Paula S. Fass. The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. $19.95, 352 pp.
Perhaps more than anything else, Paula S. Fass’s learned and engaging history of American parenting, The End of American Childhood, is a meditation on tradition. This is, after all, the very nature of parenting and childhood, which is the fulcrum between generations; a chance to preserve customs or to correct course. It is the place where one generation’s anxieties and hopes, and indeed its very self-understanding as a people and a civilization, become reified — or amended or rejected — in the next.
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