:Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood

No subject makes adults today more anxious than the notion that American children are in crisis, a notion fed by widespread popular belief that children's lives are less stable now than in the past. Steven Mintz's impeccably researched, convincingly argued, and wonderfully original synthesis of the monographic literature on childhood in American history debunks this notion. Contrary to myth, he finds that childhood in the past was anything but stable for a majority of Americans. Today, thanks to an idealistic twentieth century reinvention of childhood, our children have more freedom for self-discovery than ever before. Yet we are not ready to celebrate, for (he suggests) children today face new problems born of this very reinvention. The core of Mintz's narrative is a mostly familiar chronology of changes over time in how middle-class, reform-minded adults imagined the ideal childhood, and what kinds of institutions they created in order to produce it. New England Puritans sought to provide their children with stable, orderly childhoods within the framework of patriarchal families, in which fathers could prepare them for a godly life (or a sanctified death). After the American Revolution eroded the institutional foundations of patriarchal authority, childhood became shorter and more uncertain, as children left home at relatively young ages to seek paid work. By around 1830, anxious middle-class adults sought to contain their children's precocity and restore stability to their lives by inventing the modern ideal of childhood as a sheltered period, free from labor, devoted to schooling, and guided by the moral tutelage of mothers.