Riding High on Birthrates and Sugar in the 1950s
In the 1950s, children were everywhere — and we were feeding them heaps of sugar.
Welcome to the 1950s, an age of baby-brain and back-seat parenting. While the wartime '40s was colored by the art of making do with rough circumstances, Canadians in the '50s are welcoming prosperity and perfection. Employment and wages are up, and the economy is strong. World War II veterans are home, settled, and eager to get on with the next stage of their lives: starting families.
Bringing Up Baby (Boom)
Surprisingly, no one sees the Baby Boom coming. Considering the toll taken on families during the Great Depression and World War I, experts at the time predicted a post-war decline in births. Were they ever wrong. Canada goes from having 253,000 live births in 1940, to a whopping 479,000 babies in 1960. With all of these kidlets running around, parents turn to new parenting manuals and celebrity mothering experts like Dr. Spock for advice.
- Related: CBC Archives — Dr. Spock on the Spock Generation (1993)
They introduce new mothers to the concept of mental hygiene. Experts say a child's emotional well-being is just as important as their physical well-being. To keep children emotionally fit, moms have to ensure their progeny are constantly happy. The result? The baby boom becomes the most coddled, comfortable, privileged group of children in history.
Marketing to kids
After years of wartime rationing, the '50s sees Canadian families hungry for fatty and sugary snacks. The term "consumer" becomes commonplace, and parents begin to splurge on impulse food buys and indulgences for children like ice cream, bubble gum, and pop. Supermarkets pick up on this trend, and shelves are filled with baked goods and candies.
Food companies and their ad agencies recognize the power sweets-loving children have over their parents' wallets. And in the '50s, they have even more places to reach those kids, from television spots to new children's magazines.
While most of the 1940s had been spent saving sugar rations for special occasions like birthdays or weddings, clever campaigns in the '50s popularize the belief that good mothers feed their children meals that they like, sugar content be damned. In fact, some advertisers go one step further, telling mothers that sugar is a valuable source of food energy for children. Aside from a few concerns about dental health, and the occasional report from nutritionists suggesting that sweets are not a replacement for other, more nutritious foods, sugar is largely considered harmless.
Sugar mania
The best example of the 1950s sugar mania is breakfast cereal. In the '50s different cereals are pitched to different family members. Mom and dad get old favourites like Cream of Wheat and Corn Flakes. But there's also a new breed of cereals hitting the market, specifically meant to entice millions of tiny Baby Boomers. The packaging of children's cereals are filled with cartoon mascots and bright, appealing colours, but their most appealing feature is their highly sugared, aggressively sweet taste.
Some of the iconic kids' cereals released in the 1950s had eye popping amounts of sugar:
- Sugar Frosted Flakes — 29% sugar
- Cocoa Puffs — 43% sugar
- Cocoa Krispees — 46% sugar
- Sugar Smacks (now Honey Smacks) — 56% sugar
Sweetening the plot further is the fact that the cereal boxes often contain collectable toys and comics. This ensures that every grocery day, kids will beg their parents to buy these sugar bombs, so they can collect all these prizes. Some of the decade's favourite in-box toys include Tarzan comics, hanging monkeys, Sky King statuettes, and, the funnest of all, an actual land deed that is included in every box of Quaker Oats. These deeds are part of the launch for the TV show Sgt. Preston of the Yukon. Kids are mesmerized at the possibility of owning one whole square inch of land in the Yukon. They make their parents buy box after box. Sadly, it turns out the deeds have no value.
There are a few dissenters, who wonder if all this sugar might not be as healthy as the people selling it say it is.
In 1957, British physiologist John Yudkin floats a theory that sugar is a serious health hazard. Instead of heeding his warning, he is ridiculed for being a party pooper. His book, Pure, White and Deadly: How Sugar is Killing Us and What We Can do About it, is released in 1972, but his claims are largely ignored again, this time in the face of the 1970s' fear of saturated fat. Today, as ageing Baby Boomers are battling obesity, heart disease, dental issues and Type 2 Diabetes, we have to wonder, maybe the '50s weren't so sweet after all.
Watch a modern-day family live through six different decades on Back in Time For Dinner, Thursdays at 8pm (8:30NT) on CBC