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Title: Raising America : Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children by ANN HULBERT ISBN: 0-375-40120-2 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 29 April, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.8 (10 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: An Ambitious History of Parenting Experts and Expertise
Comment: Breast or bottle? Co-sleeping or crib sleeping? Cry-it-out or rock to sleep? To spank or not to spank? New parents, eager to do what's best for their children, face endless decisions about the "right way" to raise their children. A quick glance through the parenting shelves at the local bookstore reveals that there is no lack of books weighing in on just about every current controversy, from pretty much every conceivable point of view. In just over a century, the study and popularization of child development has burgeoned from a handful of specialists to a plethora of experts, each with a particular ax to grind. How this happened is the focus of RAISING AMERICA, Ann Hulbert's ambitious history of twentieth-century parenting experts and expertise.
Hulbert structures her history around five key parenting and family conferences, from 1899's National Congress of Mothers to 1997's Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning, pausing in each case to reflect on the state of parenting philosophies and advice at the time. To further illustrate the evolution of expert advice on children, she profiles two key experts in each generation, each of whom falls into a distinct "camp." One exemplifies "child-centered" or "soft" parenting, a proponent of letting "nature take its course in childhood" and an advocate of parent-child bonding. The other, "parent-centered" expert instead advises strict discipline, believing in the power of parental nurture to shape child behavior for good or ill.
The first generation of parenting experts, Hulbert contends, came to prominence when early twentieth-century mothers, who viewed themselves as raising their children in a new and sometimes terrifying modern world, no longer trusted the time-honored "experts" of previous generations --- their own mothers and grandmothers. Instead, these modern mothers, eager to equip their children for twentieth-century success, looked to two male experts --- and parenting experts are overwhelmingly male --- for advice. G. Stanley Hall, the "soft" expert, was a psychologist who viewed childhood, especially adolescence, as a fragile, almost spiritual time --- a "new birth." His counterpart, L. Emmett Holt, was a pediatrician who advocated strict schedules and developed complicated feeding regimens for infants.
Hall and Holt's successors, too, provided polarizing advice to parents. From the strict behaviorist Watson, who famously conditioned a young child to fear not only rats but all other cute furry animals, to Gesell, whose timetables of child development were the precursors of the milestones that today's parents obsess over, to Spock, whose parenting advice defined the baby boomer generation but was later derided by the right as being too permissive and by the left as being too restrictive for women, it's no wonder that parents most often just ignored the parenting advice altogether, no matter how pervasive its message. As she profiles these experts, Hulbert includes not only excerpts from their popular manuals but also anecdotes from their personal biographies.
Since many of the experts were long on opinion but short on scientific research, they often based their theories on the childhood they knew best --- their own. Equally fascinating are these men's own experiences as parents. Too often, their advice failed to translate from the page to the nursery, and their wives and children suffered accordingly.
Ultimately, Hulbert's story is as much about the parents (mostly mothers) who digested the experts' advice as it is about the experts themselves. She concludes that, in the face of so much contradictory information, parents can't, and shouldn't, attempt to follow experts' advice to the letter. Instead, she writes, "no fine-tuned scheme for shaping futures lies in the experts' manuals, much less in their own homes." Experience, not expertise, is usually a parent's best teacher, and the readers of RAISING AMERICA, whether their own parenthood is fresh or seasoned, will be reassured by that message.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
Rating: 5
Summary: Raising America
Comment: 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.
Rating: 3
Summary: Relationship is more then me or my child
Comment: Child development or "raising" is not something that is done either by child (The Nature) *alone*, or by parent (The Nurture/er) *alone*, we are just parts.
The proverbial "whole" is our "relationship", our connection. Most experts are in fact as miss Hulbert suggests "part-centered" (either "soft", i.e. child-centered or "hard", i.e. parent-centered). But there are "whole-centered", "relationship-centered", or as Lawrence Cohen would say "connection-centered" experts, too, one of them being himself.
If you are interested in transcending all parts, check his Playful Parenting book where he transcends *both* permissiveness (Child or Nature viewed as privileged part) and authoritarianism (Parent or Nurture viewed as privileged part) by viewing our Relationship as a "Whole_Without_Privileged_Parts" through 'Playful Parenting' instead.
Your relationship with your child/ren will never be the same.
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Title: Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America by Peter N. Stearns ISBN: 0814798292 Publisher: New York University Press Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: Paranoid Parenting: Why Ignoring the Experts May Be Best for Your Child by Frank Furedi ISBN: 1556524641 Publisher: Chicago Review Press Pub. Date: September, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: American Childhoods by Joseph E. Illick ISBN: 0812218078 Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Pub. Date: July, 2002 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Worried All the Time : Overparenting in an Age of Anxiety and How to Stop It by David Anderegg ISBN: 0743225686 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 05 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Kid Stuff: Marketing Sex and Violence to America's Children by Diane Ravitch, Joseph P. Viteritti, Daine Ravitch ISBN: 0801873274 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: 28 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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