The myth of the carefree and safe childhoods of the Baby Boomers

Life was far more hazardous and likely to be cut short for children in the 1950s and 1960s than is the case today

We are all of us familiar with old people who contend that when they  were young, everything was a great improvement on the present day. Children in the past, for instance,  were better behaved; healthier; more polite to, and respectful of, their elders; showed greater courage and resourcefulness; read more and generally had a higher level of educational attainment into the bargain. This type of false-memory syndrome has been a traditional affliction of the elderly since time out of mind.  The latest generation to fall prey to such distorted views of the past is of course that of the so-called baby boomers; those born roughly between 1946 and 1964. Enormously entertaining though it is to observe the Flower Power children of the 1960s turning into querulous old men and women who complain that the country is going to the dogs and that childhood isn’t a patch on it what it was when they were themselves youngsters, there is a more serious side to the matter.

     The childhood years of the baby boomers have not only become the object of immense and unremitting nostalgia, but the practices and customs of those days as regards children are now being widely advocated as the perfect model of childhood.  In newspapers,  magazines, books, and websites; the way of life for children in the  1950s  is now  viewed as a desirable pattern to follow. It is as though schooldays  in the 1950s and 60s have become universally accepted as some Platonic ideal of childhood; the yardstick and touchstone against which all other childhoods, especially those of today, are to be measured. If children are obese, it must be because they no longer walk to school and play out of doors as they did in the 1960s. That reading is no longer a popular pastime for children can only be because they spend all their time glued to electronic screens. There was nothing like that in the 1950s, and just think  how much children used to read in those days! Are educational standards falling? Might this be remedied by getting children to chant their multiplication tables out loud as they did in the 50s and perhaps altering schools until they are more like those of the post-war years? Or consider all the knife crime and gang warfare that we read about in the newspapers. In the decades following the end of the Second World War, youngsters were too busy playing cowboys and Indians to even think of becoming feral youths. In those days, juvenile crime and disorder was unheard of; apart from playing knock-down-ginger on people’s front doors or occasionally scrumping apples. Wouldn’t it be marvellous if we could turn back the clock and  make childhood once more a time of innocence, where children pursue such harmless and wholesome hobbies as stamp collecting and train spotting?

     Often, this longing for a vanished past is inextricably associated with the supposedly  greater freedom which children enjoyed until as late as the 1970s; ‘playing out’ on their own and walking to school, without the supervision of adults. Little wonder that without all that exercise, they  have grown flabby and overweight; just waiting to fall victim to Type 2 diabetes! This must also be why today’s youth have not developed sturdy self-reliance; they spend all their time at home and never have the chance to learn about coping with minor emergencies or tricky situations without their parents hovering around, ready to step in and  help them.

     Here is a fairly typical example of the claims made about both the superiority of childhood in the past and also some of the probable ill effects for modern children of not experiencing a  childhood similar  to that of those  born during the baby boomer years;

      Forgive the rant, but I fear for the sort of mollycoddled children we are

     raising today. Danger and risk are a part of life. Exposure to them helps us

     to judge and react to them. It builds our common sense. They are, I would

     argue, essential to growing up.

          We should allow our children to play in the streets, climb trees, walk to

     school, play down the park, cycle round the neighbourhood, go to the

     corner shop,  etc. They will become better adults as a result.

This, at least, is what Steve Stack claims in his  book 21^st Century Dodos and it is to be suspected that many adults who grew up in the 1950s, 60s and 70s would agree with him. Perhaps it would help to look briefly at the ideas which Stack propounds, and to which many of that generation subscribe, to see if there might be more to this than meets the eye.

     Take, for example, the assertion made above that we should allow children to play in the streets and walk to school alone. It is enough to note that in 1965, 45 times as many children were killed by cars  each year while walking alone to school and playing in the streets as are currently dying in this way. Or what about another hazard when walking to school unescorted by a parent or other adult; one which is seldom encountered by modern children?  In 1965,  the same year that almost 1000 child pedestrians were killed by traffic, a little girl of six set off to school alone in the Midlands. She was snatched from the street by a homicidal maniac and turned up dead in a ditch a few weeks later.

      Other things which will evidently produce ‘better adults’,  are apparently children  playing in the park and going to the corner shop by themselves.  Both activities can, and did in the 1960s,  end in  violent death. Here are two more children who did not grow to be better adults as a result of these experiences; indeed, they did not grow to adulthood at all. Take  the  nine year-old girl playing cowboys and Indians in the local park and also  an even younger boy visiting the corner shop alone.

     In 1960, a child of nine was playing with her friends in a park in Southampton. No adults were around to supervise their play or even keep an eye on them.  Later that day, the little girl’s hideously mutilated body was found in undergrowth; she had been stabbed  38 times. The killer was one of the children present in the park that day. Eight years later, in 1968, a little boy  popped into the corner shop near his home in  the northern English city of Newcastle. After leaving the shop alone, he was abducted and murdered by a 10 year-old girl.

