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Since the beginning of the twentieth century, millions of anxious parents have turned to child-rearing manuals for reassurance. Instead, however, they have often found yet more cause for worry. In this rich social history, Ann Hulbert analyzes one hundred years of shifting trends in advice and discovers an ongoing battle between two main approaches: a “child-centered” focus on warmly encouraging development versus a sterner “parent-centered” emphasis on instilling discipline. She examines how pediatrics, psychology, and neuroscience have fueled the debates but failed to offer definitive answers. And she delves into the highly relevant and often turbulent personal lives of the popular advice-givers, from L. Emmett Holt and Arnold Gesell to Bruno Bettelheim and Benjamin Spock to the prominent (and ever conflicting) experts of today.
- Sales Rank: #1398310 in Books
- Published on: 2004-04-13
- Released on: 2004-04-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.03" h x .93" w x 5.17" l, .91 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 464 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Rather than a social history of how Americans have raised their children, Hulbert (The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford) offers an intellectual history of how children and parents have been studied in modern America. Here is the story of how Drs. Hall and Holt begat Drs. Gesell and Watson, who begat Dr. Spock and even Dr. Seuss, and how they in turn spawned an entire mini-industry of parenting experts. In spite of changes in terms or variations in thematic concerns, each generation of "experts" has been consistently bipolar, Hulbert finds: the "hard," parent-centered theorists fond of authority and discipline versus the "soft," child-centered theorists preaching love, bonding and liberty. With a flair for wordplay (paraphrasing Gesell's advice to parents to "walk-and speak-ever so softly, and carry a big chart") and a taste for irony (almost all the experts suffered from "mother's boy syndrome"), Hulbert documents the upbringings of the experts themselves, the fluctuations in their advice and the details of their downfalls. While few of these experts were as scientific as they claimed, they probably have managed to further parents' understanding of child development somewhat, admits Hulbert. The irony here-or perhaps it's a saving grace-is that parents, while eager for advice, rarely seem to have used it. This provocative and informative study is a model of lay scholarship. 15 photos.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Why a century of advice has failed.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* This sweeping book presents parents with a panoramic view of child-rearing advice and philosophy--and the American obsession with getting it just right--from the turn of the twentieth century to the turn of the millennium. Hulbert offers biographical sketches of the major figures in the field and the influences of their particular generations, with child-rearing advice often splitting into a pattern of strict parent-centered versus soft child-centered debates. She explores how child-care experts--from early pioneers Luther Emmett Holt and G. Stanley Hall to Benjamin Spock, T. Berry Brazelton, and Penelope Leach--were influenced by the changing political and social forces of their times, notably the rise of feminism and the more recent conservative emphasis on family values. The book is divided into four sections correlating to different time periods, and each begins with the latest expert advice on that era's understanding of essential issues and new concepts of parenthood, with growing emphasis on scientific approaches to child development and rising anxieties about striking the right balance between discipline and emotional bonding. Parents will appreciate the historical and biographical perspective of this fascinating book. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
An Ambitious History of Parenting Experts and Expertise
By Bookreporter
Breast or bottle? Co-sleeping or crib sleeping? Cry-it-out or rock to sleep? To spank or not to spank? New parents, eager to do what's best for their children, face endless decisions about the "right way" to raise their children. A quick glance through the parenting shelves at the local bookstore reveals that there is no lack of books weighing in on just about every current controversy, from pretty much every conceivable point of view. In just over a century, the study and popularization of child development has burgeoned from a handful of specialists to a plethora of experts, each with a particular ax to grind. How this happened is the focus of RAISING AMERICA, Ann Hulbert's ambitious history of twentieth-century parenting experts and expertise.
Hulbert structures her history around five key parenting and family conferences, from 1899's National Congress of Mothers to 1997's Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning, pausing in each case to reflect on the state of parenting philosophies and advice at the time. To further illustrate the evolution of expert advice on children, she profiles two key experts in each generation, each of whom falls into a distinct "camp." One exemplifies "child-centered" or "soft" parenting, a proponent of letting "nature take its course in childhood" and an advocate of parent-child bonding. The other, "parent-centered" expert instead advises strict discipline, believing in the power of parental nurture to shape child behavior for good or ill.
