Raising America : Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children

Rating:
Summary: Can Parenting Experts Offer Us More Than Confusion?
Review: After about 3 minutes of hearing Hulbert talk about the history of parenting advice this century on NPR, I knew I needed this book. I am in a peculiar position as a Parent Coach/Instructor and as a skeptic. Among other things I teach a very specific approach to parenting based on Love and Logic (See my review of Love and Logic Magic for Early Childhood). Yet while I teach a specific approach to helping parents make their lives a bit easier, I am also a skeptic at heart and therefore strive to examine all approaches to parenting with a critical eye, allowing the evidence to point where it may.

With painstaking detail and with considerable wit, Hulbert takes us through the century and helps us to see that parents have been anxious about how their kids would turn out for decades. She also shows that they frequently turn to the experts for guidance; experts who have an annoying habit of contradicting one another. Throughout the centry there has always been a "hard" approach to parenting advocated as well as a "soft" approach advocated usually by two separate experts. Many experts have, and continue to make exaggerated claims about the results of taking their advice. James Watson the famous behaviorist was the paragon of this sort of wild claim, deciding based on a few experiments with white furry things and a scared infant that he knew the secrets to take any sort of child and raise them for a career of his selection and with the character of his choice.

A century later, much is the same though there are some important differences. We continue to have an array of voices with a good deal of overlap as well as with a number of contradictions. The difference now perhaps is that there are approaches all along the continuum from soft to hard, rather than one or two at either end. Hulbert implies that all the contradicitons make it unlikely that anyone has a corner on the "correct" approach. Her NPR interview got at the practical and important point for parents at the how to bookshelf. Parents are wise to pick from among techniques offered by approaches that resonate with their core values. My take on the situation, since I am a therapist by trade, is that parenting experts are much like psychotherapy approaches. The research is clear that no one approach is heads and shoulders above others concerning measurable outcomes for therapy. However, it is clear that for people suffering from anxiety and depression, for example, therapy is certainly better than no treatment. My guess is that the results are the same with parenting. I suspect that most people taking a well organized parenting class do better than people with the same intitial skill level taking no class. I further would recommend that people pick a style that teaches mutual respect. Another key is an approach that is practical enough to teach parents how to set, healthy, reasonable limits in a way that is loving. Most people soon tire of being in the company of a child who runs the house and who is very tuned in to their own feelings and needs, but who lack the balance of knowing how to be respectful of others.

Hulbert makes superb work of bringing big parenting experts of the past century to life and letting us in on some of the details that they might have preferred not be shared openly. I found it particularly helpful to read up on Spock, as we frequently hear his name as a common cultural reference, but I like most people wasn't familiar with the fascinating and sweeping trajectory that his advice and his career took. Hulbert knows her stuff. It would be wonderful to have a conversation with her about this history of parenting experts and how they measure up to the research, including the significant blows that Judith Harris dealt developmental psycholgy by being the first to make a widely publicized stink about the lack of controls for the role genetics, and the and the failure to account for kids having effects on adults' parenting in The Nurture Assumption (another must read for those serious about understanding what we know about parenting styles). I suspect I won't get a chance at the conversation with Hulbert, but this book was a superb second best.

Rating:
Summary: Raising America
Review: As parents, we have all been told how to feed an infant; how to ensure he or she sleeps; how to discipline a toddler; and how to talk with and listen to our children. If you've ever wondered: "Where are these `experts' coming from?" read Hulbert's information-packed and insightful Raising America.

Hulbert provides biographical anecdotes about the prominent child-rearing theorists of the 20th century and places them each in the social and political climate of their day. She writes with a wise, graceful and truly humorous pen -- a pleasure to read.

At the risk of offering one more bit of "advice" -- after a century inundated with it -- I recommend that you put aside for a while Spock, Brazelton, Leach, and Greenspan and settle down with Raising America for a thought-provoking, rich and thoroughly enjoyable read.

Rating:
Summary: An Ambitious History of Parenting Experts and Expertise
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: Relationship is more then me or my child
Review: Child development or "raising" is not something that is done either by child (The Nature) *alone*, or by parent (The Nurture/er) *alone*, we are just parts.

The proverbial "whole" is our "relationship", our connection. Most experts are in fact as miss Hulbert suggests "part-centered" (either "soft", i.e. child-centered or "hard", i.e. parent-centered). But there are "whole-centered", "relationship-centered", or as Lawrence Cohen would say "connection-centered" experts, too, one of them being himself.

If you are interested in transcending all parts, check his Playful Parenting book where he transcends *both* permissiveness (Child or Nature viewed as privileged part) and authoritarianism (Parent or Nurture viewed as privileged part) by viewing our Relationship as a "Whole_Without_Privileged_Parts" through 'Playful Parenting' instead.

