I started school this week to become a Family Nurse Practitioner. So you may notice a more medical slant as my reading habits have changed.

Reading about this history of public health this statistic jumped out: during the 19th century (1800-1899 if you are like me and often forget) more than half of the working class died before their fifth birthday. It’s pretty insane, right? One-half of working-class kids died before they turned five. Smallpox, the plague, typhus, diphtheria, and many more ravaged families, to the point where it was hard to find a family that hadn’t lost a child to an infectious disease.

Then at the end of the 19th century starting with Louis Pasteur vaccines came along. All of a sudden we knew what caused these terrible diseases and how to prevent them. The change was dramatic, prompting one prominent public health worker to say, “Before 1880; after 1890 we knew it all. It was a glorious 10 years.”

Life expectancy flew up. In 1870 the global average was 29.7 years, in 2001 it was 66.6. Today, in much of the developed world, it is above 80 years. Smallpox which killed between 100,000 – 600,000 people per year during much of the 20th century was eliminated from the face of the earth in 1977. Smallpox is a term that applies to our past, not our present.

All of this changed what it means to have a child. Today, globally, over 95% of children survive their first five years. From worse than 50% odds that a child you birth would die while still a child, to an overwhelming likelihood that they would survive to be an adult.

Once we know our children would survive parenting becomes a thing. It becomes safe to be firmly attached to our children. Imagine how you would feel if your child died today. Would you risk feeling that if you knew there was a pretty good chance that they would die before five? Much of the time we wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be safe to be vulnerable.

Now many of us are immersed in parenting culture. There appear to be so many things we must do in order to raise our child right. Be involved, but don’t be a helicopter parent. Set boundaries, but allow freedom. Be concerned about their weight, but don’t give them a complex. You can be an American parent but you should add some techniques from the French, and the Chinese. There are parenting blogs, books, podcasts. New research to sift through. It’s so much.

If you ever feel stressed out by all of it, as I do sometimes. I might be helpful to also remember that it all comes out of a privilege. We have the fortune to live in a time where our children have a damn good chance of becoming an adult. Where many of us can emotionally afford to be attached to them. We can ride their highs and share their lows. We can high five their successes and help them process their failures. We can allow them to stay a part of us enjoying all the joy and meaning that they bring us.