Your point about the breakdown of the extended family as families moved out to the suburbs is excellent. After all, what was the point of Dr Spock ? You don't ask a book to tell you how to raise your kids. You ask your parents. You only turn to a book if your parents aren't nearby. And with the replacement of the extended family with the nuclear family clustered around the TV the role of the mother as primary caregiver is diminished.
The new tract houses were designed in a way to isolate the house from pedestrian traffic with large lawns. No porches where people could sit and greet passersby. Not like southern towns with porches and rocking chairs or tenements with people on the front stoop. It was intentionally difficult to recreate tight communities.
I can't help but think of the cynicism of the dating ritual of the time. Where the girl coyly doled out flesh on the basis of how much the boy spent on her (first base, second base, etc). The "bad girl" was ostracized because it was not in the interest of the "nice girls" that sex be cheap.
It's not in the best interests of *anybody* that "sex be cheap" - the illegitimacy and AIDs explosions attest to that. "Bad girls" are still ostracized in many communities because people realize that casual sex outside of marriage creates social chaos.
Another common misperception of the 1950s is that casual sex (especially adultery) didn't occur. Mary McCarthy wrote a devastating short story called "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt" (a stab at the popular book "Man in the Gray Flannel Suit") which lambasts casual adulterous sex. The Billy Wilder film "The Apartment" does the same for casual office sex in that era.
Herbert Gans's book "Levittown" talks a lot about what new suburbanites did to relieve their loneliness & isolation. They created all sorts of clubs - book clubs, sports clubs, cocktail parties - but none of it, from my reading, seemed to have been much of a substitute for Bubbe and Zahde around the corner to help out with the grandkids.
Ironic, isn't it, that "empty nesters" and gays spend fortunes on rehabbed and gentrified townhomes in the very neighborhoods that fifty years ago held large, vibrant family-oriented communities?
Excellent point. Not only is the role of mother as primary caregiver diminished, but also all the *other* roles of women - "maiden aunt," grandmother, big sister, etc.
When grandmother's advice isn't welcome, that is going to diminish grandma's importance in *everybody's* eyes - including the eyes of her husband. So then you get the depressing spectacle of grandma getting facelifts, lipo jobs, a retirement home in FL, becoming just another kind of social parasite - like her displaced-homemaker daughter.
Amazing what VA loans & the Eisenhower expressways wrought. Talk about the law of unintended consequences.