Abstract
This chapter retraces the childhood of the baby boomers. It shows how the children of the baby boom were brought up in a context of housing shortages and a general lack of material comfort. However, significant improvements in social conditions were made during their childhood, such as the arrival of household appliances. The chapter demonstrates the authoritarian upbringing of the baby boomers and notably the strict education in France. The greater accessibility of education during the period of the baby boomers’ childhood is also presented. In summary, the baby boomers’ youth was the product of these breaks and continuities with the past that occurred in the course of their parents’ and grandparents’ lives. Emerging from a period of austerity, the baby boomers contributed to the consumer society, becoming the founding members of a youth culture. After a comfortable adolescence, they entered the adult world with confidence in their strength and number.
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Notes
- 1.
Report produced in 1921 by French Senator Etienne Clémentel on the importance of research and development for national production.
- 2.
In actual fact, the expression Welfare State was first used in 1941, by William Temple, the then Archbishop of York.
- 3.
During World War II, 500,000 housing units were destroyed and 1,400,000 damaged in France (Merlin 1988). In Britain, the housing shortage was put at 1.5 million units in 1950 (Marwick 2003).
- 4.
Scarcely 1 % of housing units had an inside toilet, a bathroom, and central heating (Merlin 1988).
- 5.
Father Pierre’s appeal of 1 February 1954, prompted by the deaths of homeless people in the freezing winter conditions.
- 6.
Ludivine Bantigny (2007) explains that the return home of some 900,000 PoWs (mostly fathers) put a considerable strain on relations between children and their parents.
- 7.
In 1951, “there was a shortfall of about a million and a half dwellings” (Marwick 2003).
- 8.
The Event histories and contact circle survey found that two thirds of the generations born between 1946 and 1950 spent their early years in overcrowded accommodation.
- 9.
According to the 1954 census, 31 % of four-person households in France had just one or two rooms in which to live, and this figure was 47 % in Paris (Cahen 1957). By 1962, the average size of dwellings had risen to 3.09 rooms, and the average number of people per household was just three, meaning that there was approximately one person per room (by 1999, this ratio had fallen to 0.62; Merlin 2005).
- 10.
On the subject of children (and young adults) and their bedrooms, see Ramos (2002) and Glevarec (2010).
- 11.
France’s mother and child welfare system ( Protection Maternelle et Infantile, PMI) was established on 2 November 1945.
- 12.
In the United States, the baby boomers are sometimes referred to as the Dr. Spock Generation, as their mothers were deeply influenced by Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, published in 1946. This work was translated into French in 1952, and French mothers were also greatly influenced by Laurence Pernoud’s J’Attends un Enfant, which first came out in 1956.
- 13.
According to François de Singly, “sociologists explained that the working class was ‘authoritarian’ because it reproduced within the home the relations that working men and women had to endure in the workplace (Kohn 1969)”.
- 14.
A notion contradicted by Richard Hoggart (1957), who demonstrates that the time of childhood is a preserved time.
- 15.
Even today, parents bring their sons and daughters up differently, as several sibship studies have shown that parents have gendered expectations and keep a closer eye on girls (Langevin 1999).
- 16.
These double standards were to persist, according to the Simon report of 1972 (Roussel 1975).
- 17.
Cf. Marc Sangnier’s movement Le Sillon (The Furrow) and Emmanuel Mounier’s Personalist movement.
- 18.
The term primary socialisation is generally used to designate the socialisation that takes place within the family, although it can also apply to the inculcation of knowledge and basic attitudes. A third definition refers to the socialisation that takes place in childhood, as opposed to adolescence (Darmon 2006).
- 19.
The Event histories and contact circle survey showed that 12 % of people living in the Paris region who were born between 1930 and 1950 spent at least 1 year in some sort of institutional setting before the age of 15, be it a boarding school (75 %), an orphanage, a sanatorium, a borstal or a hostel.
- 20.
According to the Next of kin, close friends, and relatives survey, these early separations were especially frequent among respondents whose parent(s) had died or divorced, or whose mother was in full time employment (Clément 2002, 2009; Lelièvre et al. 2005).
- 21.
For every 4.6 pupils in the first year of secondary school whose parents belonged to the managers, professionals and higher level intellectual occupations category, there was just one pupil whose parents were farmers or manual workers (Mendras and Duboys-Fresney 2007).
- 22.
Although a French ministerial circular introduced co-education in 1957, it initially only concerned new schools. Moreover, religious institutions continued to resist co-education. As a result, in 1960, only 25 % of lycées were mixed-sex (Bantigny 2007).
- 23.
Everything the baby boomers came into contact with was carefully vetted, especially children’s literature, as well as films (Sirinelli 2003).
- 24.
Between 1970 and 1976, sales of jeans in France increased by 300 % (Borne 1988).
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Bonvalet, C., Clément, C., Ogg, J. (2015). The Baby Boomers’ Childhood. In: Renewing the Family: A History of the Baby Boomers. INED Population Studies, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08545-6_3
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