Reinventing Childhood after World War II

Abstract

Reinventing Childhood after World War II Paula S. Fass and Michael Grossberg, eds. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Contents, notes, index. 182 pp. $42.50 paper. ISBN: 9780812243673How many historians does it take to write an insightful, provocative, scholarly, and readable little book that will help stu- dents and historians alike understand the contexts in which the history and histo- riographies of children and youth have developed over the last half century? In this case, seven-the number who con- tributed to this model of purposeful collaboration that stakes a claim for the potential of history as a tool to explore and even influence public attitudes about and government policies toward children.If not quite seamless, the book is nevertheless tightly organized. Paula Fass focuses on the creation of a generation of anxious parents and children as more mothers went to work, divorce rates grew, schools worsened, and drugs became available to control child behaviors. Michael Grossberg explains how children's "rights" at first widened (the 1954 school desegregation decision, for instance) and then narrowed (due to censorship and worries about sexual predators). Steven Mintz explores the commercialization of children's culture and the growing belief that children's pastimes required less imagination than in the past (he also partly debunks that notion). Stephen Las- sonde argues that, while the first postwar generation grew up with clear coming- of-age markers, the commercialization of childhood, the increasing awareness of psychological and eating disorders, and the exposure to sex and violence all com- bined to "compress" childhood, even as other cultural trends have caused adults to extend their own childhoods. Mary Ann Mason examines the difficulty of fitting the notion of the "best interests of the child" into the constantly shifting defi- nitions of family with the emergence of surrogate motherhood, gay adoption, and other new or newly accepted technologies and concepts. Kriste Lindenmeyer suggests that the American Dream became differ- ent things for postwar children and their parents and led the federal government to build programs intended to level the play- ing field for all children. And Bengt Sandin offers a Swedish perspective in which chil- dren's rights became a dominant priority of the central government and children's lives became a state responsibility in ways that Americans could hardly imagine.One of the most important threads running through the essays is anxiety: Par- ents worried about giving their children too much or too little freedom; Govern- ment officials worried about creating a class of permanently dependent citizens; Cultural critics worried about child con- sumerism and about forcing (or allowing) children to grow up too fast; Traditional- ists worried about expanding construc- tions of families; And, for more than half the period covered by the book, everyone worried about the Soviet threat and its ramifications. …