Seeking: your views for OHbaby! article

Hi
I'm doing a feature for OHbaby! magazine on whether parenting is easier or harder than it was 30 or 40 years ago. I'm looking for opinions from mums, dads, grandparents about who had/has the better deal - more modern amenities, disposable income, husbands helping out versus a simpler life 30 years ago with no expectation to go back to work and maybe more family support.
What does everyone think? Love to hear from you,

Ruth Brown, OHbaby!

Hmm well in my particular situation, i basically have the best of both, we live with extended family, DDs Grandparents and Aunt and Uncle, while I'm studying part-time there is no expectation for me to return to work anytime soon.

The modern conveniences is a big ++++, just having a washing machine with different settings to wash our new modern (and easier) cloth nappies in is great.

We have a lot more support for BFing so in a way that makes it cheaper, on the other hand if you do go down the formula route it is REALLY expensive!

And Partners helping out is great, BUT I find that his father keeps going, well I never did that, so every time I do ask him to do something I get the long suffering sigh. (He does still tend to do it and hes great at housework :D) And you can actually leave the baby with him for a few hours (BF baby so not too long) and come back and shes been well looked after.

You are asking a very wide range of ages of parents for opinions meaning that OUR parents, grandparents will have a big variation of what was what in their time :D

First time parents (or more children too of course) range in age from 16-40+ on this forum :D

Easier if you are talking about convince. If you compare to say 50+ yrs ago. We have modern time saving appliances, we have home entertainment, we have a verity of fast foods, we can get knowledge at the touch of a button, support groups, books written on how to bring up your child. So I guess we have everything..

Discipline is different I think, now days it seams to be everyone business what you do & how you do it & when they bring laws in to reflect that it infringes on parenting.

I have to say I don't recall talking back to my mum as much as my kids do it...either I have forgotten or my kids don't get enough time outs.

Yeah, the discipline is a big thing - how is it that in our day we had a natural respect for our parents and wouldn't dare cross them but even preschoolers now are very cheeky!

I so agree with the over the top PC and that there are so many different options/opinions easily accessible these days.

In some ways it is good, easy to find information about anything and everything to do with parenting, but then you get information overload and aren't sure what to do.

As for PC, cmon, what happened to parental responsibility for your own kids. Its NOT the teachers job to raise them, or teach them moral values etc. They are there to teach the basics of schooling and reinforce good moral values, but not to teach and instill them in the first place.
The government seems to be passing the buck of who should teach children how to behave on to teachers and in fact everyone but the parents.

Well that's all very true - maybe it was easier in our parents' time. But then it was also a much more conservative society with no one allowed to be too different in any way. A bit repressive maybe.

Hmm, I'm not really sure whether it's easier/harder or just different, since I'm quite young and don't really have any experience of what it used to be like!

However, my mum says that things were a lot easier for her. She thinks that although now we have a lot of 'technology' things were still easier then because you didn't have so many different and confusing options. She didn't have to do washing by hand or anything, she had a washing machine, but she did without a drier, etc.

While she was expected to cook and clean etc. everything else was taken care of - my dad looked after the finances and all of the paperwork etc. so she didn't have many jobs that needed doing in town, other than groceries. She was also in close contact with family who helped out a lot with childcare and sometimes housework, and she used to have playgroup with her neighbors and friends. All-in-all she thought it was really rewarding to be a mum and spend her days at home while we were growing up, and she thinks it must be really hard for women these days that are expected to have and do everything.

In comparison, I am studying full-time (which is optional as well, but in the end we need me to be in some kind of well-paid full-time employment or we are never going to be able to send the kids to school on hubby's wage!). This means that the kids need to be in daycare, which is well-subsidised for me apart from in the summer holidays - but in order to keep the kids place in daycare I need to keep them in over the summer, which means we are really out of pocket, because it's nearly impossible to get a job down here for only 6 weeks. Anyway, rant...

Although DH does everything he can to help out (chores, looking after the kids, dinner, etc.) we lead very hectic lives as he is in full-time work and I'm studying full-time. I would love the freedom to stay at home for a few years with them, however I won't be able to get a student loan to pay for study if I don't do it now, for various reasons. We keep in touch with friends usually from afar - we have Skype etc. to talk about the kids but it's a battle to organise a playdate when all my mummy friends are busy and have mixed schedules due to work/study etc.

I think the pace of life is more stressful these days than before. There is less time to just be - just be a mum, just spend unstructured time with the kids, with friends that have kids etc. Time to experiment with meals and have hobbies.

But the main thing that I think is harder now is the huge number of options and expectations for mothers. It seems like there used to be only one or two ways of doing things, so there was less needing to choose, less guilt and less pressure to have so many gadgets for babies. My mum wasn't worried about which kind of nappies to use, which disposables are best, which fabrics and cleaners are best for cloth nappies, what the latest best skincare formulas are for babies, the lastest things that you NEED to do in order for you baby to get any kind of IQ, which expensive fabrics breath the best and are up with the latest fashions, which toys are designed to maximise your babies potential, which stroller has all the best accesories, which classes and groups to enrol your toddler in. She didn't have to decide on types of milk to wean a baby on to, whether to give pureed food or go with baby-led-weaning. There is so much conflicting advice these days, which I think is really good but it's also tiring.

The main thing my mum always mentions is that she would spend ten days in hospital after each child, being looked after and being taught everything she needed to know about looking after a baby. I wish I'd had something like that to help me decipher all the contradicting pieces of information that I had to plow through in order to teach myself.

Bowie even in my g'mas day she had meds for a reflux baby. She talks about having to boil formula of sorts on the stove until it 'just turned' and then adding something to it afterwards for her reflux baby. Of course he wasn't called reflux then but she knows now thats what it was....

We have automatic washing machines and disposable nappies can't get much easier than that.

If what my MIL has to say about it, babies were just as difficult and demanding as they've always been. There wasn't much help from Father's back then.

I think we have it far easier, we have so much more choice about everything to do with parenting and babies and a lot more support both societal and financial. There wasn't any DPB 40 years ago.

Edited by caliandjack

I think that there is far more pressure these days to have all the right things, there is so much choice out there.

IE Cloth vs disposables - when I had my twins, Mum assumed I would use cloth, because she did with us. She couldn't understand why someone would want to shell out money on sposies.

I remember things being simpler growing up, like others said, things weren't so PC, and we all turned out fine!

In money terms, we are luckier, we have the option to take PPL, Mum didn't have that luxury. We have daycares and can go back to work if we wish. Having a man stay home is becoming more common.

even still I think though that my parent's had it better, and the stresses were less then.