Pricing the Priceless Child as a Teaching Treasure

Viviana Zelizer” has become a household name in many of the courses I have taught since 1985. Soon after Pricing the Priceless Child was first published, Contemporary Sociology asked me to write an essay-length review. I read the book with a great deal of pleasure and wrote a positive review;¹ in subsequent years I have routinely assigned Pricing in courses related to the sociology of childhood. This essay shares insights I have gleaned from many years of teaching Zelizer’s fine book.

It is rare, in my experience, for a book to hold its teaching value for well over two decades; perhaps that’s a useful operational definition of a “classic.” Pricing the Priceless Child has held up over time, in part, because it traces a compelling sociological trajectory through the specifics of the varied and changing lives of US children during a key period of historical transition between the 1870s and 1930s. With careful attention to empirical detail, Zelizer maps the institutional as well as ideological reconfiguring of childhoods that took place as boundaries shifted among families, markets, and states. Her attention to both structural and cultural change helps demonstrate the value of focusing not only on children, but also on childhoods, that is, on the institutionally and discursively constructed conditions in which particular children grow up.

Zelizer develops her illuminating historical and sociological account through ingenious case studies of varied domains of changing practice such as reliance on or limiting children’s participation in paid labor, shifts in the types of children most desired for adoption (from work-fit older boys to sentimentalized baby girls), and the altered framing (from “wage” to “allowance”) of monetary payments to children. These vividly detailed cases give concrete specificity to Zelizer’s broader argument, and, I have discovered year after year, they open up rich topics for further exploration.

In my sociology of childhood courses I often ask undergraduates to do their own small-scale empirical projects, framed by and used to reflect on course readings and lectures. Taking off from Zelizer’s discussion of children’s wages and allowances, some students have interviewed elementary school–aged children about their relationships to and feelings about money. They have found that young informants are often closely attuned to the ways in which different families organize their children’s access to and uses of money; comparative information is useful if kids want to press for change in their own parents’ practices. One child reported that she and her siblings got a weekly allowance only if they did specific chores, like cleaning the parakeet cage or mowing the lawn, but in the household across the street, a weekly allowance was understood as an entitlement, unrelated to the chores the children did or didn’t do.

Students may begin to reflect upon connections between generational and historical change when they are asked to interview older people about their daily lives as children growing up in earlier times. One of the most memorable papers I received was based on Nikiko Masumoto’s interview with her grandmother who, at the age of thirteen, was incarcerated with her family in an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. The grandmother recalled helping in the camp office and cafeteria and serving as a nurse’s aide, but these tasks were much easier than picking crops and doing other farm work with her parents and siblings before they were incarcerated. The grandmother recalled the age separation of camp life. She ate with other young people in the cafeteria and got to run around with her girlfriends, who lived “right next door.” By and large, her experiences in the camp were “fun.” In contrast, her older siblings, who were more aware of the larger context of internment, had a much tougher time in the camp.

Other interesting themes have spun out from using Pricing the Priceless Child to provide historical perspective on more recent times. My courses have focused not only on topics related to children, labor, and schooling, but also on the increasing sexualization and commercialization of childhoods. Ideas from Zelizer’s book...