Why the History of Childhood Matters

Steven Mintz

The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Volume 5, Number 1,

Winter 2012, pp. 15-28 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/hcy.2012.0012

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/470102

Access provided by University of Winnipeg Library (20 Oct 2018 08:18 GMT)
 Presidential Address

JHCY 5.1 final text.indd 15 1/18/2012 3:26:55 PM

 “French refugee child painting.” New York, New York Children’s Colony, a school for
refugee children. Photographer Marjorie Collins, October 1942. Library of Congress
Prints and Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USW3-009955-E.

JHCY 5.1 final text.indd 16 1/18/2012 3:26:55 PM

 STEVEN MINTZ

WHY THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD MAT TERS

he history of childhood is often treated as a marginal, excessively senti-

mental, and under-theorized subject. It is frequently regarded as a subset of
family history or as a minor aspect of cultural and intellectual history, focusing
on adult ideas about children and artistic, cinematic, and literary representa-
tions of childhood. Yet, the history of childhood is anything but a trivial topic.
Childhood, I shall argue, is the true missing link: connecting the personal and
the public, the psychological and the sociological, the domestic and the state.
As a historian of the United States, this essay will draw on evidence from
the US experience to underscore the significance of the history of childhood. Yet
while the details would surely differ, I would like to suggest that this US-centric
account of the ways that the history of childhood matters for a broad range of
political and social issues has a broader purview. Because the implications of
the history of childhood are highly context-specific, I hope that this essay will
encourage readers to consider the relevance of the history of childhood for the
specific places and times that they study.
Not only are children inextricably engaged in the central events in the his-
tory of the United States—from colonization and revolution to industrialization,
urbanization, immigration, and war—but the history of childhood is bound up
with key cultural, economic, historical, psychological, and sociological themes.
An understanding of the history of childhood is essential, first of all, because
the subject lies at the heart of many key historical themes, such as the growth
of the state’s police and administrative powers, the rise of modern bureaucratic
institutions, the development of the welfare state, the triumph of the therapeu-
tic, and the emergence of modern criminal jurisprudence.1 Secondly, the history
of childhood encourages us to rethink what we mean when we speak of agency,
identity formation, generational consciousness, and subcultures and their rela-
tionship with mainstream culture.2 Equally important, the history of childhood
defamiliarizes the present and helps us understand the distinctiveness of con-
temporary society’s value system and social arrangements.3

Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (v5.1) © 2012 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

JHCY 5.1 final text.indd 17 1/18/2012 3:26:55 PM

 18 WHY THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD MATTERS

Let us begin by looking at the relationship between the history of childhood

and broad political and sociological themes. First, state formation. Many of the
hottest contemporary domestic controversies in the United States, such as wel-
fare and health care reform, school testing, charter schools, teenage sexuality,
and Internet filtering, focus on children. Yet rarely do commentators realize that
this preoccupation with children is not new. Throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries the growth of the state’s police and administrative powers
in the United States was tied to changing definitions of childhood. Conflicts sur-
roundings schooling, poverty, delinquency, factory labor, and criminal justice
inevitably centered on children.
The establishment of nonsectarian public schools was justified largely on
the grounds that tax-funded schools were necessary to instill the values of
citizenship and promote social mobility.4 In the late nineteenth century, the
concept of child protection provided the rationale for an expansion of the
state authority to intervene in the family.5 At the turn of the twentieth century,
the newly established juvenile justice system was instrumental in pioneering
such concepts as probation, parole, indeterminate sentencing, and compulsory
medical and psychiatric treatment.6 During the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, many
seminal social welfare innovations originally arose as efforts to assist children.
By 1919, thirty-nine states provided mothers’ pensions to “deserving” single
mothers with dependent children. Although the stipends were meager and the
laws contained “suitable home” provisions that strictly regulated recipients’
behavior, the pensions represented a fundamental shift in philosophy, from
charitable benevolence to welfare as an entitlement.7 Grants-in-aid to states
were a product of the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, which provided federal
funding of information and instruction on nutrition and hygiene, prenatal and
child health clinics, and visiting nurses for pregnant women and new mothers.8
During the mid-1960s, direct government funding for health care originated not
only in Medicare, but also in Medicaid, which was originally envisioned as a
way to improve the health of impoverished children.
The history of child welfare illustrates many of the distinctive features of
the American state. Distaste for centralized governmental authority encour-
aged the development of a mixed public-private approach to child welfare, in
which private and religious agencies exercised a great deal of responsibility for
assisting children. A commitment to federalism produced a highly decentral-
ized approach to child welfare, with broad local, state, and regional variations,
which only gave way to uniform national child welfare laws and policies after
1960. At the same time, a commitment to the principle that child welfare is
primarily a familial responsibility discouraged adequate public funding of

