Adult Supervision Required: Private Freedom and Public Constraints for Parents and Children By Markella B. Rutherford Rutgers University Press. 2011. 208 pages. $45.95 cloth

Abstract

Just a generation or two ago, it was not only acceptable but also encouraged for children to roam their neighborhoods from dawn until dusk, negotiate their social worlds without constant adult intervention and contribute to the running of their households in indispensable ways. Today, an eight-year-old child wandering through the streets alone, planning the family meals and grocery shopping and freely talking to strangers invites shock, concern, or possibly a call to the Department of Social Services. This profound transformation in the social construction of childhood lies at the heart of Markella B. Rutherford's Adult Supervision Required: Private Freedoms and Public Constraints for Parents and Children (2011). Drawing on an analysis of parenting advice in readily accessible commercial magazines over time, Rutherford astutely documents the increasing privatization of children and childhood and what this privatization portends for parenting, changing definitions of the public/private sphere, freedom, autonomy and democracy. While other sociologists have examined advice columns to study changing definitions of good mothering or intimate relationships, Rutherford takes an innovative approach, investigating the kinds of assumptions about the public/private divide that the parenting literature makes explicit. She traces the increasing equation of parental supervision within the home with good parenting, demonstrating that as children's autonomy outside the home has diminished, their freedoms within it—in terms of what they wear, when they eat and sleep and how they talk to their parents—have grown exponentially. Central to this shift, she convincingly argues, is the decline in informal community networks and the increasing intervention of the state in parent's lives. Without a publicly shared sense of responsibility for raising children, parents are now on their own to figure out how to raise a child equipped for the demands of 21st century life. Consequently, while parents have more freedom to define parenting on their own terms, they are also increasingly (and anxiously) concerned with raising “my kid” in the private sphere rather than “our kids” in the public one.