The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child

by Paula S. Fass

Overview

How American childhood and parenting have changed from the nation's founding to the present

The End of American Childhood takes a sweeping look at the history of American childhood and parenting, from the nation's founding to the present day. Renowned historian Paula Fass shows how, since the beginning of the American republic, independence, self-definition, and individual success have informed Americans' attitudes toward children. But as parents today hover over every detail of their children's lives, are the qualities that once made American childhood special still desired or possible? Placing the experiences of children and parents against the backdrop of social, political, and cultural shifts, Fass challenges Americans to reconnect with the beliefs that set the American understanding of childhood apart from the rest of the world.

Fass examines how freer relationships between American children and parents transformed the national culture, altered generational relationships among immigrants, helped create a new science of child development, and promoted a revolution in modern schooling. She looks at the childhoods of icons including Margaret Mead and Ulysses S. Grant—who, as an eleven-year-old, was in charge of his father's fields and explored his rural Ohio countryside. Fass also features less well-known children like ten-year-old Rose Cohen, who worked in the drudgery of nineteenth-century factories. Bringing readers into the present, Fass argues that current American conditions and policies have made adolescence socially irrelevant and altered children's road to maturity, while parental oversight threatens children's competence and initiative.

Showing how American parenting has been firmly linked to historical changes, The End of American Childhood considers what implications this might hold for the nation's future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691178202
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	11/07/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	762,079
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Paula S. Fass is professor of the Graduate School and the Margaret Byrne Professor of History Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. The author of Kidnapped and Children of a New World, she recently edited The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World. Fass lives in Berkeley, California.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Young in America 1

1 Childhood and Parenting in the New Republic 13

Sowing the Seeds of Independence, 1800–1860

2 Children Adrift 45

Responding to Crisis, 1850–1890

3 What Mother Needs to Know 86

The New Science of Childhood, 1890–1940

4 A Wider World 127

Adolescence, Immigration, and Schooling, 1920–1960

5 All Our Children 171

Race, Rebellion, and Social Change, 1950–1990

6 What’s the Matter with Kids Today? 215

Epilogue 268

Notes 275

Suggestions for Further Reading 309

Index 319

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Why have we reached ‘the end of American childhood'? What explains the surge in ‘helicopter parenting'? A virtuoso historian, Paula Fass offers convincing answers. With vivid examples and persuasive arguments, she takes us on a memorable tour looking at two centuries of parent-child relations. A pathbreaking interpretation of American childhood, her book will attract all those concerned with contemporary families."—Viviana A. Zelizer, author of Economic Lives

"Childhood is primal and no one has looked at it more deeply or clearly than Paula Fass. In her book The End of American Childhood, our hopes, obsessions, and mistakes are laid bare. The way we have raised our children from Revolutionary times to the present perfectly mirrors our society and Fass is a terrific and surprising guide. She brilliantly shows us how we got to where we are today—starting in childhood. This is nothing less than a modern-day Rosetta stone for understanding America."—Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids

"This richly detailed account of the continuities and variations in Americans' childrearing values and methods puts our contemporary anxieties and challenges in historical perspective."—Stephanie Coontz, author of The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

"This ambitious book sketches major developments in the history of American childhood and parenting from 1800 to the present. Fass shows, with striking insights, that a distinctive American approach to children runs through the entire chronology covered, despite major changes from one period to the next."—Peter Stearns, author of World History in Brief

"The End of American Childhood provides a brisk account of the histories of childhood and childrearing from the Revolution to the present. It unifies these stories with a single thread—the way that Americans raised their children with a sense of independence. With a strong and meaningful point of view, this book brings a historical consciousness to contemporary thought and policy."—James Marten, Marquette University

Editorial Reviews

"The material Fass provides on America in the 19th and early-20th centuries is important, and highly relevant to the really essential issues driving parenting behavior in our day."—-Judith Warner, New York Times Book Review

"The End of American Childhood is a worthwhile and enlightening book, and [Fass] comes to some persuasively tough conclusions."—-Daniel Akst, Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

"Childhood in the U.S. has been distinct in the Western world: the relations between generations were more flexible, provided choices, and encouraged children's independence. Historian Fass uses autobiographies, parents' advice, and child welfare literature to paint a portrait of children who, regardless of class, gender, ethnicity, or race, shouldered family responsibilities from the pioneers on the frontier to immigrant children working in factories a century later. . . . Her overview on past parents' fear for children's health and survival serves as a sobering reminder to ‘helicopter' parents and ‘tiger moms.'"

Choice

Paula S. Fass…is very much at home in the distant past. She knows where and how to find primary source material that can make long-dormant voices come to life on the page. In her new book, The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting From Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child, she puts this knowledge and skill to valuable use in defining a uniquely American form of childhood—characterized by a combination of pluck, grit, autonomy and self-sufficiency—that came into being in the early 19th century. She also shows how that idea of childhood was accompanied by parenting practices that survived, despite challenges, in the century and a half that followed.

The New York Times Book Review - Judith Warner

★ 05/16/2016
Fass (Children of a New World), a UC Berkeley professor emerita of history, provides a wide-ranging and stimulating history of childhood and parenting in the U.S. Fass convincingly argues that in the rural, “new” society of Thomas Jefferson’s America, parents saw themselves as inheritors of a revolutionary tradition and tried to adapt to a raw and tumultuous country by emphasizing individual resourcefulness and independence. She shows how these qualities never really left the American psyche, highlighting how they led to a revolutionary modern school system; high school, for instance, is a “uniquely American institution” that became a second home for adolescents. She illustrates her points with examples from the childhoods of figures both famous (Ulysses S. Grant and Margaret Mead) and obscure (Rose Cohen, a 19th-century child seamstress). She concludes by noting that with the insecurities of the global economy, adolescents put off independence, particularly financial independence, for far longer than in the past two centuries, but that independence is still their eventual goal. Her work provides an invaluable perspective on an important topic. Agent: Jill Marsal, Marsal Lyon Literary. (June)

Publishers Weekly

2016-03-22
A comprehensive investigation of how Americans have raised their children in the past two centuries.In today's global society, many Americans question whether there's still an advantage to raising children in the United States, as opposed to other countries, whether immigrants still find significant advantages here, and whether parents have enough or too much control over their children. Using extensive sociological research, Fass (History, Emerita/Univ. of California; Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalization, 2006, etc.) delves deeply into the evolution of the American childhood from the post-Revolutionary War era to the present day. "Children's lives are always enmeshed in the changing cultural and political landscape of their time," she writes, "and each generation will have a somewhat (and sometimes drastically) different set of social conditions influencing its life." In the 1800s, children were expected to work alongside their parents in traditional roles while enjoying a sense of freedom that would be considered dangerous nowadays. They grew up rapidly, forming independent, reliable characters at an early age. After the Civil War, many children were left fatherless, forcing them to live on the streets, which birthed foundling associations and "orphan trains" that sent homeless children to the ever expanding West. Meanwhile, former slave children sought education of their own, which brought about educational reform. As America settled into the next century, scientists explored health benefits and concerns, and the emphasis shifted toward lowering the staggering numbers of infant and early childhood mortalities. Researchers applauded breast-feeding and stressed the importance of education and play. As American lives stabilized after the world wars, more attention was directed toward child abuse, extended educational opportunities, the issues of race and immigration, and the role of working mothers in the family dynamic. In each scenario, Fass provides ample historical and scientific evidence to support her findings, giving readers a methodical, meticulous accounting of childhood in America over the past 200 years. An accessible academic analysis of the progression of American children's lives since 1800.

Kirkus Reviews