     There are a number of points to think about here. First, it is not being suggested that murders of the sort we have just looked at were very common in the 1960s; merely that they happened  and that unaccompanied children, out and about in public places faced a definite risk of death. In other words, some of them would not have their ‘common sense’ increased or be given the opportunity to grow to be ‘better adults’ by these experiences; instead, visits to the park, popping to the local corner shop and walking to school alone were, quite literally, the death of them. This is sometimes forgotten when discussing childhood at that time. Those who claim that children today should be able to play in the park and visit the corner shop alone are presumably saying that a certain number of avoidable deaths are a reasonable price to pay for such increased freedom on the part of those who will not be murdered or knocked down and killed by cars. Obviously, the three deaths at which  we have just looked would not have happened if the children had not been out by themselves, but were rather accompanied by their parents or other responsible adults,  as many of us now feel is desirable and wise.

     Secondly, it was not only the danger of sudden death which was faced by children playing out in the streets and parks without adults. In 1975 Cynthia Illingworth,  a doctor in Sheffield, published a paper which analysed injuries to children using playground equipment such as swings, roundabouts and slides. This was at a time when it was common practice for parents to send an older child to the park, in charge of younger siblings. One might perhaps have a boy of 10 or 11, sent to the park with his five year-old sister. This again is part of the golden age  about which so many baby boomers now feel nostalgic. Dr Illingworth found that thousands of small children were suffering fractured skulls, broken arms and various other serious injuries; some were even being killed. Staff at the casualty departments at hospitals to whom she spoke likened the injuries seen from such accidents to those encountered in road accident victims. Many of these children had been playing in parks; usually without their parents.  One of the chief causes of such injuries was that, to quote the report which Dr Illingworth later produced;

     The younger children were at particular risk on equipment such as the

     wooden rocking horse or roundabout, when the speed of operation could be

     controlled by older children.

Yet one more disadvantage of leaving children in the park to play by themselves!

      Another random statistic; in the 1950s, 300 children a year in Britain lost permanently the sight in one eye. This blindness resulted almost entirely from assaults by other children, using catapults, bows and arrows, airguns, stones, fireworks and bottles. Today, a single child being blinded in this way is likely to be reported by the press. These injuries were almost invariably inflicted when adults were not around to intervene when things were getting out of hand. The 3,000 British children who were blinded in one eye in this way during the 1950s  are presumably to be regarded as yet more collateral damage.  It seems a heavy price to pay, so that the other children who had not lost an eye while ’playing out’ could grow up to be better adults and have their common sense increased.

     The book by Steve Stack, a quotation from which we examined above, is by no means exceptional. Precisely the same sentiments are to be found in many other books, newspapers, magazines, television programmes, Internet discussions and personal conversations with those who recall fondly the baby boomer years.  All tend to illustrate the difficulties in finding out what the past was really like. There is no doubt that the middle-aged and elderly men and women expressing these view are perfectly honest and telling the truth as they understand it, but this does not necessarily mean that they are right. It is, for instance possible genuinely to think that the fruit which one ate as a child was sweeter and tasted better;  even though the true explanation has more to do with the declining number of taste buds in mature years. The same might well apply to memories of eternally sunny summer holidays and  snowy Christmases. Memory can be an unreliable thing. For this reason, we must delve a little deeper than merely listening to and recording the subjective impressions of people who were children at the time.

     This is not a trivial matter of disputing the recollections of this or that pensioner. Collectively, the reminiscences of the baby boomers have somehow ended up being treated as clinical data upon which government policy should be founded. The wholly erroneous  belief that the streets of 50 or 60 years ago were free of what we now call ‘feral’ youths has led to laws being passed which forbid young people even to walk along certain, designated streets. The idea of the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ leads to a ‘sugar tax’; worries about an apparent lack of exercise by children has resulted in an official policy to encourage school pupils to walk to school; misleading ideas about a rise in illiteracy causes governments to champion educational techniques which are said to have been successful in the 1950s, although there is no real evidence that this was so. In short, the supposed superiority of childhood during the formative years of the baby boomers over modern childhood has become an official doctrine which is shaping our society.

      Other than the fanciful and distorted tales which older people traditionally tell of their childhood days, what reason do we have to believe that childhood in the 1950s or 1960s really was better in any way than today? Moving beyond just anecdotal evidence, which for one reason and another may not be wholly reliable, takes us into deep waters. On the face of it, nothing could be simpler. Why not just analyse the facts and figures from the years following the end of the Second World War and then compare them with what is happening now? Surely in that way, we will be able to build up a detailed and objective picture of the two periods and see just how they shape up against each other? Unfortunately, this is quite impossible.

