Even if your smaller family and others like it had a more relaxed approach to parenting, no doubt that was in part due to the culture of the time where people generally had larger families.
The collective media fearmongering that is persistent nowadays is only popular because most people accept the narrative. This could easily be because today they generally have one or two children whereas when you grew up that was not the norm and such ideas would not have been popular.
> Even if your smaller family and others like it had a more relaxed approach to parenting, no doubt that was in part due to the culture of the time where people generally had larger families.
Nope. If you think about it, GenX was the smallest of the recent generations, despite Boomers being a large generation (hence their name), so family sizes had already shrunk dramatically before the more recent phenomenon of helicopter parenting. "Gen Xers were sometimes called the "latchkey generation", which stems from their returning as children from school to an empty home and needing to use a key to let themselves in. This was a result of what is now called free-range parenting, plus increasing divorce rates, and increased maternal participation in the workforce prior to widespread availability of childcare options outside the home." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X
As far as I remember, almost all of my peers had only one sibling at most. Families of two children or even one child were extremely common at the time.
By the way, the reason that people had larger families in the past wasn't because kids died and needed to be replaced. It was because they didn't have birth control.
Even if your smaller family and others like it had a more relaxed approach to parenting, no doubt that was in part due to the culture of the time where people generally had larger families.
The collective media fearmongering that is persistent nowadays is only popular because most people accept the narrative. This could easily be because today they generally have one or two children whereas when you grew up that was not the norm and such ideas would not have been popular.