Dangerous Parents

Abstract

While we know much about the cult of childhood, historians have spent less time analysing the ways in which certain parents became demonized from the late eighteenth century. This chapter traces growing criticisms across nations of parents who were felt to have endangered their offspring and to have deprived the nation of a future robust population. Industrialization and urbanization lent a growing shrillness to the debate. Doctors, opponents of child labour and slavery, and criminologists all began to denounce parents and especially those from the left who they identified as a threat to their offspring and society. As the nineteenth century progressed and competition between nations increased, the growth of eugenic thought gave extra virulence to these denunciations. This set the stage for demands for ‘dangerous’ parents to be stripped of their guardianship.