This is a social and oral history of parenthood that recreates the lost world of family life in Britain from the 1900s to the 1950s. Based on many interviews and told largely from the parents' perspective, the book starts with birth, bringing up babies and how parents coped with the high infant mortality rate and goes on to show how parents moulded the characters of their children through training and discipline. Other chapters cover family holidays and leisure entertainment, the poorest parents and how they survived and the family at war including the effects of the Blitz and rationing.