Miriam, as I've said to other posters, this is about babies and toddlers at Mass specifically, not children.
Babies and toddlers are among the classification, "children." And at our High Mass, the 5 and 6 year old children are often more disruptive than 3 year olds -- if the parents of the 5 and 6 year olds do not want to participate in childcare and are generally permissive at home.
And as you point out, since Vatican II, babies and toddlers at Mass is the norm and the bitter, old grumpies had better offer it up. I get it.
No, I didn't "point that out." I pointed out that it's been many a year since adults had the luxury of leaving young children at home for no money. I'm quite sure that didn't begin in 1962. Stop blaming V2. V2 did not invent permissiveness or bad parenting; V2, in its blithe naivete, posited that there was no reason not to embrace "the world" -- in all its facets. This is called the erroneous acceptance of novelty and modernism. The timing of it was that the Church embraced the world at the precise time that the world was devolving into anti-traditionalism, iconoclasm, and rebellion against authority.
Permissive parenting flowered during the 1960's -- just before and certainly much after V2 -- most of it having nothing to do with the Council directly. Since 1960 disrespect for authority has been the norm in the West, regardless of religious affiliation.
Ridicule of tradition, including traditional attire and suitability of attire to the occasion, was part of the social revolution. I know plenty of non-Catholics who consider suitability of dress (based on tradition and convention) to be antiquated and irrelevant. These are the people who wear flip-flops to formal occasions, claim (if they are men) that they don't own a single dress jacket, and refuse to wear anything but jeans. I mean to weddings, funerals, Masses, graduations, recitals, court appearances, you name it. They stubbornly insist on a single, casual wardrobe.
V2 merely exploited the Capital Sin of Sloth present in all of us. The Council appealed to the lowest common denominator and invited the faithful to rationalize laziness and self-indulgence in the area of religion, as modern society was already doing in all other spheres.
My parents were not afraid of their authority, and for the most part, their friends weren't either. So children other than babies were expected to be as silent at Mass as adults were, no matter how bored or how little they supposedly understood about the Mass. Punishment was more swift and corporal punishment common. Nevertheless (again), efforts at regulating the behavior of young children were as difficult as they have been in most eras. Parents who, overall, succeed have to spend lots of Mass time doing childcare: we have been over this and over this on other threads.
Tradition bumps along the bottom and has been entirely unsuccessful in halting the VII revolution.
Tradition has not enjoyed a massive return to itself by a self-indulgent society accustomed to getting its own way and impatient with standards, discipline, respect, and authority. It's as difficult to find people who respect
any kind of tradition as it is to convert most of the Catholic hierarchy and laity back to
religious tradition.