1950s Parents Reveal How They Felt About Their 1960s Baby Boomer Children

the parents of the 1950s were I think the most unusual generation of the 20th century these are the people who had grown up in the depression they had experienced real tough times when they were children and when they were teenagers and then World War two hit as many of them were just reaching adulthood and they had the trauma of the war and then after all that they reached the 1950s at a time when the US was tremendously prosperous when the economy was booming as we've never seen it before and I think they reacted to that prosperity and they think I think they reacted strongly to all of the trauma of the depression and the war by turning inward a bit by marrying young by emphasizing home and family it was a perfect setting in which the youth culture in a certain sense could could blossom life in the suburbs was organ organized around the kids again they were the center of attention a rat endless round of Little League games and PTA meetings etc so it was in the suburbs in a certain sense that this message about the importance and the uniqueness and the generational potency associated with these kids I think was delivered with real force in the average American family today children are the object of more concentrated thought and concern than the young of any previous generation or out of an increasing understanding of child psychology has come an awareness the children are real people with individual personalities which must be respected and encouraged this was a distinctly new way to be raised in the world and it allowed for a whole generation that I suppose we would now call spoiled spoiled kids which from another point of view simply meant kids who had very high expectations in life with respect to freedom and happiness they thought life was about being free and about being happy and they carried those expectations forward into high school and into college and brought with them a kind of a level of expectation that was simply unprecedented in I would say in world history we found out in the 50s that if you get up in the morning and went to work and did a good day's work the things got better you got promoted or you got more money you were able to buy furniture you could have more children the children could have better clothes and life just improved we knew it was because you went to work but I'm not sure our children realize that they saw simply that the clothes got better the house got figured this the neighborhood got nicer and I have a strong suspicion that what happened in the late 60s was that the kids who rebelled took it for granted that life would improve automatically now here's a major seat of the 60s because of their profoundly different life experiences kids had trouble understanding why their fathers worked so hard the way many of them saw it their fathers were engaging in the single-minded pursuit of material comforts my dad was always above board in all his business dealings but I would say money and getting ahead and and and and making a lot of bucks was his goal and I think what it was was dad meant well dad wanted to love us but dad was so busy at work he would work till 2:00 3:00 in the morning doing arc work artwork for the business he'd get up early and be gone I hardly ever saw him everything young boy saw at home and TV told them that if they did as they were supposed to they would be quote lucky enough to follow in their father's footsteps Cub Scout Program helps the boys adjustment both to the family and to the group this son of yours has been fighting again look at this shirt can I tell you about it pot cookies proud of it please pop no no Jerri I'm tired Adam I know you said you didn't have the guts to stand up for yourself so I took a poke at him that was all right what Mike what TV show you was a world in which men were essentially impotent didn't have any right to say that about you did he pop go to your room and get a decent shirt this minute did he pop there were no chance for risk there was no place for excitement there was no place for no challenges being offered whatsoever and the other kind of show you could watch were the westerns which showed what a real man could do measuring himself against other men especially with a gun and I think that anybody who was a red-blooded American boy in the in the 1950s knew that they wanted to be more like Matt Dillon or more like the paid gunfighter and have gun will travel than they wanted to be beaver cleavers father [Music] and what did girls feel was in store for them a life just like their mothers [Music] thank you how they used to be for you before you had the electric motor heater and the washer so now I add the pectin educational films like this one reflects society's belief that women could find fulfillment only as housewives and mothers let it come to a full rolling boil again it won't take long you like to cook those who pet oh it's not just liking the cook if it's more well it's accomplishing something It's Made cooking me Susan Douglas and not just cooking but not creating something special oh I wish miss Holland could talk to you he could say it so much better than I can who's miss Holland she's my home economics teacher not enough of any one means instead of even girls were sent to college often majored in what were called the domestic sciences there's one nice thing about is happening in class here it's part of our learning at home it would be a minor tragedy there was a song when I went to college at Smith College which they don't sing anymore I know that had a verse that went something like this you're sharp as a pinpoint your grades are really 10-point you our Dean's List Sofia Smith but when a man wants a kiss kid he doesn't want a quiz kid oh you can't get a man with your brains with your brains with your brains oh you can't get a man with your brains and it had verses that went on and on now I sang that in 1957 with a sense of how true it was and how funny it was now of course it makes a shiver run up and down my spine I had four choices of things that I could be when I grew up I could be a teacher a nurse a stewardess or a secretary I couldn't go into two things that dealt with medicine I couldn't go into law I couldn't go into the real professions it was it was extremely limiting and of course the overall goal was to find a husband get married have children and live with a white picket fence I used to make little snooze to my child and used to spit them out and stick them on the wall but I went on doing it I don't know why a dr. Spock I think dr. Spock ruined everything I really I mean he's why he's wonderful in the peace movement but there's this whole image of giving your children everything you had and they they have to be satisfied and they have to be content and I think we gave them much too much and here it is the American family of the 1950s as it was seen thousands of evenings on TV happy kids happy father happy mother everyone behaving as they were supposed to be way to meet a girl the message was absolutely unmistakable this was the way your life should be and if it wasn't something must be very wrong

Channel: David Hoffman

Views: 2,493,212

Keywords: 1950s, 1950s parenting, 1960s, life in suburbia, suburbia, 1950s suburbia, American social history, baby boomers, David Hoffman filmmaker, PBS 60s documentary, 60s documentary, 1960s documentary, CNN 60s, white middle-class, middle class, suburbs, 60s, the 60s, hippies, Baby boom, Genx, millennial, technology, history, ken burns 1960s, trump, biden, republicans, liberals, democrats

Id: KUorVXJ8MZE

Length: 8min 33sec (513 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 04 2018