The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child

Fass (Children of a New World), a UC Berkeley professor emerita of history, provides a wide-ranging and stimulating history of childhood and parenting in the U.S. Fass convincingly argues that in the rural, “new” society of Thomas Jefferson’s America, parents saw themselves as inheritors of a revolutionary tradition and tried to adapt to a raw and tumultuous country by emphasizing individual resourcefulness and independence. She shows how these qualities never really left the American psyche, highlighting how they led to a revolutionary modern school system; high school, for instance, is a “uniquely American institution” that became a second home for adolescents. She illustrates her points with examples from the childhoods of figures both famous (Ulysses S. Grant and Margaret Mead) and obscure (Rose Cohen, a 19th-century child seamstress). She concludes by noting that with the insecurities of the global economy, adolescents put off independence, particularly financial independence, for far longer than in the past two centuries, but that independence is still their eventual goal. Her work provides an invaluable perspective on an important topic. Agent: Jill Marsal, Marsal Lyon Literary. (June)