The next information that you are about to read, are comparisons we made with only the dutch parents and grandparents:
Comparison grandparents:
Every grandparent we interviewed had an estimated time schedule running from around 8:15 to 3:30 pm, and only one grandparent explained that sometimes he had school until 5:30 pm. Funnily, this is also still about the time students in the Netherlands nowadays have school. The grandparents also said they all had around 6/7 subjects in one day, 8 if they had a long day. Still the amount of subjects most students nowadays have. All subjects were compulsory, and only one grandparent said she could choose certain subjects she wanted to do herself. It was also interesting to see how students then still went to school the same way, they either walked or took the bicycle, and sometimes the bus
types of schools. All of our grandparents that were interviewed went to different type of schools. They went to those schools because they didn’t have a choice or there parents choose. Some of them went to a religious school and others not. At some of the schools religion was a compulsory subject
What we know about the first generation is that, on average, they had a big number of siblings (around five in every household). This is quite different to the situation of siblings today. As currently the average is about one to two siblings per household. From this information we can thus deduce that the amount of siblings has more than halved.
Comparison parents: We can see that most parents lived in a household of on avarage 5.25 people. Most of these households where nuclear, which means there were only parents and children, without aunts or grandparents. Most of the parents also liked going to school in their time. Something that is very notaceble is the fact that almost every school started around 8:30 in the morning, and stopped at around 3:30/4:00 in the afternoon. There was quite the variety of ways to go to school back then. Some parents went by bike, some walked, and one even used public transportation to go to school. So overal there are quit some similarities, but most important are the differences.
Occupation
The first generation’s mothers all had the same occupation, wich is to say they had none. They were housewives after all. The fathers however had quite different jobs, but they had one thing in common; they did heavy labour. One of the fathers even had two jobs; he worked in the metal industry and as a conductor at a train station. What we can conclude out of this is that, at that time, heavy labour was in very high demand.
Parents and grandparents comparison School times have not changed at all since the generation of grandparents. All of our parents still started around 8:30, and finished around 3:30 pm. One thing that did change is the amount of people in households. Some grandparents lived with their own parents and siblings,but also their grandparents, and even their aunts and uncles. Our parents’ parents (our grandparents) still seem to be pretty traditional, having the father work and the mother stay home as a housewife.
Own opinion Since there were some personal matters going on at the time of this project, i sadly couldn’t interview any family members. However there were still interviews of the family of my group and thus i could still continue this project. I would say that while things have indeed changed between the generations, there are still quite a lot of similarities. Even though i didn’t use much of my free time finding more information about the topic, i still learned a big heap of things about how things have changed and how things have stayed the same.