American Children, Parents, and the State, 1960-1980

FAIN: FA-252548-17

Leslie Paris
University of British Columbia (Vancouver V5Z1W4 Canada)

A book-length study on children’s experiences and parenting during two decades of political and social change.

My book project explores why and how children figured so centrally both as icons and as historical actors amid the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Both parenting and children’s experience were reconfigured in an era of political and social turbulence. During this period, challenges to traditional forms of authority took many forms. My work intervenes in the Americanist historiography by placing children, adolescents, and the adults who cared for them squarely at the center of this story instead of the margins to which they have generally been relegated. Using age as my central category of historical analysis, I explore the ways in which American children, their caretakers, and concerned policy-makers navigated an era of increasing options amid increasing rancor, and examine how these experiences differed across age and generational divides.