Reinventing Childhood After World War II

Paula S. Fass, Michael Grossberg

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780812205169
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

In the Western world, the modern view of childhood as a space protected from broader adult society first became a dominant social vision during the nineteenth century. Many of the West's sharpest portrayals of children in literature and the arts emerged at that time in both Europe and the United States and continue to organize our perceptions and sensibilities to this day. But that childhood is now being recreated.Many social and political developments since the end of the World War II have fundamentally altered the lives children lead and are now beginning to transform conceptions of childhood. Reinventing Childhood After World War II brings together seven prominent historians of modern childhood to identify precisely what has changed in children's lives and why. Topics range from youth culture to children's rights; from changing definitions of age to nontraditional families; from parenting styles to how American experiences compare with those of the rest of the Western world. Taken together, the essays argue that children's experiences have changed in such dramatic and important ways since 1945 that parents, other adults, and girls and boys themselves have had to reinvent almost every aspect of childhood. Reinventing Childhood After World War II presents a striking interpretation of the nature and status of childhood that will be essential to students and scholars of childhood, as well as policy makers, educators, parents, and all those concerned with the lives of children in the world today.

1

The Child-Centered Family? New Rules in Postwar America

Paula S. Fass

“In America,” Dr. Benjamin Spock told his millions of devoted readers, “very few children are raised to believe that their principal destiny is to serve their family, their country or God. Generally we've given them the feeling that they are free to set their own aims and occupations in life according to their own inclinations.” This passage neatly summed up what Spock headlined as “Child-Centered America.” The clinching line came in Spock's next paragraph: “The tendency is for American parents to consider the child at least as important as themselves—perhaps more important.”¹ In stating the American dream in this way, that the child's destiny was not hindered by parents and past, Spock in the 1950s, 1960s, and even into the early 1970s was connecting the well-known American dream of future improvement to a particular view of the relationship between parents and children. That view of the critical connection between child rearing and American identity stretched back possibly as far as the American Revolution in the last third of the eighteenth century, and certainly to the 1830s when Alexis de Tocqueville made his cunning observations about their relationship. And then, as if by articulating it so bluntly for all the readers of Baby and Child Care, the parent-child experience he was testifying to began to disappear, replaced by a very different kind of child-centeredness.

The relationship between parents and children, and quite specifically among the significantly enlarged post-World War II middle class to which America's most popular childcare manual was addressed, would change in important ways in the 1970s and 1980s. That change put parents much more firmly in the driver's seat, reduced the independence and autonomy of children, and made it hard for middle-class parents to imagine that their children's lives would be even as rosy as their own, let alone better.

By the late 1970s, commentators began to observe these changes. Christopher Lasch, one of the most perceptive, believed that middle-class families were beset by “warlike conditions” that affected marital relationships, the rearing of children, and the psychological dimensions of American happiness. Concerns about these conditions grew and became more intense as the end of the century neared. Some blamed it on the fallout from the Vietnam War or on liberated women, while others blamed Spock himself for helping to rear a permissive generation. But it was not necessary to place blame anywhere for most to recognize that American family life had been substantially refashioned. As we think about the changes after the 1970s, it is best not to embrace a mistaken nostalgia for an earlier time in what is often an illusion of a 1950s family high or an exaggerated jeremiad about what followed. Students of the American family have often adopted such polarizing perspectives, and some of the social commentators of the time were trapped in that duality.² Nevertheless, it is important to examine and contend with the very real changes in child rearing and in children's lives that took place in the half century following World War II, and to understand that the nostalgia was itself a symptom of just how wounding the perceived rupture with the past was.

A Backward Glance

American family life, and specifically the relations between generations, had always been multiform and complex. Composed of several very different regions and multiple racial, religious, and ethnic groups, no one pattern could do justice to the real pleasures, tensions, and conflicts that marked the relations between parents and children in America since its revolutionary beginnings. Historians are usually able to observe only general tendencies and certain consciously held beliefs that both natives and outsiders expressed when they reflected on America's particular cultural forms and social habits. Nevertheless, the vast and increasing size of the country, its free market, broad-based white male suffrage, and available land did set American experiences apart from those of Europeans (and almost everyone else) in the nineteenth century, and allowed a cultural style to develop that privileged the future, and with it the next generation.

