (and should restrict their interactions to the domain of that job).
It wasn’t even three or four generations ago that our system of taxation (in the US) was wildly different, and now many people act as if wanting to increase taxes on the wealthy is an affront to the Founding Fathers.
These are just off the top of my head, and they’re skewed in the direction of some of my areas of interest; apologies for that. The main point is, it doesn’t take very long at all for people to forget—if your parents raised you insisting that X was commonplace, and the people around you largely got the same programming, it’s hard to know (unless you check) whether X was actually brand-new at the time, or maybe just a generation old.
EDIT: The “nuclear family” is baaasically an invention of the twentieth century; the term wasn’t even coined until the 1920′s iirc and it didn’t become the assumed default until post WWII.
EDIT II: Suburbs! Levittown.
EDIT III: the number of foods that people think we’ve had forever (bananas, broccoli) but are actually quite recent additions to the human diet.
My mom (who had children starting in 1982) said that doctors were telling her (IIRC) that, when a baby was crying in certain circumstances (I think when it was in a crib and there was nothing obviously wrong), it just wanted attention, and if you gave it attention, then you were teaching the baby to manipulate you, and instead you should let it cry until it gives up.
She thought this was abominable; that if a baby is crying, that means something is wrong, and crying for help is the only means it has, and it’s the parent’s job to figure out how to help the baby. Furthermore, that if the parent’s response was to not help the baby, that would be teaching the baby something extremely bad about the parents’ relationship to it. And generally she was in favor of mothers listening to their instincts.
I believe she said that, as time went on, some actual research was done, which generally favored her views.
A quick google turns up a study: https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcpp.13338 , which says this:
I guess the “behavioral theory” was what my mom found abominable (and what the doctors she complained about subscribed to), and the Ainsworth study favors her views.
The linked study seems to say that further evidence looks ambiguous. Not gonna dig into it now, but I would lean towards trusting my mom’s opinion.