The rules your grandmother grew up with are probably not those you’re enforcing in your home, and the rules in your grandchildren’s homes will likely have changed again. We change our parenting styles as we learn more about how children’s brains and bodies develop, and most of us keep some of the methods and rules our parents used and picked up from others.
Plenty of past advice, like giving baby a little nightcap to ensure he sleeps, is downright scary. Other old-school rules, like forcing a child to finish everything on his plate, are now known to be harmful. However, some of the old parenting advice has only gained more evidential support over the years. We’ve seen it work consistently over generations, though it has been tweaked over time, such as giving the same treatment to kids regardless of gender.
Here are some of our favorite examples.
Send Kids Outside
The practice of playing outside has changed. We’ve been through the era of Stranger Danger and the era of busybodies calling the police or Child Protective Services because children were playing outside. There are also stories of parents going too far—like leaving a toddler in the yard with only the dog to supervise. Then there are those horrifying photos of window cages, as seen in Apartment Therapy!
The solid part, though, is that our kids need time outside, breathing fresh air, and getting exercise. This was obvious to our grandparents and their grandparents, and it’s obvious to us. Granted, it can be a little harder to get kids outside these days, but it’s still important.
Support Other Parents
In the 1950s, it was leaving the babies in a playpen while the two moms had tea in the kitchen. In the 1980s, it might have been trading child care with a neighbor so you could both work part-time. Even in our distant hunter-gatherer past, parents relied on building a sharing society to ensure that the next generation would survive to adulthood.
These days, we have the Mommy Wars, and parenting can often be a competition. Moms may snipe at one another in online groups for using disposable diapers or baby formula, and there are ongoing arguments about co-sleeping, taking necessary meds during pregnancy, and so on.
Still, we’d benefit from implementing this piece of advice today: instead of judging the mom next to you, offer her some help.
Set Aside Time For Adults
Whether it was sending the kids to bed early to have a cocktail party, sending them outside in the morning and saying to come back when the street lights come on, or scheduling their kids for summer camps, parents have found ways to have some time to themselves.
Now we feel like we have to be involved and busy every minute, or we think we’re failures or will be judged as such. However, we’d be wise to take the best piece of advice that our grandmothers shared and find a little bit of time to be an adult. The kids can be at sports practice in the backyard or their rooms, but we need to find an hour here and there to talk to our spouse without interruptions, to visit with adult friends, and to just relax without the demands of parenting.
Teach Respectful Interactions
If you polled adults about what they wish they could bring back about child-rearing in history, “respect” would be one of the top responses, if not the absolute top. It’s a common lament that kids are not as respectful as they once were.
While there’s some truth to this for some kids, it’s also relevant to understand that how we show respect has changed over the years and that kids have learned they can expect respect in return. While “respect” may have once been defined as kids being “seen but not heard” or only speaking when spoken to, we see kids standing up for themselves and participating in society.
Even if the definition of respect has changed, its importance hasn’t changed, and teaching kids to show respect for themselves and others goes a long way in smoothing both your life as a parent and their entire future.
Seek A Simpler Life
According to Sloww, the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” has a variety of origin stories, but depending on which you believe, it seems to have arisen between the mid-1800s and early 1900s. There have probably always been parents who raised their kids that way, trying to have the newest and best dolls, dresses, televisions, and other status symbols and distractions available.
Then again, there have always been families who were content to meet their children’s needs and limit the extras. Implementing this in 2024 doesn’t mean your kids should have a bare-bones bedroom with a mattress on the floor and two changes of clothes, but it does mean you could stop and think about whether the latest game console is essential and whether a pile of birthday gifts should be taller than the kid.
Meet needs, figure out just how much of the ‘wants’ are appropriate, and stick to it. That’s always been good advice.
Teach Kids To Clean Up After Themselves
This rule may have been more gendered in some eras and/or households. Still, when our grandparents were kids, the common wisdom was to teach children to at least rinse, if not wash, their dishes, to keep their bedrooms tidy, and to help keep the house presentable for guests dropping in.
Today, we can implement this by teaching all of our kids, regardless of gender, to run a vacuum or sweep a floor if they’ve tracked in mud, to wash their dishes and load a dishwasher, to keep their own space clean if not necessarily tidy, and to be aware of their surroundings and able to take care of messes when they see them.
Give Kids Unstructured Time
Kids have always needed structured time. For hundreds of years, this has included schools (at times, public schools for the poor and tutors for the wealthy) and chores, or in some cases, full-time work on the farm or in the family business. Still, kids have also always needed free time for their own use.
A hundred years ago, in America, some kids were denied this because the family needed them to work for survival. Today, some kids are denied unstructured time because there are just so many activities to be involved in. They’re enrolled in sports, after-school programs, clubs, church groups, and more until they hardly have a moment free to breathe.
