Childhood in World History.

Childhood in World History. By Peter N. Stearns (New York: Routledge, 2006. ix plus 146 pp.).

The Greatest Generation Grows Up: American Childhood in the 1930s. By Kriste Lindenmeyer. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005, xi plus 304 pp.).

Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960. By Nicholas Sammond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005, ix plus 472 pp.).

Peter Stearns is the author or editor of eighty-four books. His work over the last thirty-five years includes studies of the French working class, an early foray into the history of masculinity in American culture, the history of emotions, as well as histories of gender, body image, obesity, old age, consumerism, and culture contact. Latterly his efforts have turned to the growing field of world history. Childhood in World History is just one example of several books by Stearns in the last few years on some aspect of world history. Stearns's inclusion of childhood in his surveys of world history signals its emergence as a growing subfield in historical studies. A slender volume, reliant on a correspondingly lean literature, it nonetheless spans the globe and all of known human existence. Stearns's treatment is characteristically learned, conceptually sleek, and sensitive to societal and temporal variation. While frank in its acknowledgement of the improvements in children's lives--particularly over the last 150 years--it is intensely skeptical about whether the gains in children's material and physical well-being over the same period have been worth the cost spiritually and culturally.

As almost every historian of childhood will note, children in the past are particularly elusive historical subjects because even more than adults, they leave behind few traces of their lives. The historical "record" of prehistorical peoples makes this task even more difficult, yet Stearns summarizes what is known (or reasonably surmised) to address an important transition in the care and regard for children from early societies of hunters and gatherers to societies based on agriculture, roughly 10,000 years ago. Transient by definition, hunter--gatherers could not carry more than one child at a time and so it is speculated that women rarely had as many as four children over the course of their reproductive lives. With the rise of agricultural economies family size increased and led to the eventual expansion of human populations as agriculture crept across the world. This marked the advent of the major epoch in human civilization and established the essential outlines of children's roles, functions, and treatment in societies everywhere that, despite variations owing to religion, social structure, and political practices, shared more similarities than differences for thousands of years.

It was during this lengthy era that children's utility as household members became a central feature of the family's functioning. In addition to contributing to the production of foodstuffs they learned crafts and became essential to home manufacturing. The enlarging capacity to produce food meant that more children could be supported, resulting in a key demographic change: the birth rate climbed as six or seven children were born, on average, to each family, making the "agricultural centuries" ones in which villages "were full of children," who usually exceeded half the total human population (12). Higher fertility rates were necessitated in large part by the intensive nature of agricultural labor; moreover, because average life spans remained short and infant mortality high, fertility was elevated for thousands of years. Other important social changes were realized during this period as well. Ties with extended family and especially grandparents became more prominent than previously and gender distinctions grew stronger. The ability to accumulate wealth in agricultural economies meant that social distinctions multiplied and at every social level patriarchy began to take root as men assumed control of crop raising and relegated females to necessary but supporting roles in the household economy. Extending from this, property holding and the inheritance of property was ultimately limited to men in many societies and obedience to fathers received especial stress in parent--child relations.

So much attention has been devoted to the study of children in the West that historians have tended to overlook attitudes toward the rearing and treatment of children outside of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern civilizations until quite recently. Stearns's summaries of the ancient classical traditions of China and India then, offer valuable perspectives on the better--known story of childhood in Western societies. Despite notable differences among the traditions of these civilizations, what is perhaps most interesting are their similarities. Over time, patriarchy, enhanced distinctions between males and females, and the necessity of instilling good work habits in young people were commonly espoused. High infant mortality, low average life spans, and equilibriating fertility practices shaped the broad outlines of life and death in these societies and consequently expectations of children commonly urged discipline, obedience, and "the need to bend children to a sense of duty" (31).

With the decline of the world's classical empires and the rise of world religions by the sixth century CE, gender differences became even more distended but so did legal protections for children: again, within the parameters of the agricultural economies that hosted them, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam contributed to the treatment and perception of children for the following millennium. They shared an emphasis on the responsibilities of parenthood, children as a source of pride to parents, and the duty of children to respect and obey their parents. They all recognized the presence of some form of divinity in every person, and thus the specific obligation of parents to shelter children "as God's creatures" (35). By extension, new prohibitions on infanticide and the sale of children arose as well. All of these religions amplified filial piety--specifically obedience to fathers--and linked this to the higher duty to obey the commandments of their dieties.