This did not necessarily transform Americans into solicitous parents or protect children from harsh treatment and brutal household regimes. Rather, social and economic circumstances in the United States made it easier to transfer responsibility to the young, providing earlier autonomy to young people, whose own judgment would be required to wrestle with the open-ended conditions accompanying the economic potential and landed vastness. Ulysses S. Grant recalled in his memoirs that from the time he was eleven and “strong enough to hold a plow,” until he was seventeen, he did all the work with horses on the land his father (a leather tanner) owned. In return,

I was compensated by the fact that there was never any scolding or punishing by my parents; no objection to rational enjoyments, such as fishing, going to the creek a mile away to swim in summer, taking a horse and visiting my grandparents in the adjoining county, fifteen miles off, skating on the ice in winter, or taking a horse and sleigh when there was snow on the ground.

Grant loved horses, and by the time he was eleven he was allowed to trade horses on his own account. On one occasion, when he was fifteen, he executed such a trade seventy miles from home.³ These long-distance travels were nothing new.

This independence was often described by foreign visitors as resulting in a laxness in children's manners and an unwillingness by parents fully to guide and correct the younger generation. Some thought American children were badly brought up, unruly, and discourteous to adults. But others, such as Polish count, Adam C. de Gurowski, understood that parent-child relations were the result of the special circumstances of American life; in his words, “the space, the modes to win a position by labor were unlimited, and thus children began early to work and earn for themselves. Thus early they became self-relying and independent, and this independence continues to prevail in filial relations.” In 1857, the count concluded that children matured early and were early “emancipated…from parental authority and domestic discipline.”⁴ In this way, de Gurowski accounted for the observations so common at the time. “Children accustomed to the utmost familiarity and absence of constraint with their parents, behave in the same manner with other older persons, and this sometimes deprives the social intercourse of Americans of the tint of politeness, which is more habitual in Europe.”⁵ To some degree observations such as these from class-conscious European aristocrats, such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Count de Gurowski, were natural responses to a society without feudal traditions and its mannered courtesies. But, these views also registered the looser forms that governed the interactions between American parents and children and the greater responsibilities given children in a land of copious opportunities.

A half-century after de Gurowski's observations, some Americans were already attempting to find ways to encourage these traits of independence and autonomy in children; traits, they feared, were vulnerable as the circumstances that had encouraged them changed in the context of industry and city life. Thus, America's premier philosopher and educational reformer, John Dewey, tried to inscribe independence in a reformed schooling where children could actively participate in their own instruction, thus replacing an early independence in the world with a new active experience in school. In trying to create a school surrogate for active engagement early in life, Dewey sought in the “Child and the Curriculum” (1902) to restore to the branches of learning “the experience from which it had been abstracted.” Dewey opposed the habits of schooling in which children were “ductile and docile.” Of the child in this revised school setting, Dewey proclaimed at the end of his essay, “It is his present powers which are to assert themselves; his present capacities which are to be exercised; his present attitudes which are to be realized.”⁶ Dewey was well aware that schooling was itself locking children away from the very experiences that once assured their active independence. He thus sought a schooling that would create real experience, not just learned anticipation. Only in this fashion would children continue to be inducted into the American style of independence.

Dewey was responding to the major changes in American social and economic life at the turn of the twentieth century, when earlier natural potentials for autonomy and self-regulation were being slowly eroded through the advent of factories, tenements, and, yes, schools. For Dewey, America's changing institutions were making it harder to find ways of encouraging those traits in childhood that he, among others, assumed to be necessary components of American democratic character.