Free time to use as they please is essential for kids’ growth and development, but that hasn’t changed.
Proportional Response To Inury
An opinion piece in Let Grow addressed the 80’s style of injury care: “Rub some dirt on it.” The author opined that modern parents are too quick to grab first aid kits and seek emergency care. By contrast, they describe old-school responses to falls and scrapes:
“An 80s parent? Make sure we weren’t bleeding (too much) and send us back to whatever we were doing in the first place. You might get a Popsicle if you’re lucky.”
When I first became a parent, someone told me that if my kid had a minor bump, I should comfort them but also distract them. Amazingly, when you know it’s not a serious injury, toddlers respond much better to a hug and “Hey, you want to try again?” instead of catastrophizing.
Of course, if a serious injury is possible, it should be taken seriously, but keeping it proportional is still good advice.
Sit Down & Share A Meal
Family meals were once a standard to aspire to, if not always a norm. Even if your family sat down with tv dinners in front of the television, it was to watch the family in Leave It To Beaver or The Brady Bunch have dinner together with family conversation.
Busy schedules and food insecurity have contributed to societal shifts away from this ideal. Personal screens—tablets, phones, and handheld gaming consoles—have likely played a role, too. However, statistics show that this move away from family dinners is affecting the working class more than the wealthy and can often reflect parental priorities and obligations. The American Survey Center found in 2022 that single-parent families sit down to a shared meal less frequently.
At the same time, they found that those who grew up with family meals are more likely to attend and complete college, less likely to experiment with substance use, and less likely to be suspended from school.
Having a family dinner may be harder than ever, but it’s still a goal to strive for, even if it’s only possible part of the time.
Say It, Mean It, Stick To It
One thing our grandparents’s generation got right in parenting was consistency. If they said bedtime was at nine, or that you couldn’t go out until you washed the dishes, or you’d be grounded if you didn’t get good grades, you could expect that to stick.
Today, we might set different rules and different consequences in some cases, but consistency is still key. It’s less important that bedtime is at nine o’clock than that it’s consistent so a child knows what to expect. Screen time might be set at an hour a day, or it might be for however much time your child has left after completing homework and before bathtime, but it should be the same rule, and if broken, the promised consequences should be enforced.
Set Rules & Boundaries
One of the most important things parents have done consistently for generations is setting rules. They may not be the same in every household or every generation, but having boundaries is an important part of healthy growth.
Kids are naturally programmed to explore, to test their limits, and to see what they can do. When parents (and teachers and caregivers) lay out what is and isn’t allowed, kids have an easier time knowing the boundaries and what to expect.
They should also know that rules may be different in different places — the grocery store, a friend’s house, a classroom, and home may all have slightly different rules of behavior, but if kids have those rules laid out clearly in advance, they have the opportunity to succeed and flourish.
Instill A Work Ethic
Your kids probably don’t have to milk cows and gather eggs before breakfast or go to work in the local factory instead of attending school. Your family’s livelihood probably doesn’t depend on your teenager (or even younger) holding a job.
That doesn’t mean that kids today have less work ethic than those brought up during the Great Depression, it just means a little less desperation about it.
In 2024, teaching work ethic can involve household chores and other responsibilities. A child who has vacuumed the living room has a lot more respect for the state of the carpet and is more likely to remember to take his shoes off at the door.
Teaching Life Skills
Our grandmothers learned to bake bread and prepare a pot roast, standing beside their own mothers in the kitchen, often before they were tall enough to see over the table. Our grandfathers were shadowing their fathers, learning to hammer a nail and repaint a barn.
For some time, these skills moved into public school classrooms, where girls sat in Home Ec classes learning to sew a neat hem and boys learned to repair a car engine. Those courses gradually became more co-ed, and then faded out of schools almost entirely. Both are now seeing a little resurgence, but there’s still plenty of room for teaching life skills at home.
Today, we should ensure that all children, regardless of gender, can do at least some basic cooking and know how to do such minor fixes as checking for a tripped breaker or replacing a flat tire. Sewing one’s own wardrobe is no longer necessary, but all kids can be taught to do a quick needle-and-thread repair and hammer a loose stair board back in place.
Set A Bedtime
Bedtimes and curfews have been a mainstay of parenting throughout human history. They’ve lasted because they have genuine value.
Though we recognize more autonomy and freedom for even our youngest kids today than has been the norm at times, we also know that getting enough sleep is important for academic success, mental health, and physical health and well-being.
Kids who don’t get enough sleep suffer, and routines are essential, so setting a bedtime and sticking to it is still a vital parenting tip today.
Limiting Screen Time
Until recently, there were natural limits to screen time. Most families didn’t have a television when they first became available, so the only ‘screens’ kids had access to were movie theaters (and even then, kids loved to pick a matinee and watch all afternoon if they could!). Even as home televisions became popular, until the late 1940s, the stations went off the air in the evening! Even adults had enforced screen time limits!
