Our ancestors' childhoods

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I was reading a review online of Toy Story 3-- and yes I've already seen it (squeeeeeeeee!! !! !! !! !! !).

the review received a comment mentioning that the generation of the '70s & '80s was the first to still be really thoroughly connected to their childhoods, whereas every generation before that didn't seem to have much of a connection.

Now, I can sort of understand the generations of the '20s-early '40s, but beyond that even I'm a bit sketchy.

Anyone know why the '50s & '60s generation didn't hold on as heavily to their childhood enjoyments as ours seem to?

Baby boomers. They don't like having 10 siblings while growing up.

That reviewer has apparently never seen a grown man puttering over a Lionel train village just like he did back in 1955, only now that he's a grown man he can afford more trains and a much larger village. And it's his basement so he can take up as much of it as he wants with his Lionel train world.

That was my Dad. But certanly not just my Dad. It used to be fairly common for men who had grown up in the 40's and 50's to build train villages in their basements in the 60's and 70's. They paid lip service to the idea that they were doing this for their sons but their sons rarely seemed interested (my brother wasn't). And so you don't see it as much anymore because it didn't actually get passed on to the next generation. But an awful lot of grown men who had mid-century boyhoods spent an awful lot of time in basements when they were adults puttering over these things.

That was the men. The women...not so much. Some held onto dolls. But I never saw as many doll collections as I did train sets. Does that gender divide still hold? You'd be in a position to know if toy sales to adults (who are buying for themselves) skew towards men.

They wanted to grow up, so that they could have their freedom.

Well I don't remember too many folks from their generation mentioning the cartoons, and I remember even fewer talking fondly of their Marx playsets, etc.

I must confess that while I partially understand why the mentality seemed to start a bit later on, I think it's quite pitiful how the earlier generations were taught to deal with their issues of stress, anxiety, and desire to pursue their dreams...among other things.

which I find so incredibly funny as their grown-up self didn't seem all that different from their parents' grown up self, which they seemed "so eager" to leave behind...

I was born in '59, grew up through the 60s and 70s, but my 'childhood' was squarely in the 60s and I am extremely connected to my childhood toys, books and records.

I've spent scads of money I could not afford trolling EBay replacing things that were lost or thrown out or damaged beyond recognition or just loved to death more than 40 years ago.

What the hell am I gonna do now with a glow-in-the-dark Ka-Bala board game, or a promotional plastic Texaco fire helmet with a built-in microphone (that won't even fit on my grownup head), or an original issue Scholastic books 'How to Care for Your Monster'?

I dunno, but I have them all again, along with complete sets of paperback Star Trek novelizations (animated series included) and a mint November 1971 Playboy (the fist one I ever stashed under my bed). Took me two weeks to digitize all the tracks from both the Walt Disney's Merriest/Happiest Songs LPs that came free with a fill up at a Gulf Station in '67 & '68 and filter out all the pops and scratches. And that's not to mention the images of Vampirella, Astro Boy, The Twilight Zone, a red plastic 45 RPM record adapter and The Fireball XL-5 that make up part of the tattoo tableau that sleeves my left arm. Of course I don't know if that's generational, or just an Aspie obsessive thing.

Next I've got to find a complete set of Adam West Batman Series bubblegum cards, and all the Dark Shadows mini-posters. Now that I have plenty of spare time, maybe I'll put together all those Aurora monster models with the glow-n-the-dark parts again, while watching the first season of Johnny Quest.

Social Security starts in 1936, before that old age was your problem. Lyndon Johnson, Food Stamps and Medicare, before that you starved or died.

Starting about 1970, credit cards, credit just on your name. A hundred dollar car repair could be spread over a year.

Pre WWII, most spent their lives trying to eat and stay alive. Childhood was a time of being hungry and cold.

Human history as you have seen it is a rare time based on a real estate bubble.

Recent children have computers and games worth more than everything I owned before twenty, and I worked for that.

When you said ancestors, I thought you meant ANCESTORS! Do you know where childhood developed as its own specific 'time' rather than just minature adults doing the same thing as their parents (chopping wood, hauling water, gathering food, existing?) It came when children needed to be educated to be literate. Before that, all bets were off on any sort of 'child hood'.

from a website that caught my attention:
"The absence of literacy, the absence of the idea of education, the absence of the idea of shame - these are the reasons why the idea of childhood did not exist in the medieval world,"

Only after the development of the printing press, and of literacy, did childhood begin to emerge, he says. Despite pressures on children to work in the mines and factories of an industrial age, the need for literacy and education gradually became apparent, first among the elite, then among the masses. Childhood became defined as the time it took to nurture and transform a child into a civilized adult who could read and comprehend complex information. The view American settlers was that only gradually could children attain civility and adulthood through "literacy, education, reason, self-control and shame."

