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1. Constructing Creativity in Postwar America
- University of Minnesota Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 1 C O n s t r u C t i n g C r e a t i v i t y i n P O s t w a r a m e r i C a T H E n o T I o n o F T H E C R E A T I v E C H I L D emerged in earlier generations as an educational and artistic ideal, but it was newly constructed and commodified as an aspect of middle-class culture with the rapid population expansion of the baby boom after World War II. The years after the war have been called “child-centered” for the huge numbers of children born during the largest extended baby boom in U.S. history. In 1947, 3.8 million babies were born to American parents. This number reached 4 million every year from 1954 to 1964. These 76.4 million children born between 1946 and 1964 were significant in part because of their sheer number, but also because of the attitudes of their parents and the societal shifts they embodied.1 Not only were American middle-class parents raising more children, but they also strived to raise better children.2 Scientists argued that babies learned more and earlier than had been traditionally accepted, and it became a parent’s job to stimulate and guide the growing child even before he or she entered school. Just as pediatricians and psychologists created norms and stages against which children were measured and charted, so too were matters of parental guidance increasingly analyzed. Raising IQ, improving school readiness, and developing social skills were the anxious refrains in masscirculation magazines and parenting guides. And Cold War pressures stimulated unsettling questions about national renewal, future competitiveness, and material abundance. In the midst of these and other debates, creativity became an important subject of psychological and educational research and a quality that striving parents hoped to cultivate in their children. The real value of creativity was, and still is, hard to define. Admired as inventiveness, problem solving, insightfulness, originality, and discovery of personal potential, creativity encompasses a broad variety of meanings. Although it is an abstract concept—and became and remained a colloquial conStructInG crE AtIVIt y In P oSt wAr AMErIcA 2 buzzword—creativity was consumed in the postwar economy as a solid middle-class belief and was invoked in the national conversation on identity, cultural progress, and future material and political gains. Because children were widely perceived as possessing this apparently innate quality, nourishing and directing it was a common theme in the burgeoning advice literature on parenting. The widespread acceptance of creativity as a “natural” and instinctive attribute of children paralleled the scientific research on creativity. After psychologists began to study and measure creativity, around 1950, they argued that it was a vital and productive aspect of the human personality. Governmental authorities such as the U.S. Children’s Bureau, toy manufacturers , and magazines quickly popularized this scientific literature, arguing for an overlooked but uniquely valuable creative child who might contribute to society in yet untold ways. As the child became an object of intense study and discussion, scrutiny and measurement of children’s abilities also transformed the idea of the creative child, who shifted from a romantic agent of authentic insight to a quantifiable consuming citizen of the postwar era. The romantic ideal, however, persisted in new forms. The curious and imaginative protagonists who populated the growing market for children’s picture books and juvenile television programs gave the constructed image of the creative child a lasting place in the middle-class household. PosTwar ParenTs In a 1946 article about the importance of raising a new generation “imbued with a high resolve to work together for everlasting peace,” a writer for American Home commented that parenthood was “not a dull, monotonous routine job, but an absorbing, creative profession.”3 The new parents of the baby boom children were younger than their own parents had been when they had children, were more affluent, and were greater consumers of everything from household appliances to advice literature about raising children. Furthermore, the role of the parent had shifted in the twentieth century away from a disinterested scientistic model of the behaviorist to an observant coach who attended to the individual needs and developing personality of the growing child. As best-selling parenting books and masscirculation magazines reached young families, they established a set of social and cultural expectations about...