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During the first decade of the twentieth century, American cities continued to grow at an unprecedented rate. Many immigrants from Europe and Asia, as well as rural Americans, arrived in urban centers looking for better education and work opportunities. Unfortunately, they often found themselves and their children embroiled in social problems bred in filthy, overcrowded slums, where crime, gangs, truancy, and juvenile delinquency were rampant. Contemporary critics and social reformers placed much of the onus for a wide range of urban problems directly on the disorganization of the slum communities. They also blamed slumbased gangs and juvenile delinquency on the loss of parental control. Children who were arrested were sent to reform schools or incarcerated in adult prisons; neglected or dependent children were sent to orphanages.1 To assist parents who worked, reformers and social workers often established playgrounds and recreational programs with supervised activities . The Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Girl Guides, and Boy Pioneers organizations were started to teach nature lore, health craft, handicrafts, and citizenship, as well as to keep children entertained. When Irma’s children were born, middle-class parents had many resources to provide their children with activities. There were dancing classes, piano lessons, summer camps, plays, concerts, and, for Jewish children , Hebrew and Sabbath or Sunday schools. Middle-class parents kept their children busy, and, most often, their mothers were not employed outside of the home so could supervise them relatively closely to make certain they did not get into trouble. Still, even for the middle-class parent, there were no books on child rearing. Much of the practical information about babies, their care and feeding, was passed from woman to woman. However, because of increased mobility, urban-fostered anonymity, and other factors, there was Children and Learning, 1910–1912 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 a general shift among the more educated middle-class women to asking doctors’ advice and attending lectures on child development. Sometime during 1908, Irma heard a lecture about children’s literature that had a profound impact on her subsequent behavior and child-rearing philosophy. She revisited that 1908 lecture twice in her journals. On Monday , January 26, 1931, she wrote: “I always thought ‘the personality of the mother’ was a great thing in child training. Professor McClintock of the University of Chicago had said that. . . . A happy adjusted, adjustable mother would still be better for [children] than a sad one.” Then, on Sunday, May 9, 1948, Mother’s Day, she commented: The most significant remark that ever was made to me was at a club meeting where Professor McClintock of the University of Chicago had delivered a lecture at the Isaiah Woman’s Club on Fairy Tales for Children. During the question period I told him that I do not like the wicked step-mother, the fierce man-eating beasts and the malignant witches that filled my childhood with terror. He said that children are not unduly frightened by these things, that in Alice in the Looking Glass when the Queen commands “Off with his head!” No child is frightened. I did not agree. Alice in Wonderland is a whimsical fantasia which young persons enjoy and do not take seriously, but Grimm’s Fairy Tales while they have in them such gems as “The Ugly Duckling,” which was one of my childhood favorites, are full of cruel and terrifying stories. “Hansel and Gretel” may be a classic, but I never could see the enjoyment, in opera, on the stage or in a book of wandering children being forced into an oven and asked to stick out their fingers so that the malignant witch might know if they are properly roasting. These are German stories and no doubt the Nazis got some of their brilliant ideas from them, particularly in regard to the ovens. Professor McClintock finally admitted that an imaginative child might be harmed but that most children will read or hear such tales one minute and forget them the next. Perhaps they will forget them the next minute but at night when the lights are out and the house is still, they are afraid. We argued and argued as did the little bird and the duck in that delightful tale of Prokofiev which cannot possibly frighten an imaginative child however much it will feel sorry for the duck, . . . and finally Professor McClintock said (Finally, I think as much to silence me as anything else), “In the raising of children the one factor of greatest importance is c h i l d...

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