Did Teenagers Follow The 1950s Rules For The Middle Class? Watch What Some Felt Growing Up Then/

This is a portion of my 6 part PBS television series, Making Sense Of The Sixties. Many of you have asked me to present more sections from the series. Please remember that I made it in 1989, more than 30 years ago. You can't look at the 1960s and what happened without looking at the life young people lead in the 1950s. Especially suburban white teenagers which is what my television series focused on. PBS had presented a series a year earlier called "Eyes On The Prize" which focused on the black American experience, and the grant they gave me and my coproducer asked us to focus on what white American teenagers and their parents were experiencing. This clip from my series presents largely white middle-class suburbanites who grew up then plus several leading experts who studied American culture during the 1950s and 1960s.

As my subscribers know, I have posted many clips that present some aspect of life during the 1950s and 1960s. Some comments disagree with this perspective, often without noticing that this focuses on a segment of American society at that time, not the experience that everyone had. Some who view this either grew up or who had parents or grandparents who grew up living a life that not what middle-class Americans were experiencing. Tens of millions grew up in suburbia and it was those tens of millions of young people/teenagers and their parents who I focused on.

Some commentators point out that they were not familiar with these unspoken rules. Others say that they like the rules or would like to return to a time when they exist again - that American society would be better if these rules existed. But research done by my team and others in the late 1980s found that at least 40% of those who grew up back then, disliked or hated the rules. And remember, as some of those interviewed point out in this clip, these social behavior rules were almost never written down. That made articulating them somewhat difficult and my team spent months uncovering and defining these rules and then checking with ordinary citizens and experts to see what they remember experiencing.