     There are several difficulties with just listing various statistics relating to 1957 or 1967 and then comparing them with similar data for 2017 and hoping to be able to see how things have changed over the last 60 years. Sometimes the information is not available and even when it is, the methods used for measuring various things about the condition and achievements of children have changed completely. A few examples will make this clearer. Let us consider first a claim frequently made in the press; that the academic attainments of children today are inferior to those of 50 or 60 years ago. This is often described in terms of  the  ‘dumbing down’ of our educational system. One aspect of this is that illiteracy is said to be on the rise and indeed to be approaching epidemic proportions. It is often  suggested in newspapers, using official figures, that one  British adult in five is functionally illiterate; a far higher rate than was believed to exist in the 1950s or 1960s. Surely, this figure alone tells us that something is seriously wrong with modern schools? Why can’t we go back to the old ways of teaching, which reduced illiteracy to practically zero? It is this perception which led several years ago to the officially recommended adoption in most maintained, state schools of the use of phonics for teaching children to read. Out went all the trendy, whole-word teaching methods popular in the 1970s, along with the ’real books’ schemes of the 1980s and instead, the sounds of the alphabet were once again emphasised.

     Appearances are proverbially deceptive and this is very definitely the case with the apparently declining levels of literacy in this country; caused, according to some  by sloppy teaching and by others   the widespread  use of mobile telephones and other digital technology.  Until the 1970s, there was a very simple, rough and ready means of determining whether or not an individual was literate. Literacy was defined as the ability to read and write a simple note. If one could write, ‘Gone to shops, Back in ten minutes’ or read such a communication from another person, then you were literate. These days, more precise and, it is claimed, scientific methods are used and simply being able to read and write is not considered enough to be described as ‘literate‘. People are tested on, among other things,  their so-called ‘document literacy’. This is based upon the ability to decipher bus timetables and other tables and charts. There have always been plenty of people who struggle to work out when the next bus is due; the author of this book being one of them! It is this group, those who cannot always extract information from charts and tables or make sense of newspaper articles from the Guardian, who are now officially regarded as illiterate. In short, literacy is defined by the ability to gain a GCSE in English language of at least Grade C. Using the same method of measurement as that used in the 1950s would reveal that the actual literacy rate in today’s Britain is, just as it was then,  virtually 100 per cent.

     Much the same thing happens when we try to work out whether or not children in the 1950s were really leaner and healthier than those at school today. Some readers may be aware of the dramatic rise in obesity which struck the world in 1998, when the Body Mass Index threshold used to calculate whether a person was overweight was arbitrarily reduced from 27 to 25. Overnight, 29 million Americans became overweight or obese. In this country, an ‘obesity time bomb’ was created, with many hundreds of thousands of people, including children being classified as overweight. When the goalposts are being shifted in this way, it becomes very difficult to know if we are comparing like with like.

     As with literacy and obesity; so too with crime and anti-social behaviour. Take knife and gun crime, for instance. A few years ago, newspapers in Britain were full of alarming headlines which talked of a rise in gun crime; children as young as 10 being arrested for firearms related offences. At first sight, this all sounds quite horrifying. Surely we cannot deny that this is a new trend? Children weren’t toting guns in the 1950s, were they? Except of course, they were. Close reading of the articles beneath these terrifying headlines reveal that by ’firearms offences’, the police were lumping together the figures relating not only to actual firearms, but also starting pistols, air rifles and replica weapons. If we rephrase the question as, ’Were 10 and 11 year-olds in the 1950s playing around with airguns?’, then the answer is of course that they were; far more than is the case today. The Just William stories often mention William’s affection for  airguns and in real life, air pistols and air rifles were  all over the place. Boys’ comics carried advertisements for airguns and these were taken out to play with an alarming frequency.   In those days, of course, no policeman would have dreamed of arresting a boy with an airgun. If the thing was obviously being misused, then he might step in and take the boy home, giving a few words of advice to the parents, but other than that airguns were accepted as a fact of life.

      A similar situation exists with knives and knife crime. If a police officer 60 years ago saw a 12 year-old with a knife, then he would not even have bothered to break his step. After all, practically all boys carried knives at that time. We are far less tolerant today of children and teenagers carrying around potentially deadly weapons and so arrests and convictions for the possession of knives and guns have soared. This tells us very little and certainly does not tend to suggest an ‘epidemic’ of knife or gun crime.

     All of which makes  it extraordinarily difficult to obtain  a rounded picture of childhood and adolescence in the decades following the end of the Second World War; one that may profitably be compared with the situation today. Never the less, the attempt will be made, drawing upon newspaper reports, contemporary observations and what records do exist. The result might be more than a little surprising to anybody who has formed a view on the childhood experiences of the baby boomers relying only on their own recollections in late middle age, or what is worse, from reading what is said about this era in newspapers and magazines.

