Actually, older people of my generation tend to remember catching childhood illnesses like measles,mumps, chicken pox, rubella, flu etc and being pampered at home by a doting mother or grandparent and enjoying some time off school. These diseases weren't caught by infants or toddlers because they had natural immunity for those first few years from their mothers.

We also remember that when we had babies, autism was only 1 in 10,000, not 1 in 88 like in the heavily vaccinated US military families, or 1 in 38 boys as the Cambridge study found in the UK. I stopped vaccinating after my daughter's reaction to a dpt in 1983, she still has the allergies and health issues today,unlike her unvaccinated siblings. Back then I was worried about brain damage or SIDS, had never heard of autism. With the overloaded current schedule, parents have a lot more to worry about! BTW, childhood cancers were practically unheard of back then - check out the current stats.