In 5 pages a century of family size and raising children is examined with attention paid to the sometimes extreme advice of so-called authorities including Dr. Spock in hopes of developing a more middle-of-the-road approach. There are 7 bibliographic sources cited.
Name of Research Paper File: CC6_KSsocChildRear.rtf
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Congress of Mothers met in Washington, DC in the winter of 1899, ushering in the hope of greater awareness of the effects of child rearing. At that time and
for several more decades, the general view of children was that they were necessary and when older could be quite useful (Hulbert, 1999). They should, however, "be seen but
not heard." A mark of the worth and success of parents in the early days of the 20th century was in how well behaved their children were - i.e.,
whether the children were capable of acting like small adults rather than as children. So much has changed in the past several decades.
We swung the pendulum too far away from austerity to in some cases total abdication of the responsibility of raising children. Too many today are allowed simply to
grow up rather than being raised, but we seem to be gravitating to a more reasonable middle ground. The Early Years of the Century
Certainly the United States had some large cities by the turn of the century, but the larger population still was rural. Even the towns and cities other than
those that already had become urban (New York and Boston, as example) still retained a rural atmosphere in terms of how families and society viewed the role of children.
On the farm and even in semi-rural settings, there was much work to do and the practice of hiring outsiders to help was rare.
It was up to the family to perform all of the routine chores associated with raising and caring for animals, growing plant-based food, preserving food for the winter, making