Amid the gathering turbulence of 1964, baby making abruptly fell out of favor. In the spring of that year, American women were still giving birth at a record pace. But in the months that followed, conceptions plummeted--and by mid-1965, the U.S. fertility rate was entering its steep post-Boom decline. A national fertility study confirmed that a third of all mothers now admitted having at least one unwanted child, Stay-at-home moms began wearing buttons that read "Stop At One," "None Is Fun," and "Jesus Was an Only Child." The reasons for this sudden turn included birth control pills, nascent feminism, and a new societywide hostility toward children.3
America's new antichild attitude revealed itself most clearly in the media. By the mid-1960s, the production of smart-kid family sitcoms and creative-kid Disney movies slowed to a trickle. Replacing them was a new genre featuring unwanted, unlikable, or simply horrifying children. Rosemary's Baby, a thriller about a woman pregnant with an evil demon, anchored a twenty-year period in which Hollywood filmed one bad-kid movie after another (The Exorcist, It's Alive, The Omen, Halloween). Most came with sequels, since audiences couldn't seem to get enough of these cinematic monsters. Moviegoers also lined up to see kids who were savages (Lord of the Flies), hucksters (Paper Moon), prostitutes (Taxi Driver), emotional misfits (Ordinary People), spoiled brats (Willie Wonka), and barriers to adult self-discovery (Kramer vs. Kramer). Meanwhile, Hollywood made far fewer films for children. The proportion of G-rated films fell from 41 percent to just 13 percent, and the new R-rated films soon became Hollywood's most profitable. Disney laid off cartoonists for the only time in its history.4
Throughout the Generation X childhood era, the adult media battered their collective reputation and, over time, began to portray this generation as having absorbed the negative message. "We're rotten to the core," sang the preteen thug-boys in Bugsy Malone. "We're the very worst--each of us contemptible, criticized, and cursed." As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, teenagers began repeating this line, as when one student mockingly tells his friends in River's Edge: "You young people are a disgrace to all living things, to plants even. You shouldn't even be seen in the same room as a cactus."
America's new consciousness celebrated childhood as an ideal, but it neglected childhood as an actual living experience. The nation moved from what Leslie Fiedler called a 1950s-era "cult of the child" to what Landon Jones called a 1970s-era "cult of the adult." With older Greatest still smarting from attacks by their own kids, with the Silent now reconsidering their American High--era family choices, and with fertile Boomers taking voyages to the interior, the very image of more children provoked widespread anxiety. Parents were shunned if they tried to bring small children into restaurants or theaters. Many rental apartments started banning children. The ascendant Zero Population Growth movement declared each extra child to be "pollution," a burden on scarce resources.5
Sacrificing one's own career or conjugal happiness for the sake of the kids became passé--even, by the logic of the era, bad for the kids themselves. A flurry of popular books chronicled the resentment, despair, and physical discomfort women now said they endured when bearing and raising Generation X children. As the cost of raising a child became a hot topic, adults ranked autos ahead of children as necessary for the "good life." The abortion rate sky-rocketed; by the late 1970s, would-be mothers aborted one fetus in three. In Ourselves and Our Children, a committee of Silent authors ranked "considering yourself" ahead of "benefiting our children" as a principle of sound parenting. Parental guides began emphasizing why-to-do's over what-to-do's.6
The popular Parental Effectiveness Training urged adults to teach small tots about consequences rather than about right and wrong. As Marie Winn noted, an "early-childhood determinism" enabled parents to assume their kids could cope with later trauma "given how carefully they had been tended as tots." Thus reassured, Awakening-era parents spent 40 percent less of their time on child raising than parents had spent during the American High.7
The Awakening's casual sex, nontraditional families, and mind-altering drugs left a large imprint on this child generation, an imprint reflected in much of the later Generation X music and prose. In the late 1960s, sang Susan Werner:
There were some people smokin' weed, there were some others doin' speed"I remember wallpapering my younger brother's room with Playboy centerfolds," recalled Adriene Jenik. "I remember bongs and pipes and art and music among my parents greatest artifacts and my mother's vibrator and reading my father's Penthouse forums." As novelist Ian Williams wrote, "We could play truth or dare with our parents' sex lives if we wanted to." By the late 1970s, once Generation Xers began practicing what they had learned, adults had grown accustomed to seeing kids dress and talk as knowingly as Brooke Shields in ads or Jodie Foster in film.
But I was way big into raisins at the time.
As the media standard for the typical American family changed from My Three Sons to My Two Dads, divorce struck Generation Xers harder than any other child generation in U.S. history. Where Boomers had once been worth the parental sacrifice of prolonging an unhappy marriage, Generation Xers were not. At the end of the American High, half of all adult women believed that parents in bad marriages should stay together for the sake of the children, but by the end of the Boom Awakening, only one in five thought so. Best-selling youth books like It's Not the End of the World tried to show that parental divorce wasn't so bad, but left children with the impression that any family could burst apart at any time.8
In The Nurturing Father: Journey Toward the Complete Man, Kyle Pruett promised that family dissolution "freed" parent and child to have "better" and "less-constricted" time together. By 1980, just 56 percent of all Generation X children lived with two once-married parents, and today this generation's novels and screenplays bristle with hostile references to parents who didn't tough it out. Polls have since shown Generation Xers far more inclined than older Americans to believe current divorce laws are too lax.9
In homes, schools, and courtrooms, America's style of child nurture completed a two-decade transition from Father Knows Best to Bill Cosby's Fatherhood: "Was I making a mistake now? If so, it would just be mistake number nine thousand seven hundred and sixty-three." "If anything has changed in the last generation," Ellen Goodman later admitted, it was the "erosion of confidence" among "openly uncertain" mothers and fathers. Alvin Poussaint noted the dominant media image of parents as pals who were "always understanding; they never got very angry. There were no boundaries or limits set. Parents are shown as bungling, not in charge, floundering as much as the children."10
Parents who admit they are "many-dimensioned, imperfect human beings," reassured Ourselves and Our Children, "are able to give children a more realistic picture of what being a person is all about." At best, the new model parents were, like Cosby's Cliff Huxtable, gentle and communicative; at worst, they undermined trust and expressed ambivalence where children sought guidance. Like father and son in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, adults became more childlike and children more adultlike.
