I remember having measles. I smelled bad. I remember having mumps. My parents thought it was funny as hell that I couldn’t eat a pickle. There was no SCAN to call back then.
:dubious:
Did they ask you to swallow anything?
Seriously, my parents would have done the same.
Taiwan is a lot like America of the 1970s. Many people here just don’t put their kids in safety seats.
Back around 1970 when my younger brother was three and in times when was only he and I with my mom, he would sit in the middle of the bench front seat and I’d sit by the door.
One day he wanted to sit by the door, and for some reason my mom allowed it.
On the first curve we went around, he went flying out the door because he had opened the door. Fortunately he was ok.
When my brothers and I were babies (1968, '74 and '76 births), the pram could be taken apart. The box the baby goes in would be put in the back seat; Dad would put the folded structure between the box and the seat in front of it to hold it in place (no backseat belts). I remember that car seats, while not required, did come out when Littlebro was still small enough to use one and already mobile enough that it was welcome; having pram-box and car seat and me in the back seat at the same time… well, let’s say I’m glad my hips were still narrow back then. By the time Littlebro was old enough to use the car seat, Middlebro was car-trained enough to stay out of trouble without one.
My grandparents first car was a Model A Ford and they said they built a box and attached it somehow to the backseat for the baby to lie in.
After I was born, I was brought home from the hospital in a 1933 Ford Roadster, with the top down, and my mom pissed off to no end. See, it was 1971, and my dad had just finished restoring the car for a customer (who would eventually gift it to the Air & Space museum in San Diego) and wanted to bring me home “in style”. I’m guessing I was just held by my mom for the trip home.
Growing up, dad would take me and my older brother around town in his Corvette convertible. My brother got the passenger seat, and I got wedged between the two seats, sitting on the console.
I’m going to kind of hijack my own post.
I was watching an episode of My Three Sons last week. It was the first season so it was 1960. New neighbors were moving in across the street. They had a baby probably 6 months old. The grandma was caring for the baby while the parents were directing the moving company. There was lots of commotion in the house. The grandma says to her daughter that it’s too noisy for the baby to nap in the house. The mother of the baby tells grandma to put the baby in the back of the station wagon!!! So she did! It looked like it was a warm summer day. All I could think of was all of the incidents we hear of now where babies and kids are dying after being left in a hot car. At least the grandma made sure the back window was down!!
How times have changed…
I was born in '72 and my family had a '69 Ford Econoline. Besides the front seats, the back was open with a long bench that ran down the driver’s side. We could sit on that or play on the floor. I remember colouring, doing puzzles, drawing, etc. On longer trips, it became a camper van and extra benches were added, making the entire back into one big mattress. It was great fun and comfortable to travel in. Thank goodness we never had an accident.
We didn’t have a car with seatbelts for all the passengers until 1983.
I also remember riding in the back of pick up trucks in the early to mid 80s. In particular, I remember going to boy scout camp this way, waving bye to my mom from the back of the truck as we pulled away.
I remember arguing with my brother about who got to lay up behind the rear seats in the window “shelf”.
Families have gotten smaller and wealthier and have urbanized. A lot of what we see as ‘common sense safety’ was simply inaccessible to poorer families back in the day. The real big turning point was in 1962 when Congress added child protection to the SSA. By 67, there were mandatory reporting laws in every state. In 1974, Congress passed CAPTA and that’s really when things started to change. Parents basically became very afraid. Child abuse reports went through the roof. In 1970, there were 60 thousand reports a year of child abuse. By 1990, it was up to 2 million reports yearly. The 80s really saw a fear that any step out of line could result in your children being taken away. In 2000, there were about 4 million babies born in the US and about 3 million reports of child abuse. It encourages parents to err far on the side of caution when it comes to ‘neglect.’
This was also the era when we saw the rise of kidnapping fears. More disposable income in the 80s meant that parents were able to afford new safety devices that would have been luxuries before. You see the rise of outlet caps and poison control centers along with fingerprinting of kindergartners and other issues that really didn’t cross people’s minds in earlier eras. One of the things that I always point to was the young age at which people started hunting. In my parents’ generation, hunting at the age of 4 was not strange and hunting on your own at 9 or 10 was the norm. Nowadays, the thought of a 4 year old shooting a gun makes shivers go down our spine, but back then, it was normal.
I once saw a movie about babies being born around the world. The Mongolian couple left the hospital with their baby after two days and climbed onto a motorcycle – papa driving while mama held onto him, with the baby strapped to her. The safety issues were obvious, but it also seemed like an uncomfortable trip for the mother so soon after the birth.
Not about car seats, per se, but when my family went to Orlando, FL in the early 70’s dad had a pickup with a basic camper top. My parents put a mattress in the bed of the truck and all 3 kids, aged about 5 - 10, rode back there for 450 miles. We thought it was a blast! A bit hot, but a blast. If we needed a restroom stop or the like we would get there attention in the rearview mirror and signal what we needed. My parents got a quiet road trip out of it…
I remember playing in the rear footwell, with the instructions to hide if we saw police, and I wasn’t born until the '80s. The seat belt rubbed on my neck and chin, it was really uncomfortable on long trips. I suspect my parents just had us on their laps as babies, I doubt I was in the car with one adult as a baby, as we only had one.
That’s how all of my scouting trips were done in the early 70s, except we would just be in the back of an open pickup.
And if the mother had to stop the car more suddenly than usual, she grew the habit of automatically reaching out with her right hand to make sure the kid didn’t shoot off the edge of the seat. (Or her left hand depending on the country.)
It’s hard to believe that not even seat belts were universal until the 1960s or 70s. State laws requiring the use of seat belts didn’t exist before the 1970s, IIRC.
Wasn’t there a movie in the 1990s, Riding In Cars With Babies?