Another half-century later, Benjamin Spock brought these same issues into the nursery. During that half century of turbulent twentieth-century child-rearing debates, Americans had come to expect that the early years were fundamental to personality, so Spock's advice was planted in fertile ground.⁷ After World War II, Spock engaged in an attempt at early childhood psychological reconstruction much as Dewey had attempted a sociological renewal. Little wonder then that Spock would be accused of encouraging permissiveness, just as Dewey's “permissive” educational reforms were believed by some to undermine authority. Back in the nineteenth century the experience that these attempted reconstructions were meant to resurrect had made visitors, such as Harriet Martineau, respond with a similar kind of condemnation regarding America's ungovernable children, permissively brought up by their parents.⁸

By the time Spock tried to create the conditions at home to encourage an independent spirit in two-year-olds—through, among other means, toileting regimes (“He won't really have reached this last stage of training until he does these jobs by himself”)—it was too late. Despite playful line drawings that emphasized the point, “Children want to do grown-up things,”⁹ the changes in the American economy and institutional life that had been developing for over a half-century had overwhelmed the potentials for the kind of child development and intergenerational relationships Americans believed were a cultural inheritance. In place of early independence and a growing autonomy among children, the sociocultural context was re-creating intergenerational relations in ways that became clear only by the end of the twentieth century.

What Changed?

After World War II millions of veterans returned to a society that offered opportunities seemingly everywhere—in an expanding set of economic choices, new educational institutions, independent homeownership in fresh suburban enclaves, and a reinvigorated and more stable family life. These are matters that depression era and war weary Americans had hoped for. It seemed like a revival of opportunities and a renewed American dream. Historians have described these changes in some detail, and while many have been critical of continuing inequalities in an expanded consumer republic or the wastefulness of new suburban tracts, or the constrictions of women's choices in a family constructed in a cold war climate, most historians and other analysts have recognized that both the new standards of living and the new domesticity promised comforts if not palaces to many more Americans than ever before. ¹⁰ If nineteenth-century opportunities had created independent landowners and entrepreneurs, the postwar promised to create a republic based on an expanding middle class with open-ended possibilities for leisure, consumption, and personal self-realization.¹¹

Indeed, the decade of the 1950s often appears to be the gold standard against which later marriages and families are judged. Divorce rates were low, mothers were at home caring for their children, and children attended well-run schools. Later changes in these domains are usually identified as the sources of the increasing difficulties faced by American children, as divorces skyrocketed in the late 1960s, local schools were disassembled and education was underfunded in the 1970s, and the explosion of women with young children in the workplace became alarmingly evident in the 1980s. In fact, however, the transformation of parent-child relations had already begun before these more obvious changes took place. And Benjamin Spock's insistence on the child's autonomy represents an alarm bell in the midst of the so-called stability of the domestic 1950s rather than a signal of its fulfillment.

The place to begin is in the schools. The attention to schools at mid-century were signs of an extensive economic transformation already underway, although it was hardly visible to most observers at the time. Americans had taken pride in their schools since the nineteenth century, when they had joined other modernizing states and industrializing societies in creating institutions to develop a literate citizenry. But classroom time for most American children was usually quite limited, usually no more than a few years of intermittent attendance for the majority, with only the very few who moved toward college experiencing a longer preparation.¹² The expansion of schooling that marked a profound shift took place in the first four decades of the twentieth century, as secondary schooling expanded enormously and enrollments skyrocketed. By the middle of the twentieth century all adolescents were spending serious time in high school, now a firm feature of the American landscape, indeed sometimes the most prominent landmark in towns and cities across the country. The United States was unique in this regard. In the first half of the century, Americans created comprehensive, publicly funded, widely available high schools for the masses. Organized in communities across the country, these schools were the result of unparalleled prosperity and made necessary by immigration.¹³ Even the Swedes and Germans, highly committed to education, confined high school attendance to a small select few whom they isolated in institutions for the elite.

After World War II, high school attendance and graduation became an expected part of normal American adolescent experience and, by the 1950s, American educators were already beginning to measure the high school dropout rate and to worry about this as a sign of social failure, rather than celebrating the growing expansion as they had in the past. By 1960, almost 90 percent of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds (upper high school years) were in school.¹⁴ And the road into the classroom did not end there. Whereas only about 15 percent of young people eighteen to twenty-two went to college in 1940, on the eve of America's entrance into World War II, 53 percent did so by the early 1960s.¹⁵ Schooling was now a standard part of the extended adolescence that prepared children for adulthood in the United States. This explosion in the institutionalization of American adolescents represented a critical transformation in social life. As social psychologist Arlene Skolnick has observed, “Today all roads to a successful livelihood lead through the classroom.”¹⁶