For most of recorded history, older people have been in the habit of claiming that everything  was a good deal better during their own childhoods than  is now the case. The summers were longer, the fruit sweeter, the food more wholesome and the world an altogether  happier and less complicated place when they were young. Not only that, but the children themselves were different in the old days. They were more obedient, industrious, well-behaved, polite, happy and healthy. Such sentiments were being expressed centuries before the birth of Christ and the notion is still going strong; that this modern world is not a patch on the one which existed 50 or 60 years ago and children not what they once were. The Old Testament  book of Ecclesiastes was composed in the third century BC; perhaps 2,300 years ago.  Its  author wrote, ‘Never ask, “Oh, why were thing so much better in the old days?” It’s not an intelligent question.’

     This imaginary world, very different from our own and the children  much happier, has always lingered tantalisingly on the edge of living memory; so close that we feel that our generation has only just missed it. It is generally the time in which our parents or grandparents grew up. In the last century of so, the golden age was the Edwardian Era before the First World War and then later, the years before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Today, it is the 1950s and 1960s which were such a wonderful time to be young. Children at that time had, according to some of those who were children in those days, unlimited freedom to roam a world which was safe and inviting; a strange and magical land where no serious harm ever befell  children, as long as they made sure to be home by teatime.

      A. E. Housman summed up perfectly this yearning  for a vanished, enchanted world, when he wrote;

               Into my heart an air that kills
               From yon far country blows:
               What are those blue remembered hills,
               What spires, what farms are those?

               That is the land of lost content,
               I see it shining plain,
               The happy highways where I went
               And cannot come again.

     Most of us, at least when we are young, tend to take this sort of thing with a pinch of salt. When Granny tells us how much healthier everybody was in the old days, with all  the  fresh air and exercise that they got, and  the food  eaten  wasn’t contaminated with all those dreadful additives and other chemicals, we listen politely but without placing too much credence upon her tales. Similarly, when we are informed that children in the past were better behaved, stronger, healthier, happier, more polite, pluckier, possessed of greater reserves of initiative, and studied harder at school or that the summers were longer and the winters snowier; we treat these assertions too with caution.  After all, memory can be faulty and there is no reason at all to suppose that  recollections of this sort from over half a century ago are wholly accurate and objective. It is hardly likely that the world  really was a better place when our parents and grandparents were little children, nor that children were really all that different; whatever we might now be told.

     There are a number of factors at work when we see older people constructing fantasy worlds of this sort; some physiological, others psychological. Beginning first with the way in which  physiological deterioration as we grow older helps shapes our memories of childhood; it must be borne in mind that once we pass our mid-twenties, our faculties and senses usually begin to decline and fail. We have fewer taste buds and those we do have shrink and are less efficient. The range of sounds we are able to detect shrinks; our eyesight is seldom as keen in later years as it was in our youth. All of which means that our earliest memories of tastes, for instance, will seem more vivid and rich than those we actually experience in middle and old age. Few of us wish to confront our own failing faculties and declining vitality and it is therefore more reassuring and satisfying  to pretend that the fault lies with modern food, rather than our own bodies. It’s not that our tongues are gradually becoming less sensitive;  the blame lies rather with this awful stuff that the shops sell now. When we were children, you could buy apples which tasted like apples. Everything today is so tasteless and bland!

     Another reason why childhood experiences are remembered as being richer and more enjoyable than those in middle or old age is psychological, rather than physiological.  The first time we encounter something, whether it is eating an ice cream or walking through snow, will always make more of an impression upon us than the hundreds or thousands of subsequent times we go through the experience. There is the exhilarating sense of novelty about early childhood experiences which cause them to stand out as being particularly vivid and memorable. From swimming in a river for the first time to sliding down a hill on a toboggan; the first time is always likely to be recalled in the future as the best of all. This is another of the factors at work when older people claim that their childhoods were  marvellous; far more exciting than the way things are now. For them, this is perfectly true, but it tells us little about the objective state of the world; either then or now.

      Human memory is not a passive process of simply pointing our eyes and ears at a scene and recording faithfully all that is seen and heard. It consists  rather of an active and continuous mechanism of editing and enhancing the original sense impressions; discarding some and enlarging others. Why would we wish to retain memories of disappointment and sadness when we were little, in preference to images of pleasure and enjoyment? This too contributes to our skewed perspective when looking back at our schooldays from the perspective of 50 years or so of subsequent life. How else are we to explain why so many older people recall the past with such enthusiasm, claiming that their schooldays were the happiest of their lives?  It is curious, and more than a little suspicious, that one never meets a 14 year-old who believes this to be true.