Your relationship with your child/ren will never be the same.

Rating:
Summary: Only a beginning
Review: Our parent education book group agrees that advice-giving to parents has been complex and inconsistent. However, identifying an "odd couple" (experts who give contradictory advice) for each period of the century is arbitrary, contrived, misleading and inappropriate. Hulbert mentions that she selected advice givers who had spoken at national conferences. Otherwise, she give us little information about her biases or about the criteria she used to select individuals highlighted. Why did she choose L. Emmett Holt (not a well-known individual) and G. Stanley Hall (who focused primarily on adolescents)? The protaganist format meant that in the recent years, advice-giving "giants" such asThomas Gordon, Hiam Ginott, Jean Piaget, B.F. Skinner, Erik Erikson, and Rudolph Dreikurs barely receive mention. A history book on parent advice IS needed, not only for scholars, but also for parents to understand their own upbringing. This book barely begins to fill the need.

Rating:
Summary: Centered on the experts, not the advise or children
Review: Perhaps my very mixed feelings about this book came from unmet expectations. I thought it would be a book about the history of the actual advise given American parents---how advise about such issues as toilet training, sleep and eating have changed over the years, and how this affected parents. However, the book was actually much more about the experts themselves---THEIR childhoods, education, marital problems, academic careers, etc. This might be interesting to some, but it wasn't to me for the most part. The book had a feel of an insider sort of expose---written for those in the academic world. Children were mentioned very little, except if they happened to be the children of the experts themselves. There was much delving into the psychological history of each expert, but I found that at times I had a very vague idea what the experts actually advised! For example, Hall, an early expert, had his life opened for scrutiny, but I would be hard pressed to explain what his child care views were. The writing was scholary and confident, but in no way personal---the author's children or her own views are not mentioned. So I guess I would just advice that you know what you want to read about before buying this book---It might be just what you are looking for, but it might be far from what you are looking for.

Rating:
Summary: Centered on the experts, not the advise or children
Review: Perhaps my very mixed feelings about this book came from unmet expectations. I thought it would be a book about the history of the actual advise given American parents---how advise about such issues as toilet training, sleep and eating have changed over the years, and how this affected parents. However, the book was actually much more about the experts themselves---THEIR childhoods, education, marital problems, academic careers, etc. This might be interesting to some, but it wasn't to me for the most part. The book had a feel of an insider sort of expose---written for those in the academic world. Children were mentioned very little, except if they happened to be the children of the experts themselves. There was much delving into the psychological history of each expert, but I found that at times I had a very vague idea what the experts actually advised! For example, Hall, an early expert, had his life opened for scrutiny, but I would be hard pressed to explain what his child care views were. The writing was scholary and confident, but in no way personal---the author's children or her own views are not mentioned. So I guess I would just advice that you know what you want to read about before buying this book---It might be just what you are looking for, but it might be far from what you are looking for.

Rating:
Summary: Tracing 100 years of parenting tips
Review: REVIEWED BY SUZANNE FIELDS ...

