In keeping with the strong re-assertion of women's traditional roles which occurred in the postwar period, the children's services which received most attention and which expanded most rapidly were kindergartens. The various kindergarten unions and the AAPSCD returned with relief to providing and supporting educational programs, mainly for three- and four-year-old children; at every opportunity they distanced their project from ‘child minding’. Kindergartens, as we have seen, assumed a model of family life in which roles and responsibilities were sharply divided along gender lines: father performed the role of breadwinner, mother that of nurturer and homemaker. As the decades wore on and kindergartens were increasingly regarded as the first rung of the educational ladder, they began to assume some of the features of the school system; closing during school holidays, for example. At the same time, the term ‘pre-school’ became popular with parents, presumably because of its clear educational connotation and the fact that it was not associated with ‘charity’. Pre-schools were transformed in a number of ways during the 1950s and 1960s.