This antiauthoritarian nurture fit the iconoclastic mood of the Awakening. Older generations went out of their way to tell children (in the words of Mad's Al Feldstein) that "there's a lot of garbage out in the world and you've got to be aware of it." Silent parents, recalling their own closeted Crisis-era (Depression and World War II) childhood, were especially eager to expose their children to everything. Judy Blume exhorted parents to expose their children to every possible human catastrophe. "They live in the same world as we do," she insisted. She and other Silent authors launched a New Realism bookshelf for children, targeting subjects (such as abortion, adolescent cohabitation, child abuse, family-friend rapists, and suicide) that prior child generations had never encountered. After absorbing the books, movies, and TV shows the Awakening-era culture offered them, and after observing adults carefully and emulating how they behave, many Generation Xers began resembling Tatum O'Neal in Paper Moon, the kind of kid adults have a hard time finding adorable.11
The events of the Awakening reinforced the impression that grown-ups were neither powerful nor virtuous. To the child's eye, adults were simply not in control, either of their own personal lives or (during the years of Vietnam, Watergate, and gas lines) of the larger world. Instead of preventing danger or teaching by example, adults were more apt to hand out self-care guides that told kids about everything that might happen and how to handle it on their own. As Neil Postman observed in The Disappearance of Childhood, Generation X children were given "answers to questions they never asked." It was an era in which everyone and everything had to be liberated, whether it was good for them or not. In Escape from Childhood, John Holt urged freeing children from the vise of adult oppression, while Hillary Rodham Clinton published articles on children's rights.12
Nowhere were Generation X children liberated more than in Awakening-era schools, where High-era education now stood accused of having dehumanized little Boomers. Each child should be "left to himself without adult suggestion of any kind," urged Open Education advocate A. S. Neill, who suggested that facts and rules and grades and walls be replaced with "tools and clay and sports and theater and paint and freedom." Reformers tried to boost child self-esteem through "person-centered" education that stressed feelings over reason, empirical experience over logical deduction. Rather than ask students to evaluate a book's universal quality or message, teachers began probing students about how a reading assignment made them feel. Grammar was downplayed, phonics frowned on, and arithmetic decimals replaced by the relativistic parameters of New Math. Textbooks emphasized sensitivity and accessibility.13
Standards were weakened, in line with reformer Roland Barthe's theory that "there is no minimum body of knowledge which it is essential for everyone to know." The average time children spent on homework fell to half what it had been in the High era, and grade inflation ran rampant. As the Awakening progressed, the percentage of high school graduates who described themselves as straight A students nearly tripled.14
Back in the American High, being a good adult had meant staying married and providing children with a wholesome culture and supportive community. Now it meant festooning the child's world with self-esteem smiley buttons while the fundamentals (and media image) of a child's life grew more troubled by the year. Increasing numbers of children were born to unmarried teen mothers. While underfunded foster-home systems buckled in state after state, the media began referring to latchkey, abandoned, runaway, and throwaway kids. In the middle 1970s, the distinction of occupying America's most poverty-prone age bracket passed directly from the (elder) Lost Generation to the (child) Generation X without ever touching the generations in between. By the late 1970s, the child suicide rate broke the Lost's previous turn-of-the-century record. Through the Awakening, the homicide rate for infants and small children rose by half, and the number of reported cases of child abuse jumped fourfold.15
The Awakening's new hostility to power, authority, and secrecy had one meaning for 45-year-olds seeking a nuanced view of a complicating world, but another for 10-year-olds trying to build dreams. For the Silent, taught to Think Big as Crisis-era children, Thinking Small was a midlife tonic. But never having had their own chance to Think Big, preadolescent Generation Xers heard a new message: America's best days were over. Like the child of divorce writ large, this generation wondered if it was only a coincidence that they came along at just the moment in history when older people started complaining that everything in America was falling to pieces.
Many Generation Xers as young adults, when asked how they were raised, reported that they raised themselves--that they made their own meals, washed their own clothes, decided for themselves whether to do homework or make money after school, and chose which parent to spend time with on weekends (or side with in court). They grew up less as members of family teams, looking forward to joining adult teams, than as free agents, looking forward to dealing and maneuvering their way through life's endless options. In their childhood memory, the individual always trumped the group. During the Consciousness Revolution, as older generations stripped away the barriers that had previously sheltered childhood, Generation Xers were denied a positive vision of the future--denied, indeed, any reassurance that their nation had any collective future at all.
This page was last modified on 07/20/2025 06:22:07