Good old days?

THERE’S AN article going around the Internet, entitled “To Pinoys/Pinays who were born in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and early 80’s.”   It’s a nostalgic and, in many ways, delightful piece that tries to remind people about a time when children didn’t have Playstations and Facebook and cell phones, among other things.

But I feel uneasy about the way the article suggests that we (I’m included, being born in the 1950s) were a tougher bunch.  Pregnant mothers, the article notes, could smoke and drink San Miguel and syoktong (Chinese wine) and have manghihilot (traditional midwives) deliver their babies.  Did mothers, the article rhetorically asks, have to bring kids to pediatricians for DPT (diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus) vaccines?

We slept on cribs “covered with lead-based paints,” the article continues, and rode bikes without helmets, kneepads and sometimes the bikes didn’t even have brakes.  We drank from the garden water hose, and shared softdrinks (and didn’t get sick), and there were no diet softdrinks but there was no obesity either among children.

I can understand where the writer is coming from.  I do get nostalgic too at times and recognize that not all of modern technologies and gadgets are blessings.  But, having worked in public health since the 1970s, I also know what the not-too-ancient past was like, and they were far from being the good old days for children.

<STRONG>4 births, 1 death</STRONG>

I want to run through some Philippine statistics for child mortality rate, which is defined as the number of children who die before the age of 5.  This rate is given as a ratio for every 1,000 live births.  I’ve dealt with these statistics for years, but I was still shocked to discover that in 1903, the figure was 253.  It’ll be easier to comprehend if we convert that into a percentage, which would be 25.3 percent.  Put another way, for every four babies born, one died before the age of 5.

I was startled as well to find that in 1904, the figure dropped to 94, which is still very high because that means one out of every 10 babies born died as a toddler.  As I went through the figures across the years, I realized that there were  spikes in particular years, and although I didn’t have the time to dig deeper into the causes of these sharp increases in child deaths, I am certain they were due to outbreaks of certain diseases.

Cholera, for example, killed thousands of both adults and children in the years it broke out.  Young children face many more deadly threats, for example gastrointestinal infections that cause severe diarrhea and, eventually, dehydration and death.  When I was doing rural work in the 1970s in the Cordillera, I would see outbreaks of measles that would quickly spread from one household to another, stopping only because it had run out of children, and would move on to the next barangay.

Let me get back now to the statistics.  Through the first half of the 20th century, the child mortality rates were usually between 100 and 200 per 1000 births.  For some reason which I still have to dig up, during the 1930s, the rate was higher, ranging from 200 to 280.  I suspect that during World War II, these figures went even higher.

In the postwar period, we continued to have child death rates between 100 and 150 per 1,000 live births.  In the 1960s, we finally moved below the 100 mark.

I don’t want to bore you with too many figures, so let’s look at the figures for the end of each decade.  In 1970 it was 89.  In 1980, it was 81.  In 1990 it was 50.  Today it is about 33.

<STRONG>Tragedies</STRONG>

Now I suspect that some readers might scoff and argue that even if one out of 4 children died before the age of 5, that meant 75 percent of children survived.  But it doesn’t work out that way. Each child death is a tragedy, and the numbers do add up.   I still get to interview mothers from urban poor and rural areas who, when asked how many children they have, will still answer something like, “Walo—anim ang buhay” (Eight, six of them living).

Also remember the figures are national averages.  In poor communities, the death rates were always higher, as in the Cordillera areas I mentioned earlier.  Even today, in many parts of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao, the child death rates still hover above the 100 mark.

Also, to give a better perspective on where we are, while our national average for the child death rate is about 33 per 1,000 births, neighboring Thailand has a rate of  14 and Singapore’s is 3, a rate that’s even lower than those of some developed countries.

This is a long way of reminding people that nostalgia is fine, but let’s not romanticize the past. We survived, but thousands of others died from malnutrition, accidents and diseases preventable by vaccines and safe water.  Many didn’t have a fighting chance, dying shortly after birth because they had very low birthweights, or had congenital problems, some caused by their mothers’ (and fathers’) smoking and drinking.

We’ve come a long way with maternal and child care.  At the same time, we do have a long way to go in making pregnancies safe and assuring mothers don’t die while bringing children into the world (about 11 mothers die daily in the Philippines because of complications in pregnancy).  And of the two million or so babies that are born in the Philippines,  more than 60,000 will die before the age of 5, from infectious diseases, from hunger, from parental neglect.

<STRONG>Sports programs</STRONG>

One thing I did strongly agree with in the article: the games children played in the past were in many ways healthier, physically and mentally.  Kids could run, kids could shout, kids could learn fair play and team cooperation, all of which you can’t do with PlayStations (and Ipads).

I know, many of us don’t even have safe streets for the kids to play in.  Sports programs are an alternative.  Xavier in San Juan has summer classes in badminton, baseball, basketball, chess, fencing, football, karate, shaolin wushu kungfu, street dance, swimming (also for adults!), table tennis, taekwondo and tennis.  You can pick up copies at Gate 2 of the school or you can download the full schedule from: https://w4.xs.edu.ph/2011/03/04/xavier-summer-sports-program-2011/

You might also want to check out dance programs, which are not just for physical fitness but are great for kids to learn to coordinate with each other. Julie Borromeo’s studio has been around for years (on S. Laurel Street in Mandaluyong) offering ballet, jazz, hip-hop and Flamenco (as well as adult fitness programs).

Unfortunately, these are programs you have to pay for. The  government really needs to find ways to support such programs for low-income families, many of which will have their kids out in the streets, playing the many games we miss from our own childhood, but the streets, even in rural areas, are no longer as safe for kids.

* * *

Email: mtan@inquirer.com.ph