tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post5974409561302049134..comments2024-03-28T21:56:51.675-04:00Comments on Face to Face: Pictures of pre-helicopter parenting: Early socializingagnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-27985041002459778232013-08-06T17:26:51.487-04:002013-08-06T17:26:51.487-04:00That woman without a kid looks pretty good :P
-Cu...That woman without a kid looks pretty good :P<br /><br />-CurtisAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-7889468073280279182013-08-02T18:11:40.161-04:002013-08-02T18:11:40.161-04:00People turn to material things for meaning when th...<i>People turn to material things for meaning when they lack social connections and community belonging. They didn't need to obsess over things in the '80s. That's more of a '50s thing, which everyone noted at the time ("consumerism," "mass society"). Getting the right car, the right set of kitchen appliances, welcoming the television set into the household like a new god.</i><br /><br />I don't know. I haven't ever noticed the least socially connected and "outgoing" people I know being the strongly most interested in acquiring new stuff. I don't know if self rated extraverts have ever tended to be the least consumerist and materialist. The 1950s was an era of new affluence for the common man and low inequality and so new possessions for the common man, but was it an era of obsessing about stuff?<br /><br />The 1980s seems relatively materialist compared to earlier ages, but less today, even if they seem more vigorously alive and extroverted compared to earlier eras - but perhaps I get too much of my sense of how materialism was changing from Philip K Dick and John Carpenter films (who are interested in portraying an ever sleazier and more materialistic society).<br /><br />Looking at ngrams (which are obviously an imperfect proxy for public interest and consciousness) for "consumerism" and "consumer society" start to pick up from 0 at around 70s-80s.<br /><br />"Mass society" mainly grows during the 1960s-70s but does drop during the 1980s. You could view this as a backlash.<br /><br />"Materialism" is slightly a more frequent term and peaks 1960, but I wonder if that isn't because of "historical materialism" and peak communism?<br /><br />"Shopping" shows really linear growth to the present day, but takes off around the "annus mirabilis" of 1963. "Money" and "rich" tend to stay constant or decline over time with a slight peak for money during the Depression era. "Corporate" begins to grow during the 1960s and never slows down its rate of growth.<br /><br />(Interestingly, in terms of religion, it seems , "God", "holy", "faith", "religion", "church", "worship", "prayer", "pray" show almost perfect correlation in frequency change in ngrams. "Evangelical", "heaven", "angel", "soul" and "hell" are similar as well, with slight time lags. <br /><br />Modest rise from 1800-1840 then a huge fall to the 1920s and then a pretty even rate subsequent to that. <br /><br />Its interesting to me that this apparent fall in religious expression in writing can be dated roughly to the 1840-1920 period).Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-6140703959074202452013-08-02T15:57:34.404-04:002013-08-02T15:57:34.404-04:00"Whatever the reason, she still wanted to sho..."Whatever the reason, she still wanted to show up to socialize with the other mothers, who were glad to have her around."<br /><br />Right, and nowadays, they wouldn't let her in because of suspicion. Hear about the guy who was turned away from the Lego factory because he didn't have a kid with him(he was with his adult daughter)?<br /><br />-Curtis<br /><br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-817154356101777612013-08-02T13:26:10.287-04:002013-08-02T13:26:10.287-04:00Sometime ago I wrote a post on what happened to gi...<i>Sometime ago I wrote a post on what happened to girls wanting to play with baby-nurturing dolls. Those commercials were constantly on kids' TV in the '80s and early '90s. That's a sign that girls had less avoidant attachment styles back then.</i><br /><br />I suspect that the closer to the peak of a crime wave is born the stronger parental instincts and this leads to a higher fertility rate as adults. I recently looked into cohort fertility rate trends and found that after dropping for all 19th century cohorts there were three trend reversals in the 20th century the first being roughly 1906 when fertility started raising to a peak 1933 then falling until the late 50s when it started raising again, these years all match up with when crime trends reversed. Women born between 1955 and 1960 had fertility rate of about 2, women born between 1961 and 1965 2.06, women born between 1966 and 1970 2.1(and it will likely end up slightly higher), the projection for 1970 to 1975 is 2.2 and based on the trends in over 35 birth rates that will be met if not surpassed. The projections are less certain but woman born in the late 70s will probably have a higher fertility rate still.