The remainder of Childhood in World History dwells on what Stearns calls the "modern model" of childhood, which first emerged in Western Europe and the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Stearns is at pains to distinguish between this "modern model" and the concept of "modernization." Modernization posited either directly or implicitly the "modern child" (or "modern" anything else) as the product of Western cultural ascendance. He proposes the "modern model" as a set of now-characteristic experiences in Western Europe and United States absent the overweening presumption of cultural superiority that accompanied modernization theory. In other words, whereas in the past historians viewed the "modernization of childhood" as an unalloyed good, Stearns takes care to convey the toll of the modem model on children and parents psychologically, as well as on the societies that raise such children.

The modern model has three main features: 1) the sharp decline of infant mortality, 2) the restriction of fertility, and 3) schooling rather than work as the most pervasive, sustained childhood experience. From these, other changes followed: children were increasingly kept apart from parents; greater distinctions between children and adults were recognized; parents' control of their children diminished; rather than being seen as innately venal, children were malleable creatures subject to socialization; emotional ties became the hallmark of parent-child relationships; childhood became synonymous with innocence; more laws were devised to protect children from adults; and heightened awareness and reinforcement of gender distinctions accompanied the cultural work of childhood.

Paradoxically, even as the contemporary model was forming, children throughout the world were being exposed to lengthier work days and more dangerous and exploitative forms of labor. At one extreme was slavery and at the other was "placing out," the consignment of children to others' households for a period of apprenticeship, which was commonly practiced in labor-hungry economies. And of course the most conspicuously hazardous forms of child labor arose at the height of industrialization in Europe and the United States, wherein children performed every kind of menial task from shucking oysters or sorting coal, to mending broken threads on hulking textile machines.

While Stearns's survey of the modern epoch consumes half this volume, it is in ways patchier in its coverage because so much more is known--however selectively--about the experiences of children, especially in the West and after the seventeenth century. Therefore Japan, somewhat disappointingly if predictably stands in for "modern childhood in Asia," when Stearns had earlier sketched out such useful comparisons of Chinese, Indian, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern classical civilizations. India is mentioned in the book's second half only intermittently and each time as a counter example to the modern mode. By the same token, Stearns insightfully urges that something like a "communist childhood" was developed during the twentieth century in the Soviet Union and China. Although distinctive in their details each interpolated ungainly aspects of the agricultural and modern models to forge a childhood experience that baldly served the interests of the state. The most striking element of communist childhood was the use of schooling to fashion the child as a tool of the state. Here we are reminded how closely entwined can be the purposes of the state and the ideology of childhood, which consciously or not often advances the political, economic, and social priorities of any society in which mass schooling is established; for schooling more than any other cultural innovation created the social and institutional space for childhood.

Two themes unite the experience of childhood in the modern mode across the globe in Stearns's view--the use of schooling to socialize children and the increasing role of consumption in children's lives. Schooling created the peer group, heightened age consciousness, and extended the period of preparation for adulthood. While schooling tended to undermine familial authority and could engender anxiety in parents over their children's capacity to assume the burdens of adulthood, the juvenilization of consumption was more insidious. The "enthronement" of the consumer-child says Steams, led to, among other effects, a "massive reconsideration of child discipline" (104). Deference toward adults and manners more generally were relaxed. Sexual permissiveness increased, children's obligations to parents decreased throughout the twentieth century, and leisure time and opportunities for the pursuit of leisure expanded as children's purchasing power increased along with post-World War Two affluence.

The child-as-consumer triumphed decisively in the United States and Japan and ultimately prevailed in Europe. In the book's most incisive passage, Stearns observes that a bargain seems to have been struck in contemporary childhood, in which "children are supposed to tolerate schooling, ideally even to excel, but are given unprecedented consumer abundance and latitude in return." (106) The price, he suggests, is high. The psychological effects on many young people are self-destructive behaviors, untethered identity, stress, depression and suicide. And despite the erasure of age-old threats to children's mortality, parents' anxieties about their children appear only to have risen. The outpouring of expert advice on childrearing serves only to destabilize parental confidence about promoting children's physical and emotional well-being. Ironically, as children have assumed greater importance culturally, Stearns concludes, adult hostility toward and dissatisfaction with children have enlarged correspondingly.

