The Teenager Emerges: Canada in the 1950s

Teenage life in Canada during the 1950’s is hard to understand unless having lived there. With this new demographic, many things had to be created in order to satisfy this demographic, such as clothing, music, rules, and schools. Unique aspects of teenage life in this era include a lot of rules, the movie theatre, rock n roll and the way they communicated to each other. Issues teenagers faces include marginalization, condemnation and disapproval. The new demographic helped Canada as it made the “children” demographic smaller, and it gave the teenagers more freedom, independence and they finally felt as they could have their own “stuff” as they would call their music, their clothes, their friends their social life etc.

The demographic of the Teenagers was created in the 1950’s due to the giant number of population in this age group and due to teenagers gaining more independence, freedom and privacy.

Because of this new demographic, people started seeing teenagers differently than children, as they did before. They had more freedom; they would be able to go out after school, they would start doing some “adult” activities, such as working. They had more independence from their parents. Teenagers would usually want to stay alone in their rooms talking to friends over the rotary dial phone (if they had one) or they would sneak out at night to go to clubs and parties.

The baby boom was a big contributor to the new word “Teenager” as in “The 10 years from 1946 to 1956, the population increased by 20 percent, in Canada. Those new kids demanded new furniture, new clothes and more food be produced, along with new houses, and new cars and lots of other services like schools and playgrounds, and swimming pools and hockey rinks. Lots of ne...

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...nite help to Canadian culture as a whole. It let teenagers; now that they’re their own population have more independence, freedom and rights. They were not seen as children anymore, so they started to focus on post-secondary education and looking into their future adult life in general, so they strived for a richer future. In Canadian culture, it gave bands and musicians such as Elvis Presley or the Beatles (1960’s) to have a target audience.

It is important to learn how Teenagers were in the past to take advice from the good of it, and reject the bad, today. We could look at how much less teen pregnancy was back in the 50’s and learn, and we can reject all the exaggerated rulers there were for teenagers during the 1950’s.

Works Cited

(http://socialdance.stanford.edu/syllabi/fifties.htm)

(http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_did_the_Baby_Boom_impact_Canada#slide5)