Anxious Parents

A History of Modern Childrearing in America

Peter N. Stearns

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780814739990
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a dramatic shift in the role of children in American society and families. No longer necessary for labor, children became economic liabilities and twentieth-century parents exhibited a new level of anxiety concerning the welfare of their children and their own ability to parent effectively. What caused this shift in the ways parenting and childhood were experienced and perceived? Why, at a time of relative ease and prosperity, do parents continue to grapple with uncertainty and with unreasonable expectations of both themselves and their children?

Peter N. Stearns explains this phenomenon by examining the new issues the twentieth century brought to bear on families. Surveying popular media, *#8220;expert” childrearing manuals, and newspapers and journals published throughout the century, Stearns shows how schooling, physical and emotional vulnerability, and the rise in influence of commercialism became primary concerns for parents. The result, Stearns shows, is that contemporary parents have come to believe that they are participating in a culture of neglect and diminishing standards. Anxious Parents: A Modern History of Childrearing in America shows the reasons for this belief through an historic examination of modern parenting.

1

Anxious Parents
A 20th-Century History

SYMPTOMS OF PROBLEMS may shift, but the anxiety remains the same. A rash of new child-rearing manuals began to appear in the United States in the 1920s, followed shortly by Parents Magazine; the publications were designed to provide answers to parental concerns but also to offer standards that might lead parents to feel concerns where none had existed before. Parents Magazine, in fact, became both a stimulus and an outlet for a range of parental worries, from children’s physical health to their performance in school to their personality development. Polls in the late 1930s, exploiting a new capacity to probe public opinion, encouraged parents to rank-order a long list of worries. Post–World War II parents wondered, in cyclical fashion, whether bad marriages or divorces were worse for children. Surveys in the 1970s and 1980s suggested declining parental satisfaction with children, in part because of the troubles involved in raising them. By the 1990s, anxious parents increasingly sought new targets, arguing that schools and teachers should rate their kids highly regardless of performance, lest the child’s or the parents’ self-esteem be damaged as a result of an adverse opinion.

The 20th century, once rated the “century of the child,”¹ became rather a century of anxiety about the child and about parents’ own adequacy. And children did not necessarily benefit from this process of adult debate and self-doubt.

To be sure, a few worries soared for a time, only to recede. Strictures about children’s posture, high on the anxiety scale during the first third of the century, ultimately fizzled, as adults gave up on slouch. The need to identify and correct left- handedness disappeared by the 1950s. But new problems were discovered. Hyperactivity, for example, though discussed by experts in the 1920s, became a widespread concern only in the 1970s. The list of targets did not shrink.

In one sense, the level of anxiety was surprising, for the 20th century ushered in some unprecedented gains. American children were far less likely to die in the 20th century than were their counterparts in centuries past. Key childhood diseases were conquered. Thanks to improvements in adult life expectancy, children were also far less likely to be orphaned. Standards of living and educational access improved for most children, though there were continuing pockets of poverty and periods of concern. Child labor abuses receded under the twin glare of regulation and economic change. Opportunities for entertainment expanded.

Against these gains, obviously, two countercurrents surfaced. First, the very successes achieved in improving children’s lives led to an escalation in what came to be seen as the minimal standard for children’s well-being, which brought its own set of anxieties. Second, successes were not clear-cut: the ubiquity of mass entertainment brought new worries, and even the decline in child labor raised unexpected issues about children’s functions and identities. Levels of anxiety experienced by parents did not correlate with what might have been registered as historic progress in children’s quality of life.

This is a book about the emergence and evolution of key parental worries during the past century. It does not ignore the joys, but it deliberately concentrates on the anxious undercurrents. It focuses on concerns not only about children but also about parental adequacy. It seeks to explain what caused these anxieties and why objective gains did not enhance parents’ self-confidence.

The basic argument is simple: it was during the past century that some of the key uncertainties about modern childhood were clearly deployed. The key question was what children’s role should be, as traditional functions were progressively stripped away. While elements of the question had been posed in the 19th century, particularly for sectors of the American middle class, its prominence is a 20th-century phenomenon. For it was only during the past hundred years that it became fully clear that children could not be expected to contribute significantly to the family economy, that in truth they were primarily economic burdens, and that, as a result, other measurements of function had to be developed. Given the fact that children had literally always worked in the past, usually for the family directly, this fundamental redefinition posed a tremendous challenge, one that has not fully been resolved to this day. The fact that many parents sensed the definition dilemma only vaguely, believing instead that their concerns stemmed from more specific problems such as adolescent growing pains, compounded the difficulty.

