Changing Family Life and the Generation Gap

Just as education changed to meet the needs of postindustrial society, family structures and parent–child relationships shifted from what they had been a century earlier. Households became more varied: cohabiting couples, single-parent families, blended families, families headed by same-sex partners, and childless marriages all became more common. At the end of the 1970s, the marriage rate in the West had fallen by 30 percent from its 1960s level, and after almost two decades of baby boom, the birthrate dropped significantly. Belgian women, for example, bore 2.6 children on average in 1960 but only 1.8 by the end of the 1970s. In the Soviet bloc, the birthrate was even lower.

Daily life within the family also changed. Technological consumer items filled the home, with radio and television often forming the basis of the household’s common social life. Appliances such as dishwashers, washing machines, and clothes dryers became more widespread, especially in the western bloc. More women worked outside the home during these years to pay for the prolonged economic dependence of children, and, in contrast with the past, the modern family seemed to have a primarily psychological mission, providing emotional nurturance for children who acquired their intellectual skills in school. Parents turned to psychologists, social workers, other experts, and the media for models of how to deal with life in postindustrial society.

Postindustrial society changed teenagers’ lives most dramatically, creating strong differences between adolescents and adults. A century earlier, teens had been full-time wage earners like their parents; now, in the new knowledge-based society, most were students and some were financially dependent on their parents into their twenties. Despite teenagers’ longer financial childhood, sexual activity began at an ever younger age, prompting the idea of a “sexual revolution.” Youth simultaneously gained new roles as consumers, wooed with items associated with rock music—records, portable radios, and stereos. Rock music celebrated youthful rebellion against adult culture in scornful, critical, and often explicitly sexual lyrics. Sex roles for the young did not change, however: promoters focused on groups of male musicians, whom they depicted as heroic, surrounded by worshipping female “groupies.” New models for youth such as the Beatles were themselves the products of advanced technology, marketing for mass consumption, and a unique youth culture separating the young from their parents—the so-called generation gap.