As a social historian, I have helped to direct scholarly attention to the history of family life and helped to create the field of history of children. I'm the editor of a pioneering three-volume encyclopedia on the history of children and the author of six books and editor of three others based on extensive research about children’s experiences in the United States and the Western world. I've also been widely interviewed on the subject. The End of American Childhood brings this research experience and broad expertise in the field to a subject of urgent interest to today’s parents who want to understand how their own views about children and their child-rearing perspectives are grounded historically.
The End of American Childhood introduces readers to changes in parenting over the past 250 years. From the beginning of national life, American parents were more lenient with children than their European counterparts and children’s views were included in family councils. Changes in the following 150 years—immigration, schooling, concerns about child neglect, and medical child-rearing guidance—affected parenting patterns and turned many Americans toward greater supervision. After World War II, Dr. Spock dominated child-rearing advice and promoted the vision of a child-centered family during the baby boom. Recently, childrearing trends reflect the growing insecurity of families (women working outside the home, child kidnapping fears, economic and global challenges, conflicting childrearing advice) as parents have become more concerned to control their children’s lives through specific oversight and guidance.
Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care (first published in 1946 and then frequently updated and reissued after) is the most important childcare and advice manual of the twentieth century.
Beginning after World War II during the baby boom, tens of millions of mothers turned to Spock for advice about the physical and psychological care of their children. As childrearing advice, Spock’s calm insights into matters like feeding, responding to crying, and identifying the signs of disease remain invaluable to parents struggling to understand their daily challenges.
And Spock’s level-headed confidence in parents can help to tame the bewildering torrent of contemporary conflicting views on how best to raise children.
Sociologist Viviana Zelizer began the research quest to understand modern American childhood and policies toward children by proposing that how we understand the value of children changed radically in the late nineteenth century.
By redefining children as emotional assets rather than as economic investments—as objects of love and caretaking, rather than contributors to the household and public economy—American parenting was revolutionized.
This fundamental transformation offers the basis for understanding policy changes, a new commitment to schooling, and other efforts on behalf of children that took root at the turn of the twentieth century.
In this landmark book, sociologist Viviana Zelizer traces the emergence of the modern child, at once economically "useless" and emotionally "priceless," from the late 1800s to the 1930s. Having established laws removing many children from the marketplace, turn-of-the-century America was discovering new, sentimental criteria to determine a child's monetary worth. The heightened emotional status of children resulted, for example, in the legal justification of children's life insurance policies and in large damages awarded by courts to their parents in the event of death. A vivid account of changing attitudes toward children, this book dramatically illustrates the limits of economic views…
Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood is a comprehensive and important history of American children and their varied experiences.
By synthesizing a large literature in engaging prose, Mintz introduces readers to children’s lives across four centuries of the American past, starting in the seventeenth century and reaching into the present. Mintz strives to encompass different racial, class, and gender experiences.
This is the best book to begin exploring the new field of children’s studies.
Like Huck's raft, the experience of American childhood has been both adventurous and terrifying. For more than three centuries, adults have agonized over raising children while children have followed their own paths to development and expression. Now, Steven Mintz gives us the first comprehensive history of American childhood encompassing both the child's and the adult's tumultuous early years of life.
Underscoring diversity through time and across regions, Mintz traces the transformation of children from the sinful creatures perceived by Puritans to the productive workers of nineteenth-century farms and factories, from the cosseted cherubs of the Victorian era to the confident…
Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America probes what I consider to be the basic dilemma of modern American parenting – how the love for children and concern for their welfare has led to growing anxiety among parents eager to do it right.
In imaginative research into different dimensions of culture, Stearns shows that middle-class parents became increasingly self-conscious and self-questioning about meeting the needs of their children starting in the early twentieth century. The book probes the emotional consequences of modern parenting’s commitment to encouraging child expression and individual happiness.
Stearns’s exploration demonstrates one of the consequences of the revolution—from viewing children as having utility to having only emotional value—first defined by Zelizer. It suggests how even the best-intended changes can have unexpected consequences.
An examination into the history of modern parenting
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a dramatic shift in the role of children in American society and families. No longer necessary for labor, children became economic liabilities and twentieth-century parents exhibited a new level of anxiety concerning the welfare of their children and their own ability to parent effectively. What caused this shift in the ways parenting and childhood were experienced and perceived? Why, at a time of relative ease and prosperity, do parents continue to grapple with uncertainty and with unreasonable expectations of both themselves and their children?
Peter N.…
How we treat children has a political dimension and is related to policies toward children.
A Right to Childhood discusses the first and only time that the United States created a federal agency to investigate and help direct child life. Lindenmeyer traces the origins of the Children’s Bureau to the fierce efforts of reform-minded women, and considers the agency’s attempts to improve the welfare of all children, including the children of the poor and foreign.
Starting with concerns about very high rates of infant mortality in the United States, the bureau moved on to study and inform mothers about children’s health, nutrition, and development, and issued a widely- distributed and influential guide to child rearing to mothers across the country.
For me, the experience of the Children’s Bureau provides an important lesson about how policies can be created and their political vulnerabilities.
Warring factions in the United States like to use children as weapons for their political agendas as Americans try to determine the role--if any--of the federal government in the lives of children. But what is the history of child welfare policy in the United States? What can we learn from the efforts to found the U.S. Children's bureau in 1903 and its eventual dismemberment in 1946? This is the first history of the Children's Bureau and the first in-depth examination of federal child welfare policy from the perspective of that agency. Its goal was to promote "a right to childhood,"…
When Lara was four years old, her father moved from Rochester, New York, to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of over 4,000 miles. She spent her childhood chasing after him, flying a quarter of the way around the world to tug at the hem of his jacket.
Now that he is in his eighties, she contemplates her obligation to an absentee father. The Truth About Unringing Phones is an exploration of responsibility and culpability told in experimental and fragmented essays.
When Lara was four years old, her father moved from Rochester, New York, to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of over 4,000 miles. She spent her childhood chasing after him, flying a quarter of the way around the world to tug at the hem of his jacket. Now that he is in his eighties, she contemplates her obligation to an absentee father.
The Truth About Unringing Phones: Essays on Yearning is an exploration of responsibility and culpability told in experimental and fragmented essays.
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