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

by Ann Hulbert

Book Overview

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, millions of anxious parents have turned to child-rearing manuals for reassurance. Instead, however, they have often found yet more cause for worry. In... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375401202
• ISBN13: 9780375401206
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 450 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.6" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Can Parenting Experts Offer Us More Than Confusion?

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 wh

Raising America

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.

Raising America

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.

This is a terrific read

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.

Tracing 100 years of parenting tips

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 A