Although parents, teachers and other authority figures constantly stressed the need for order and obedience to ensure the stability of the family, the community and the nation, not all young Americans were willing to abide by the norms society had set for them. Many responded to societal calls for order by disobeying parents, breaking the law, drinking and engaging in risky sexual behaviour. While most juvenile delinquents of the era were male, female delinquents also attracted attention, and the anti-social behaviour of girls seemed in many ways to be more threatening than that of boys.

Ironically, considering the subject was one which roused such interest and evoked such strong emotional responses from the American public, some scholars, such as historian James Gilbert, have questioned whether juvenile delinquency actually was more common in the post-war period than it had been before World War II. Despite the findings of the 1954 Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency that juvenile crime had increased 45 per cent after World War II, which seemed to confirm the US Children's Bureau report of an increase in youthful misbehaviour, it is unclear whether American teens in the late 1940s and 1950s were actually committing more crimes or, if they were, what the exact nature of those crimes was. As many historians have noted, new worries about adolescents in the Cold War period may have encouraged adults to be more aware of what teenagers did, to actively look for evidence of adolescent offenses and to report those transgressions that occurred.