Endless Childhood in America

“Nowhere are children so free, so bold, such enfants terrible, as in America,” French observer Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne wrote in 1866 after an eight-month sojourn in the United States (p. 232). Is there really something exceptional about childhood in America? Yes, historian Paula S. Fass asserts. In her new book, The End of American Childhood, Fass charts the evolution of parenting in the United States from the country’s founding through the present day. As it turns out, Duvergier de Hauranne was not too far off the mark. Commitments to independence, autonomy, and individuality have long served as the hallmarks of U.S. childrearing, Fass argues, even as these values have been increasingly challenged by the changing realities of childhood through the years.

Fass is a leading scholar of American childhood and one of the founders of the robust and growing field of childhood history. While the narrative arc of her book will be familiar to readers with a knowledge of that field, her clear synthesis and engaging examples will make this book a useful primer and an ideal text for use in the classroom. The book’s accessible prose and extended commentary on childrearing today may earn it a place alongside popular books on modern parenting (a genre on which Fass casts a critical eye—but more on that later).

The End of American Childhood opens in the decades after the American Revolution. Profound social and familial changes followed in the wake of that political upheaval, as Americans came to terms with what it meant to live in a democracy. Challenging the king dealt a significant blow to the authority of fathers in America, Fass contends, resulting in a more egalitarian family structure in the United States than in Europe. Fass acknowledges that women continued to be constrained by patriarchal laws and that the democratization of family life took place largely outside of the South, where patriarchy and slavery were inextricably intertwined. Nonetheless, she provides compelling evidence of children’s independence during the years of the early republic. Readers meet Anna Howard Shaw (who grew up to be a suffrage leader), who helped build her family’s home on the frontier, and Caroline Stickney Creevey (who became a nature writer), who as a girl roamed freely through the woods. Children’s early autonomy was a product both of newly forged American values and of the particularities of life in a country perched on the edge of a vast wilderness.

Just as Americans developed their own unique brand of parenting, the Civil War and the years that followed brought about a “crisis” in American childhood (p. 45). The offspring of newly freed slaves, urban migrants, and immigrants from overseas formed a large cohort with uncertain future prospects. And so, U.S. reformers went about setting up institutions—foundling asylums, child protection agencies—charged with caring for children when their parents were not up to the task. These institutions helped popularize a new sentimental ideology that positioned youngsters at the emotional heart of the family. They also served to threaten the independence that had come to define childhood during the country’s first century of existence.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the authority to shape children’s lives had passed from reformers to childrearing experts, as popular interest shifted from “problem” children to “normal” ones. Armed with scientific knowledge, a cadre of authors sought to instruct mothers in the proper care and nurturing of children. From Arnold Gesell, who introduced parents to developmental milestones, to John Watson, the behaviorist best known for cringing at mothers who kissed their kids, these experts spoke to the first generation of mothers for whom infant survival could be taken for granted. Liberated from fears over their children’s potential early deaths, parents (in particular, mothers) could now focus on their young ones’ socialization and emotional growth. Fass notes the irony...