In the era of the modern mode in the United States, the 1930s were pivotal. At first glance this would seem counterintuitive since so much of what is "modern" about twentieth century childhood has to do with unprecedented levels of consumption by and on behalf of children and adolescents. Yet as Kriste Lindenmeyer persuasively argues, it was in the depths of the Great Depression that the United States created a coherent set of policies that "defined childhood dependency from birth through age seventeen"(238). In The Greatest Generation, Lindenmeyer examines child labor, political agitation for children's rights, juvenile health, poverty, play, popular culture, schooling, transiency, and federal efforts to bring relief to children suffering from physical maladies. Where Stearns's work is sweeping, Lindenmeyer's is tightly focused. In each chapter she anchors her observations in a case study, linking the particulars of a person's or family's story to some larger phenomenon. The sources of these vignettes are wide ranging: from letters to Eleanor Roosevelt or interviews from the Federal Writers' Project, to reports by the U.S. Children's Bureau and Errol Uys's oral histories of teenage transients during the Great Depression. Lindenmeyer's resourcefulness in this respect makes this book compelling and persuasive.

The most inspired chapters serve as sober reminders that the entering wedge of change occurring during the first half of the twentieth century--in areas such as public health, schooling, and the prohibition of juvenile labor--came slowly to many portions of the United States, especially those most isolated geographically or economically from the mainstream. The drive to cure polio, for instance, received enormous attention during the 1930s, because of President Roosevelt's affliction but other diseases existed to a degree unappreciated until exposed by the social and economic surveys of New Deal programs. Diphtheria, pellagra, malaria, measles, and whooping cough, diseases often arrested in less remote areas well before the 1930s, were still commonplace in the most impoverished sectors of rural America.

While the depression chased most adolescents out of the workplace and into the nation's rapidly expanding secondary schools, bureaucratic innovations such as child accounting and age--grading (grouping children by age and aptitude) came to rural areas as schools were consolidated in response to the need to forestall the entry of young people into the workforce for as long as possible. While one-quarter of the U.S. workforce was unemployed in 1933, joblessness for people aged 16-20 years old ranged between 29 and 56 percent as late at 1938. Typically as household heads lost their jobs, older children attempted to compensate by seeking work. If they found work, however, it was usually only part time or secured under unusually harsh conditions.

A sick economy, a consensus that adults rather than youths should receive jobs as they became available, and a growing belief that young people's place was in school until age sixteen convey the impression that youths were purged from the labor market during the 1930s, but as Lindenmeyer points out, in addition to extensive work in agriculture, "Children and adolescents continued to work in the hidden economy as shoeshiners, as scavengers, in the street trades, and doing odd jobs for neighbors and business owners."

Until now, the sole historical treatment of children's experiences in the United States during the Great Depression has been Glen Elder's study of children who grew up in the shadow of family instability and joblessness in Oakland, California. Elder's contribution remains unsurpassed in revealing the long-term effects of children's vulnerability and resilience under the pressure of economic and family strain, yet Lindenmeyer has given us, finally, an important and comprehensive overview of the social, political, and cultural impact of the decade that placed children's well being at the center of a series of reforms that constituted what would come to be recognized as the modern welfare state. The children who lived through the Great Depression and came of age during World War Two, Lindenmeyer suggests, consequently "felt a direct connection to the federal government" much like their parents, who began to look to the federal government for solutions to problems too profound for local and state governments to address on their own (242).

Perhaps the decade's most perplexing development in the United States was the emergence of children and adolescents as a target of American marketers. Young people were at the bottom of the consumer food chain, especially during the decade that discouraged or diverted them from the labor market in favor of underemployed adults. Still, children gained unprecedented media attention during the 1930s as radio, film, and comic strip stars and were rightly perceived as the group with the most potential to increase their spending in the future, according to Nicholas Sammond's Babes in Tomorrowland. Walt Disney, one of the most prescient of American businessmen in cultivating juvenile consumption during the 1930s, is the subject of Sammond's highly ambitious examination of mid-century American childhood. At a time when historians have stressed the need for uncovering children's experiences in the past rather than further exploring the concept of childhood, Sammond unapologetically analyzes the discourse of experts on juvenile marketing, child-rearing, the effects of media on children, and child development in creating what he calls the "generic child."

