Children and people in general were more "Expendable" in the 1950s and early 1960s still

 What do I mean by this?

People still sort of expected somewhere between 1/2 or so of all children to die of something by the time they were 12. Why?

Because this is how things always were before around 1900 or 1920. Life was hard to maintain into adulthood. People tended to have more serious psychological problems in the 1950s too because of things like the Great Depression and World WAr II made a lot of people nuts in various ways. Life was much much harder in some ways at the end of World War II.

As a child what I got from adults was something like: "You are so lucky not to suffer like we did through the great depression and world war II when we had to watch so many people in the world die!"

This was the primary thing I heard all the time from adults and Grandparents and such. So, they tended to think of children growing up in the 1950s as very spoiled compared to them. And often they spoiled us and then punished us because our lives were better than theirs were as children.

So, I guess life at every point is kind of strange and everyone sort of does the best they can for themselves and their children. 

But, things were not like they are now at all in any way, shape or form.

So, when people try to put their value systems on the 1950s and Before it is ONLY out of ignorance that they do this because people were doing the best they could in those times and also hindsight is better than foresight in much of this.

Even as a child and young adult I wondered how I would survive such a world and wondered if I actually wanted to be alive in a world like this where things were so repetitive and dreary?

But, a lot of changes in the late 1960s and early 1970s gave me hope and I found a way forward by moving out into the country and buying property and building my own house in the wilderness. This was wonderful for me to get out of the big city (Los Angeles) and away from millions of people and to go remote into the mountains and build a home on 2 1/2 acres of land and to home school my children there.

IT was heaven getting away from it all and into the wilderness that I knew and loved from around 1980 to 1985. This gave me enough hope in life to where I'm still alive now at age 75.