Ann Hulbert, an accomplished journalist and editor, has written a lively and informative history of advice to American parents in the last 100 years. From the beginning of the Progressive Era to the present moment, we learn about the "experts" who wrote prescriptive advice to mothers about the proper way to maintain their children's health and wellbeing. Whatever advice this new generation of experts purveyed was presumptively based upon science, specifically pediatrics or child psychology. Raising America provides a lively and intelligent tour through the dogmas, vagaries, and all-too-often contradictory advice dispensed to parents by (mostly male) experts. The journey begins with a preoccupation with proper nutrition and physical health, moves mid-century toward a concern with social and emotional development, and winds up in the current celebrations of the intellectual prowess of the youngest of humans coupled with dire concerns about their future character and morality. Hulbert uses biography well to shed light on influences on each particular "expert's" advice.
As a backdrop, Hulbert discusses briefly how the mammoth disruptions of the latter half of the nineteenth century, the rapid rise in the status of science, and the decline of religious authority all conspired to leave parents bereft of traditional forms of support for the eternal dilemmas of raising happy, healthy, and productive children. Even if grandmother lived nearby, her advice began to falter in the face of a movement to replace her "uncertain instinct" with the "unhesitating insight" of "educated motherhood." A new generation of mostly white, middle-class, educated women were delighted with the notion of transforming motherhood into a true vocation based upon science. To do so would confer status on motherhood and provide an outlet for their education at a time when such outlets for women were few. Selfless mothering was thus transformed into a form of self-fulfillment.
Hulbert divides the last century into four eras; each era begins with a theme set forth by a conference on child development. For each era, she identifies two differing psychological or medical experts who dispensed advice to mothers on matters related to the health, morality, and mentality of children. The experts are all descendents of John Locke, proponent of discipline and nurture, and Jean Jacques-Rousseau, proponent of the free and naturally developing child. Hulbert divides the experts into two groups, each at one or the other end of the eternal tension American parents experience between emphasizing discipline or freedom. This tension allows Hulbert to use the rather tidy categories of "hard" and "soft" advisors. At one end stand the "hard" advisors-parent-centered, emphasizing the power of nurture, the child's malleability, and the importance of discipline and character development. At the other end stand the "soft" advisors-emphasizing child-centered parenting, flexibility, understanding, and the importance of children's freedom. The "hard advisors" tend to be preoccupied by schedules (for mother and child), discipline, and morality. The "soft" advisors believe in spontaneous development from within the child and are less concerned with discipline as they are with cultivating spontaneity and not interfering with nature's program.
For Hulbert, the century begins with a standoff between the pediatrician Dr. L. Emmett Holt and that most famous child of Rousseau and proponent of a carefree child-