Early 20th Century · 1930s
Radio Broadcasting
Youth Corruption and Family Distraction
In the early 1930s, American parents — and the pundits who make a living naming their worries — sounded alarms about the new mass medium of radio and its influence on children. By then, commercial broadcasting was less than a decade old, but receivers had already spread into roughly half of American homes, and the programmes children adored most were serials: half-hour adventure stories, often about crime or the supernatural, dropped into the living room at the same time every weeknight.
The educator Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg, who ran the Child Study Association of America, warned in 1931 that unlike earlier amusements, "the radio… cannot be locked out" — it invaded the home and enthralled kids in ways parents struggled to control. Critics claimed radio serials and jazz music were "overstimulating, frightening and emotionally overwhelming" for young minds. A group of concerned mothers in Scarsdale, New York — a wealthy suburb that took itself seriously — lobbied broadcasters to curb indecent or violent content aimed at children. These "Scarsdale Moms" succeeded in putting real pressure on the industry: the National Association of Broadcasters (the trade body representing commercial stations) adopted a code promising not to glorify criminals or disrespect for authority in programmes for youth. Amid fears that radio was distracting children from reading, homework and family interaction, some towns even organised evening "radio boycotts" — declaring the set switched off on particular nights so that dinner-table conversation might return.
The complaints will sound familiar to anyone who has raised a child in the presence of a screen. What each new medium takes from childhood, it also gives — access, imagination, connection — in forms the previous generation never had. The Scarsdale Moms were not wrong that something was changing. They were, however, trying to hold back a change that their own children would soon think of as simply the way the world had always sounded.
The educator Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg, who ran the Child Study Association of America, warned in 1931 that unlike earlier amusements, "the radio… cannot be locked out" — it invaded the home and enthralled kids in ways parents struggled to control. Critics claimed radio serials and jazz music were "overstimulating, frightening and emotionally overwhelming" for young minds. A group of concerned mothers in Scarsdale, New York — a wealthy suburb that took itself seriously — lobbied broadcasters to curb indecent or violent content aimed at children. These "Scarsdale Moms" succeeded in putting real pressure on the industry: the National Association of Broadcasters (the trade body representing commercial stations) adopted a code promising not to glorify criminals or disrespect for authority in programmes for youth. Amid fears that radio was distracting children from reading, homework and family interaction, some towns even organised evening "radio boycotts" — declaring the set switched off on particular nights so that dinner-table conversation might return.
The complaints will sound familiar to anyone who has raised a child in the presence of a screen. What each new medium takes from childhood, it also gives — access, imagination, connection — in forms the previous generation never had. The Scarsdale Moms were not wrong that something was changing. They were, however, trying to hold back a change that their own children would soon think of as simply the way the world had always sounded.