Science in the service of children, 1893-1935
By: Alice Boardman Smuts ; with the assistance of Robert W. Smuts ... [et al.].
Contributors: Smuts, Robert W.
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: New Haven
Language: eng
Number of pages: 381
ISBN-13: 9780300108972
Subjects: Child development -- Research -- United States -- History; Children -- Research -- United States -- History; Child welfare -- United States -- History; Child rearing -- United States -- History
Description: "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."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Three movements, one goal; title: Save the child and save the nation : the rise of social feminism and social research; title: G. Stanley Hall and the child study movement; title: Scientific child rearing, organized motherhood, and parent education; title: Social welfare reformers and reform-minded scientists; title: The Children's Bureau under Julia Lathrop : government at its best; title: From juvenile delinquency research to child guidance; title: Better crops, better pigs, better children : the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station; title: The children's decade; title: Child development research : preventive politics; title: Out of step with his times : Arnold Gesell and the Yale Clinic; title: The child guidance movement : another approach to preventive politics; title: Child guidance becomes child psychiatry; title: The Children's Bureau under Grace Abbott : uphill all the way; title: Epilogue: What happened to the early movements? : the child development field after World War II.