A host of other new issues have drawn parental attention. Worries about cars, and the need to drive children to essential destinations, constitute a case in point. An array of new consumer products, ranging from comic books to violence-laden video games, was aimed at children, and it proved difficult to restrict access to these devices despite parental disapproval. New disease entities, like Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and fears of adolescent suicide framed a new set of physical concerns that extended literally from birth to adulthood. Changes in family structure reduced parental confidence, as well, particularly when the rising divorce rate made clear the lower priority society placed on children and created new waves of adult remorse.

For it was in the 20th century that parents grasped, more fully than in the previous decades, when it seemed easier to shelter middle-class children, that the modern world was a dangerous place for children. There was no easy transition from childhood innocence to successful adulthood, even for women—perhaps particularly for women. As a mother of an overfriendly toddler wrote to an advice columnist at the century’s end, “How can I teach my daughter that the world is dirty and evil?”

There were less tangible changes, as well. The fundamental image of children shifted for a number of reasons, including parents’ guilt over their failure to provide traditional levels of care (whether these levels were real or imagined) and the new, intrusive sources of child-rearing expertise. Like Victorian observers, 20th-century commentators saw childhood as a separate experience, not just a prelude to adulthood. But the similarity ended there. Unlike the 19th-century view of children as sturdy innocents who would grow up well unless corrupted by adult example and who were capable of considerable self-correction, 20th-century rhetoric viewed children as more vulnerable. Contemporary children were seen as more fragile, readily overburdened, requiring careful handling or even outright favoritism lest their shaky self-esteem be crushed. Notions of children’s fragility obviously caused new levels of parental anxiety, but they were also a reflection of these anxieties.

Both mothers and fathers were involved in new kinds of self-doubt. For many men, the notion that one satisfied parental obligations by being an adequate breadwinner declined in salience, at least from the Depression onward. Supporting the family remained essential (of course, some men defaulted on this), but, amid growing prosperity and particularly with the increase in the number of women at work, it was no longer a big deal. As early as the 1920s, many men tried to develop new kinds of contacts with their kids. But, while this was an encouraging and potentially rewarding trend, the question was how to do so. Many fathers continued to feel a bit awkward around their children, deferential to mothers’ expertise, in a situation ripe with new opportunities for self-doubt.

Burdens on the mothers’ side were at least as acute. The huge change came in the 1950s and 1960s, when the majority of white mothers went out to work amid crushing anxieties about whether they were abandoning their children. (African Americans had faced this dilemma for decades.) But, even before this, as early as the 1920s, 19th-century assumptions about mothers’ instinctive suitability for their task had been challenged, amid cutting attacks on maternal overprotectiveness and “smother love.” It was harder than before to know whether one was performing correctly as a mother.

Parents’ doubts about their own adequacy were sharpened by a number of new dilemmas. In the chapters that follow, we discuss worries about school, about work, and about leisure. New kinds of concerns emerged in these areas, derived from dramatically novel situations; in all three cases, the concerns were enhanced by a characteristic tension, a set of question marks. Was school too much for kids, or was the main anxiety making sure that kids were ready? If formal work for children was now mostly inappropriate, what about chores at home—was there a family variable in the definition of work? And what was the main problem in the entertainment field—shielding children from the inappropriate or providing fun at all costs? All these dilemmas produced really interesting compromises, but the compromises did not eliminate the extra anxiety involved.

In this book I hope to improve our understanding of the kinds of parental concerns and doubts that have become commonplace in our time, despite some changes in how they are manifested. The key tool is historical perspective; I treat the 20th century as a new period in the generation of worries about children and argue that a better comprehension of the origins of these worries and of prior patterns will illuminate not only the recent past but the present, as well. History will help us understand ourselves.

The result does not provide explicit formulas for behavior. It may encourage some parents to worry a bit less, but others may decide quite reasonably that even though some of their concerns are products of a particular history, they will cling to them all the more. The goal is greater freedom from the assumption that our standard worries are absolutely inevitable or natural so that we can step back from them, think about them through a historical lens—regardless of what we then decide to do, or not do, about changing them. Besides, the highlights of 20th-century parenting are simply interesting and provide a means of exploring why certain paths were chosen during the past three or four parental generations and others rejected.