Sammond argues that from roughly 1900 to 1925, child advocates had concentrated on protecting middle-class children and saving working-class, immigrant children from the baleful effects of urban life and mass culture. By the late 1920s, child experts unselfconsciously promoted a picture of "normal" child development based on the white, Protestant, middle-class child and began to stress the importance of individual growth over earlier worries about corrupting environmental influences on children. Disney's popularity, he says, ascended just as this shift toward individual development was occurring among child welfare professionals and popularizers. His genius was to capitalize on heightened concern about the danger of mass media to children's moral development, while simultaneously gaining the confidence of the public by creating an intimate association between his persona as an artist, producer, and corporate leader and his company's products. Critical to his popular success was his rags-to-riches personal story on one hand, while his paternalism as a Taylorist micro-manager created an aura of scientific rationalism that appealed to child experts of the day, on the other. (133)

By the 1950s Disney had established Disneyland and launched an enormously popular weekly television program hosted at the studio's pioneering theme park. The company's postwar health depended in part on its capacity to diversify its product, as Sammond shows, but the booming market in juvenile consumption also benefited from the conjunction of affluence and a robust birth rate. As Disney had earlier won the approval of child welfare professionals by projecting an image of technological and organizational mastery, Sammond asserts, in the postwar era his "message" reflected the retreat from behaviorism among childrearing experts and the embrace of a more "child-centered" approach--one in which the child was regulated in response to its expressed needs and desires "instead of on a time-table of developmental stimuli" (273). Whereas formerly a disciplined application of "culture" was prescribed to conquer the child's natural impulses, child-centered parenting looked upon the relationship between culture and nature as a question of proportion rather than conquest. Disney, Sammond suggests, traded upon this rapprochement between culture and nature by televising programs that combined cartoons with nature segments that explored the parallels between animal and human behavior. Disney himself delivered a "weekly homily" that knitted the program's "disparate elements" together,... "standing on the boundary between nature and culture, between science and its subjects, and between Walt Disney productions and its audiences" (324).

Disney deserves a prominent place among the developers of children's entertainment and merchandising in the twentieth century. But Walt Disney Productions was just one of many corporations to exploit the bonanza in children's recreation and consumables. And while there is much to admire in Sammond's examination of the social-science literature over the first half of the twentieth century--he is widely read and shrewd in his assessments--his estimation of Disney's influence on attitudes toward children and childhood is conducted virtually without consideration of competing media. If you knew nothing about the rise of mass media and the commerce in juvenile literature, toys, and entertainment, you would come away from this book with the impression that Disney was the sole children's merchandiser of the mid-twentieth century.

A more serious failing, however, and one characteristic of Sammond's approach throughout this book, is that he makes no attempt to determine whether the concerns of child welfare professionals during the 1920s and 1930s had any bearing on the way parents actually raised their children. So the "generic" child of Sammond's description may not have had any substance outside the laboratories and advice books of child-rearing experts of the day. By extension, the relationship between the "discursive apparatuses" Disney supposedly "deployed" (13) and the methods favored by child-rearing experts, whether in the prewar heyday of behaviorists like Watson, or the postwar era's child-centrism, are similarly tenuous.

Discourse analysis can be an effective tool for revealing assumptions that unite seemingly unconnected elements of a culture's ideation, but to be meaningful there must be some verifiable correspondence between the intentions of those who trade in the tokens of the symbolic order. All too often Sammond produces reductive, mechanical formulae that undermine the credibility of his arguments. On the discursive operation of Disney's feature-length cartoon, Pinnochio, for example, he says: "The popular assumption regarding children and the movies ... was that every child in the theater would partake not only of Pinocchio's triumph, but of Walt Disney as the motive force behind that triumph. To watch Pinocchio was to consume Pinocchio. To consume Pinocchio was to consume Walt Disney; and to consume Walt Disney was to ingest the qualities essential to Americanness that were required for its reproduction in subsequent generations"(113).

A dominant theme in the historiography of childhood is the degree to which distinctions between children and adults have been erected (and dismantled) during the twentieth century in the U.S. In the realm of popular culture, Disney was instrumental in defining the domain of children, and yet Sammond's work is remarkable for its inattention to this issue given its centrality to the "discourse" on childhood. The other notable development among children in the West since World War Two, of course, has been the steady rise of spending by and for children; and while this phenomenon is critical to Sammond's argument, he treats it as significant only insofar as it reflects Disney's ability to deploy the "discursive apparatuses" that enabled him to enlarge his reputation and profitability. Sammond is erudite, and Babes in Tomorrowland contains one especially penetrating chapter on postwar politics and childrearing, yet it is an unusually opaque book that will tax even the most patient reader. Still, a work such as this, which makes almost no reference to the key themes identified by historians of children and childhood, evinces the increasing appeal of the field to scholars across an array intellectual concerns.

Stephen Lassonde

Yale University