Parents in the post-World War II decades found themselves faced with a new and daunting task. Faced with the threat of the rising power of the Soviet Union and its mission to export communism around the globe, mothers and fathers were charged with the responsibility of raising children who embodied the perfect blend of character traits needed to protect America and to withstand both the ideology and military might of the Soviet Union. American children needed to be independent and able to think for themselves and make their own decisions. However, they also had to be able to cooperate with others and respect their opinions. While they should tolerate those who were different, they also needed to accept and internalize the white, middle-class values that formed the basis of American society in the 1950s and 1960s. Children raised in the post-war world also had to be self-disciplined and law abiding. They needed to value freedom, love their country and be healthy, strong and courageous enough to defend it. Because the cultivation of such desirable qualities and the ability to reproduce them in their future children was dependent on their being willing and able to marry early and establish families, they also needed to be heterosexual and to adhere to prescribed gender roles. Complicating matters for American parents was the fact that older styles of child rearing, the methods that their parents had used to raise them in the 1920s and 1930s, had fallen into disfavour among paediatricians, psychoanalysts and the general public.