The impact of social change falls unevenly across the age spectrum. For a variety of reasons, the impact of many social changes is greater on the young than on other age groups. The population aged 14 to 24 increased in the United States by 52 percent during the decade of the 1960's. The ratio of the population aged 14 to 24 to that aged 25 to 64 increased by 39 percent during the same decade. The change meant that the most crime-prone age grouping increased enormously. Great pressures were also placed on childrearing institutions, especially schools, pressures that were exacerbated by a burgeoning civil rights movement that focused on schools following the 1954 Supreme Court decision. These and other developments occurred against a background of longer-term trends of increasing proportions of females in the work force and of nuclear family breakdown, as well as increased differentiation of childhood and state assumption of child welfare. In the midst of these social changes, child rights advocates are divided with respect to support for nurturance versus self-determination for children. The most powerful thrust for extension of children's rights may come from the impact on socialization beliefs and practices of state-managed childhood. On the one hand, the conception that individuals are free agents requiring socialization and that socialization is properly a function of the nation-state creates pressures for the extension of civil rights and for the proper alignment of individuals with the state, through socialization and other control mechanisms. On the other hand, the societal (nation-state) stake in children is based not only on individual rights but on responsibility of individuals as citizens; hence, authority over children is not abandoned, only transferred. Approximately 65 references are provided.