The first generation of parenting experts, Hulbert contends, came to prominence when early twentieth-century mothers, who viewed themselves as raising their children in a new and sometimes terrifying modern world, no longer trusted the time-honored "experts" of previous generations --- their own mothers and grandmothers. Instead, these modern mothers, eager to equip their children for twentieth-century success, looked to two male experts --- and parenting experts are overwhelmingly male --- for advice. G. Stanley Hall, the "soft" expert, was a psychologist who viewed childhood, especially adolescence, as a fragile, almost spiritual time --- a "new birth." His counterpart, L. Emmett Holt, was a pediatrician who advocated strict schedules and developed complicated feeding regimens for infants.
Hall and Holt's successors, too, provided polarizing advice to parents. From the strict behaviorist Watson, who famously conditioned a young child to fear not only rats but all other cute furry animals, to Gesell, whose timetables of child development were the precursors of the milestones that today's parents obsess over, to Spock, whose parenting advice defined the baby boomer generation but was later derided by the right as being too permissive and by the left as being too restrictive for women, it's no wonder that parents most often just ignored the parenting advice altogether, no matter how pervasive its message. As she profiles these experts, Hulbert includes not only excerpts from their popular manuals but also anecdotes from their personal biographies.
Since many of the experts were long on opinion but short on scientific research, they often based their theories on the childhood they knew best --- their own. Equally fascinating are these men's own experiences as parents. Too often, their advice failed to translate from the page to the nursery, and their wives and children suffered accordingly.
Ultimately, Hulbert's story is as much about the parents (mostly mothers) who digested the experts' advice as it is about the experts themselves. She concludes that, in the face of so much contradictory information, parents can't, and shouldn't, attempt to follow experts' advice to the letter. Instead, she writes, "no fine-tuned scheme for shaping futures lies in the experts' manuals, much less in their own homes." Experience, not expertise, is usually a parent's best teacher, and the readers of RAISING AMERICA, whether their own parenthood is fresh or seasoned, will be reassured by that message.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Tracing 100 years of parenting tips
By A Customer
REVIEWED BY SUZANNE FIELDS ...
When I was an infant, my mother swaddled me tightly in a baby blanket with hands and feet tucked inside so that I would feel warm and secure and sleep like a dream. When the pediatrician saw me so wrapped, without being able to move, he gently unfolded the blankets and told my mother to let her baby stretch and kick. As soon as the doctor was gone, my mother wrapped me tightly again.
I was the object of two polarized approaches to child care - the "hard," more disciplined, confident mother-centered approach that my mother had learned from her mother and the "soft," more open and flexible child-centered "psychological" approach that alternated with it for the past century. My mother trusted her instincts. The pediatrician trusted the scientific experts of the moment.
In a splendid book, "Raising America: Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice About Children," Ann Hulbert traces 100 years of the "hard" and "soft," yin and yang, Locke vs. Rousseau, strict vs. permissive, split-personality and split-philosophical approaches to child care which influenced everything from feeding schedules to toilet training, reactions to crying and playing, approaches to affection and discipline. It shouldn't surprise anyone who has raised a child or is raising one, however, that in spite of millions of words, common sense is still the best teacher.
What ultimately works depends on the baby's temperament and the parent's endurance, and most common sense, emerges during a parent's on-the-job training. Many experts rely on common sense, too, though they are loathe to admit it because no one would buy their books if they did. Overstatement gets most of the attention, but no matter what parents read, they usually find books with ideas that confirm what they already think. Many mothers may buy the book, but few will do it by the book.
Miss Hulbert opens each of the sections of this social history with major conferences on child rearing methods and research, which highlight shifting social, scientific, psychological and political concerns. The scientific research on any side of an argument is usually slight and rarely conclusive.
