Publisher's Synopsis
The National Survey of Health and Development has studied the development of more than 5000 British men and women from their birth in 1946 to their middle adulthood in 1989. The individuals were children during a time of great innovation in education and health care. The study began two years before the National Health Service started and shortly after the 1944 Education Act began to implement changes intended to reduce barriers to educational opportunity. This was also a time of less tangible change - "traditional" relationships between the classes and the sexes, and between professional "experts" and lay people, were being questioned; there were new ideas about the value of education; there were new approaches to health care; and the predominantly skilled manual workforce had to be transformed into a more highly trained, flexible one.;In this book, Michael Wadsworth shows how the study members' circumstances and experiences as children and adolescents during this period were reflected in their adult health and way of life, and contrasts childhood in the early post-war years with that of the members' first-born children as they grew up in the 1970s and 1980s.
