Childhood into Adolescence

Growing up in the 1970s

John Newson, Elizabeth Newson, Peter Barnes, Susan Gregory

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138565944
• eBook ISBN: 9781351344548
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book is about the lives of 11-year-old children growing up in a Midlands city in the late '60s and early '70s. Based on interviews with their parents, it describes family life at the time, as well as the experiences, hopes and concerns of the children as they themselves become adolescents. The book reflects upon the changes that occur for children in the transitional period between childhood and adolescence. It looks at the friendship patterns of eleven-year-olds, their special interests and activities and how they spend their leisure time as well as describing the children's worries and concerns as perceived by their parents. It also considers family life and parental issues in the context of children's growing independence and their developing sexual maturity.

Originally written in the 1980's but recently discovered and published now for the first time, this is the fifth book in the series of long-term investigations of child up-bringing, by John and Elizabeth Newson, distinguished child psychologists at the University of Nottingham. Their research began in the late 1950s when the cohort of children was a year old; their mothers were subsequently interviewed at intervals as the children grew up. This fifth volume draws links between the material from interviews with parents when their sons and daughters were seven, eleven, sixteen and nineteen years, and also invites comparison with the lives of children growing up now. The final chapter reviews the book series and the Newsons' research programme.

This exceptional book will be of interest to psychologists and other academics interested in child development, as well as professionals involved in work with children and adolescents such as teachers, doctors, nurses and social workers. It also has great historical significance with its potential for comparisons between the lives of children and adolescents now with those growing up some 50 years ago.

1

SETTING THE SCENE

Peter Barnes and Susan Gregory

How this book came to be published

John and Elizabeth Newson were developmental psychologists, whose professional careers covered many areas. They met as undergraduate students at University College London in the late 1940s and married in 1951, on the same day that they received the notification of their degree results. Shortly afterwards they moved to Nottingham where John had been offered an assistant lectureship in the university’s Department of Psychology. Elizabeth worked for a time as a primary school teacher before joining John at the department.

Together, they founded the Child Development Research Unit at Nottingham University in 1967. Their interests in developmental psychology were wide and varied, including toys and playthings and the training of educational and clinical child psychologists. In addition, John had a particular focus on mother–infant interaction and intersubjectivity, while Elizabeth developed an expertise in the assessment and management of autism. She was awarded an OBE for that work in 1999.

Their main body of work, however, was a longitudinal study of children growing up in Nottingham. For this, they studied a large cohort of around 700 children, carrying out interviews with the parents, usually the mother, when the children were 1, 4, 7, 11, 16 and 22 years of age. The findings of the study of 1-, 4- and 7-year-olds were published in the 1960s and 1970s:

Infant Care in an Urban Community – hardback in 1963 and paperback (as Patterns of Infant Care in an Urban Community) in 1965;

Four Years Old in an Urban Community – hardback in 1968 and paperback in 1970;

Seven Years Old in the Home Environment – hardback in 1976 and paperback in 1978; and

Perspectives on School at Seven Years Old (with Peter Barnes) – hardback in 1977.

One of the main features of this research was the emphasis on involving parents as a source of information, rather than professionals. The idea for the study arose following the birth of their first child, Roger, in 1955. They found that few, if any, of the existing child care manuals provided information about what parents actually do and how they cope. As psychologists, it seemed to them that it was important to find out what really went on in families and what the parental experience was. That interest, which began in infancy, continued as the children grew older, still with the focus on the parents’ perspectives.

Inevitably, a proliferation in commitments later in their careers, their otherwise busy lives and subsequent ill health had implications for the demands of the longitudinal study. At the time of their deaths, John in 2010 and Elizabeth in 2014, only the above books relating to 1-, 4- and 7-year-olds had been published, although much of the later data had been analysed and selected parts had appeared in edited books and journals (Newson and Newson, 1980; Newson, Newson and Mahalski, 1982; Newson and Newson, 1984; Newson, Newson and Adams, 1993).

