Judith Sealander

Sealander book explores ‘The Failed Century of the Child’

IIn her newly published book, The Failed Century of the Child: Governing America’s Young in the Twentieth Century, Judith Sealander, history, explores an unprecedented American effort to use state regulation to guarantee health, opportunity and security to the nation’s children. The achievements envisioned in the decades between 1900-2000 were enormously ambitious. “Their failure is somewhat a product of their ambition,” Sealander says. They do deserve recognition for their attempt to improve the lot of those who were previously “enslaved or ignored,” she affirms.

They also reflected entrenched, but self-contradictory, values and Americans’ inconsistent expectations of government. “People expected more of government but also placed more restraints upon government,” she says. As such, a “failed” century, Sealander argues, deserves a mixture of rebuke and cautious admiration. “In the words of E. M. Forster,” she says, “'Two cheers are quite enough. There is no occasion to give three.’”

Released simultaneously in hardcover and paperback editions by Cambridge University Press, the scholarly book offers cautionary tales that are well worth noting by a broad audience and is written in accessible language.

Governments on the local, state and national levels rarely established clear priorities when the interests of the young, their elders and the general public clashed, Sealander writes. Failure to do so often produced unexpected, even nonsensical, consequences. At best, it nourished ambivalence about responsibilities for children, reflected in public policy’s frequent inability to draw the lines—between proper parental discipline and child abuse—between medical privacy and mandatory immunization of all children—and between a disabled child’s right to an education and a school system’s need to balance a budget.

That contributed to the country’s failure to achieve the goals symbolized in the phrase, “century of the child.” In 1900, well-read Americans discussed a just-published book, The Century of the Child. Its Swedish author, Ellen Key, predicted that children’s welfare would be central to any definition of 20th- century progress. Nowhere did this really happen, certainly not in the United States, according to Sealander.

“The ideas central to attempts to improve childhood also enshrined contradictions in American culture,” Sealander says, pointing out that the contradictions are ongoing. While we esteem stability, many people “marry and divorce, marry and divorce.” While we love children, w spend far more on people over 65 than on people under 18. And though we venerate those who spend time with children, many fewer adults now actually do.

“We are a highly age-segregated society—more than any other society on earth—through public policy,” she says. We have moved away from a school system in which a 16-year-old boy can be in the same class with a kindergartner. “We don’t know what to make of age,” she adds. “With mothers and daughters often wearing the same blue jeans and worrying about preparing for dates, who’s the parent?”

Age demographics have also shifted dramatically over the century. In 1900, she points out, the average American was an 11-year-old male living on a farm. In 2000, the average American was an urban woman in her mid-30s.

The Failed Century of the Child explores a century’s history thematically, analyzing the creation and impact of decisions affecting children’s welfare, work, education and health. The topics range widely—beginning with some of the oldest duties accepted by states—to punish wrongdoers and succor the poor, and proceeding to analysis of state supervision of children’s work, education and health, functions previous centuries largely left to families.

Sealander's book investigates the “Alice’s Wonderland” of juvenile justice, 20th-century responses to child abuse, state aid to poor children, efforts to regulate child labor, government work programs for teenagers, the creation of comprehensive systems of compulsory public education, the expansion of public schooling for very young and disabled youngsters, efforts to improve and control children’s diets, play, and exercise and, finally, the establishment of required immunization against infectious childhood diseases.

Based on a wide variety of primary and archival materials, Sealander’s study synthesizes work from numerous disciplines as it investigates the transformation of American childhood into a public concern and a different experience. It surveys recent scholarship in many fields and reviews the literatures produced by earlier generations of experts on children.