'Century of the Child a misnomer,' historian says

BOWLING GREEN, O. — In her newly published book, “The Failed
Century of the Child: Governing America’s Young in the Twentieth
Century,” Dr. Judith Sealander 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,” the Bowling Green State University history
professor 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.

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, and 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, we 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. The nation has
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 also investigates the “Alice’s Wonderland” of
juvenile justice, state aid to poor children, efforts to regulate
child labor, government work programs for teenagers, the creation
of comprehensive systems of compulsory public education, and
efforts to improve and control children’s diets, play and
exercise.

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.

(Posted January 15, 2004 )