JHCY 5.1 final text.indd 18 1/18/2012 3:26:55 PM

 Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 19

child welfare programs. Fearful that aid to children would benefit undeserving
adults and encourage irresponsible behavior, public policies strove to insure
that parents would support their children with minimal public assistance.9
Let us turn, next, to the emergence of consumer economy. Modern child-
hood and a modern consumer economy arose hand in hand.10 During the early
twentieth century, middle-class parents and educators, fearing the allure of the
streets, penny arcades, pool halls, and movie theaters, sought to sequester chil-
dren and youth in the home, in schools, and in adult-directed organizations and
activities.11 Middle-class parents, in growing numbers, embraced store-bought
toys as an outlet for children’s self-expression and a pathway to healthy child
development.12
Children’s toys were among the first modern consumer products.
Manufactured toys intended for solitary play did not, for the most part, exist
before the late nineteenth century, in part because earlier children rarely played
alone. But as birthrates fell and families grew smaller, manufactured toys pro-
vided a way for children to entertain themselves. Over time, toys marketed
to parents to socialize children were supplanted by toys marketed directly to
children, designed to appeal to children’s fantasies.13
Then, too, childhood plays a crucial role in the reproduction of the class
order. In the United States, children’s class background and upbringing have
played a crucial role in shaping their class status as adults. In recent years,
however, middle-class parents’ efforts to transmit their status position to their
children have grown increasingly deliberate and self-conscious.14
Over the course of American history, the sources of diversity in children’s
lives have shifted radically. During the early seventeenth century, demographic,
economic, ideological, and religious factors combined to make geography as
well as race the most significant markers of childhood diversity. By the mid-
nineteenth century, a highly uneven process of economic development made
urban and rural divides, gender divides, and class divides more salient sources
of diversity. In our own time, a key source of diversity is aspirational. Parents
have very different expectations for their children, and these differences have
a strong bearing on parenting strategies, schooling decisions, and the activities
that children undertake. At the same time, income and wealth have produced
distinct family arrangements that differentiate the poor, the working class, and
the middle class, with middle-class arrangements far more stable.15
There have long been sharp differences in childrearing strategies, including
the use of strict scheduling, monitoring, and corporal punishment, along class
lines. In recent years, however, these differences have widened as the permis-
sive mode championed by Dr. Benjamin Spock lost favor. As economic growth