<br /><br />There is no reason to think that women born in the 80s won’t continue the trend, polls of millennials (these polls always include people born the early 80s as millennials) have consistently shown that they place more value on parenting than prior cohorts did at the same age. Starting in 2001 polls on ideal family size have started showing the people under 30 have larger ideal size than older people while in the past they showed younger people had a smaller ideal family size. Given all this is reasonable to conclude that women born in the 80s will end up with a higher fertility than those born in the 70s.<br /><br />Another interesting note is that after adjusting for different child mortality rates (using a very rough calculation since I couldn’t find detailed data) women born in the 1970s will have a very similar fertility rate to those born between 1910 and 1920.<br /><br />I can provide sources if needed but I don’t want to get caught in a spam trap.<br />ddnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-40067320763304454232013-08-02T01:28:52.145-04:002013-08-02T01:28:52.145-04:00Here's that Saturday Evening Post cover on con...Here's that Saturday Evening Post cover on consumerism, from 1959:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/saturday-evening-post/1958-1.jpg" rel="nofollow">Cover</a><br /><br />It's acknowledging the problem and giving folks a gentle nudge away from consumerism through the use of humor. But in the '80s, such a theme would only be handled through parody or mockery.agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-25448846483022259262013-08-02T01:17:22.916-04:002013-08-02T01:17:22.916-04:00"Pretty much everyone is with the program on ..."Pretty much everyone is with the program on the role of mothers. Where's the culture war?"<br /><br />The vocal minority who keep lamenting the onward charge of helicopter parents. The tension is taken for granted enough that newspapers (websites) put up amusing articles showing the extremes of helicopter parenting all the time, like the one about the 15 year-old girl getting kicked out of camp for kissing a boy.<br /><br />Then there are more grassroots things like people forwarding emails or linking to websites about how dangerous things used to be when we were growing up, and how sissified everything has become. <br /><br />The culture war during the mid-century was similar, in that it was a vocal minority railing against the dominant trend of smothering mothers.agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-44147739971444990832013-08-02T01:11:47.930-04:002013-08-02T01:11:47.930-04:00"people in the '80s probably were more co..."people in the '80s probably were more competitive and hung up on possessions"<br /><br />I don't see that in anyone's home movies, pictures, or any area of pop culture. In fact, the hit music groups parodied or denounced materialism (Madonna, the Pet Shop Boys, among others), and glorified the common man (all of heartland rock, which is a strictly '80s genre, without counterparts from the '50s).<br /><br />The theme of charity pervades the era, most notably in the mega benefit concert Live Aid -- aka, Woodstock with a conscience.<br /><br />Black music groups weren't bragging about how much bling they had, not even rappers. One of the most famous early rap songs, "The Message," says that it's a fool's game for a ghetto kid to let his reach exceed his grasp in the hopes of driving big cars, spending twenties and tens.<br /><br />People turn to material things for meaning when they lack social connections and community belonging. They didn't need to obsess over things in the '80s. That's more of a '50s thing, which everyone noted at the time ("consumerism," "mass society"). Getting the right car, the right set of kitchen appliances, welcoming the television set into the household like a new god.<br /><br />There's even a cover of the Saturday Evening Post showing a newlywed couple looking up and seeing their dreams take shape in the night stars -- all of material possessions that they're hoping to acquire.agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-32482429956068262362013-08-02T01:00:07.504-04:002013-08-02T01:00:07.504-04:00"any diachronic work that compares child-pare..."any diachronic work that compares child-parent "attachment styles" and find changes between studies then and now? like a meta-analysis."<br /><br />Not that I know of for academic studies. You'd have to be careful there to make sure your population is roughly the same over the time periods.<br /><br />There was something to that "narcissism epidemic" idea, but it had it beginning in the early '80s IIRC -- way too early. But that's about when the higher ed bubble started inflating, so you have a whole new population of undergrads, below the traditional "college material" types from before.