     It is often expressly stated that fewer children were being abducted or murdered by strangers during the 1950s and that children were able to play freely out of doors without the risk of falling prey to  predatory paedophiles. This is quite untrue, as a quick trawl through newspaper archives soon reveals. The reason for this particular misconception is not hard to find. These days, news of a murder will  spread around the internet before it even reaches the newspapers. It would be all but impossible to prevent a child with a mobile telephone from finding out about all sorts of horrors, including child abuse and murder. This was not the case 50 or 60 years ago. Few children at that time were avid newspaper readers and if they didn’t listen to the news on the radio or watch it on television, then they would be most unlikely to hear about  murders involving children.

     There is a natural, widespread and understandable tendency for parents to shield and protect their children from unpalatable or distasteful aspects of life, in case they became distressed or frightened  about the terrible things which have befallen some child of similar age to them. For this reason, and because it was easily accomplished in the pre-electronic media years of the baby boomers’ childhoods, there was a tacit conspiracy among adults to conceal news of dreadful murders or child abuse. It was felt that there was no need to draw attention to such things in any case, having a bearing as they sometimes did  upon sexual depravity; sexual activity of any kind being a taboo subject for discussion in most families at that time.  It is for this reason that many baby boomers did not realise then, and have never taken the trouble in later years to find out, about the child murders and sexual abuse of children at the time that they were growing up. One or two especially dreadful cases might have filtered through to them, the so-called Moors Murderers being one of these, but in general child abuse or murders were unknown to children at that time.

     The  baby boomers are merely the latest generation to wax wistful about their wonderful childhoods. The term ’baby boomer’ itself might perhaps need a little explanation. During the Second World War, with many husbands away fighting, the birth rate, for obvious reasons, dropped. At the end of the war in 1945, the large-scale resumption of  connubial activity resulting from the return of the soldiers who had been away from home, led to a surge in births nine months later.  This rise in the birth rate lasted for nearly 20 years and became known facetiously as the post-war ‘baby boom’. Children born between roughly 1946 and 1964 are  therefore popularly known as baby boomers.

     The baby boomers, who now range in age from their late 50s to perhaps 75 years of age, enthusiastically promote the idea that the past was a glorious place; particularly for children, who were of course all  happier and healthier than kids today; as well as enjoying far more freedom. So far, so good, and in proclaiming their affection for a lost world of childhood where everything was better than it is now, the baby boomers are doing no more than their parents and grandparents have done  before them.  Here is a piece which sums up this view of childhood during the 30 years  or so which followed the end of the Second World War.  It is worth quoting this account which in various forms has been circulating for several years on the internet, at length; for it contains a number of themes at which we shall later be looking  in detail. In 2012, the Daily Mail described this as, ‘the new online sensation’. The newspaper went on to say that it was, ‘A lyrical evocation of growing up in the Forties, Fifties and Sixties, when children were safe to play where they liked’. Again, we note the curious idea that children were safe when they played out of doors 60 years ago, in a way that is no longer the case. By implication, the streets and fields of Britain have become more dangerous with the passage of time.

     CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL WHO WERE BORN IN THE 1940's, 50's, 60's!

     We survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they

     carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos. They took aspirin, ate blue

     cheese, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat, tuna from a

     can, and didn't get tested for diabetes or cancer. Then after that trauma,

     our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints. We had

     no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode

     our bikes, we had no helmets or shoes, not to mention, the risks we took

     hitchhiking. As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air 

     bags.

     Take away food was limited to fish and chips, no pizza shops,

     McDonalds, KFC or Subway. Even though all the shops closed at 6.00pm and

     didn't open on the weekends, somehow we didn't starve to death! We ate

     cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soft drinks with sugar in

     it, but we weren't overweight because...... WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE

     PLAYING!!

     We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as

     we were back by tea time. No one was able to reach us all day. And we

     were O.K.  We built tree houses and dens and played in river beds with

     matchbox cars. We did not have Playstations, Nintendo Wii, X-boxes, no

     video games at all, no 999 TV channels, no video/dvd films, no

     mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat

     rooms..........

     WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them! We

     fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no

     Lawsuits from these accidents. You could buy Easter Eggs and Hot Cross

     Buns only at Easter time. We were given air guns and catapults for our

    tenth  birthdays and rode bikes to our friends’ houses. 

    Our teachers used to hit us with canes and gym shoes and bullys always

    ruled the playground at school.  We had  freedom, failure, success and

    responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL! 

     And YOU are one of them! CONGRATULATIONS! You might

     want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids,

     before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own

     good. And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know

     how brave their parents were!

We note that the children born in the post-war years were apparently in the habit of leaving their homes in the morning, at weekends and during school holidays, spending all day in the streets or fields; only returning for their tea. This particular claim has become something of a leit motif for baby boomers; it regularly crops up whenever discussion turns to the difference between childhood in those days and the situation now. Here is Robert Elm, the writer and broadcaster, describing his own childhood in the 1960s;

     By the time I was nine or ten it became a ritual to be given the money for

     a one-day bus pass known as a Red Rover and the instruction to come back

     in time for tea.