She writes engagingly about the personalities behind the theories, casting long shadows on the inconsistencies, contradictions and hypocrisies in both the work and the personal lives of many of the so-called experts. By far the most eccentric and unlikable is the behaviorist John Broadus Watson, who is famous for bringing Pavlovian techniques to Little Albert, a 9-month-old baby. Dr. Watson, identified here as a "misbehaviorist," wanted to show how he could condition Albert's emotional reactions to furry animals. In a lab setting he introduces a white rat to Albert at the same time that he creates a loud clanging sound for the baby. He repeats this exercise for several days.
The baby, as who wouldn't, becomes upset at the rat even when the doctor stops the clanging noise, and Little Albert later transfers his aversion to the rat to a bunny rabbit and a dog. Although Dr. Watson said his sadistic little experiment proved a child could be conditioned - in this case to fear furry animals - it's much easier to conclude that the baby - and his parents - should have had an aversion to Dr. Watson and other such child-raising experts.
Dr. Watson sounds crazy from today's perspective, but he was a popular child-rearing authority in the 1920s, even though he told parents they were incompetent and often committed "psychological murder." He is not the only extremist in Miss Hulbert's book, but she finds lots of benign advisers, too. A continuous theme of "Raising America" is that nearly every expert reflects trendy ideas packaged to capture an audience and that the ideas are received or dismissed depending on the reader's predisposition to "hard" or "soft" schools of thought.
We meet Dr. Spock as pediatrician and celebrity demonstrator against the Vietnam War, credited with the spock-marked baby boomer generation. Bruno Bethlehem, his nemesis (who defended the war), wrote a provocative rationale for children's taking pleasure in fairy tales in his book "The Uses of Enchantment," and vastly overstated his achievements with autistic children. More recently Dr. T. Berry Brazelton and Dr. Stanley Greenberg suggest a child-centered focus.
Dr. James Dobson and Dr. John Rosemond in this analysis are "parent-centered," even though the two men have little in common. Dr. Dobson's popular book is called "Dare to Discipline." Dr. Rosemond counsels parents to pay more attention to their marriage than to the kids.
Dr. Arnold Gesell and psychologist Erik Erikson bring developmental data to the debate. Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and contemporary neuroscientists compete in the arguments over nature vs. nurture; traditionalists, modernists, moralists, feminists and fundamentalists drive specific theories.
Political and economic issues shape debates over the pros and cons of day care, working mothers, the proper balance between individual responsibility and government obligation. Steven R. Covey looks at the family as a corporate team and brings his tension-management business techniques inside the home.
"Raising America" should come as a relief for most parents - there's something for everybody. But the parents nearly always trump the experts for knowing what they're doing. Conclusion: If offered either a child care manual by Dr. Spock or "Cat in the Hat" by Dr. Seuss, pick up Dr. Seuss and read it to the kids. Then remember what Mr. Gesell's daughter-in-law said about life with a baby: "Frankly, science is as nothing to me when compared to a few minutes more sleep."
56 of 60 people found the following review helpful.
Centered on the experts, not the advise or children
By Suzanne Amara
Perhaps my very mixed feelings about this book came from unmet expectations. I thought it would be a book about the history of the actual advise given American parents---how advise about such issues as toilet training, sleep and eating have changed over the years, and how this affected parents. However, the book was actually much more about the experts themselves---THEIR childhoods, education, marital problems, academic careers, etc. This might be interesting to some, but it wasn't to me for the most part. The book had a feel of an insider sort of expose---written for those in the academic world. Children were mentioned very little, except if they happened to be the children of the experts themselves. There was much delving into the psychological history of each expert, but I found that at times I had a very vague idea what the experts actually advised! For example, Hall, an early expert, had his life opened for scrutiny, but I would be hard pressed to explain what his child care views were. The writing was scholary and confident, but in no way personal---the author's children or her own views are not mentioned. So I guess I would just advice that you know what you want to read about before buying this book---It might be just what you are looking for, but it might be far from what you are looking for.
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