JHCY 5.1 final text.indd 19 1/18/2012 3:26:55 PM

 20 WHY THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD MATTERS

slowed beginning in the early 1970s, time-pressed and increasingly affluent,

well-educated parents became ever more anxious about their children’s safety,
well-being, and future prospects. Instead of expecting their children to grow
up naturally and almost automatically, aspirational parents have placed a
heightened emphasis on attachment and the systematic, concerted, and self-
conscious cultivation of certain competencies in children. These parents increas-
ingly emphasized early cultivation of children’s cognitive and verbal skills and
substituted structured, adult supervised activities for unstructured play. These
parents were also more likely to intervene on their children’s behalf in school
and other settings. The effect was to encourage assertiveness and a sense of
entitlement and agency in their offspring.16
In addition, the history of childhood discloses the growth of age conscious-
ness and age segregation as key elements in the process of modernization
and bureaucratic rationalization. Among the pivotal developments of the past
two centuries are an increase in awareness of life stages and developmental
norms and segregation by age.17 Contemporary Americans find it startling that
between the age of eleven, when his father died, and eighteen, Sam Clemens,
the future Mark Twain, worked as a printer’s apprentice in Keokuk, Iowa; New
York; St. Louis; and Washington, DC. Or that by the time that he was twenty,
Herman Melville had worked in his uncle’s bank, as a clerk in a hat store, as a
teacher, a farm laborer, and a cabin boy on a whaling ship. Today’s life course is
far more rigidly structured and predictable than it was even a century ago, and
the young are far less likely to have contact with adults who are not teachers or
relatives or family friends.18
During the mid-nineteenth century, the establishment of Sunday Schools
and common schools with age-graded classrooms marked the start of a process
of age classification. At first restricted to the ages of seven to thirteen, age strati-
fication intensified in the early twentieth century with the expansion of kinder-
gartens and high schools. The expansion of schooling to ever larger segments
of the youthful population and to a broader age range meant that age became
a key category organizing the life course. Instead of understanding children’s
capacities and maturation in terms of their physical size, strength, or coordina-
tion, a new emphasis was placed on age norms.19
The late-nineteenth-century Child Study movement, spearheaded by the
pioneering psychologist G. Stanley Hall, identified a series of distinct stages
of child development, culminating with the “discovery” of adolescence as a
turbulent period of storm and stress linked to puberty. The notion of childhood
and adolescence as distinct developmental categories contributed to the growth
of pediatrics as a medical specialty.20 Equally important was the developmental

JHCY 5.1 final text.indd 20 1/18/2012 3:26:55 PM

 Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 21

paradigm’s role in the “psychologizing” of childhood and adolescence. The

Child Study movement not only marked a first step toward the emergence of
the field of developmental psychology and child psychiatry, but pointed toward
the ascendance of psycho-dynamic and therapeutic approaches to troubled and
troublesome young people, whose acts of delinquency, acting out, or rebellious-
ness were increasingly understood in psychological terms and whose disorders
(including temper tantrums, bedwetting, or acts of shoplifting) were to be
treated by child guidance clinics and child psychologists.21
Following World War II, extended schooling and tightened legal restrictions
on driving, drinking, and smoking reinforced age segregation. In recent years,
in contrast, age appears to be losing its salience as a basic organizing category
as children embrace adolescent and even adult behavior and attitudes at ever
younger ages, and as adults, in increasing numbers, mimic the styles and fash-
ions of the young. This former phenomenon, known as “age compression,” has
allowed marketers to target ever younger consumers, using all the wiles previ-
ously reserved for adults.22
Let us now shift to a second broad topic: children and culture. I will focus
on two aspects of this topic: childhood and the construction of class, ethnic,
gender, generational, and sexual identities, and children’s peer cultures. First,
childhood and identity construction.
Childhood plays a crucial role in the intergenerational transmission and
development of collective identities. Racial identity provides a particularly
vivid instance of this process. A century ago, African American children in the
South experienced repeated indignities and rituals of humiliations designed to
teach them to accept a subordinate status. When a child named James Robinson
boarded a bus in Knoxville early in the twentieth century, he was told, “You
damn little darkey, didn’t anybody learn you to stay in your place? You get the
hell back there and wait till the white people get on the bus.” Years later, the
memory of this incident remained fixed in his memory and contributed to his
sense of self: “What hurt me most of all was that grown-up Negro men had not
dared to speak in behalf of a helpless child.”23
An essential lesson that Benjamin Mays, the African American educator
and civil rights activist, learned as a child was that “in this perilous world, if
a black boy wanted to live a halfway normal life and die a natural death he
had to learn early the art of how to get along with white folks.” Young African
Americans were repeatedly told to bite their tongues and repress their feelings
of anger.24 Yet if parents emphasized the importance of self-restraint and self-
control, mothers and fathers also showed children how to maintain a sense of
self-respect and self-worth. Pauline Fitzgerald’s father told her never to call a

