Abstract
Reinventing Childhood after World War II, edited by Paula S. Fass and Michael Grossberg, is a compact collection of separately authored chapters about some of the developments in the literature about childhood since 1945. The authors are all well-known scholars in the field and they each offer a brief but cogent discussion of a topic or topics close to their own solidly grounded expertise. The result is a compact and handy volume which can serve a variety of needs. It could be an introduction to the now burgeoning field of childhood studies; it offers numerous important insights into the thinking of childhood professionals, and it serves as an important and focused critique of contemporary American culture.
Each of the seven chapters could stand alone as a significant contribution to the discourse about childhood in the last sixty plus years. Take together, they make a compact but comprehensive whole. One of the editors, Paula S. Fass, leads off with an overview of some of the salient trends of the period such as the rise in the numbers of women working outside the home, doing so, Fass contends, “because their children no longer could” (p. 9). Fass also discusses the increased use of drugs such as Ritalin to treat behavioral disorders in children and the rising divorce rate.
The other editor, Michael Grossberg, traces changes in legal interpretations and practices in the second chapter. In the 1970s, when groups such as American Indians and women followed the lead of the Civil Rights Movement by rejecting their dependent status and asserting their own autonomy, some would have extended the same autonomy to children, but according to Grossberg, child professionals were almost uniformly hostile to any recognition of children's autonomy and self determination even for older adolescents. They sought domination, not simply a new balance between liberation and caretaking, and declared that liberation itself endangered the young. (p. 31)
The struggle between the caretakers and the liberationists in the late twentieth century ended with a clear victory for the caretakers, as the advocates for children’s autonomy found themselves in retreat and under attack.
The other chapters refine the themes established by the editors and explain some of the particular developments in the transformations of American family patterns and the rise of children’s caretakers. For example, Steven Mintz outlines the incredible expansion of marketing to children and youth. At the same time, parents now worried more about their children than the parents of previous generations had. According to Mintz, “Anxiety became a hallmark of middle-class parenting. From birth, parenthood was colored by apprehension, from fears of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and physical and sexual abuse, to more mundane problems such as sleep disorders and hyperactivity” (p. 45).
Stephen Lanssonde describes age compression wherein children learn more about adult matters such as sexuality at much earlier ages than had been the norm in earlier times. Childhood has become shorter, and the important developmental work is thus compressed in a smaller period and may be incomplete as children reach the normal adult age.
Mary Ann Mason traces the convoluted evolution of child custody case law, highlighting a case involving a surrogate mother. The prime reason for changes in custodial practice was the rise of the social sciences and the use of their theories in the context of custody battles. These theories such as the concept of the “psychological parent” fit well with a trend in courts to approach custody more in a mediation mode than in an adversarial one.
Kriste Lindenmeyer describes some of the lags in public policy affecting children since the end of the Second World War. She notes that “despite the fact that U. S. per capita income ranks second in the world, its infant mortality rate is thirty-fourth and the country ranks only forty-second in overall life expectancy” (p. 109).
The book concludes with a chapter by Bengt Sandin, which compares the situation for children in the United States with that of Sweden. Sandin, who is chair of Thematic Studies-Child studies at the University of Linköping, Sweden, finds Sweden much more child-friendly than the United States. In Sweden, the liberationists seem to have prevailed: We can see then , that childhood in the late welfare state of the twenty-first century in Sweden has made the child's competence increasingly visible, matched by the changing role of the state, which now assumes a less normative and regulatory role, relying instead on children's rights defined on the basis of international conventions. (p. 137)
In 1959, The UN General Assembly adopted a Declaration of the Rights of the Child. The United States has never ratified this document even though much of it tracks well with US public policy respecting children, but Sweden has not only ratified it but adopted it as the basis for its own welfare policy regarding children. Probably, the disparity is explained less by the adoption of the UN Convention than it is by the different culture and political systems of the two countries.
The main weakness of this important work is its brevity. Most serious students of childhood and child welfare policy in the Untied States will want more. Fortunately, the authors are themselves prolific scholars, and a serious reader can pursue greater depth and breadth in the extensive bibliographies of these authors. A second and related weakness is that this book is about conversations among adults who work with or for children. The children themselves appear only in court cases and other official references. This may well be a consequence of the defeat of the liberationists at the hands of the caretakers in the United States in the late twentieth century. If American scholars and advocates absorb the lesson offered by Sandin and Sweden, maybe this defect can be remedied in the near future.