Raising the World

Child Welfare in the American Century

Sara Fieldston

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780674368095
• eBook ISBN: 9780674425521
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

After World War II, American organizations launched efforts to improve the lives of foreign children, from war orphans in Europe and Japan to impoverished youth in the developing world. Providing material aid, education, and emotional support, these programs had a deep humanitarian underpinning. But they were also political projects. Sara Fieldston's comprehensive account Raising the World shows that the influence of child welfare agencies around the globe contributed to the United States' expanding hegemony. These organizations filtered American power through the prism of familial love and shaped perceptions of the United States as the benevolent parent in a family of nations.

The American Friends Service Committee, Foster Parents' Plan, and Christian Children's Fund, among others, sent experts abroad to build nursery schools and orphanages and to instruct parents in modern theories of child rearing and personality development. Back home, thousands of others "sponsored" overseas children by sending money and exchanging often-intimate letters. Although driven by sincere impulses and sometimes fostering durable friendships, such efforts doubled as a form of social engineering. Americans believed that child rearing could prevent the rise of future dictators, curb the appeal of communism, and facilitate economic development around the world.

By the 1970s, child welfare agencies had to adjust to a new world in which American power was increasingly suspect. But even as volunteers reconsidered the project of reshaping foreign societies, a perceived universality of children's needs continued to justify intervention by Americans into young lives across the globe.

CHAPTER ONE

Manufacturing the Citizens of the World

THROUGHOUT THE SPRING OF 1944, as Allied troops prepared for the D-Day assault on Normandy, a group of Americans gathered to plot their own attack on Nazism. Inside the walls of Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and educators planned for the reformation of Germany after the war. Much attention had been given to Germany’s military, political, and economic institutions, the scholars noted. But to truly erase Hitler’s legacy required something more—it required a change in German people themselves. Nazism grew out of an aggressiveness deeply rooted in the German character, a personality trait passed down from generation to generation. Eradicating fascism, then, required disrupting the process of cultural transmission. To accomplish this would demand intervention in the rearing of children. The scholars recommended training German parents in new methods of child care. They suggested establishing preschools and extracurricular programs for German youngsters. As military leaders aimed their weapons and tanks at the beaches of France, conference participants set their sights on nurseries, schools, and orphanages in Germany and across the war-ravaged world.¹

The scholars who convened at Columbia University were no strangers to the significance of childhood. Anthropologist Margaret Mead’s studies of child rearing and adolescence in New Guinea and Samoa had made her a household name during the late 1920s and 1930s. Behavioral scientist Lawrence K. Frank was the former director of the child development program at the Rockefeller Foundation and was involved in the founding of Parents’ magazine. Marion E. Kenworthy, a psychiatrist who specialized in the field of children’s mental health, had worked with American voluntary groups to assist European refugee children during the early war years. Pediatrician Frank Spooner Churchill had recently authored a proposal urging the U.S. government to prioritize child guidance clinics as it established reconstruction agencies in postwar Europe. Psychologist Erik Erikson, who would soon publish his groundbreaking book on developmental psychology, Childhood and Society, was also involved in the planning of the Germany after the War conference, though he was unable to attend in person.²

Driving these scholars’ interest in children was the conviction that human difference was rooted in culture rather than blood. These individuals rejected the claims of eugenicists who understood personal characteristics as governed by heredity. An individual’s personality was not predetermined at birth, they argued, but bore the indelible stamp of early childhood experiences. This belief invited, in the words of historian Joanne Meyerowitz, “a biopolitics of child rearing.”³ Anxieties over who gave birth to children were replaced by concerns regarding how and by whom children were reared. It was those who molded the malleable matter of childhood who ultimately determined the nature of adult personality—and, by extension, the shape of nations.

During the Second World War, intellectuals and child-care experts on both sides of the Atlantic developed and popularized new theories regarding the needs of children and the connection between methods of child care, the family, and the larger social order. These theories reshaped best practices for child care in the United States, placing a new emphasis on emotional health and tying children’s well-being to the family, particularly to mothers. They also profoundly influenced the American social workers, psychologists, and educators who would travel abroad in the years directly following the war. American relief workers who journeyed to war-torn Europe and Japan located the roots of both democracy and totalitarianism in the experiences of early childhood. They looked to the family, to social work, and to child-rearing practices as a means of reforming society at large.

But even as child-care experts extolled the family as the key both to youngsters’ healthy development and to the rehabilitation of the postwar world, they also fretted over the harmful influence of parents unschooled in “modern” precepts of child rearing. If parents were responsible for forging strong democratic citizens, they also had the power to create the next generation of fascists. As the primary institution responsible for shaping young minds, the family emerged from the war more loved—and more mistrusted—than ever.

