Science in the service of children, 1893-1935 / Alice Boardman Smuts ; with the assistance of Robert W. Smuts ... [et al.].

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Smuts, Alice Boardman.

Contributor:

Smuts, Robert W.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Child development--Research--United States--History.

Child development.

Children--Research--United States--History.

Children.

Child welfare--United States--History.

Child welfare.

Child rearing--United States--History.

Child rearing.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (1 online resource (xiv, 381 p.) ) ill.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, c2006.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This book is the first comprehensive history of the development of child study during the early part of the twentieth century. Most nineteenth-century scientists deemed children unsuitable subjects for study, and parents were hostile to the idea. But by 1935, the study of the child was a thriving scientific and professional field. Here, Alice Boardman Smuts shows how interrelated movements-social and scientific-combined to transform the study of the child.Drawing on nationwide archives and extensive interviews with child study pioneers, Smuts recounts the role of social reformers, philanthropists, and progressive scientists who established new institutions with new ways of studying children. Part history of science and part social history, this book describes a fascinating era when the normal child was studied for the first time, a child guidance movement emerged, and the newly created federal Children's Bureau conducted pathbreaking sociological studies of children.

Contents:

Introduction: Three movements, one goal

Save the child and save the nation : the rise of social feminism and social research

G. Stanley Hall and the child study movement

Scientific child rearing, organized motherhood, and parent education

Social welfare reformers and reform-minded scientists

The Children's Bureau under Julia Lathrop : government at its best

From juvenile delinquency research to child guidance

Better crops, better pigs, better children : the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station

The children's decade

Child development research : preventive politics

Out of step with his times : Arnold Gesell and the Yale Clinic

The child guidance movement : another approach to preventive politics

Child guidance becomes child psychiatry

The Children's Bureau under Grace Abbott : uphill all the way

Epilogue: What happened to the early movements? : the child development field after World War II.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-281-72167-0

9786611721671

0-300-12847-9

OCLC:

1100444647