The Failed Century of the Child
Governing America's Young in the Twentieth Century

Charts the effort to use state regulation to guarantee health and security for America's children.

Judith Sealander (Author)

9780521535687, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 3 November 2003

386 pages, 23 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.57 kg

'Sealander's The Failed Century of the Child is simultaneously accessible and scholarly. The text is highly engaging, free from the dryness of many academic tomes. … Sealander provides us with an extremely useful compendium. The book is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate courses in history, child welfare, social policy, social work, and political science. It is also likely to be of interest to practitioners, policy makers and academics in those same fields.' Youth and Policy

Between 1900 and 2000 an unprecedented American effort to use state regulation to guarantee health, opportunity, and security to the country's children failed to reach its goals. The achievements envisioned were enormously ambitious and reflected entrenched but self-contradictory values and Americans' inconsistent expectations of government. As such, a 'failed' century deserves a mixture of rebuke and cautious admiration. Starting with the young, American public policy transformed individuals into strings of measurable characteristics. People became statistics, and if society could just get the measurements right, social policy said, progress would be possible. But children proved hard to quantify. Policies based on optimistic faith in the powers of applied scientific truth revealed perils implicit in acceptance of poorly understood social science paradigms. Definitions changed, as psychology or sociological or statistical theory changed, and good intentions foundered, as experts fiercely challenged each other's conclusions and public policies sought to respond.

Part I. Children's Welfare: 1. Juvenile justice: from 'child saving' to 'public accountability'
2. 'The Pontius Pilate' routine: government responses to child abuse
3. 'Illusory promises': state aid to poor children
Part II. Children's Work: 4. 'Inducting into adulthood': state reactions to the labor of children and adolescents
Part III. Children's Education: 5. 'Laying down principles in the dark': the consequences of compulsory secondary education
6. The return of the infant school: twentieth century preschool education
7. Public education of disabled children: 'rewriting one of the saddest chapters'
Part IV. Children's Health: 8. 'Shaped up' by the state: government attempts to improve children's diets, exercise regimes, and physical fitness
9. Mandatory medicine: twentieth century childhood immunization.

Subject Areas: Central government policies [JPQB], Age groups: children [JFSP1], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], History of the Americas [HBJK]