Across the twentieth century each generation of American children has come of age in a different world of realities. The differences are typically expressed through the experiences of families and the lives of parents, as when migration from farm to city placed children in social worlds unimagined by their parents. The Great Depression made families and children materially insecure; then, mass mobilization in World War II removed fathers from countless households over a period of years. Prosperity in postwar America meant that children of the depression had moved in one lifetime “from scarcity to abundance, from sacrifice to the freedoms made possible by prosperity” (Elder, 1974, p. 296). Such changes add proper caution to generalizations from one historical era to another and underscore the need to bring historical insights to the developmental study of children. The developmental significance of this link stems from a widely recognized connection between children's lives and their ever-changing world.

The question of how to achieve studies that are informed by both historical and developmental insights prompted this volume and its research project during the 1980s. We gave this matter a good deal of thought at the time.