JHCY 5.1 final text.indd 21 1/18/2012 3:26:55 PM

 22 WHY THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD MATTERS

white person “marse” because she should not suggest that any white man was
her master. If an African American childhood was harsher than whites ever sus-
pected, it also left black children with a sense of pride, family and community
loyalty, and resistance to injustice.25
Next, let’s turn to children’s peer cultures. In recent years, the history of
childhood has undergone a paradigm shift. While many studies still focus on
the ways that childhood is defined and represented and on how children are
treated, scholarship has increasingly shifted attention to children themselves:
their voices, experience, and agency.26 If historians are serious about treating
children as active agents, scholars need to recognize that children, like other
social groups, create their own peer cultures, with distinctive slang, rituals,
styles, tastes, and values. Researchers also need to appreciate that it is within
these peer cultures that children, collectively, observe, adapt, interpret, and
reinvent the culture around them. It is within children’s cultures that new sen-
sibilities evolve.27
Children’s cultures involve the expressive and meaning-making activities
that are an integral part of children’s everyday lives. These include children’s
imaginative world, such as their folklore and humor; children’s social relation-
ships, including friendships and peer interactions; children’s play, sports, and
computer and videogames; and children’s consumption of commercial popular
culture, such as children’s books, television shows, and movies.28
Children’s cultures are neither monolithic nor static. To be sure, there are
striking continuities in children’s rhymes, jokes, songs, and play forms across
Western cultures over a vast sweep of time. This is not accidental. These peer
cultures meet certain common needs: to affiliate and develop shared identities,
to cope with the anxieties of life, and to assert autonomy and express their
growing maturity and competence. Children’s culture has also served as an
outlet for kids’ aggressive impulses and for working out children’s fears, as well
as a way to express their exuberance and vitality. And finally, children’s culture
has repeatedly involved conflict with adults and their efforts to regulate and
direct children’s activities.29
Still, there have been dramatic changes in children’s cultures over time.
Sometimes, children’s culture has been adaptive—promoting the adoption of
adult values and behavior patterns. At other times, it has represented an alter-
native culture or one that is resistant or rebellious.30 Today’s children’s culture
is at once adaptive and adversarial. Take the example of videogames. Often
condemned as addictive, violent, sexist, and socially isolating, these games can
increase eye-hand coordination and visual acuity and hone a variety of skills
considered important in the twenty-first century, including strategic thinking,

JHCY 5.1 final text.indd 22 1/18/2012 3:26:55 PM

 Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 23

problem solving, multitasking, role playing, and parallel processing. Yet there
can also be no doubt that these games also serve other functions: their virtual
worlds can keep game players preoccupied and out of parents’ hair for hours
on end; give young people membership in a realm largely unknown to their
parents; and like hip hop music, provide a cathartic outlet from the constraints
of middle-class childhood and a vicarious connection to a more intense reality.31
Another major theme that I wish to explore is how the history of childhood
makes the present exotic and underscores its abnormality. We study history
for many reasons. One is to rebut myths, such as the myth that families in the
past were far more stable than those today, or that childhood in the past was
much more carefree than it has since become. Another reason to study the past
is because it defamiliarizes the present. Today, we take it for granted that child-
hood is life’s formative stage, that secure attachment with a mother figure is
essential for healthy psychological development, and that sensory deprivation
in childhood is severely harmful. In fact, most Europeans three or more centu-
ries ago would have strongly disagreed with each of these ideas. History helps
us understand how distinctive contemporary middle-class culture is. US society
is extreme in the way that it individuates and color codes infants’ gender. It is
also distinctive in its age consciousness and its tendency to divide childhood
into distinct stages and give each a precise label. And it is unusual in the way
that it segregates children and keeps them financially dependent.32
Perhaps the most important reason to study history is because it carries les-
sons that we ignore at our peril. One such lesson is that childhood is a construct.
The meanings assigned to childhood and the actual experience of childhood
have changed dramatically over time and will no doubt continue to change.33
Another lesson is that the definition of childhood has always been contested.
Today, two conceptions of childhood compete. One is the notion of a protected
childhood: the idea that children need to be insulated from adult realities. The
other notion is of a prepared childhood: that far from being sheltered from real-
ity, children need to be prepared from a very early age for the kinds of threats
they will face.34 A third lesson is that historical trade invariably involves trade-
offs. All liberations come at a price and all gains are accompanied by losses.
Contemporary childhood underscores the trade-offs that accompany historical
progress in a particularly pronounced fashion.
Today’s middle-class children are at once freer and less free than their pre-
decessors. They are more knowledgeable about adult realities; they have greater
independent purchasing power and become sexually active at an earlier age.
Their legal rights, too, are greater, as the courts increasingly regard them as
rights-bearing and autonomous individuals. Girls and children of color have far

