“Where are the parents?” Parental Responsibilities in the 1960s and 2010s Ros Edwards Photos courtesy of Pat Marsden

Salford Slum and Re-housing study, 1962—1963 Mothers Alone study, 1965—1966 DENNIS MARSDEN COLLECTION

Sam had an accident that nearly killed him. A builder’s ladder had been left and some boys of around 10 and 11 were manhandling it when it fell over (or was pushed) and fractured Sam’s skull. It happened at at night and he had to be rushed into hospital for a brain operation … From the newspaper accounts it appears that no blame can be pinned on anyone (although the original story was that the ladder had been pushed over deliberately perhaps).

With the little girl June she seems rather over protective … she takes June all the way to school which is quite a long way, possible half an hour’s trip, just so that she can see her across the road …

I’ll tell you the sort of thing when I was living with me husband. He didn’t want me to work... he didn’t like me to work anywhere where there was any men. So, when he was out in the morning, and I had our Cynthia I used to put her to bed at 9 o’clock for her morning sleep. I used to kid myself that she was ready for a sleep at that time and I used to go off down the pub and clean them for two hours, and then I’d rush off home. She’d always be asleep. And that’s how I used to do. The only trouble was, I used to have to go Sundays as well. So Sunday mornings, what I did, I used to get all the kids ready, put them in the pram, and go down past the pub and I’d nip in and do the cleaning for a bit, and Jack would take the pram down to Greenhead Park, and push it around and I’d join him there. That’s how me husband never found out.

They’re left to their own devices most of the day. Their mothers sets them off in clean clothes in the morning, pushing the baby in the pram or walking him, and when it’s fine they’re out nearly all the time. William has a sleep ‘on the couch’ in the afternoon. William who’s two and very, very fat goes off by himself. I’ve seen him being wheeled and led off by other children (a neighbour’s child seems to take him for a walk) riding with a group of boys on a lorry cart. But usually there’s John or Mary to look after him. John sometimes has to stop in to mind William while his mother goes to the shops and both can be seen at the window standing on the couch.

I went down there and I cried, I begged and prayed for them to take them but they say ‘they’re your children, and you’ve got to bide by that’. Oh, to think of children in one of them homes. Although they are very nice. I’m always meeting someone and she said, ‘Don’t be sorry for them, they’ve got seven pairs of different sorts of shoes, and they have two holidays a year, and at Christmas-time they are going for this trip, and that trip. They have a lot more than what ours have’.

Britain’s dysfunctional base is expanding … The transmission of parenting skills from generation to generation has changed considerably, and while the middle classes can read the guide books, those with lower educational and social skills are finding parenting skills squeezed out as extended families reduce and more one parent households have smaller knowledge bases on which to draw … As a society, we seem to have reduced the standards of responsibility which we expect parents and households to meet when children are born. This has produced tacit acceptance (particularly from those who do not have to face the consequences) of many of the dysfunctional conditions least favourable to successful childrearing. (2008: 30)

Everyday parenting practices in the 1960s would be regarded as irresponsible today. Parental liability now a moralised discourse. Shift to contemporary focus on children’s well-being. Direct comparisons cannot be made between everyday practices then and now, to say that one is worse or better than the other, because conceptions of children’s needs and capacities, and what is involved in taking care of children, have shifted so radically across the past fifty-odd years.