Following Elizabeth’s death in 2014, their daughter Carey was looking through the many cases of material relating to their professional careers that were stored in the basement of the house in Oxford to which they had retired. There she came across a 237-page typescript describing the findings from the 11-year-old interviews, bound between orange card covers. In many aspects this appeared complete, giving references and additional notes, but in other respects it seemed unfinished. There is some evidence that the work was finalised in 1984 and submitted to a publisher, probably George Allen & Unwin who had produced the four previous hardbacks, but for reasons unknown it never saw the light of day in print.

The newly discovered manuscript was shared with a number of people familiar with the research. It provided, for the first time, information about this group of children at 11 years of age, plus a final chapter that discussed more longitudinal aspects of the research, bringing together the early information with findings from interviews conducted at 16 years. It seemed important that it was published, despite some reservations about the implications of the passage of time. How would an audience in the 21st century make sense of reports of 11-year-old children’s lives in the late 1960s and early 1970s? Would people be sufficiently interested? Who would fund it and who would publish it?

After some discussion, it was decided to approach a publisher and for the University of Nottingham to ascertain the likely response to the proposal to publish. The decision to go ahead was based on the positive reactions received.

The origins of the research and how it took shape

As already described, the origins of the longitudinal study lay in the seemingly mundane experience of John and Elizabeth Newson as first-time parents in suburban Nottingham in the mid-1950s. Here is how they described it many years later:

We were finding that our academic training […] was rather less than adequate to answer the questions that naturally seemed to arise in the day-to-day practice of parenthood; and we were curious to know whether our own ways of dealing with quite ordinary issues were in fact typical. We just didn’t know whether most people fed their babies on schedule or demand. We didn’t know whether they potted the baby from the second day or the second year, nor what difference it made. When our son cried in the night and we hauled him into bed with us and sleepily sang him a song or muttered a nursey rhyme, we wondered whether we were quite alone in such indulgence. […]

Over and above our curiosity, on an anthropological level, to know where we stood in the cultural scheme of things, we were intrigued by the degree of authority with which ‘professional’ advice on child rearing was vested. Words like ‘ought’ and ‘should’ seemed to be bandied about on issues which we were gradually coming to believe were matters of opinion; value judgements in terms of ‘good’, ‘best’, ‘correct’, ‘harmful’, ‘faulty’ were made with an assurance which, naively, we first assumed must stem from a well-established body of knowledge. […] It took us some time to realise that if we seriously wanted answers to our questions, we would have to undertake some of the basic research ourselves.

Newson and Newson, 2001: 413–14

Who were the children?

That ‘basic research’ took shape in 1957. The immediate aim was to interview 700 Nottingham mothers about how they were bringing up their 1-year-old child. The initial sample was drawn from the records of the City of Nottingham Health Department. This meant that at the time of the child’s birth and during the first year of life the families were resident within the city boundaries. As the total interviewing programme was spread out over a period of two years, batches of names were drawn month by month in an effort to ensure that interviews took place within a fortnight either way of the child’s first birthday. As a consequence, the dates of birth of the children in the sample ranged from late 1957 to late 1959.

Certain exclusions were made: illegitimate children; children known to have gross disabilities; children not in the care of their mother; and children whose parents were recent immigrants. These exclusions did not imply that such children and their families were not of interest in their own right; several were the subject of subsequent studies at the Child Development Research Unit, using similar methodology and drawing on data from the core sample for comparative purposes. These included: children with cerebral palsy (Hewett, 1970); blind children (Wood, 1970); fatherless children (Canning, 1974); deaf children (Gregory, 1976); Punjabi children (Dosanjh, 1976); and West Indian children (Grace, 1983).

Names were drawn at random from the Health Department records until a total of 500 interviews had been completed. At that point a further random sample was scrutinised in terms of the fathers’ occupation in order to increase the representation of those social class groups, as defined by the Registrar General’s classification (see p. 13), which were less well represented in the initial random sample. It thus became a stratified random sample (Newson and Newson, 1963, Appendix 1).

How were the data collected?

In total, 709 mothers were interviewed. Elizabeth Newson conducted 184 of them herself, 16 were carried out by ‘other university people’ and the majority (509) was undertaken by health visitors from the Health Department. Elizabeth recorded her interviews on the sole reel-to-reel tape recorder available in the Department and then transcribed excerpts from what the mothers said, in longhand. The health visitors’ interviews were not recorded.

