‘Where are the parents?’: Changing parenting responsibilities between the 1960s and the 2010s

Abstract

Introduction In 1947, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, British Pathe Pictorial produced a short film, a mass-distribution filler shown in cinemas, entitled ‘East and West’. It was built around the symbolic and long-standing confluence of space and class in London, with its affluent middle-and upper-class ‘West End’ and poor working class and immigrant ‘East End’. The film contrasted life for the pampered children and dogs of the West End, constantly cared for and watched over, and isolated, with the carefree children and dogs of the East End, allowed to roam and part of a (romanticized) strong community. Over clips of a gang of rather grimy and scruffy young boys playing cricket on rubble-strewn waste ground ‘down’ in the East End of London, without an adult in sight, followed by shots of individual or pairs of clean, well-dressed children accompanied by nanny, feeding ducks or driving small replica boats on a lake in a park ‘up’ in the West End, the commentator enunciates:[The East End kids’] playground is all too often the place where the bomb dropped. He learns to take his pleasure where he can. What have [the West End children] got that the other fellow hasn’t? Probably a nanny keeping an eye on them, a nanny who never lets them out of her sight, these children of the west who must dress up even to play in the park.1