MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In the 1950s and 60s popular authorities like Dr. Benjamin Spock encouraged American parents to shift from discipline and surveillance to a more hands-off child-rearing approach that emphasized nurturing individuality and self-discovery. Boisterous play was now an important part of child development. Mothers and fathers were to make their homes more informal, to let children feel relaxed and welcome there. Remodeled bedrooms, or newly created playrooms and recreation rooms free of fine furnishings and isolated from the rest of the family appeared partly in response to such prescriptions. They also suggested an ambivalence aroused by the open plan interiors that were increasingly typical of middle class postwar dwellings.

Some clearly had a hard time with this new parenting philosophy. One frazzled mother told McCall’s magazine, “The bigger the children, the louder the noise. I’d just like to dig a hole in the cellar.”¹ Psychologists found that most adults considered the sound of children at play more distracting and annoying than traffic noise. Manufacturers recognized these frustrations and began to tout the sound deadening qualities of their ceiling tiles, wallboards, and carpeting. The old adage that children should be seen and not heard, seemed to have been replaced with the idea that children should be neither seen nor heard.

This paper explores the rhetorical underpinnings for such “don’t say no rooms” and the physical form these spaces assumed. Drawing upon the visual conventions of building product promotional materials combined with close readings of parental advice literature and accounts by contemporary parents, the paper identifies how these child-centric environments form a centrifugal counter to the centripetal cultural emphasis on the nuclear family and the single family home as a space of togetherness.