Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children - Hardcover

Examines twentieth-century child rearing practices, contending that the theories of top authorities reflect popular trends, but fail to ease modern child-rearing anxieties.

ing inquiry into America’s preoccupation with raising children, Ann Hulbert blends biography and critical analysis to probe the personal dramas, the scientific claims, and the social visions of a succession of experts who during the twentieth century aimed to make a science of child rearing. She describes how these pediatricians and psychologists came to be popular advisers, and explores the origins and outcome of their ambitious quest to predict and perfect children’s futures, and to solve the dilemmas of modern mothers and of families in flux.

The story unfolds like a curious―and often contentious―family saga, featuring an odd couple of presiding experts in each generation: one a stern father figure espousing a nurture-counts-most, “parent-centered” emphasis on discipline; the other a “child-centered” proponent of gentler bonding as a child’s nature develops. They include turn-of-the-century pioneers L. Emmett Holt, whose precise in