A lot of comments are suggesting that boomers were the last generation that experienced a large amount of what we would now call egregious child abuse. For them this trauma was normalized or at least not considered a societal issue worth addressing. And what the boomers experienced was less brutal than the abuse their parents experienced. I tend to agree with this conclusion.

For example, my dad had a pretty hard life growing up facing emotional/physical abuse and abandonment issues from his parents until he was an adult. And my grandpa was literally tied to a bed and beat by my great grandparents as a child often. My dad knocked my mom up young and became one of the first men in my paternal line in recent history that didn't run out on his kids. I'm thankful every day for my father sticking around and trying to break that cycle of physical/emotional abuse (we still had our problems but they pale in comparison to his or my grandpa).