The data from the completed schedules were then transferred to yellow Cope-Chat cards, one for each child. The 8 inch by 5 inch cards (it was still the late 1950s!) had 116 punched holes around the margin. Each hole was assigned a characteristic or attribute – social class, gender, temperament, method of feeding – and, depending on the response, the hole was either left intact or clipped open. So, for example, if the record was of a child with a father in a skilled manual occupation, the designated hole was clipped. When it came to analysis, the completed cards were stacked and a knitting needle passed through that line of holes and jiggled about. All of the Class III manual clipped cards fell out and those left on the needle could then be further sorted to end up with separate piles for the five social class categories that formed the basis of the analysis. These cards could then be sorted according to other variables of interest and the numbers recorded. For a pair of researchers juggling the demands of jobs and a growing family – there were now three children under the age of 7 – this technology, seemingly primitive by today’s standards, had advantages:

[I]‌f one wanted to try out some hunch of correlation, all one needed was the box of cards and one’s homely knitting needle, and the hypothesis could be checked there and then – no booking ten minutes’ computer time some day next week!

Newson and Newson, 1976: 28

It was in this fashion that the findings of the 1-year-old study came together and the resulting book produced (Newson and Newson, 1963).¹

Although the health visitors who carried out the majority of the interviews were experienced at interviewing in the course of their jobs, there was a perceived problem in that the professional relationship they had had with the families prior to carrying out the interviews ran the risk of generating responses from the mothers that were closer to what they judged the health visitor would want to hear rather than what they actually did. Subsequent analysis of the data found evidence that that was indeed the case, which had implications for what became the next stage in the research.

What happened next?

The 1-year-old study may have been embarked upon as a one-off, but there was a grander ambition, as stated in 1968:

Integral in itself, we nevertheless planned, with more hope than confidence, that this should be dovetailed into a much more ambitious investigation which should follow children through their childhood and adolescence, and indeed into early adulthood, if this proved practicable.

Newson and Newson, 1968: 16

The 4-year-old research built on the lessons learned from its predecessor. It also enjoyed the significant support of a generous grant from the Nuffield Foundation, which, among other benefits, meant that it was possible to engage a team of six part-time interviewers in addition to Elizabeth Newson herself. Between them, these interviewers visited 275 of the mothers who had been seen at 1, together with 425 first-time interviewees, randomly selected from the same Health Department records that had been used in 1957. These families replaced those who had been interviewed by the health visitors.

As the research programme progressed through the 7- and 11-year stages there was inevitable further drop out and replacement. It was not possible to follow up 83 of the 700 interviewed at 4 when the child was 7; just over half declined to take part and the remainder had moved away and could not be contacted. A further top-up sample was drawn of children born in 1960, resulting in a total of 697 interviews.

A similar pattern can be seen at 11: a proportion of those interviewed at 7 years could not be followed up four years later and additional numbers were recruited such that 780 interviews were completed. The data presented in the following chapters are based on that number. Further details of the composition of the sample at the later age-stages are provided in Appendix 2.

Who were the interviewers?

There was a welcome continuity in the team of interviewers from stage to stage. It is possible to account for ten over the duration of the research, based on a combination of the acknowledgements in the published books and personal memory. The Newsons summarised their significance in a retrospective account of the project. From the outset

Elizabeth’s genuine role as a young mother was enormously in her favour: when we were financially able to employ a team of interviewers, a prime qualification was their motherhood, so that this could be mentioned in the introductory letter; once contact had been made, we could all grow older together! The nature and length of the encounter (two to four hours, or more) seemed to have a bonding effect, as did the intimacy of the topic; and training new interviewers in achieving the skills we wanted was ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Setting the Scene
• 2 Continuity and Change: The 11-year-old in context
• 3 Enduring Friends and Foes
• 4 Great Busyness
• 5 Risk, Anxiety and Frankness as Children Grow Up
• 6 Uncertainty and Incomplete Answers
• 7 Making Good
• 8 Styles and Outcomes
• 9 ‘Childhood into Adolescence’: The importance of the parent’s perspective
• Appendix 1 : Interview schedule
• Appendix 2 : Sampling and statistics
• Appendix 3 : Local and topical references
• Index