The memory  of playing out all day, without the presence of any adults, from breakfast until  tea time is a powerful one for many adults born between 1946 and 1964. It invariably crops up when they are talking about their childhood. Going out by themselves to play, and walking to and from school without their parents has come to be seen as a desirable  way of life; one denied to modern children, with dreadful consequences such as  the likelihood of developing life-limiting diseases in later life.

     It is very right and proper that older people should believe that their own childhoods were richer, more stimulating and generally an improvement on  the lives lived by modern children and if they wish to pretend that their lives as children were like one long Enid Blyton adventure, then this does not hurt anybody. It is a harmless enough piece of make-believe. In recent years though, rather than merely listening indulgently to these stories, we are increasingly being expected to treat the fanciful reminiscences of men and women in their sixties and seventies as being reliable data, upon which we should act,  or even use to formulate government policy. Books are being published with titles such as Toxic Childhood,  which purport to show that modern children really are worse off in many ways than their older relatives were at a similar age; suffering from mental health problems, physical ailments, restricted liberty and various other awful consequences of being born into this modern world. Even more bizarrely,  government agencies and health trusts  are now  writing policies, and even framing legislation, which seemingly acknowledges that childhood today is somehow failing, and in need of rescuing to make it more like the way of life enjoyed by children in the 1950s. All of which is a little disconcerting, to say the least of it!  This peculiar trend is best illustrated by looking first at one of the most popular manifestations of this trend;  the idea that today’s children do not get enough exercise and that if we could only recreate the conditions under which children grew up during the 1950s and 60s, then we would see a tremendous and beneficial  change  in the physical and mental health  of British children. This is thought to be a good idea for several reasons; not least of which is that such a radical change of lifestyle is necessary to tackle what is sometimes called the ’obesity epidemic’ or ‘obesity time bomb‘. All such ideas are predicated on the assumption that children in previous generations were healthier and fitter than young people today and that the best way to improve the health of the rising generation is to take steps to replicate the experience of the baby boomers.

     In 2014 the British government published a draft Cycling Delivery Plan; designed to increase the number of people who travel on bicycle and by foot. One of the targets was that within the next ten years, the percentage of children aged between five and ten who walk to school should rise to 55 per cent.  A laudable enough aim, one might think and just the sort of thing to get children to exercise more. Surely, a return to the days when children walked to school, rather than being driven by their parents could only be a good target to strive for?  After all, forty years ago, the overwhelming majority of children did walk to school and were in consequence much fitter and healthier than today’s youngsters. This, at least, is the received view.

     There can be no doubt at all that children in the first three decades after the end of the Second World War spent far more time out and about in the streets without adults. This included playing with their friends after school and at weekends, as well as  walking to and from school. In 1971, for example, over 80 per cent of seven and eight year-olds walked to school alone.  Twenty years later, this figure had fallen below 10 per cent and today it would be surprising to see any seven year-old arrive regularly at school, having walked there alone. Indeed, so unusual would this be that it would almost certainly be the object of unfavourable remark by other parents and probably teachers as well. If a child of that age continued to arrive at school unaccompanied by an adult, then it is entirely possible that social services would be notified. At which point, many baby boomers will begin muttering things like;  ‘The Nanny State!’ and  ‘Health and Safety gone mad!’  Surely it makes sense that children should be given the chance to become independent without a lot of molly coddling and fuss? After all, the baby boomers themselves  didn’t come to any harm, did they?   Why shouldn’t today’s children be accorded a similar amount of freedom to that which was enjoyed fifty years ago?  It definitely made for a more healthy lifestyle, didn’t it?

        The description of baby boomer childhood from the internet, which we saw above, contains this claim;

     we weren't overweight because...... WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE

     PLAYING!! We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as

     we were back by tea time. No one was able to reach us all day. And we

     were O.K.

‘We were O.K.‘ How true actually is this statement?

     If we wish to know what childhood was like in the 1950s and 60s, we really need to look at records and statistics from that time and use those as the basis for our investigations; combining them where necessary with newspaper reports and other contemporaneous accounts. Looking at the genuine situation of the baby boomer children shows just how healthy and safe, or otherwise, their lives actually were.

          As a woman remarks sadly on the Netmums site, regretting the restricted circumstances of her own child‘s experiences;

    I miss the carefree childhood. I could play out from 8am to 6pm 

    and my Mum never had to worry I would be snatched.

