Offspring as Enemy? How Canada's National Magazine Confronted Youth and Youth Culture in the 1960s

The idea of a "generation-gap" is one of the principal features in the mythology of the 1960s. The construct implies that the response of parents to the social and cultural activism of their teenage baby-boomers, those born in the period 1946-1962, was systematically hostile and decidedly unsympathetic. An examination of the contents of the Canadian periodical Maclean's between the years 1959 and 1973, however, reveals a very different reaction towards youth. Attitudes in the magazine regarding youth culture were generally positive and frequently laudatory, thus calling into question the reality of the generation-gap.