As Dewey knew well, and as anyone who has been there can testify, schooling and adolescent classrooms in particular offer a peculiar kind of “experience.” At once real life in a school peer culture, schools provide academic preparation for a very different future outside the classroom, while separating young people from their parents without giving them a sense of competence. And it comes in the midst of the tense process by which the two generations define the boundaries of separation that lead to independence. While it is a route to opportunity, it is a poor substitute for real life. The seeming independence of young people in high school is a mirage, as parental support, continuing residence at home, and peer conformity limit young people's horizons and direct their behavior. This was already clear to a host of observers in the 1950s, from Edgar J. Friedenberg to Paul Goodman and Kenneth Keniston,¹⁷ who began to offer blistering criticisms of the lives of confined young Americans.

David Riesman was probably the most perceptive critic, as he described the results of a new social scene where the young learned not independence through the active creation of meaningful individual goals, but a glib conformity encouraged by peer pressure and initiation. No one who read The Lonely Crowd could mistake the point that lay behind Riesman's apparently neutral observations about the changes taking place around him and his team of researchers. The book was published in 1950, long before nostalgia for the 1950s had begun.¹⁸

In fact, throughout the 1950s, there was a haunting sense that American children and youth were being prepared for a transformation in adult experience while they were in the process of defining a new life phase. Underneath the seeming domestic retreat provided by the suburbs and the apparent confidence reflected in the marriage and birth rates, one can see the relationship between the generations being renegotiated in a changing economy. The new emphasis on extended schooling and competitive skills training, I would contend, was a response not so much to the Cold War as some historians have argued (although some Cold War competition was clearly at stake) as it was to an early sounding of a much longer-term transformation in global economics. The “postindustrial society,” heralded by Daniel Bell in 1968, was underway as an earlier dominance of factory labor for the majority of workers or small-scale entrepreneurship gave way to a service economy and an international system of trade, capital exchange, and offshore production. When Japanese cars moved smoothly into United States markets after the first oil crisis in 1973, Americans were taken by surprise, but the Japanese automobile industry (and its underlying developments in steel and technology) had long been preparing for just such a shift. The decline of American industrial production (which had itself replaced the farm-based economy of an earlier century), and the factory work that allowed some to work from an early age (at least by our contemporary standards) and still participate in expanding opportunities, was already changing the urban landscape in Detroit in the 1950s.¹⁹ Textile manufacturing was moving rapidly, first to the American South and then offshore. At the same time, the white-collar sector, both in managerial tiers and in lower-level forms, was growing rapidly, and with that came requirements for literacy and social behavior. If not every child who went to school was preparing to become a professional, many more were learning that the corporate office, not the shop floor, was their likely destination.

In the 1950s, therefore, alert middle-class parents and those eager to have their children join the middle class were already taking note and keeping their children's noses close to a bookish grindstone as they anticipated a transformation in rewards long before it was broadly advertised. These same parents exercised generational authority in a new way, and they did it long after most parents in the nineteenth century and many working-class parents in the twentieth were forced to give up because the economy loosened their grip. Indeed in Arlene Skolnick's words, the middle class was “the most revolutionary class insofar as the family is concerned. Our major periods of family crisis have occurred when the middle class has redefined the meaning of the family.”²⁰ Although Skolnick attributes that change to the period after the 1960s, I think it is wise to see its early manifestations in the 1950s. Children who were being directed toward schooled success, not only spent more time in school, they dated less, rarely went steady, married later, and were supported by their parents through their college years.²¹ These patterns would become very familiar by the end of the century, but in the 1950s they were still quite new.

We can also see some of the ways in which families in the 1950s anticipated later experiences by ex...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1: The Child-Centered Family? New Rules in Postwar America
• 2: Liberation and Caretaking: Fighting over Children's Rights in Postwar America
• 3: The Changing Face of Children's Culture
• 4: Ten is the New Fourteen: Age Compression and “Real” Childhood
• 5: Whose Child? Parenting and Custody in the Postwar Period
• 6: Children, the State, and the American Dream
• 7: Children and the Swedish Welfare State: From Different to Similar
• Notes
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Acknowledgments