Post-War Childhood by Webb Simon;

Author:Webb, Simon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2017-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Falling Life Expectancy:

Are the Baby Boomers More Healthy than their Grandchildren?

For at least 500 or 600 years, the life expectancy of people in Britain has risen inexorably. In the Middle Ages, the average life expectancy at birth was perhaps 35 or so. This was due in part to the very high infant mortality rates at that time; many babies did not live to see their first birthday. Childhood was a hazardous business, with around a quarter of children dying before they reached adolescence. By the middle of the eighteenth century, life expectancy had gone up slightly and was about the 40 mark. It was in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that life expectancy really soared. By the 1930s, men could expect to live until the age of 60 and twenty years later, this had risen to 65. In 2015, the most recent year for which figures are available at the time of writing, men in this country are expected at birth to live to 79 and women to 83. At the beginning of the twentieth century, only 20 per cent of babies born would live past their sixtieth birthday; today, the figure is 80 per cent.

In short, until ten or fifteen years ago, the news for life expectancy in Britain has been increasingly optimistic with each passing year, each successive generation living longer than those preceding it. There seemed no reason to suppose that this happy state of affairs would not continue with the children of the so-called millennials, those born between the early 1980s and the year 2000, living longer than either the baby boomers or their children. The picture was rosy.

According to many newspaper reports, based upon statistics from the NHS and other authoritative sources, this trend towards ever higher British life expectancy is about to be thrown into reverse. Not only will the life expectancy of those born in this country begin to fall, this effect will be dramatic enough to mean that children today are likely to die before their own parents. That such an implausible scenario should be uncritically accepted by many people illustrates once more the powerful grip that the myth of the baby boomers’ childhood has upon so many people, including those in the government and National Health Service. In Chapter 3, we saw how laws had been passed which were founded upon a false vision of childhood in the 1950s and 1960s, the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, which introduced the new mechanism of ASBOs, being a direct response to the perceived menace of children and young people who were believed to be running out of control in an unprecedented fashion. Taking as their model the supposedly less savage children who were around during the 1950s, the new Labour government attempted to tackle what they saw as dangerous and disturbing trends in children’s conduct, which could be checked by new laws. Always in mind was the notion of the carefree, happy and inoffensive lives that government ministers had themselves enjoyed. The

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.