WHERE THE BOOK FITS

A brief history note: this book is based on research by many different scholars, historians but also sociologists and others. Readings suggestions at the end of each chapter encourage further exploration of the major topics. A number of chapters are also based on original research; I have previously worked on some of the topics in chapter 1, which I now apply to the parenting field, and for this book I undertook additional research, particularly on children’s work and consumerism.

There are few comprehensive reviews of 20th-century parenting practices. There is a terrific book by Viviana Zelizer on the early 20th century; I want to add to its main thesis, but I value it greatly. There are some splendid histories of fathering, but, interestingly, they apply more to the 19th than to the 20th century. Histories of children and, particularly, three really good studies on the history of adolescents provide useful material. Social historians have offered other crucial insights, as they expand our understanding of what the past is; I depend greatly on what they have discovered on various aspects of schooling, on anxieties about new media, on the impact of birth control, and on many other areas. Still, on many specific topics and on the larger perspective, this book breaks new ground. The purpose, to be sure, is not to provide an exhaustive history of all aspects of parenting but rather to explore some intriguing features of the recent past and to use them to shed light on the present.

PRELIMINARIES AND ASSUMPTIONS

Before turning to the main task, I must take up a few other issues. First, the personal. Any historian writing about a topic of this sort inevitably brings some individual baggage. I am trained as a social and cultural historian and have written on a number of topics in American, European, and world history. A study of parenting fits my intellectual interests in aspects of the recent past, in dealing with ordinary people and their beliefs and practices, and in trying to link historical patterns with current concerns. Previous work I’ve done on topics ranging from the history of aging to changes in emotional standards of behavior or self-control obviously sets up aspects of this study. And I’ve also done some previous work specifically on childhood.

But I also was a child, of course, and have been and am both parent and stepparent. I had a deep relationship with my father (and with my mother, also, but she died when I was fairly young—an atypical 20th-century pattern) and with my sister and half sisters. I always wanted to be a parent and have had four children, in two different batches; I also have four stepsons. All of this has undoubtedly shaped my historical perceptions. I have long been interested, for example, in part because of my experience (yes, also exasperation) not only with my own offspring but with myself, in the problem of deciding how much family work children should do and in how our views on this subject have changed and become more complicated. I believe in objective history, but of course we choose historical topics in part because of personal experiences, and undoubtedly our objectivity is colored by these same experiences, particularly around a topic such as parenting. So: this book is not a personal story, and I’ll be describing some parental concerns I’ve never experienced personally. But there is a personal element that I cannot always tease out myself.

(I should add, for the record: despite trials and tribulations on both sides, I’ve largely enjoyed my experience as parent and am immensely proud of what my children and stepchildren have become or are becoming. This is not a sour- grapes history. Nor, I hope, is it the kind of history that aging observers sometimes write, lamenting the deterioration of our youth. This genre has a hoary history of its own, bemoaning the deteriorating virtue and the follies of the young. We have had this approach aplenty in the 20th century; it is one way to express adult concern about children and about Americans’ own performance as parents. Indeed, we live in a period in which blasts at wayward or misled youth are particularly common, as part of the resurgence of social conservatism. This book must comment on approaches of this sort, and about some very real changes in young people’s behavior. But I do not, for the record, think that our recent history is a story of clear decline, and I’ve rather pitied some eminent historian-colleagues who, at relatively late ages—later than mine—have indulged in this kind of lament.)

Issue number 2: race, class, and ethnicity. Generally, middle-class ideas about children and parenting received wide dissemination in the 20th century. Middle-class guides shifted from a 19th-century emphasis on the distinctions between families that were respectable and those that were not to a claim that proper child-rearing standards should be urged or imposed on everyone. The distinction, of course, was not complete: key groups might still be singled out for their apparent neglect of the appropriate standards. But the missionary impulse ran strong. During the 20th century, ever-larger segments of American society, nearly 85 percent of all citizens by the 1950s, claimed to be middle class. Consumerism, which played a considerable role in shaping both childhood and adult concerns, pervaded society, affecting the middle class and also centers of urban poverty. Some of the most interesting anxieties about children and parenting, finally, emerged from broadly middle-class settings. Despite prosperity and generally good health conditions, parents worried loudly and extensively about their own children and/or children in general. This book focuses heavily on this middle-class experience, relying extensively on the literature that the middle class generated and accepted and on the growing breadth of middle-class identity.