<br /><br />I think it's more productive to look for traces of attachment styles in pop culture and track that over time. That way we can tell what truly resonated with folks over time.<br /><br />Sometime ago I wrote a post on what happened to girls wanting to play with baby-nurturing dolls. Those commercials were constantly on kids' TV in the '80s and early '90s. That's a sign that girls had less avoidant attachment styles back then.<br /><br />There was a study doing a content analysis of advice in Parents Magazine from, I think, the mid-'50s through whenever the study was done... mid-late '80s, I think. The upshot was that in the '50s and early '60s, it was still the Benjamin Spock era -- over-exaggerate the importance of the mother's parenting style in how the kid turns out. Later on in the '80s, they were letting mothers know that they don't have so much influence over their kid's destiny.<br /><br />And there was something about the type of parenting style they advised -- more engineering-based in the '50s and early '60s, stemming from the belief that the mother's parenting had so much influence. Then by the '80s, the mother's role was seen to be less of an engineer, programming it just the right way, and more of a discoverer and observer, trying to figure out who this new person is, and how to best welcome them into the household and enjoy their company. The mother as hostess or social liaison.<br /><br />Obviously since the '90s the pendulum has swung back toward "the nurture assumption" of the mid-century, but the article couldn't see the future.agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-42336421818539278182013-08-02T00:45:41.480-04:002013-08-02T00:45:41.480-04:00"Nice photos. Yellow color filter?"
Bea..."Nice photos. Yellow color filter?"<br /><br />Beats me. They look like that in the original photographs, so it was either the ambient lighting or something in the camera that's changed since then.<br /><br />I have noticed that in the one room in our house that was remodeled during the '80s (judging from the tile pattern), the light above the medicine cabinet makes your appearance in the mirror below look like it has a golden glow to it.<br /><br />So maybe the ordinary type of lighting back then was ambery/glowy rather than harsh bright white like today.<br /><br />Although I think you still see the same tint when the pictures are outdoors in natural light... did the camera companies build their products to capture the image with a golden tint to it? Like they knew it would look better in a photo album for it to look slightly grainy/blurry and with a glowing light, more like a projected movie image rather than live on-the-scene TV video footage.<br /><br />Now people don't want something that looks like it's meant to be nostalgic sometime in the future. They want it to look harsh and too-realistic.agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-40822164435903819472013-08-01T21:02:34.342-04:002013-08-01T21:02:34.342-04:00Nice photos. Yellow color filter? Nice photos. Yellow color filter? asnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-66248452409996917782013-08-01T20:36:35.265-04:002013-08-01T20:36:35.265-04:00"Clinging to mother's skirts" is ove..."Clinging to mother's skirts" is overstating it. Even for those who want to go out into the social climate, there's nothing to go into. God knows I've tried since discovering your blog.<br /><br />-CurtisAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-86747332755446654222013-08-01T03:47:39.831-04:002013-08-01T03:47:39.831-04:00agnostic - reckon there's any diachronic work ...agnostic - reckon there's any diachronic work that compares child-parent "attachment styles" and find changes between studies then and now? like a meta-analysis. it would interesting to see if there are any frequency changes in behaviors.<br /><br /><i>Everyone's stuff looks like it could have come from the Goodwill store because folks weren't so hung up on materialism in the '80s (one of the most vile lies about the era).</i><br /><br />People tend to say this comparing the '80s to the '60s-'70s and the '30s-'50s, and people in the '80s probably were more competitive and hung up on possessions (even if more outgoing generally as well).<br /><br /><i>culture wars over the role of mothers in society was the mid-century, when inequality was low and falling</i><br /><br />I can see this typifying the 30s-50s, beause they really did go from low female employment and high birth rates to high female employment and low birth rates over that time. It really is a big change.<br /><br />But I don't really see it in the Millenial era. Pretty much everyone is with the program on the role of mothers. Where's the culture war? Status competition between parents is not the same as a culture war at all.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com