       This is an interesting idea. Were children safer from being ‘snatched’ a few decades ago? It was not of course only seven and eight year-olds who walked to school alone in those days; even  six year-olds were sent off by their mothers every morning to make their own way to school and back.  On 8 September 1965, six year-old Margaret Reynolds set off alone for school. She lived in the Aston district of Birmingham.  Little Margaret didn’t arrive at school that day and nothing more was heard of her for four months.

     Five year-olds too were allowed to travel the streets on their own back in 1965. On 30 December that year, five year-old Diana Tift was walking to her grandmother’s house in Bloxwich, when she too simply vanished. The following month the corpses of the missing little girls were found laying side by side in a ditch. They had been murdered.

     This then is one of those things that happened during the childhood years of the baby boomers about which we seldom hear. Obviously, little girls of five and six are far more likely to be abducted if they are walking the streets alone than when they are accompanied by  their parents. Still, it may be argued, such murders must surely have been freakishly rare? This is true, although we might ask ourselves how often a wandering maniac would be likely to encounter a little girl whom he could snatch off the streets today. It is hard to recall when last a child of five was kidnapped and killed in this way in Britain by a random stranger; there simply aren’t that many opportunities for such crimes these days.

     If the  murder of a child  by a complete stranger is today a very unusual occurrence; so too is being killed crossing the road. In an average year in this country, only about  20 young people under the age of 16 are knocked down and killed by cars. Of course, as any baby boomer will tell you, there were far fewer cars about during their childhood, which must have made the streets safer for them; or so we are supposed to believe. In 1965, the same year that Margaret Reynolds and Diana Tift were murdered, over 900 child pedestrians were killed by traffic in Britain. Somewhere in the region of 45 times as many children died crossing the road that year as are likely to be killed by cars this year. It can hardly be doubted that this was mainly due to the fact that so many young children were out and about, crossing roads by themselves. This was part of the human cost of the baby boomers walking to school alone and playing out until tea time.

     In fact, the raw data for traffic accidents are a little misleading; the situation was even worse than at first appears. There were only a third as many cars on the roads 50 years ago. This means that a car in 1965 was 135 times as likely to knock down and kill a child as a car today. A sobering thought indeed and one which causes us to raise our eyebrows at the idea that it will improve the health of modern children if they are encouraged to walk to school, rather than travelling in cars. If children started playing out all day and walking to school by themselves, the first thing we would see, before any fall in obesity levels,  would be soaring statistics for deaths and serious injuries among child pedestrians. Despite this, there is a concerted effort throughout Britain to try and get more children to walk to school, because this kept children fit and healthy in the 1950s and 1960s.

      The results of such official nostalgia for 1960s childhood may be seen in Wales. In 2009, the Welsh Assembly Government launched a walking and cycling initiative; a flagship policy to get more adults walking and cycling to work, along with children using these methods to travel to school. The following year, the number of children walking to school had risen and this was hailed as a triumph in the battle against obesity. Four years later, those collating statistics for child casualties on the roads noticed a disturbing trend. For two years running, in 2013 and 2014, a rise in the number of child pedestrians being seriously injured on the roads was noted. In 2014, there was a 12 per cent increase in children under 16 suffering serious injuries. For a policy designed to improve health by reducing obesity,  this was a regrettable side effect.

     The baby boomer years were not really safer and more healthy for children in any respect,  on the roads or elsewhere. In 1970, deaths from accidental causes for children were running at 17.5 per 100,000 in England. Thirty years later, this had dropped to 4.5 per 100,000; it is now about 2.7 per 100,000. In other words, about seven times as many children were being killed accidentally in the 1960s as are now. Compared with the years when the first baby boomers were born; the situation is even more striking. Ten times as many children were  being killed in accidents in the mid 1940s, compared with today. When baby boomers complain, as  regularly happens, about Health and Safety, they do tend to forget how many children’s lives are  being saved by it.

     What of the health generally of children of the baby boomer generation? It has to be said that the picture is consistently and unremittingly grim. Looking back at the document taken from the internet, we see that:

     First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while

     they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos. They took aspirin, ate

     blue cheese, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat, tuna

     from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes or cancer.

Again, this sums up the point of view of an awful lot of baby boomers. These things didn’t do them any harm, so why all the fuss now? Of course, the adults today who were born during that period certainly did survive; that much is indisputable. What though of the babies and children who did not? We seldom hear about them. The statement, ’we survived being born to mothers who…’ is, to say the least of it, misleading. The infant mortality rate in 1960, the proportion of babies who died before their first birthday, was five times what it is today. The percentage of babies who died in infancy in Britain that year is roughly the same as a modern-day, third-world country such as Egypt. Nor was the situation very good for older children.

      Most of the great killer diseases in modern Britain, things such as cancer and heart disease, tend to strike almost exclusively at adults. The death of a child under 16 from illness is a terrible, but thankfully rare, occurrence. These days, we view the death of  even a single child from an infectious disease as being a shocking tragedy and if two or three die in an outbreak of disease, we are alarmed and demand answers from the medical authorities.  For the baby boomers though, the death of children from illness, especially infectious diseases,  was routine.

