Until the 1930s, most children grew up on family farms.
Less than a century has passed since the end of the America's Great Depression of the 1930s, Yet those who lived through it, some still living into the early 21st century, have experienced more social and economic transformation than any previous generation. According to the US census, since the founding of the United States until the early 1900s, the United States was mostly agricultural, more than 50 percent of families and children lived on farms, had close contact with parents, and often transitioned into adulthood while maintaining close extended familial ties. By the 1930s, these societal patterns began to change.
Farms to Cities
The Great Depression that began with the stock market crash in October 1929 suddenly altered many families' lifestyles. Children in rural settings most often spent their days contributing to the family farm. During the Depression, in many cases, fathers left the family homestead and traveled to cities in search of work. Young children were required to fill in the gaps and carry adult responsibilities at home, including working the farm and maintaining the home. In the 1930s, previously successful farms in the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and New Mexico turned into dust bowls as a result of drought and overplanting, and the promise of a prosperous future became a daily struggle to survive.
Public School System
In the 1930s, America's public education system taught basic educational skills such as reading, writing, arithmetic, and geometry. Students acquired new career ambitions, and many of those who lived on farms looked forward to leaving the family farm and becoming independent adults with nonagricultural careers. However, because of funding shortages in the 1930s, some schools shortened the school day, and some families could not afford to buy requited books in those areas where schools did not provide them. Schools were racially segregated and most children, other than in families of the wealthy, did not study classes required for college attendance.
Childhood Fun and Games
Children during the 1930s invented their own games, based on their imaginations and popular culture influences. Young boys played marbles, cowboys and Indians, and cops and robbers while using handmade guns and toys. Girls played with Shirley Temple dolls starting in the mid-1930s and read Nancy Drew mysteries. Before television arrived in the family home, national radio shows such as Dick Tracy, Popeye the sailor, The Shadow, and Ripley's Believe It or Not stimulated young children's imagination. The 1930s was crowned the Golden Age of Radio, as families often gathered around large radios to hear the latest installment of a favorite radio show in much the same way children today watch cartoons on Saturday morning television.
The Rising Influence of Popular Culture
The 1930s initiated a culturally-segmented society. The lifestyle of rural families differed significantly from those in urban cities. While these differences had always existed, the introduction of magazines and radio broadcasts communicated lifestyle differences across the entire country. For the first time, children's most significant inspiration no longer came from their parents. Inspiration and influence came from the larger society. As a result, as the decade drew to a close and America began to pull itself out of the Great Depression, memories from the times of economic turmoil motivated children towards selecting a lifestyle different from that of their parents as a pathway away from the economic trauma they had experienced.
Tags: Great Depression, came from, family farm, lived farms, most children