JHCY 5.1 final text.indd 23 1/18/2012 3:26:55 PM

 24 WHY THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD MATTERS

more options than their earlier counterparts. Yet children remain segregated in
age-graded institutions, middle-class children’s geography has grown increas-
ingly constrained, their legal rights remain circumscribed, and the young
remain financially—and emotionally—dependent upon their parents well into
their twenties. 35
Let me end with a series of questions that many people ask—and that
require a knowledge of history to answer. The first question is whether today’s
children are better off than those in the past. Despite high rates of divorce,
single parenthood, and out-of wedlock births, by most measures children are
doing better than ever. Adolescents are less likely than their parents to smoke,
take drugs, or become pregnant. Juvenile crime rates have fallen, school
achievement has improved, and college attendance has climbed substantially.36
The explanation is straightforward. Today’s parents are better educated
than their predecessors. Fathers are more nurturing. Mothers, in general, are
happier and more fulfilled. In addition, lower birthrates mean that parents can
devote more resources to the children that they have.
Yet in several important respects, the young are surely worse off. They have
less access to free spaces outside the home. They have fewer opportunities for
free play and fewer ways to demonstrate their growing maturity and compe-
tence. Even in the area of children’s health, where the gains are most obvious,
more children now suffer from chronic illnesses, congenital health problems,
and physical and psychological disabilities than in the past.37
A second question is whether Americans like children. Superficially, the
United States is exceptionally child-centered. No other Western society has a
greater range of institutions, products, or services devoted to children. No soci-
ety spends as much on children’s education, health care, childcare, or toys—or
on juvenile justice and children’s protective services.
Yet while parents treasure their own children, as a society, the United States
is much more ambivalent. No other advanced society allows as many children
to grow up in poverty. No other Western society makes fewer accommodations
for children while parents work. Despite talk about children’s rights, children
have little say in custody decisions and frequently face longer punishments for
crimes than adults. Their parents are much more likely than in other contempo-
rary Western societies to inflict physical punishment. At the same time, hyper-
aggressive marketers prey on children with the same aggressiveness previously
reserved for adults.
Contemporary society is acutely attuned to the physical and sexual abuse
of children. But it is less sensitive to other forms of abuse, which the literary
critic Daniel Kline has identified. There is the violence of expectations in which

