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Breast or bottle? Co-sleeping or crib sleeping? Cry-it-out or rock to sleep? To spank or not to spank? New parents, eager to do what's best for their children, face endless decisions about the "right way" to raise their children. A quick glance through the parenting shelves at the local bookstore reveals that there is no lack of books weighing in on just about every current controversy, from pretty much every conceivable point of view. In just over a century, the study and popularization of child development has burgeoned from a handful of specialists to a plethora of experts, each with a particular ax to grind. How this happened is the focus of RAISING AMERICA, Ann Hulbert's ambitious history of twentieth-century parenting experts and expertise.
Hulbert structures her history around five key parenting and family conferences, from 1899's National Congress of Mothers to 1997's Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning, pausing in each case to reflect on the state of parenting philosophies and advice at the time. To further illustrate the evolution of expert advice on children, she profiles two key experts in each generation, each of whom falls into a distinct "camp." One exemplifies "child-centered" or "soft" parenting, a proponent of letting "nature take its course in childhood" and an advocate of parent-child bonding. The other, "parent-centered" expert instead advises strict discipline, believing in the power of parental nurture to shape child behavior for good or ill.
The first generation of parenting experts, Hulbert contends, came to prominence when early twentieth-century mothers, who viewed themselves as raising their children in a new and sometimes terrifying modern world, no longer trusted the time-honored "experts" of previous generations --- their own mothers and grandmothers. Instead, these modern mothers, eager to equip their children for twentieth-century success, looked to two male experts --- and parenting experts are overwhelmingly male --- for advice. G. Stanley Hall, the "soft" expert, was a psychologist who viewed childhood, especially adolescence, as a fragile, almost spiritual time --- a "new birth." His counterpart, L. Emmett Holt, was a pediatrician who advocated strict schedules and developed complicated feeding regimens for infants.
Hall and Holt's successors, too, provided polarizing advice to parents. From the strict behaviorist Watson, who famously conditioned a young child to fear not only rats but all other cute furry animals, to Gesell, whose timetables of child development were the precursors of the milestones that today's parents obsess over, to Spock, whose parenting advice defined the baby boomer generation but was later derided by the right as being too permissive and by the left as being too restrictive for women, it's no wonder that parents most often just ignored the parenting advice altogether, no matter how pervasive its message. As she profiles these experts, Hulbert includes not only excerpts from their popular manuals but also anecdotes from their personal biographies.
Since many of the experts were long on opinion but short on scientific research, they often based their theories on the childhood they knew best --- their own. Equally fascinating are these men's own experiences as parents. Too often, their advice failed to translate from the page to the nursery, and their wives and children suffered accordingly.
Ultimately, Hulbert's story is as much about the parents (mostly mothers) who digested the experts' advice as it is about the experts themselves. She concludes that, in the face of so much contradictory information, parents can't, and shouldn't, attempt to follow experts' advice to the letter. Instead, she writes, "no fine-tuned scheme for shaping futures lies in the experts' manuals, much less in their own homes." Experience, not expertise, is usually a parent's best teacher, and the readers of RAISING AMERICA, whether their own parenthood is fresh or seasoned, will be reassured by that message.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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