Changes in family life and structure, along with fluctuations in wealth, shaped the context of children’s experience after the Second World War. From 1945 to the early 1970s, American families grew steadily wealthier. The birth-control pill, introduced in the early 1960s, slowed the birth rate, so children grew up in smaller, richer families than ever before. Larger houses gave children more privacy, more wealth meant more toys, including television, more travel and, by the 1980s, more computers and other electronic devices. Meanwhile, a steadily rising divorce rate, followed towards the end of the century by more frequent remarriage, created a complex family structure with multiple residences, incomes and cultures. All these combined to increase the cultural and commercial significance of children and childhood.

Schooling reflected these changes. Attentiveness to children’s individual personalities produced innovations in teaching techniques in the 1960s and 1970s, including open classrooms and highschool electives, though the 1980s and 1990s brought a resurgence of adult authority and a “return to basics.” Parental involvement in schools eroded after the 1970s as demand for income encouraged adults to work longer hours and/or multiple jobs. Beginning in the 1980s, communications technologies lengthened the work day itself. Children’s activities became more structured with playgroups, after-school care, organized sports and summer camp replacing the less-structured street play of earlier generations of children. New therapeutic approaches to troubled children emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, and therapists offered Ritalin and other prescription drugs to help these children “adjust” more readily.

Though the Civil Rights movement and new constitutional doctrines on equality improved social and economic opportunities for non-white citizens, non-white and recent immigrant groups stayed poorer than whites. African American, Asian and Latino children continued to play with their peers on public streets and in public playgrounds instead of in private rooms at home or in the supervised parks available to the more affluent. While prosperous minority families followed other middle-class families into the suburbs, the integration of professional sports provided African American and Hispanic children with new nonwhite role models of immense wealth and prestige to emulate. Beginning in the 1970s, growing racial disparities in wealth clashed with these children’s heightened desires for both basic and glamorous goods, introducing new tensions into poor families and communities.

Gender expectations of children also changed as adults won increased educational, professional and recreational opportunities. Despite controversy evidence of underachievement by girls led to new girl-centered initiatives, including girls-only math and science camps, magazines devoted to empowering girls and an increased sensitivity about schoolyard teasing.

Post-Second World War America has paradoxically both shortened and lengthened childhood. Children mature early as independent consumers, but remain dependent longer on more affluent parents. School days and years are longer, though pedagogy has become more respectful of children’s individuality Children receive more organized assistance with leisure, learning and emotional development, though working parents, underfunded public programs and the labor market often require even young children to shift largely for themselves.