What was life like for children/teenagers during the Great Depression?

Erica: What was life like for children/teenagers during the Great Depression?
I’ve been searching for information about children and teenagers during the Great Depression for a few days and I haven’t really been able to come up with a lot of information. Most of the sites only have a few lines about children/teenagers. Can anyone recommend a website with depth or give me some information they know? Thanks!

Answers and Views:

Answer by +[L]+
imagine life as we know it, except kids in the corner doing it with your mother

Answer by Gosling
Go rent the Walton’s.. or read the books by Earl Hammer Jr. He wrote a lot about the depression era when he was a teen.

Answer by April
don’t know of a site but my boss was a child during the end of the depression. he remembers an instance when he was just sitting outside and watched a family dig through trash cans and eat whatever they could find. he says he was too young too understand what was going on but it truly scared him. he is 84 years old this year

Answer by Wawa
People who lived through it tell us that teenagers had after-school jobs that were necessary to help feed their family. In many places part-time jobs were more available than full-time jobs, so family members took all the part-time work they could to pay the rent (few people owned their house) and for groceries. Teens only got a chance to relax on Saturday nights, when they went to locally organized dances or parties. Teenagers routinely cared for younger siblings while parents were working, preparing food on wood- or coal-fired stoves, doing laundry with washboards or the very basic washing machines available to the wealthy.
There isn’t much about teenagers during the Depression because the concept of teenage years as a stage of development wasn’t common until the 1940’s and then there was disagreement: some famous sources at the time said adolescence didn’t exist in other countries and only existed here because adults allowed teenagers to act silly.
Medical knowledge that adolescents have physical changes going on internally came later, in the 1950s and after.

Answer by aircops
Try this:

Answer by animalpoo
I dont know wether this will help but………

With most causes of depression or sadness it is often caused by low serotonin levels in the brain.Serotonin is produced at day time when their is a lot of sunlight and it isnt produced at night time because their is no sunlight.The great depression may have a link due to smog and children being forced to work in dark factories unable to be in the sunlight.

Answer by Colin
Sure thing! My grandparents all grew up during the depression (wow, I hope my grandchildren won’t be saying that about me…) Their stories are all really interesting. All of them were the children of Irish immigrants, although their stories are pretty different.

My grandfather (mom’s dad) had a particularly life that I couldn’t have even imagined. His mother died when he was five and his father when he was 13, both of pneumonia because they couldn’t afford health care. He ended up getting taken away from his stepmother by social services after she was neglecting him and his brothers. He was lucky – this had recently been created by FDR. After that, he lived with a few sets of relatives, who treated him horribly. They even sent him to work for the CCC (civilian concentration corps, look up more info about that if the Depression interests you, as it appears to) but the family collected the money, not him. Eventually he joined the army and was able to have a normal life – got married, bought a nice house, had seven kids. His story always inspires me when I think of the American dream!

I hope that’s enough info. I know the stories of my other grandparents, but that would take forever to type!