Paula S. Fass, “The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child” (Princeton UP, 2016)

New Books in Sociology · Aug 11, 2016 · 59m

Paula S. Fass is a professor of history emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. Her book The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child (Princeton University Press, 2016) traces the changing views of childhood and childrearing as it followed the fortunes of the nation. Beginning with the nation’s founding when independence was fostered in children, to the nineteenth-century sentimental view of childhood as a time of innocence, to today’s parental anxiety about their children’s success, Fass examines both the changing opinions of…