JHCY 5.1 final text.indd 24 1/18/2012 3:26:55 PM

 Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 25

children are pushed beyond their social, physical, and academic capabilities,
largely as an expression of their parents’ needs. Then there is the violence of
labeling that diagnoses normal childish behavior as pathological. Further, there
is the violence of representation, the eroticization of pre-adolescent girls and the
exploitation of children and adolescents by advertisers, sensationalistic journal-
ists, seemingly well-meaning advocacy groups, and opportunistic politicians.38
Finally, there is the violence of poverty.39 Today, about a quarter of US children
reach their early twenties seriously off track. They have failed to graduate from
high school, they have been imprisoned or placed on probation, they suffer
from a serious disability, or they have a child of their own.
The final question that I shall address is whether childhood is disappearing.
Since the early colonial era, many have believed that the younger generation is
going to hell in a handbasket: that the rising generation is more disrespectful,
rude, ill-mannered, and impertinent than its predecessors. Today, many adults
believe that children are growing up too fast too soon. According to this declen-
sionist model, the young are stripped of their playfulness, innocence, and sense
of trust at too early an age.
A particular definition of childhood is indeed disappearing. This is the
notion of childhood as a protected, prolonged stage of innocence and depen-
dence, the idea that childhood is the mirror-image of adulthood. That children
require nurture contributed to many social advances, but it is also an idea that
has outlived its time. Many of today’s young people find the social roles that
they have been assigned—as full-time students and consumers—profoundly
unsatisfying. Many feel marginalized and juvenilized.
Children not only need protection; they also need opportunities to dem-
onstrate their growing maturity and competence and to make meaningful
contributions to society. I would like to close by suggesting an alternative to
the sequestered, excessively structured and pressured realities of contempo-
rary childhood. This would be a society where even early adolescents would
undergo an experience somewhat similar to apprenticeship—such as an intern-
ship or a service learning opportunity involving contact with people who are
not their age. This might be a society where sixteen year olds could vote, as
they can in Austria, Brazil, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Childhood, as this society has
structured it, needs to be abolished.

NOTES
1. On childhood and the growth of the state, see Kriste Lindenmeyer and Bengt Sandin,
“National Citizenship and Early Policies Shaping ‘The Century of the Child’ in Sweden and
the United States,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (Winter 2008):
50–62. For an example of a non-US study that links the history of childhood to broad

JHCY 5.1 final text.indd 25 1/18/2012 3:26:55 PM

 26 WHY THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD MATTERS

historical and sociological transformations, see Nara Milanich, “Whither Family History?
A Road Map from Latin America,” American Historical Review 112, no. 2 (April 2007):
439–58.
2. For childhood, agency, identity formation, generational consciousness, and children’s cul-
tures, see Steven Mintz, “The Changing Face of Children’s Culture,” in Paula S. Fass and
Michael Grossberg, ReInventing Childhood in the Post World War II World (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 38–50.
3. On the ways that the history of childhood defamiliarizes the past, see James A. Schultz,
Knowledge of Childhood in the German Middle Ages, 1100–1350 (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1995).
4. Steven Mintz, Moralists & Modernizers: America’s Pre–Civil War Reformers (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
5. Stephen Robertson, Crimes Against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York
City, 1880–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
6. On the innovations spawned by the juvenile justice system, see Michael Willrich, City of
Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2003).
7. Michael Grossberg, “Child Welfare in the United States, 1820–1935,” in A Century of the
Juvenile Court, eds. Bernadine Dohrn, Margaret Rosenheim, David Tannehaus, and Frank
Zimring (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 33–34.
8. Kimberly S. Johnson, “From Healthy Babies to the Welfare State: The Sheppard-Towner Act
of 1921,” in Governing the American State: Congress and the New Federalism, 1877–1929
ed.? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 136–55; Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-
Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1994); Jan Doolittle Wilson, The Women’s Joint Congressional Committee and the Politics of
Maternalism, 1920–30 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 27–49, 50–65, 133–47.
9. Michael Grossberg, “Child Welfare in the United States, 1820–1935,” 3–41, esp. 38, and “A
Protected Childhood: The Emergence of Child Protection in America,” in American Public
Life and the Historical Imagination, eds. Wendy Gamber, Michael Grossberg, and Hendrik
Hartog (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 213–39.
10. For an early history of the connections between childhood and consumerism, see J. H.
Plumb, “The New World of Children in Eighteenth-Century England,” Past and Present 67,
no. 1 (1975): 64–95. For the twentieth-century developments, see Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff:
Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999); Lisa Jacobson, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in
the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
11. Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York:
Basic Books, 1978).
12. Cross, Kids’ Stuff.
13. Cross, Kids’ Stuff.
14. On the history of American childrearing ideas and practices, see Ann Hulbert, Raising
America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children (New York: Vintage,

