Posted on 05/31/2013 6:21:29 AM PDT by IbJensen
Very good comments!
Wow.
Way cool. (YOUR PROFILE)
I’ve tracked my ancestry back to the mid 1600s and find a lot of people living well into their 80s. Men tended to live longer but I attribute that to the fact that they weren’t pregnant 15 or 16 times. Lots of children died but if you were a male who survived to adulthood, chances are that you would live as long as anyone today.
If you want to go back to the 1600s, life expectancy then would probably be about 35 years. (It has been rising pretty much since then, especially with steady advancements in sanitation and medicine since the latter nineteenth century.) But remember, that's only a statistical mean. Your ancestors who lived into their eighties probably had exceptional DNA to enable them to ward off the multiple medical problems that killed their peers at younger ages back then, but the fact that some folks lived long lives then is well known. Take Louis XIV of France as an example.
Yes, infant and child mortality were much more common back then statistically. But even among those who survived to adulthood, life expectancy was significantly lower in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, and even most of the 1900s than it is today.
I think you got the male vs. female life expectancy right. In those days of yore, a much larger percentage of relatively young women died due to complications from pregnancy and child birth, which overall gave males a longer life expectancy. This trend was exacerbated by the large average number of pregnancies. But with great and steady advances in obstetrics, especially since 1900 or so, female deaths due to pregnancy and child birth are today very rare, which flipped life expectancy in favor of women. The last numbers I recall give women a life expectancy of approximately six years greater than men in developed countries.
I don’t have any children, but having heard all the stories from my dad and my uncle I’d say I would rather have had Dad’s childhood. He grew up poor, but to me it sounds like he and my uncle probably had a lot more fun than I did.
Amen. One item really made me laugh. My Dad had the nerve to drive me home from my Grandmothers in a station wagon that had little, to no brakes. I’ll never forget my Dad going onto a sidewalk to pass stopped traffic at a light. He’d be put in prison now....
Bump for later emailing...
I agree bare back riding gets you in shape. Those were the days. :-)
I remember the recapped tires that my father bought during WWII that would sometimes become unraveled while he was driving.
There will be a major reset first, so the boys you are raising and influencing today (God bless you for your attitude toward the local boys) will be the leaders who will save what’s left of our republic.
“Except Barbie ... when we strapped her to a cherry bomb. :)”
Or that three rocket moonshot!
“He left out a very important part of the 1930 - 1979 time period. Everybody was bored to tears.”
No, they weren’t. They had imaginations, something today’s kid lack. If some vidiot device doesn’t give them a full color 3D motion video they don’t know what to imagine.
Kids today with all their electronics are the most bored brats out there. They have “meltdowns”, i.e. temper tantrums, all the time from being bored.
“Imagination only takes you so far. Then it turns into delusion.”
Like video game turning kids into vidiots doing stupid crap because their only imagination can from a violent game?
I also knew a man that lost one eye to a bb, so it did happen- though he was the only one I personally knew of.
I always quote Robert Heinlein when my wife gives me the stink eye for being tough on my 3 sons:
“Don’t handicap your children by making their lives easy.”
Oh no!
Hahaha.. My brothers had a ramp like that! For the dirt bikes.
Ain’t that the Truth! Back then people were so much calmer!
“Back then people were so much calmer!”
We certainly didn’t have those “meltdowns” the kids today have over everything. We had temper tantrums but they were short and not much past 2 years old.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
