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

Abstract

Are U.S. parents overly controlling their children, micromanaging, helicoptering, and spoiling them? Are parents so focused on getting their kids into the “right” day care, the “best” schools, and the “perfect” university that they are creating a generation unable to succeed on its own? Paula S. Fass's new book takes as its starting point contemporary agonizing over “the end of American childhood.” As the second part of her title makes clear, Fass is interested not just in the history of childhood and the lived experience of children but also in the history parenting. A master historian who has written extensively on these subjects, Fass makes a significant theoretical contribution with this work, drawing the connection between parenting and national identity, between the parent-child relationship and bedrock American cultural principles such as individual success and self-identity. As Fass amply demonstrates, Americans have long maintained a rather unusual approach to parenting. In the early republic, European Americans were already raising their children differently than were Europeans, emphasizing resourcefulness, innovation, and, above all, independence. Fass argues that European American parents eased up on authoritarian control over their children sooner than did their European counterparts as U.S. parents could see a future full of possibilities and opportunity for their families. She also argues that children's labor contributions to the family economy gave them more of a democratic voice, blunting strict subordination to patriarchal rule. Fass pays particular attention to the role of schooling and the expanding definition of childhood through the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries. She shows that by the 1930s, in response to immigration, the United States had created a unique high school experience, effectively extending the umbrella of childhood to cover older teens. Fass carefully traces many other changes to parenting over the course of two centuries, including the development of institutions meant to protect children, the rise of scientific parenting expertise, the effect of national policies, and the development of today's hypervigilance as a reaction to fear about children's safety and life prospects.