     In 1947, the year after the birth of the first baby boomers,  an epidemic of Polio swept Britain. There were 8,000 cases that year; resulting in the death of many children and the crippling of a very large number of those who survived the illness. As late as 1960, there were 80 deaths in Britain from Polio and many children left with varying degrees of disability; ranging from slight limps to being permanently confined to wheelchairs.  In that same year, there were 750,000 cases of measles, leading to the deaths of 150 children. A much larger number were left deaf or with brain damage.

     Younger readers might not be aware of the dreadful epidemics which swept the country with monotonous regularity during the 1940s and 1950s. Measles, polio, whooping cough, scarlet fever, diptheria, German measles, mumps; all these killed children and left others crippled, sterile, deaf, blind or with irreversible brain damage. In 1953, there were 46,546 cases of tuberculosis in  Britain, which resulted in over 8,000 deaths. Even smallpox was still a hazard for the baby boomers.  These random figures might give some idea of the risks faced by children at that time.  Often, such infectious diseases struck hardest against young children, who were far more likely to die of them than were healthy adults.

     Sometimes environmental disasters struck the country; hitting babies and children the hardest. In December 1952 came London’s Great Smog, which killed over 5,000 people. During that winter, the infant mortality rate in the capital doubled.

     The more closely we examine the ‘land of lost content’ in which the baby boomers grew to adulthood, the less appetising it appears! Almost a 1000 children a year being knocked down and killed by traffic; child murders; epidemics of infectious diseases which killed hundreds and left thousands crippled for life; rampant knife and gun crime; unchecked sexual abuse; these are just a few of the hazards facing children born between 1946 and 1964. Far from being golden age of childhood, as is sometimes claimed, it was a dangerous time for children to be alive.

     We saw that the yearning for a vanished and happier world for children has been around for many years, but the current obsession with the childhood  of half a century or more  ago does seem to be qualitatively different in some ways from the general and traditional feelings about childhood in the past. When a country’s  politicians and professionals work together to try and recreate some kind of facsimile of the past; enacting legislation and imposing policies upon hospitals, schools and the general public in the process, then there is clearly something a little strange going on.  Successive governments, along with countless  older people. and even those who weren’t even born until a couple of decades after the baby boomers, all seem convinced that opportunities for a joyously happy and fulfilling childhood somehow came to an end round about 1980, at the time when the last baby boomers, those born in 1964, were leaving school. This is exceedingly odd.

     1980 is of course significant for more than the fact that it marked  childhood’s end for the baby boomers. It was also the time that computers, electronic games, compact discs, videos and a host of other things which were to make the world such a different place began to be seen in Britain. In short, it signalled the onset of what one might call the electronic era and the beginning of the digital revolution. This digital revolution is still in full swing and it has had every bit as great an impact on life in this country as the Industrial Revolution did in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

     Not everybody in Victorian Britain was wildly enthusiastic about the visible manifestations of the Industrial Revolution; such things as factory chimneys belching smoke, noisy railway trains, the rapid growth of urban slums, the increasingly frantic speed with which people could communicate by telegraph and so on. They yearned for a gentler, pre-industrial world, with finer values than those they saw in the present day. Such people turned to the Middle Ages for their inspiration, a time when chivalry, stability and old fashioned values were still, or so it was claimed, to be found in the world. This mania for the medieval period spawned the revival of Gothic architecture, the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, poetry such as Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and William Morris and the Arts and Craft Movement. Even Queen Victoria became a fan of medievalism; she and her husband posing for statues and paintings showing them as historical figures from the era such as Edward III and Queen Philippa.

     The craze for the medieval was essentially a rejection of the modern world of mid-Victorian Britain, especially the ugliness of industry, and a desire to embrace a more attractive-looking past. Something very similar appears to be happening today with what looks rather like a longing for a pre-digital past. Whenever twenty-first century childhood is under discussion by baby boomers, it seems to be the digital technology with  which children are so familiar which excites the greatest uneasiness. Somebody will be sure to mention that when he or she was at school, they had to use long division and there were no calculators to help them. Somebody else will observe that it’s all computers today and that children and teenagers now spend  their whole time talking on mobiles or connected to the internet, with all its attendant perils. To listen to some politicians too, one gets the impression that most of  the problems faced by today’s children are somehow bound up with digital technology. The various screens are making them lazy and causing them to become overweight and develop diabetes, the calculators on their phones are harming their ability to do sums, textspeak is damaging their literacy skills, the internet is making them obsessed with violence and sex; everything seems to be mixed up with digital devices of one sort or another. This will provide enough material alone for a future article here!