How did the 1960s impact the lives of young people?
The lives of young people changed dramatically during this decade in the sense that they got more and more freedom during those years.
At the beginning of the '60s, the US was still a very straightlaced place. For example, my mother entered college in 1961 and was not allowed to wear pants on the campus of her public university. This was a time when young people's lives were still quite controlled in ways like that. By the end of the 1960s, the idea that young people's lives would be so circumscribed had completely disappeared. This was due in large part to the push by people like the Hippies. It was also seen in the growth of the youth culture in which young people listened to rock and roll music and generally enjoyed much more freedom than they previously had.
During the 1960s, young people in the US gained much more...
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of an ability to live their lives (for good or for ill) much more in the ways that they wanted to, as opposed to living in the ways that society and authority figures thought that they should.
How did the 1960s change people's lives?
There are many ways to answer this question. Generally speaking, the 1960s are seen as an extremely turbulent decade in America where politics and social issues became more visible and more important than ever before. Part of the reason for this is that television was in more American homes than any other time previously, and as television programming grew more varied and sophisticated, television news journalism became more refined. This shift meant that people had access to more information about current events, but it also meant they shared the common experiences of watching the news on a given network.
Among the many social issues that rose to greater prominence during the 1960s were civil rights, women's rights, sexual liberation (partly spurred by the introduction of birth control pills in 1963), and the anti-war protest movement. The US became embroiled in many high-stakes political situations. The Cuban Missile Crisis was seen as a defining moment of the so-called "Cold War" and brought America to the brink of nuclear war in 1962.
The US involvement in Vietnam began to be the subject of vocal and dramatic protest by young people who thought it unfair that the government was drafting young people to fight in a war that very few Americans supported. The murder of prominent political figures like John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, as well as social and spiritual leader Dr. Martin Luther King, were tragic and far-reaching events that underscored how dangerous and controversial it was to engage in efforts to make widespread change.
The culture of the protest movement spurred many artists to create literature and music inspired by the various current events. Musicians like the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and Ritchie Havens wrote songs that captured the energies of the social movements taking place. The growing use of recreational drugs contributed to an atmosphere of rebellion, and the introduction of LSD was associated with the idea of consciousness expansion. Sexuality became a more prevalent topic and sex outside of marriage was seen increasingly as a norm and not a transgression. The common phrase "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" came to be associated with the 1960s, but far from being a shallow or pejorative term, it refers to enormous cultural changes occurring that would have lasting effects on countless lives for many decades.
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