A polished Betty Draper, every blond hair sprayed perfectly into place, pulls a cigarette from her lips, but before she exhales a column of smoke, your eyes are drawn down her body to her rounded belly.

Pregnant. Smoking. Shocking.

Actress January Jones, who plays Betty on the hit TV drama Mad Men, told amctv.com that show creator Matthew Weiner loves these scenes.

Weiner occasionally gives viewers amusing scenes of 1960s life that underscore how different our lives are today.

I was born in 1965. After watching a Mad Men episode last year (Season 6 premieres Sunday), I had some questions for my 1960s mom.

On Skype I asked, “How much did you smoke when you were pregnant with me?”

She thought about it for a few moments. “About 5 to 6 cigarettes a day,” she said. Mom stopped smoking in the 1970s.

How about drinking while she was pregnant?

She drank some alcohol, she admitted, but not much.

Of course I don’t endorse smoking and drinking while pregnant, but it makes you wonder. My brothers and I do not appear to have suffered any consequences of mom’s high-risk lifestyle.

Like most moms back then, mine wasn’t into breastfeeding, either. It didn’t seem necessary with the advent of formula.

“The doctor asked me if I wanted to breastfeed,” she explained, “and I said, ‘No.’ That was the end of the discussion.”

I am not criticizing my mother. She was — and still is — a fantastic mom, but it is fascinating how much parenting styles have changed in my lifetime.

While my wife is a champion breastfeeder and prepares all the meals for our 10-month old twins from mostly organic fruits and vegetables, I grew up drinking Tang instead of orange juice.

There is a good explanation for this. My dad helped invent Tang. I kid you not.

My parents are from the cereal capital of the world, Battle Creek, Mich. My father is a scientist and in the 1950s he worked on the research team at General Foods that created Tang. Dad is still quite proud of this achievement.

My parents had fun driving down memory lane during our Skype talk. And speaking of driving — there were no child car seats.

That’s not entirely true. We had one car seat with a fake steering wheel and stick shift, which could double as a chest crusher and a spear if were ever in an accident.

And on long trips, my parents put the baby mattress in the back of the station wagon and let me roll around.

But the dangers weren’t only in the car. When I was 5 and living in Ann Arbor, Mich., I remember playing outside all day, largely unsupervised, with my best friend Tim. Neither of us wore sunscreen, or a hat.

Tim and I also walked to kindergarten by ourselves, even though a serial killer had terrorized the area the previous two years. Seven females, one a Grade 8 student, had been murdered. OK, our walk was only two blocks, and a university student had just been found guilty of one of the murders.

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I don’t think Betty Draper would have seen a problem, either. She lets her children play with plastic bags.

Late in the Game appears every second Monday. Email: scolby@thestar.ca and @the_scolby on Twitter.

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