It was during that time, Postman notes, that public education flourished, that children began celebrating birthdays and that a popular culture especially for kids developed around games and songs. Postman places the high-water mark for childhood at between 1850 and 1950.

But the seeds for childhood's demise were sown even before 1850 with the advent of the telegraph. For the first time, electronic messages could be transmitted faster than the human ability to travel.

The most profound meaning of the telegraph (and of its electronic successors) was that the information transmitted on it didn't need real content. The medium itself was the message.

It's an observation that only a few people understood at the time. Henry David Thoreau was among them. When told it was possible for people in Maine and Texas to exchange electric messages, Thoreau remarked, "But what do they have to say to one another?"

Postman sees Thoreau as a prophet. The point is that electronic messages in a free-market society tend to be uncontrollable and banal. News becomes a product. Advertising becomes ubiquitous. Self-restraint and deferred gratification collapse. Celebrity takes over.

Television especially vaporizes the hierarchy that adults once held over children, Postman argues. Pictures dominate. Unlike a child learning gradually to read and to grasp ideas, no one needs to learn how to watch TV. No one gets better at TV watching by doing more of it. Its images are simply there for everyone, adult and child, to absorb.

Electronic media find it impossible to withhold any secrets," Postman writes, letting the reader's mind drift backward to the Middle Ages. "Without secrets, there can be no such thing as childhood." The electronic media thus pose a challenge both to the authority of adults and to the curiosity of children, he argues. Children's curiosity is replaced by cynicism and arrogance. "We are left with children who are given answers to questions they never asked."

Violence, for example, is offered without the mediation of a mother's voice. It's governed by no theory of child development. Rather, it's there because it makes for interesting TV.

For middle-class kids, this meshing of adult and child worlds is surely one of the biggest differences between today's childhoods and those of earlier times, say the 1950s.

Our parents never saw us play ball. They never knew that sometimes we hung out in the rail yards, or stole apples from neighbors' trees. They didn't know the games we played because they were ours. On summer mornings, we disappeared into neighborhood - kid enchantment, emerging only briefly for lunch before plunging back into our conspiracies. We had no play dates. It was assumed we'd return before dinner – safely.

Now, middle-class parents feel the need to be all over their kids' lives. Rarely do you see middle-class kids playing unattended in city parks. Kids are tightly scheduled: ballet, swim team, computer camp. An author writes about a scuffle that broke out among parents at a massive kids' soccer tournament, and then, afterward, about how parents congratulated one another for a wonderful event.


the point is, "child hood" is fluid

It might have something to do with the fact that the 50s/60s generation grew up just after WWII and families didn't have too much money to spend on toys/games etc.

Sins, is that Neil Postman? Have you read Marshall Mcluhan? You probably have, but if not, you'd dig him.

I think this is largely a myth - all societies has/had rites of passage who mark the transition from childhood to adulthood; if there is a thing that is a product of current society is adolescence, not childhood.

Dr. Twenge approaches an answer to that question in her book "Generation Me".

Starting from age 10, if I did not want to go to bed hungry, I had to work in addition to going to school. Before age ten I went to bed hungry a lot.

This.



A lot of people didn't even have TV's.

The force of "consumerism" was a lot weaker then, too. Kids made their own fun, and didn't rely on marketing for it.

My Nan, born in the early 1900's, had a few things left from her childhood. But she was poor, and when you have to move around a lot to survive, you leave unnecessary things behind. (She head off on her own, leaving a remote fishing island where a man wanted her to stay and marry him, for the big city hundreds of miles away over land and sea, and long before women's lib. There's no one I've admired more. She was a real character. Btw, her admirer wife followed her to the city. She married him over 10 years later, had my mom, and three months later he died. She married again to a man with mental retardation, so he could have someone to care for him, in the year I was born some 33 years later.)

yes, it is Neil Postman! and I have read Marshall Mcluhan and I do like him!

I was born in 1950, so I remember my 'childhood'. I was tasked with chores before I was aware of much else, everyone in the family pulled their weight, and I remember having my backside paddled almost raw for breaking dishes when it was my job to set and clear the table at maybe 6 years old. At 7 I was expected to wash the dishes as well and sweep and scrub down the kitchen at night. Mom said she did it when she was that age. I also did my own laundry and cleaned my room. (I remember the first time I went to someone else's house and her room was so neat and tidy! I could not believe her mother cleaned her room for her!)

so yes, 'childhood' is just a state of mind, obviously.

Merle