In earlier centuries, when adolescence wasn't so prolonged, I wonder if

[raccoon]

relations between parents and older children was less contentious for the average family?

No way we could ever know for sure, but I just wonder.

[orestes]

1. Never read/seen Romeo and Juliet?

[raccoon]

2. I said the AVERAGE family.

I could've said, look at Henry II and his sons--hardly a picture of family love.

[Kutjara]

3. A agree we may never know conclusively, but...

...the absence of consumer goods, fashion (except for the nobility), and mass communication probably meant the gap between generations was pretty narrow. Also, when you consider (using the Middle Ages as an example) a squire would become a knight at 12 or 13, marry a girl of equivalent age and produce offspring shortly afterward, there wasn't a whole lot of time for hanging around the house, moping about how your parents "don't understand" you.

For the peasants, working on the farm from dawn 'til dusk and then going to bed because candles were too expensive to keep burning at night, probably offered little scope for conflict. Family priorities were to get the kids weaned and productive as early as possible, or married and out of the house.

[seabeyond]

4. or one might ask why so contentious now. could it be for all the other reasons

our society and family experience in experimentation today, that no other generation has ever contended with.

[raccoon]

5. Do you mean, many people are trying to raise kids differently than their parents did? nt

[seabeyond]

6. so many things. no family. single parent home. both working home. internet

outside influences, economy, shift in jobs, education, anything goes society. be friend. not connected. mean and hateful becoming a norm. disrespect. devaluing one another.

[cali]

7. In western culture, childhood itself is a fairly recent "invention"

from wiki:

It has been argued that childhood is not a natural phenomenon but a creation of society. Philippe Ariès, an important French medievalist and historian, pointed this out in his book Centuries of Childhood. This theme was then taken up by Cunningham in his book the Invention of Childhood (2006) which looks at the historical aspects of childhood from the Middle Ages to what he refers to as the Post War Period of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

Ariès published a study in 1961 of paintings, gravestones, furniture, and school records. He found that before the seventeenth century, children were represented as mini-adults. Since then historians have increasingly researched childhood in past times. Before Ariès, George Boas had published The Cult of Childhood.

During the Renaissance, artistic depictions of children increased dramatically in Europe. This did not impact the social attitude to children much, however—see the article on child labour.

The man usually credited with - or accused of - creating the modern notion of childhood is Jean Jacques Rousseau. Building on the ideas of John Locke and other 17th-century liberal thinkers, Rousseau formulated childhood as a brief period of sanctuary before people encounter the perils and hardships of adulthood. "Why rob these innocents of the joys which pass so quickly," Rousseau pleaded. "Why fill with bitterness the fleeting early days of childhood, days which will no more return for them than for you?"

The Victorian Era has been described as a source of the modern institution of childhood. Ironically, the Industrial Revolution during this era led to an increase in child labour, but due to the campaigning of the Evangelicals, and efforts of author Charles Dickens and others, child labour was gradually reduced and halted in England via the Factory Acts of 1802-1878. The Victorians concomitantly emphasized the role of the family and the sanctity of the child, and broadly speaking, this attitude has remained dominant in Western societies since then.

snip

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood#History_of_childhood

[mrcheerful]

8. You know I grew up in the 60's and from the day I could carry a bucket of water or hold a hammer

I had to work, my folks called it chores but compared to what is called chores today it was doing hard labor. Here is how my days as a child went, get up at 4 am, eat breakfast, then go feed and water the horses, mind you we had to carry the water from the house to the horse barn. Try carrying 50 gallons of water in 5 gallon buckets at the age of 5 or 6. Then it would be back into the house to get dressed for school, can't go to school smelling like the horses you know. After getting home from school it was again filling the 50 gallon water trough, then going inside and doing house chores, sweeping floors, mopping etc. Then after dad got home from the factory, it was time to feed the horses then wash dinner dishes. So by the time you got finished with all your chores you had an hour of TV time or an hour to do home work from school so you could get to bed before 9:30, 4 am comes early.

In the summer and fall, school break time, it was time to do yard work, dig foundations for the additions to the house, feeding and watering the horses, house chores, lawn mowing etc etc. If you got everything you were given to do, then you got your free time to run with your friends, this was childhood for me and my friends. The odd thing was you didn't get into a lot of trouble over dumb stuff todays teens do. But could you see the trouble todays parents would be in if they treated their kids the way my parents treated us? What really got my goat was when my mother bitched at me for making the SO's son do dishes and clean up his room, lol.

[pansypoo53219]

9. a lot of kids sent out to work

apprentices, hard labor. help pay to feed the family. also less mouths i guess. for AVERAGE. i read a 1891 set of encyclopedias. just read about the king of sardinia, fought with his father in the 1200's at 13. enzio. less average, college/school very young.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

10. My father grew up during the 1920s and 30s

He was a teenager during the depression and one of five children. His father had a good job as a train conductor in a rail yard and was the only one in his extended family that had a job. His father took in his cousins, uncles, aunts, and grandparents into his two story house. It was one enormous family living under one roof. Over my entire lifetime, I listened to countless stories about that time from members of his family. I never detected the least amount of generational friction between young people and their elders. It was Leave It To Beaver land or like the close-knit extended family in The Grapes Of Wrath. My father was raised as much by the other adults in the household as by his own parents in what was apparently complete harmony. And my dad went to work at a very young age driving trucks and working in a meat packing plant to help with the family income. He was driving a car at the age of 13. I realize this is just anecdotal, however, and may not be repesentative of everyone during that time.