Of course, the middle class was not the whole story. Even many people who claimed middle-class membership in fact had varied experiences. And distinctive anxieties were likely to arise in African American communities where the fear of police violence against the young loomed large, or in immigrant settings where the characteristic gaps between second-generation children and their parents added so much to some of the standard generational tensions in American society. Rural-urban divisions, though declining, also entered into the picture regarding, for example, children’s work obligations. This book does not cover every major variant and does not follow trends in all the major subgroups consistently. But the issue of diversity is vital, and it imposes qualifications on some of my main points. I propose generalizations at the expense of some subtle distinctions, and some readers may dispute the resulting balance.

Issue number 3: the 20th century as a period. I try to show that the early decades of the 20th century ushered in several new kinds of concerns about kids, helping to produce parental anxieties that have proved quite durable. But some cautions apply. Some of the anxieties began to take shape in the 19th century. The concept of adolescence, for example, which has focused so much attention on a troubled period of late childhood, was a 19th-century product, emerging around midcentury and then taking on a more formal definition beginning in the 1870s. The concept reflected the fact that late childhood was becoming in some ways more difficult for several reasons, including extended schooling and consequent later work entry for middle-class children and earlier sexual maturity, which conflicted with increasing pressure to restrict sexual activity in order to avoid unwanted children. In our worries about teenagers, we build on a clear 19th-century legacy. On another front: while concerns about schooling increased in the early part of the 20th century, the modern schooling experience had begun to take shape beginning in the 1820s and 1830s; no break with the past occurred as if by magic after 1900. On yet another point: John Demos has plausibly argued that the 19th-century middle class family’s intense emotional relations and expectations set up the context for the 20th-century interest in therapy. Here, shifts in the 20th century merely built on a pre-existing impulse relevant to parenting and marital relationships alike. And, certainly, while 20th-century divorce rates soared—an important aspect of parenting—it was already clear by the 1890s that American family instability was commonplace.

Fundamentally, it was in the late 19th century that urban parents began to realize that the world their children would face as adults would be quite different from their own, that it would be unusual (and perhaps undesirable) to expect them to follow literally in their parents’ footsteps. This situation, unusual in human history, inevitably complicated parental clarity and confidence—and, of course, the realization would deepen and spread in the 20th century. I do not always dwell on the various antecedent trends, but I have no wish to oversimplify the relationship between contemporary parenting and earlier experiences in what was already an increasingly urban and industrial society.

Further, the 20th century itself was not monolithic. While, again, not focusing on some of the oscillations and internal periodizations for their own sake—I do not, for example, have an explicit section on the Depression or on World War II, though both events shaped some particular versions of 20th-century parenting—I provide some indication of political and social changes that took place over time. Certainly, in arguing for some dominant themes throughout the century, I am not trying to ignore the complexity of generalizing about an entire century.

There have been many kinds of changes within the 20th century. Shifts in the political climate have not been negligible. Parents who worried about the undue repression of children in the 1960s were replaced (amusingly, in some ways) in the 1990s by these same children transmogrified into more conservative parents who worried about character and indulgence. The 20th century has seen two periods of high immigration, with its huge impact on the interaction between parents and children, with decades of measurably increasing homogeneity sandwiched in between. The difference between the baby boom period and the preceding and succeeding decades of low birth rate is obvious and important in any examination of parental outlook.

Changes in parent-child contact have been significant, and not always in expected directions. A study in 2001 revealed a 25 percent increase in the amount of time children spent with both mothers and fathers between 1981 and 1997, with parents claiming to be aware of devoting new levels of attention to their offspring and limiting their use of such devices as playpens, which reduced the need for direct interaction. Similarly, children’s TV watching declined markedly during this time in favor of a major increase in sports participation (up by 27 percent), with the emergence of frenzied soccer moms and dads. Overorganized kids seemed to supplant the underorganized, particularly in the middle class, during this two-decade span. Some observers began to talk of “postmodern” parenthood. While the term was more trendy than useful, it’s clear that change and fluctuation are part of the contemporary experience of parenting. In later chapters I explicitly take up modifications in adaptations to school and in attitudes toward work.

Indeed, internal change within the 20th century is built into this account. It took time for the basic themes outlined, as established in chapter 1, to become part of parents’ reactions to the key aspects of their children’s lives. The key problems, in areas such as schooling and consumerism, were present early in the century. But there were important adjustments in parental formulations by the 1940s and 1950s; new ideas about disciplining and even schooling coalesced at that point. The devel...