THE EXPERTS’ ADVICE

American understandings of the family’s influence on children changed over time. During the opening decades of the twentieth century, the influential eugenics movement asserted that parents bequeathed a bevy of immutable physical and mental characteristics to their children. To “have really good children,” explained David Starr Jordan, a leading eugenicist and the chancellor of Stanford University in 1914, “the parents must be of good stock themselves. Bad fruit is borne mainly by bad trees, and the inheritance of badness springs from inherent tendencies.” Eugenicists aimed to encourage those of “good stock” to procreate and discourage those likely to bear “bad fruit” from doing so. But not all early twentieth-century thinkers saw children of questionable parentage as helpless prisoners of their heredity. Reformers who set up day nurseries to care for poor and immigrant children did so in the belief that they could instill in these malleable youngsters better habits, values, and personality traits than those learned at home. Children would serve as emissaries carrying new patterns of thought and behavior back to their parents.⁴

During the interwar years, this notion of childhood’s plasticity gained ground on eugenicists’ convictions about the importance of heredity. John Watson, a behavioral psychologist whose advice manuals for parents propelled his rise to prominence in the 1920s, famously claimed that he could take any infant at random and mold him into a doctor, an artist, or a thief, regardless of his background. As Watson understood it, children were blank slates, and parents, particularly mothers, had the ability to determine their personalities. But precisely because they wielded this great power, parents’ interactions with their young ones were to be strictly circumscribed. In order to ensure that children’s nascent characters developed properly, Watson and his fellow behaviorists prescribed rigid schedules of care and feeding. Watson warned that showing children too much affection would spoil them and render them emotionally unprepared to function in the world. Calling excessive mother love dangerous, he instructed mothers to greet children with a handshake rather than a kiss. Watson fantasized about rotating babies among different mothers or nurses so that they did not grow too attached to a single caregiver.⁵

As Watson and other experts promoted an approach to child rearing that paid little heed to children’s psychological well-being, another group of specialists focused primarily on children’s emotional health. For the psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers who constituted the new “child guidance” movement, psychological security was the key to children’s healthy development, and parents were essential to providing this security. In their view, childhood misbehavior stemmed from emotional disturbances, and parents and educators ought to prevent those disturbances. “We can no longer get the satisfaction of blaming the child; we must stop and think what made him misbehave,” asserted educational psychologist Caroline Zachry in 1934. Through clinics established across the country, and through the child-focused, experiential programs of progressive education championed by John Dewey and his colleagues, the ideas promoted by the child guidance movement gained a wide audience by the 1940s and 1950s.⁶

Behaviorists like Watson and proponents of the child guidance movement like Zachry differed in their basic philosophies of child care. But they shared a belief in children’s inherent malleability. This belief reflected a larger intellectual shift within the social sciences. Beginning in the late 1920s, an influential group of scholars associated with the “culture-and-personality” school began to dismantle biological theories. Casting aside eugenics, they described adult personality as the product of cultural conditioning during childhood. Scholars associated with the culture-and-personality school, among them Margaret Mead and Lawrence K. Frank, wove together anthropology, psychiatry, and psychoanalytic theory to argue that cultural-specific child-rearing patterns were responsible for all varieties of human difference.⁷

The implications of this new understanding of human difference were not lost on governments: if personality was malleable, then transforming individuals offered a route to reforming society at large. As the twentieth century progressed, governments sought to marshal the social sciences to further their own political agendas. From war making to social welfare projects, nations projected their transformative ambitions, in the words of Greg Eghigian, Andreas Killen, and Christine Leuenberger, “not only onto society but also into individuals.”⁸ When the United States entered World War II, the government called on psychologists and other social scientists to examine recruits, treat injured servicemen, and conduct research on propaganda and public opinion. U.S. government officials also relied on studies of “national character” conducted by culture-and-personality scholars who scrutinized early childhood experiences in an effort to understand the psychological and cultural underpinnings of adult group behavior. For example, anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer argued that Russians’ alleged rage originated in the practice of swaddling infants and that the supposed compulsiveness of the Japanese was a product of strict routines of toilet training. The United States Children’s Bureau solicited information from anthropologists, including Gorer, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict, regarding European child-rearing practices and the “psychological and cultural factors” to take into consideration when planning programs of postwar relief and reconstruction. Culture-and-personality scholars sometimes took issue with one another’s conclusions. In particular, some scholars dismissed Gorer’s focus on infancy as “diaperology,” insisting that personality formation continued well into childhood and beyond. Others criticized the very notion of “national character” as homogenizing, a critique that would gain momentum during the early 1950s. But the culture-and-personality school’s basic premise—that human differences were not innate but stemmed from cultural conditioning, particularly during the formative years—was widely accepted by midcentury.⁹

As culture-and-personality scholars looked to methods of child rearing to explain individual and national differences, American ideas about how to rear children were themselves changing. By the 1940s and 1950s, the child guidance movement’s emphasis on children’s psychological health had eclipsed the behaviorists’ focus on habit formation. Child welfare professionals now promoted a more “natural” and “child-centered” approach that took as its main goal the satisfaction of children’s emotional needs.¹⁰ This approach was bolstered by a new body of literature on child growth and development stimulated by World War II. City evacuations, parents’ service in the military and war industries, and the persecution of Jews and other ethnic groups fractured European families and deprived great numbers of children of parental care. War nurseries and other group homes served as “living laboratories” for psychologists interested in studying the effects of children’s separation from their parents.

