Children tend to survive better here in the U.S. than a lot of places on earth now

 But, it was much worse than now in the 1950s when I was growing up. My parents didn't smoke or drink and were ministers and my grandmother mostly took care of me as a child growing up and my father also worked 40 hours or more as an electrician between the time I was born and 12 years old when my mother's father died.

Then my father and my mother were not full time ministers running a church anymore so Dad started his own electrical Contracting business with a partner. He hired me summers because I was 5 foot 2 inches tall when I was 12 and could crawl under houses with much less room than he could which saved him a lot of money not having to bore so many holes in walls for electrical cables and pipes and flex conduit through which you string the electrical wires to various circuits through a house or business.

I was well taken care of by my parents and my father was always a good provider for us including my mother's mother who lived with us and took care of me ongoing. 

But, I saw many bad things happen to children I met and since I was a good listener trained by my parents to counsel people even then because they were ministers, I listened to people's problems following the example set by my parents who were counselors to everyone in the church they ran in Los Angeles.

So, I heard many horror stories from children just trying to survive their lives, of them being beaten by drunk parents or worse, and all the horror stories you could imagine growing up in the 1950s in Los Angeles.

So, I noticed that children often seemed to just disappear without a trace a lot then so this made me very grateful for my parents who were very good and honorable and decent parents including my grandmother and my grandparents on the other side too.

But, starting around the 1970s fathers got involved (including myself) in the raising of the children and I think overall this was a very good thing for the children and the mothers (except this created problems often during divorces with people fighting over custody of their children a lot too).

But, I think children survive more and it is less like the survival rate of puppies and kittens which it was when I was growing up. If you look at the death rates in children starting around 1900 and go up until now you can see how horrific it was compared to now. 

If you weren't a grown up by 14 or 16 for most people it meant you likely wouldn't survive to 30 unless your parents were very rich then in the 1950s and early 1960s.

However, things are much different now than then in many different ways.

Things are not really better except that more children survive now.

But in other ways they are NOT BETTER they are just different than the 1950s.

Many bad things happen to people now that didn't happen much in the 1950s, this is why things are only different and not better now in general.