JHCY 5.1 final text.indd 26 1/18/2012 3:26:55 PM

 Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 27

2004); Peter Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America (New
York: NYU Press, 2003).
15. Priscilla Ferguson Clement, Growing Pains: Children in the Industrial Age, 1850–1890
(Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1997); David I. MacLeod, The Age of the Child: Children in
America, 1890–1920 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1998)
16. On the development of a distinctive middle-class childrearing ethic emphasizing the con-
certed cultivation of children, see Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and
Family Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
17. Howard Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
18. Kett, Rites of Passage.
19. Steven Mintz, “Life Stages,” in Encyclopedia of American Social History, eds. Mary Kupiec
Cayton, Elliott J. Gorn, and Peter W. Williams (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993),
3:2011–22, and “Reflections on Age as a Category of Historical Analysis,” Journal of the
History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 91–94.
20. Heather Munro Prescott, A Doctor of Their Own: The History of Adolescent Medicine
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
21. Kathleen W. Jones, Taming the Troublesome Child: American Families, Child Guidance, and
the Limits of Psychiatric Authority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
22. Juliet B. Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (New
York: Scribner’s, 2004).
23. Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2004), 115–17.
24. Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 116.
25. Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 117.
26. On the paradigm shift in the study of children’s history, see Peter B. Pufall and Richard
P. Unsworth, eds., Rethinking Childhood (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2003). On children’s peer cultures, see William A. Corsaro, The Sociology of Childhood
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2005), “We’re Friends, Right?”: Inside Kids’ Cultures
(Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2003), and Friendship and Peer Culture in the Early
Years (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Pub. Corp., 1985); Gary Allan Fine, With the Boys: Little League
Baseball and Preadolescent Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Henry
Jenkins, ed., The Children’s Culture Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1998);
Kathleen McDonnell, Honey, We Lost the Kids: Re-thinking Childhood in the Multimedia Age
(rev. ed., Toronto: Second Story Press, 2005) and Kid Culture (Toronto: Second Story Press,
1994); Kathy Merlock Jackson, ed., Rituals and Patterns in Children’s Lives (Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press/Popular Press, 2005); Barrie Thorne, Gender Play: Girls and
Boys in School (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993).
27. Mintz, “The Changing Face of Children’s Culture,” 39.
28. Mintz, “The Changing Face of Children’s Culture,” 39.
29. Mintz, “The Changing Face of Children’s Culture,” 39.

JHCY 5.1 final text.indd 27 1/18/2012 3:26:55 PM

 28 WHY THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD MATTERS

30. For examples of the adaptive role of boys’ and youth peer cultures, see E. Anthony Rotundo,
American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era
(New York: Basic Books, 1994), 31–74.
31. Mintz, “The Changing Face of Children’s Culture,” 49.
32. On the ability of the history of childhood to defamiliarize the present, see Schultz,
Knowledge of Childhood. For the cross-cultural distinctiveness of contemporary middle-
class childhood, see David F. Lancy, The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel,
Changelings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
33. For an example of a constructivist approach to the history of childhood, see Mintz, Huck’s Raft.
34. Karen Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1994).
35. See Stephen Robertson, “The Disappearance of Childhood, or the Reappearance of Pre-
Modern Childhood, or The Appearance of Post Modern Childhood?” http://www-personal.
arts.usyd.edu.au/sterobrt/2044/.
36. Mike A. Males, Framing Youth: 10 Myths About the Next Generation (Monroe, ME: Common
Courage Press, 2002) and The Scapegoat Generation: America’s War on Adolescents
(Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1996)
37. On children’s health and disabilities, see Janet Golden, Richard Meckel, and Heather Munro
Prescott, Children and Youth in Sickness and in Health: A Historical Handbook and Guide
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004).
38. Daniel T. Kline, “Holding Therapy,” 7 March 1998, History-child-family listserv (history-
child-family@mailbase.ac.uk).
39. On the “ecology of poverty,” in which many children often grow up in unstable households
with a caregiver subject to depression, see David K. Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in
America (New York: Random House, 2005).

JHCY 5.1 final text.indd 28 1/18/2012 3:26:55 PM