Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0375401202, Hardcover)

In this probing 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 infant-care regimens promised calm, healthy mothers as well as babies, and his counterpart, G. Stanley Hall, who “invented” adolescence as a special time of freedom and experimentation. Between the wars, the harsh behaviorist John Broadus Watson and the maturationist Arnold Gesell faced off with grander theories about children’s personalities and maternal responsibilities. In the postwar era, Benjamin Spock, a genial Freudian intent on finessing debates between bonders and disciplinarians, soared to prominence—only to be confronted on the antiwar barricades by a fiercer Freudian, Bruno Bettelheim, and then attacked by feminists in the early 1970s.

As the millennium approached, a new host of advisers contended for primacy—from cognitive experts anxious to fine-tune children’s intellectual growth to parenting-specialists-turned-public-advocates from the right and the left issuing manuals and social manifestos to combat what they saw as the erosion of morality and harmony in a family-unfriendly America.

Raising America is a provocative account of how a hundred years of expert advice clearly failed to ease modern child-raising anxieties. It makes clear that the advisers, with their shifting formulas and dogmas, in fact proved to be unnerving. Yet as their stories reveal, they have also been enlightening, holding up an intimate mirror to the rising social and psychological expectations and tensions of an unsettled century.

Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0375701222, Paperback)

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, millions of anxious parents have turned to child-rearing manuals for reassurance. Instead, however, they have often found yet more cause for worry. In this rich social history, Ann Hulbert analyzes one hundred years of shifting trends in advice and discovers an ongoing battle between two main approaches: a “child-centered” focus on warmly encouraging development versus a sterner “parent-centered” emphasis on instilling discipline. She examines how pediatrics, psychology, and neuroscience have fueled the debates but failed to offer definitive answers. And she delves into the highly relevant and often turbulent personal lives of the popular advice-givers, from L. Emmett Holt and Arnold Gesell to Bruno Bettelheim and Benjamin Spock to the prominent (and ever conflicting) experts of today.