Worrying about the state of American children and childhood is not new. It's historiographically interesting to think about when such worries increase, who worries, about which children, why, the sources of the worries, how they spread, and how they change. It's also historiographically important to note, and try to tease out, that worrying about children and worrying about childhood are not necessarily the same—a subject for another essay. Although worrying about the demise of childhood altogether, as Paula Fass does in her magisterial new history, may be new, Fass is not alone.
By the yardstick of books by American academics, we have been in a period of heightened worry about the decline of childhood for almost thirty-five years. In The Disappearance of Childhood (1982), media theorist Neil Postman attributed the vanishing of childhood mainly to the rise of television, which gave children unprotected exposure to adult culture without the need for literacy or school. Other historians and sociologists have echoed some of Postman's concerns. In a related argument, Fass focuses on modern American parents, whose attempts to protect their children from a variety of concerns, including consumerist media that “targets younger and younger children and sexualizes children well before adolescence” (p. 257) and “from predators, from unsafe sex, from failure at school” (p. 266) that has led to the over- “managed child.”
Like American discourse on parenting generally, which has veered from blame to praise, Fass sounds at turns sympathetic and critical, especially of well-off mothers. She notes the raft of new books on “harried, worried, overwrought parenting” (p. 229) and the “obsession with perfection by upper- and middle-class mothers” who fear that the “slightest deviation in oversight will ruin their children's carefully prepared path into the future“(p. 231). Mothers have long been the bearers and targets of Americans's hopes and fears. What's new, Fass argues, is that the “formula or recipe” for American parenting (p. 5) has changed, from raising children to be independent to overprotecting them.
Fass covers a lot of ground and time in six chapters, with an admirable array of diverse primary sources. She relies upon observers of American parenting (such as de Tocqueville), modern sociologists, parenting advice, popular media, and personal memoirs and stories of individual children. She might have warned a bit more about the perils of prescriptive literature, the problem of memory, and selection bias in the voices of children, but her goal seems more to create an accessible narrative about generational relationships than to engage with historiographical issues. She incorporates much evidence on different and “othered” children and parents, but, as she admits, she is after a main, national through line, “a cultural particularity that developed from the specifics of the American context and American history” (p. 4).
In her first chapter, Fass describes how, from 1800 to 1860, the need to create independent American citizens for the new republic helped make the United States a “very strange place in the world” (p. 14), with much less hierarchical, less authoritarian relationships between parents and children than in other countries. She rightly stresses the importance of Protestant Christian values, and includes the mothering advice of Catharine Beecher (incorrectly spelled Catherine), and others, but might have said more about the strong authoritarian strain in evangelical, fundamentalist, and Catholic parenting, in which obedience, not independence, was often the goal.
In chapter 2, “Children Adrift,” covering the years 1850 to 1890, Fass describes organizations and institutions designed to supplement families to protect low-income and immigrant children, a theme that introduces the role of the state in containing and controlling “dangerous” and “endangered” children, to paraphrase the title of sociologist Jennifer Tilton's 2010 ethnography on urban childhoods in Oakland, California. Some historians of childhood, such as Steven Mintz in Huck's Raft (2004) and Viviana Zelizer in Pricing the Priceless Child (1985), have argued that the second half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of the ideal, if not the norm, of a protected middle- and upper-class child, a harbinger of dependence, not independence. Fass argues instead that despite societal and demographic change, “reliance on defining American culture by the independence of its children” was “never entirely displaced” (p. 85).
Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the rise of scientific parenting from 1890 to 1940 and adolescence, immigration, and schools from 1920 to 1960. Here again some contradictory themes appear. While Dr. Spock advised mothers to be less protective, many new scientific experts looked to the “normal” child and home as objects of “measurement and control” (p.126). As teenage peer culture expanded and adolescents pushed for independence, especially sexually, parents and schools attempted to tame them, often unsuccessfully.
Chapter 5, on “race, rebellion, and social change” from 1950 to 1990, focuses on youth protest as a form of independence. Fass describes how black youth were at the front of fights for racial equality, sometimes joined by white youth activists, who also protested the Vietnam War. She states that youth activists expressed their opinions forcefully, not because they had been “permissively raised but because they had been raised in a democratic tradition” (p. 202). In The Crucible of Consent (2012), however, James E. Block, whom Fass cites, argues that American parents and teachers created a perception of voluntary consent in childhood, in part as a means of promoting acceptance of social control, a somewhat different view of the relationship of American parenting and democracy.
In chapter 6, “What's the Matter with Kids Today?,” Fass analyzes modern concerns about how American childhood, parenting, and children have changed. She describes recent books on anxious, out-of-control, overprotective parenting in an age of global economic competition. One of Fass's messages, that a more historical perspective about the fact that parenting has always been hard, would be helpful for everyone. Attempts to prevent exposure to the myriad perceived dangers that have blurred the lines between childhood and adulthood in the last thirty years, Fass writes, has made protection “more important to parents than independence, more important than giving children the freedom to choose their own futures.” In a nuanced argument about how the meaning of childhood itself is now unclear, she concludes, “American childhood as it had evolved over two hundred years of changes had come to an end, in no small part because the end of childhood was not clearly defined” (pp. 266–267).
Although Fass includes voices of second-generation immigrant children in her final chapter, we do not hear what other Millennials might say about how they were raised. Do they feel overprotected and lacking in independence? What do they think about the discourse of “coddling” and “helicoptering”? When I ask students in my History of Childhood course about their childhoods, an admittedly small, unrepresentative sample, most say (there are always important individual differences) that they appreciate the protection they received, though many talk about painful divorces and stress to do well in school, and some were not well-protected. They also say that that they did not get much freedom for unstructured play, especially outside. Most seem to like getting frequent texts (not emails) from their moms. Seniors sound relieved that they can go home after college if they do not have good jobs and need to save money to pay off loans. In fact, student debt comes up so often that maybe we should blame ourselves and institutions of higher education for limiting independence as much as students' parents.
Maybe we should also think about a new kind of virtual, online independence. My children and students range wide and free on the Internet. They visit more sites and friends more often than I ever did in person. If they are playing Pokémon GO, they may even be playing more freely outside than I did, albeit semicontrolled by their apps. Paula Fass's comprehensive, lively, fast-paced, wide-ranging book, based on her years of research as an eminent historian of childhood, challenges us to think about long-standing issues of independence and dependence in American parenting. As historians, let's not allow what's happening to kids today pass us by, or assume that it's all bad. Let's listen to children's and youth's perspectives on agency. Maybe it's not the end of childhood, but childhood 2.0, with more versions, levels, and layers still to come, at click speed.
