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.
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.