The Hampstead Nurseries in England, under the direction of Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham, were at the epicenter of this research. Austrian-born Freud had studied psychoanalysis with her father, Sigmund Freud; Burlingham, an American, had moved to Vienna in 1925 to study psychoanalysis at the Vienna Institute. Joined by many of their colleagues, Freud and Burlingham left Vienna following the Nazi invasion in 1938 and resettled in England. With financial support from an American voluntary agency, Foster Parents’ Plan for War Children (PLAN), Freud and Burlingham established the Hampstead Nurseries in 1940. The Nurseries comprised three children’s homes, two in London and one in Essex, which provided care to children of all nationalities who had become parentless due to the war, either temporarily or permanently.¹¹

Freud and Burlingham’s observations of their young wards formed the basis of several influential works on children’s personality development and on the effects of maternal deprivation. Infants and young children in the residential nursery, Freud and Burlingham noted, developed at a different rate than that of their peers who were raised in families. Infants in the nursery enjoyed some developmental advantages with regard to weight gain and motor skill development. But intellectually and emotionally, the psychologists argued, motherless infants’ growth was seriously stunted. Young children without mothers had difficulty forming habits such as toilet training, exhibited delays in speech, and—most significantly—had trouble forging lasting emotional bonds. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Freud and Burlingham argued that humans modeled all intimate relationships on the loving relationship first experienced with their mothers. Young children for whom these maternal bonds were broken or nonexistent would grow into adulthood emotionally stunted, unable to form meaningful interpersonal connections. Just as malnutrition during the formative years led to lasting physical ailments, the psychologists maintained, lack of maternal love during the first few years of childhood would result in persistent psychological deformities.¹²

Freud and Burlingham acknowledged that parental separation was often unavoidable and that, particularly during wartime, children’s institutions filled an important need. To combat the doleful effects of maternal deprivation, the psychologists suggested that infants and young children in residential nurseries be assigned to an artificial family of three to five children under the care of a single child-care worker. This individual would serve as a “mother substitute,” providing the emotional stability and personal attachment that babies and young children needed to grow into healthy adults. Freud and Burlingham believed that fathers, in addition to mothers, played a role in their children’s emotional development; but they assumed that mothers would be young children’s primary caretakers, and they described maternal bonds as more crucial to a child’s development than paternal ones.¹³

Psychologists on both sides of the Atlantic echoed and elaborated on Freud and Burlingham’s findings on the deleterious effects of maternal deprivation. In 1948, the World Health Organization commissioned British psychologist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby to write a report on the mental state of Europe’s displaced children. Bowlby’s study, published in 1951 as Maternal Care and Mental Health, drew on meetings he conducted with child-care workers in the United States, Britain, and several countries in continental Europe. Like Freud and Burlingham, Bowlby described maternal love as essential to children’s healthy development. Infants and young children separated from their mothers, he argued, were likely to suffer deep psychological scars from which they might never recover. Bowlby’s influential work put emotional maladjustment on par with physical disease and rendered deprived children not only pitiable but also potentially threatening to society. “Deprived children, whether in their own homes or out of them, are the source of social infection as real and serious as are carriers of diphtheria and typhoid,” Bowlby warned. While some experts criticized Bowlby’s ideas as overstated, his theories received widespread publicity in the United States and helped bolster an already growing focus on children’s psychological well-being and the importance of motherhood.¹⁴

The new emphasis on children’s emotional health was epitomized in Benjamin Spock’s best-selling advice manual The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, published in the United States in 1946. Spock, a pediatrician who was connected to the culture-and-personality school through his friendship with Margaret Mead (he cared for her daughter, Mary Catherine), encouraged mothers to abandon strict schedules o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Prologue: Tales of Love and Global Power
• 1. Manufacturing the Citizens of the World
• 2. Reading Dr. Spock in Postwar Europe and Japan
• 3. Building International Friendship in an Orphan Age
• 4. Raising Little Cold Warriors
• 5. Forging the Free Child’s Armor
• 6. Training the Natives of the Future
• 7. Challenging the Global Parent
• 8. Globalizing a Happy Childhood
• Epilogue: Raising Children, Uplifting the World
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index