When I was an infant, my mother swaddled me tightly in a baby blanket with hands and feet tucked inside so that I would feel warm and secure and sleep like a dream. When the pediatrician saw me so wrapped, without being able to move, he gently unfolded the blankets and told my mother to let her baby stretch and kick. As soon as the doctor was gone, my mother wrapped me tightly again.
I was the object of two polarized approaches to child care - the "hard," more disciplined, confident mother-centered approach that my mother had learned from her mother and the "soft," more open and flexible child-centered "psychological" approach that alternated with it for the past century. My mother trusted her instincts. The pediatrician trusted the scientific experts of the moment.
In a splendid book, "Raising America: Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice About Children," Ann Hulbert traces 100 years of the "hard" and "soft," yin and yang, Locke vs. Rousseau, strict vs. permissive, split-personality and split-philosophical approaches to child care which influenced everything from feeding schedules to toilet training, reactions to crying and playing, approaches to affection and discipline. It shouldn't surprise anyone who has raised a child or is raising one, however, that in spite of millions of words, common sense is still the best teacher.
What ultimately works depends on the baby's temperament and the parent's endurance, and most common sense, emerges during a parent's on-the-job training. Many experts rely on common sense, too, though they are loathe to admit it because no one would buy their books if they did. Overstatement gets most of the attention, but no matter what parents read, they usually find books with ideas that confirm what they already think. Many mothers may buy the book, but few will do it by the book.
Miss Hulbert opens each of the sections of this social history with major conferences on child rearing methods and research, which highlight shifting social, scientific, psychological and political concerns. The scientific research on any side of an argument is usually slight and rarely conclusive.
She writes engagingly about the personalities behind the theories, casting long shadows on the inconsistencies, contradictions and hypocrisies in both the work and the personal lives of many of the so-called experts. By far the most eccentric and unlikable is the behaviorist John Broadus Watson, who is famous for bringing Pavlovian techniques to Little Albert, a 9-month-old baby. Dr. Watson, identified here as a "misbehaviorist," wanted to show how he could condition Albert's emotional reactions to furry animals. In a lab setting he introduces a white rat to Albert at the same time that he creates a loud clanging sound for the baby. He repeats this exercise for several days.
The baby, as who wouldn't, becomes upset at the rat even when the doctor stops the clanging noise, and Little Albert later transfers his aversion to the rat to a bunny rabbit and a dog. Although Dr. Watson said his sadistic little experiment proved a child could be conditioned - in this case to fear furry animals - it's much easier to conclude that the baby - and his parents - should have had an aversion to Dr. Watson and other such child-raising experts.
Dr. Watson sounds crazy from today's perspective, but he was a popular child-rearing authority in the 1920s, even though he told parents they were incompetent and often committed "psychological murder." He is not the only extremist in Miss Hulbert's book, but she finds lots of benign advisers, too. A continuous theme of "Raising America" is that nearly every expert reflects trendy ideas packaged to capture an audience and that the ideas are received or dismissed depending on the reader's predisposition to "hard" or "soft" schools of thought.
We meet Dr. Spock as pediatrician and celebrity demonstrator against the Vietnam War, credited with the spock-marked baby boomer generation. Bruno Bethlehem, his nemesis (who defended the war), wrote a provocative rationale for children's taking pleasure in fairy tales in his book "The Uses of Enchantment," and vastly overstated his achievements with autistic children. More recently Dr. T. Berry Brazelton and Dr. Stanley Greenberg suggest a child-centered focus.
Dr. James Dobson and Dr. John Rosemond in this analysis are "parent-centered," even though the two men have little in common. Dr. Dobson's popular book is called "Dare to Discipline." Dr. Rosemond counsels parents to pay more attention to their marriage than to the kids.
Dr. Arnold Gesell and psychologist Erik Erikson bring developmental data to the debate. Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and contemporary neuroscientists compete in the arguments over nature vs. nurture; traditionalists, modernists, moralists, feminists and fundamentalists drive specific theories.
Political and economic issues shape debates over the pros and cons of day care, working mothers, the proper balance between individual responsibility and government obligation. Steven R. Covey looks at the family as a corporate team and brings his tension-management business techniques inside the home.
"Raising America" should come as a relief for most parents - there's something for everybody. But the parents nearly always trump the experts for knowing what they're doing. Conclusion: If offered either a child care manual by Dr. Spock or "Cat in the Hat" by Dr. Seuss, pick up Dr. Seuss and read it to the kids. Then remember what Mr. Gesell's daughter-in-law said about life with a baby: "Frankly, science is as nothing to me when compared to a few minutes more sleep."

Rating:
Summary: This is a terrific read
Review: This book is a joy to read--funny, level-headed, full of great and sometimes damning stories about the men (and they're all men)who have, since the turn of the last century, been dispensing advice, and often sowing guilt, about how to raise kids. Hulbert covers everyone from John Watson, the chilly behaviorist turned ad-man who sternly warned mothers of the 1920s against cuddling children, to Dr. Spock, the nation's pediatrician, whose advice shaped so many babyboomer upbringings, and of whom Hulbert paints a nuanced, sympathetic, but unsentimental portrait. Hulbert is an engaging guide and a lovely writer, who sorts out a muddle of conflicting advice from experts of different schools, offers an intriguing new argument about how each generation produced an expert from the "hard," disciplinarian school and one from the "soft," permissive school of child-rearing, and immediately establishes a bond with her readers.

Rating:
Summary: Raising America
Review: We have all been told how to feed a baby (on demand -- or by rigid schedule); how to ensure that an infant sleeps (let 'em cry it out -- or let the the baby sleep in your bed); how to discipline toddlers (distract them -- or put them in time out); and how to talk with and listen to our children. If you've ever asked "Where are these `experts' coming from?" read Ann Hulbert's Raising America.
Hulbert provides interesting biographical anecedotes about the prominent child-rearing theorists of this century and places them in the social and political climate of their time. Her pen is wise, graceful and truly humorous.
While I hesitate to give advice -- in this century inundated with it -- I recommend that you put aside for a while Spock, Brazelton, Leach and Greenspan. Instead, settle down with Raising America -- a thoroughly information-packed, thought-provoking read.