The End of American Childhood takes a sweeping look at the history of American childhood and parenting, from the nation's founding to the present day. Renowned historian Paula Fass shows how, since the beginning of the American republic, independence, self-definition, and individual success have informed Americans' attitudes toward children. But as parents today hover over every detail of their children's lives, are the qualities that once made American childhood special still desired or possible? Placing the experiences of children and parents against the backdrop of social, political, and cultural shifts, Fass challenges Americans to reconnect with the beliefs that set the American understanding of childhood apart from the rest of the world. Fass examines how freer relationships between American children and parents transformed the national culture, altered generational relationships among immigrants, helped create a new science of child development, and promoted a revolution in modern schooling. She looks at the childhoods of icons including Margaret Mead and Ulysses S. Grant--who, as an eleven-year-old, was in charge of his father's fields and explored his rural Ohio countryside. Fass also features less well-known children like ten-year-old Rose Cohen, who worked in the drudgery of nineteenth-century factories. Bringing readers into the present, Fass argues that current American conditions and policies have made adolescence socially irrelevant and altered children's road to maturity, while parental oversight threatens children's competence and initiative. Showing how American parenting has been firmly linked to historical changes, The End of American Childhood considers what implications this might hold for the nation's future.

About the Author
Paula S. Fass is professor of the Graduate School and the Margaret Byrne Professor of History Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. The author of Kidnapped and Children of a New World, she recently edited The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World. Fass lives in Berkeley, California.

Reviews
"The material Fass provides on America in the 19th and early-20th centuries is important, and highly relevant to the really essential issues driving parenting behavior in our day."--Judith Warner, New York Times Book Review The End of American Childhoodis a worthwhile and enlightening book, and [Fass] comes to some persuasively tough conclusions."--Daniel Akst, Wall Street Journal "A wide-ranging and stimulating history of childhood and parenting in the U.S. ... [Fass] illustrates her points with examples from the childhoods of figures both famous (Ulysses S. Grant and Margaret Mead) and obscure (Rose Cohen, a 19th-century child seamstress). She concludes by noting that with the insecurities of the global economy, adolescents put off independence, particularly financial independence, for far longer than in the past two centuries, but that independence is still their eventual goal. Her work provides an invaluable perspective on an important topic."--Publishers Weekly "A comprehensive investigation of how Americans have raised their children... Fass provides ample historical and scientific evidence to support her findings, giving readers a methodical, meticulous accounting of childhood in America over the past 200 years."--Kirkus "[An] enlightening book... Our instincts tell us to do more, not less, to protect our children from the cruel 21st-century world.The End of American Childhoodis a corrective to that outlook."--Isabel Berwick, Financial Times "Childhood in the U.S. has been distinct in the Western world: the relations between generations were more flexible, provided choices, and encouraged children's independence. Historian Fass uses autobiographies, parents' advice, and child welfare literature to paint a portrait of children who, regardless of class, gender, ethnicity, or race, shouldered family responsibilities from the pioneers on the frontier to immigrant children working in factories a century later... Her overview on past parents' fear for children's health and survival serves as a sobering reminder to 'helicopter' parents and 'tiger moms.'"--Choice



Book Information
ISBN 9780691162577
Author Paula S. Fass
Format Hardback
Page Count 352
Imprint Princeton University Press
Publisher Princeton University Press
Weight(grams) 567g