My grandfather was born in 1928, so he was too young to serve in the war. However, he said there was an extremely high demand for boys his age, around 14 to 16, to lead programs for younger kids, say 8 or 9. These groups, he said, included the boy scouts, YMCA and the like, and saw an influx of membership because children of soldier fathers and factory worker mothers needed somewhere to be outside of school. At the same time, older leaders were themselves involved in the war effort, so it reportedly fell on people my grandfather's age.
My question:
Was this a widespread, nationwide phenomena? Were there any structural changes in the lives of US children ad I described above? Was there any "combat readiness" aspect to the BSA or YMCA camps at the time? Conversely, were my grandfather's experiences as a teenager independent of the war effort, i.e. many teenagers of the era would have been counselors anyway?
I know less about children on the home front than I would like to, but here it goes!
My specialty is Victory Gardens, so I'll start there. over 22 million Americans had Victory Gardens in 1943, so odds are your grandfather was involved in one; his family had one at home, one of his parents had a company-plot at their workplace, or (perhaps most likely) he was involved in gardening projects at school. These would often involve mentoring programs, as well as vigorous inspections, and involved kids of all ages and, yes, would take place after school often to help replace childcare. HERE is my favorite photograph of school gardens. (I'm so sorry I can't find the proper citation for that right now - it's lurking somewhere in my files!)
Another organization that was hugely popular for children and worked closely with government organizations in the war (USDA, Office of War Information, etc.) was 4-H. (I haven't found any scholarship on YMCA or Boy Scouts yet.) Through 4-H, schools, and community organizations, children rallied to not only garden (and, in rural areas, raise livestock too), but also to aid in scrap metal, rubber, and even cooking fat drives, drives to sell liberty bonds, community watch orgs to look for submarines periscopes on the ocean or enemy airplanes in the sky, write letters to soldiers overseas, and just about anything you can think of.
As far as combat-readiness, I have not found any evidence that children of any age were engaging in drills or military preparation in any systematic or serious way. Often, though, military metaphors were used to convey the seriousness of what they were doing; I have one advertisement in my files where they write, "In the Victory Garden, Dad's the general, mom's the lieutenant, and bro and sis are the foot soldiers to victory!." Similar language pervaded the home front, as if to assuage guilt for not being in actual combat, and also to build solidarity with the soldiers abroad fighting.
Overall my research (mostly archival; there's no comprehensive home-front study of children's lives yet!) suggests that yes, children became involved in many many many more groups than they might have been in previous to the war. However, it is important to note that this is also true of adults on the homefront; fighting World War II was propagated as a 24/7 activity, and you could always be doing more. (Watching a movie? Bring your knitting to the theater and whip out a hat for our boys fighting!) Civic engagement rose exponentially after Pearl Harbor (prior to that, most Americans were anti-interventionist), and slowly faded with fatigue over the course of the war. Children's lives were restructured, but so too were all Americans'.
A Quick Bibliography of Scholarship on the World War II Homefront: (contrary to what you might think, there is shockingly little academic scholarship; World War II lit is mostly journalism of military history!)
Amy Bentley, Eating for Victory : Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998);
John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976)
Advertising and the World War II Home Front (Waltham, Mass.; Hanover [N.H.]: Brandeis University Press ; Published by University Press of New England, 2009);
Sarah Jo Peterson, Planning the Home Front: Building Bombers and Communities at Willow Run, 2013;
Robert G Spinney, World War II in Nashville: Transformation of the Homefront (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998);
Ronald T. Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 2000).
