The Failed Century Of The Child

Charts the effort to use state regulation to guarantee health and security for America's children.

In 1900, Ellen Key wrote the international bestseller The Century of the Child. In this enormously influential book, she proposed that the world's children should be the central work of society during the twentieth century. Although she never thought that her "century of the child" would become a reality, in fact it had much more resonance than she could have imagined. The idea of the child as a product of a protective and coddling society has given rise to major theories and arguments since Key's time. For the past half century, the study of the child has been dominated by two towering figures, the psychologist Jean Piaget and the historian Philippe Ariès. Interest in the subject has been driven in large measure by Ariès's argument that adults failed even to have a concept of childhood before the thirteenth century, and that from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth there was an increasing "childishness" in the representations of children and an increasing separation between the adult world and that of the child. Piaget proposed that children's logic and modes of thinking are entirely different from those of adults. In the twentieth century this distance between the spheres of children and adults made possible the distinctive study of child development and also specific legislation to protect children from exploitation, abuse, and neglect. Recent students of childhood have challenged the ideas those titans promoted; they ask whether the distancing process has gone too far and has begun to reverse itself. In a series of essays, Beyond the Century of the Child considers the history of childhood from the Middle Ages to modern times, from America and Europe to China and Japan, bringing together leading psychologists and historians to question whether we unnecessarily infantilized children and unwittingly created a detrimental wall between the worlds of children and adults. Together these scholars address the question whether, a hundred years after Ellen Key wrote her international sensation, the century of the child has in fact come to an end.

The 20th century, declared at its start to be the “Century of the Child” by Swedish author Ellen Key, saw an unprecedented expansion of state activity in and expert knowledge on child-rearing on both sides of the Atlantic. Children were seen as a crucial national resource whose care could not be left to families alone. However, the exact scope and degree of state intervention and expert influence as well as the rights and roles of mothers and fathers remained subjects of heated debates throughout the century. While there is a growing scholarly interest in the history of childhood, research in the field remains focused on national narratives. This volume compares the impact of state intervention and expert influence on theories and practices of raising children in the U.S. and German Central Europe. In particular, the contributors focus on institutions such as kindergartens and schools where the private and the public spheres intersected, on notions of “race” and “ethnicity,” “normality” and “deviance,” and on the impact of wars and changes in political regimes.

Integrating analyses of clinical, political, historical, educational, social, economic, and legal aspects of ADHD and stimulant pharmacotherapy, Mayes and colleagues argue that a unique alignment of social and economic factors converged in the early 1990s with greater scientific knowledge to make ADHD the most prevalent pediatric mental disorder.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • A “vivid and devastating” (The New York Times) portrait of an indomitable girl—from acclaimed journalist Andrea Elliott “From its first indelible pages to its rich and startling conclusion, Invisible Child had me, by turns, stricken, inspired, outraged, illuminated, in tears, and hungering for reimmersion in its Dickensian depths.”—Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, Time, NPR, Library Journal In Invisible Child, Pulitzer Prize winner Andrea Elliott follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani, a girl whose imagination is as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn shelter. In this sweeping narrative, Elliott weaves the story of Dasani’s childhood with the history of her ancestors, tracing their passage from slavery to the Great Migration north. As Dasani comes of age, New York City’s homeless crisis has exploded, deepening the chasm between rich and poor. She must guide her siblings through a world riddled by hunger, violence, racism, drug addiction, and the threat of foster care. Out on the street, Dasani becomes a fierce fighter “to protect those who I love.” When she finally escapes city life to enroll in a boarding school, she faces an impossible question: What if leaving poverty means abandoning your family, and yourself? A work of luminous and riveting prose, Elliott’s Invisible Child reads like a page-turning novel. It is an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family and the cost of inequality—told through the crucible of one remarkable girl. Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize • Finalist for the Bernstein Award and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award

In 1990, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child declared that children's "survival, protection, growth and development in good health and with proper nutrition is the essential foundation of human development." Drawing from many disciplines - history, anthropology, demography, art history, disability studies, and sociology - and across a broad geography, Healing the World's Children sheds light on the medical, political, and cultural dimensions of the efforts to preserve and protect the lives of our most vulnerable citizens.

Of the many hundreds of people who were investigated in connection with day care and ritual abuse cases around the country, some 190 were formally charged with crimes, leading to more than 80 convictions. But, none of it happened. It was a decade-long outbreak of collective hysteria - on a par with the Salem witch trials. Using extensive archival research conducted in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Minneapolis, and elsewhere, and drawing on dozens of interviews conducted with the hysteria's major figures, n+1 editor Richard Beck shows how a group of legislators, doctors, lawyers, and parents, most working with the best of intentions, set the stage for a cultural disaster. Psychiatrists and talk therapists turned dubious theories of trauma and recovered memory into a destructive new kind of psychotherapy. Social workers and detectives employed coercive interviewing techniques that led children to tell them what they wanted to hear.

This chapter provides a brief overview of the book highlighting the modest progress from child welfare to child well-being re?ected in these chapters, and the parallel movement in Kahn’s career and research, as his scholarship developed over the years. It then moves to explore the relationship between two overarching themes, child and family policy stressing a universal approach to children and social prot- tion stressing a more targeted approach to disadvantaged and vulnerable individuals including children and the complementarity of these strategies. Introduction To a large extent Alfred J. Kahn was at the forefront of the developments in the ?eld of child welfare services (protective services, foster care, adoption, and family preservationandsupport). Overtimehisscholarshipmovedtoafocusonthebroader policy domain of child and family policy and the outcomes for child wellbeing. His work, as is true for this volume, progressed from a focus on poor, disadvantaged and vulnerable children to a focus on all children. He was convinced that children, by de?nition, are a vulnerable population group and that targeting all children, empl- ing a universal policy as a strategy would do more for poor children than a narrowly focused policy targeted on poor children alone, As we ?rst argued more than three decades ago (Not for the Poor Alone; “Universalism and Income Testing in Family Policy”), one could target the most disadvantaged within a universal framework, and this would lead to more successful results than targeting only the poor.

Neoliberal logics of government shaping childhood today produce market-based frameworks for understanding childhood risks. In this timely work, Nadesan argues that these frameworks encourage affluent parents to pursue individualized technologies of the self to reduce risks posed to their children's future success.