Now, a generation that had access to all-night television (even if we were sometimes reduced to watching infomercials) and Nintendo systems and VCRs, and a generation that had iPads are raising another generation that has access to screens nonstop, and even more of them. Many kids today have a cell phone, a tablet, a Chromebook for schoolwork, a few consoles that connect to their television, and a few handhelds. They may even have a smartwatch to read texts or an Alexa or similar device.
Screens are everywhere, which means that our kids’ eyes are on them all the time. Setting limits can be hard, but it’s still important today.
Let Kids Figure Things Out
A lot of us grew up figuring things out for ourselves. I remember my family having a computer with about four programs on it—one for accounting, one that was a plain-text word processor, hangman, and a drawing program. What it didn’t have was a mouse. At about 6 years old, I stood in the computer chair and learned how to use the arrow keys and spacebar to place lines in the drawing program and to use menu options to get ellipses, rectangles, and colors.
The same was true for other things — we learned how to do a lot of things on our own because our parents were busy. That’s not necessarily to say they were unavailable, but they definitely weren’t hovering.
There are times to jump in before your kid figures something out by trial and error, like when he’s about to microwave a pop tart in the foil wrapper (guilty of that one myself back in the 90s, and boy did I scream when those sparks started popping). Still, it’s also really cool to stand back and allow them to work things out.
Share Traditions & Create New Ones
Generation after generation of parents have repeated a tradition for no reason other than that it’s the way they’ve always known things to be done. On the other hand, some traditions are valuable and worth keeping, and some new traditions are worth implementing.
You’ll have to decide for yourself what those are. Do you keep the Elf On The Shelf and the Christmas Eve pajama box? Do you skip or keep grandma’s tradition of the birthday celebrant picking dinner?
If you can keep some traditions your family has held for generations, it helps create a bond and recognize the value of family history. Even if you can’t or choose not to, create your own traditions because ritual is a very important bonding tool and means a lot to kids.
It’s Okay For Kids To Be Bored
Not so many generations ago, letting kids be bored was more or less standard. Parents didn’t see it as their responsibility to entertain children.
Now, we try to provide infants with intellectually stimulating toys and sights, from crib mobiles to kick pianos to toy cell phones. We turn on the ABC song, and offer board books that are safe to chew. Then, we try to keep up that energy as the kids age.
Here’s the thing. It’s great to give your toddler a set of blocks and your elementary schooler a build-your-own-volcano kit. Still, it’s also really awesome for their development to let them have time without any prepared entertainment.
When kids are bored, the creativity comes out. This is when they (and heck, we as adults too) start thinking about how to build a robot out of cardboard boxes or why the sky is blue or how to create a new beaded jewelry design or build a nonprofit to feed homeless kids. This is the beautiful time, and kids still need it.
Teach Kids To Value Family
Some people are cringing reading this one because, in their experience, this means sacrificing autonomy or tolerating abuse and meanness. Coming into 2024, the value of family is still significant, we just have to approach it differently.
Getting together and maintaining connections with grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and the whole extended family was a norm for many or most of us growing up. If we can give our kids the same great experience. If not, we can teach them to value and love the families and support systems we and they build..
Lead By Example
I’m not claiming that all of our adults actually followed this advice or that any of us will be perfect at it. However, it is sound parenting advice that was given then and is given now.
We all remember sitting through the D.A.R.E. program and seeing warnings about ‘drugs’ that included alcohol and cigarettes, then going home to see our parents have a beer and a Winston and panic about their ‘drug use,’ right? I remember trying to have “The Talk” with at least one of my adults about the danger of tobacco products.
And, okay, they weren’t wrong about some of that, but what we saw was a program that gave the impression that beer and rat poison belonged on the same shelf, and then our dads acting like one beer after supper was no big deal — for a kid, that’s hard to reconcile.
The conclusion isn’t that we should eliminate programs that teach about substance abuse or that we can’t indulge in a drink as parents, but it does demonstrate that parents should consider balancing how their messaging and actions work together. (This applies not only to substance use but also screens, attitudes, and so much more.)
Teach Family History
History is sometimes to be celebrated and sometimes to be learned from, but regardless, it’s always valuable information, especially when it’s directly related to one’s own family.
The ways we’ve handed down family history have varied over the generations. At times, it has been a purely oral tradition, and at other times, there have been diaries and other media. Regardless of exactly what history has entailed, knowing one’s family history has always been a way to connect with the past and feel connected to something larger than the present.
These days, people are using technology more than ever to try to preserve those memories. They utilize genealogy sites to create family trees and DNA services to learn more about their family history and find cousins they never knew existed. It just goes to show that finding out one’s family history develops a deeper sense of connection.