Motherhood, Childhood, and Parenting in an Age of Education: An Invited Invasion 2022055530, 9781032352275, 9781032352251, 9781003325949

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“What makes this an important contribution is that it links changes in the wider society (and even the world as in the world educational revolution) to changes in what constitutes the good mother without pretending that we now know what constitutes good motherhood. That is, the book avoids essentialist traps and pretentious universal application claims while still showing how consequential the models of the good mother have become for mothers, children, and their societies. This will be a salient text for students, teachers, and researchers for years to come.” Francisco O. Ramirez, Professor of Sociology, Stanford University “Reading this book changes the way you think about how education has transformed motherhood and childhood over the past century, including the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. Schaub’s compelling analysis is full of insights, creatively contrasting everyday notions and academic arguments with a wealth of evidence embedded in an accessible, engaging narrative of shifting intergenerational relationships. An important sociological contribution, it unmasks how the ever-tighter intersection between schooling and the family influences roles, expectations, and identities of childhood and parenthood everywhere.” Justin J.W. Powell, University of Luxembourg

Motherhood, Childhood, and Parenting in an Age of Education

Motherhood, as a celebrated yet underappreciated role, is often thought of as a natural process, something instinctive that we refine by watching our own mothers and others in our community. We rarely think of motherhood as something that is time and culturally specific, yet, like culture itself, it is socially constructed, and both motherhood and childhood evolve over time. With the rise in educational attainment of mothers in the American population, the expectations associated with childhood increasingly include not just education but cognitive development and extracurricular activities as the partnership between parents and education intensifies in the joint project of human development of children. Motherhood, Childhood, and Parenting in an Age of Education offers a new way to conceptualize the high demands of contemporary parenthood. It traces the emerging narrative about the “good mother,” changes in the underlying assumptions of what constitutes the “good mother,” and the implications for the “good childhood” as education grows in institutional strength. This book demonstrates that education is driving the formation of the parent and child roles in the dominant contemporary culture of the US although alternate models exist. Education itself has expanded over time to become our largest social intervention, defining behaviors and beliefs such as parental involvement in schooling, the unengaged parent, and the deficient student. Maryellen Schaub is an associate professor of education policy studies in the College of Education at the Pennsylvania State University and the professor-in-charge of the Education Theory and Policy program. As a sociologist of education, she investigates how social institutions, particularly family and schooling, intertwine and overlap in society. Her current research delves deeply into the social constructions of parenting and childhood, examining it from a number of angles and organizations. For example, she has published on topics as diverse as the increase of parent engagement in early childhood cognitive activities, the expansion of early childhood education, and the growth of child rights worldwide.

Motherhood, Childhood, and Parenting in an Age of Education

An Invited Invasion

Maryellen Schaub

Cover image: Shutterstock First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Taylor & Francis The right of Maryellen Schaub to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data Names: Schaub, Maryellen, author. Title: Motherhood, childhood and parenting in an age of education : an invited invasion / Maryellen Schaub. Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022055530 | ISBN 9781032352275 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032352251 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003325949 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Motherhood. | Parenthood. | Education— Parent participation. | Educational achievement. Classification: LCC HQ759 .S2744 2023 | DDC 306.874/3 — dc23/eng/20221207 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022055530 ISBN: 978 -1- 032-35227-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978 -1- 032-35225-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978 -1- 003-32594 -9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003325949 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

It is with the deepest gratitude for the example set by the many women in life who constitute my “mothers” and also “big sisters” that I dedicate this book. First and foremost, Mary Ellen Adamo Schaub but also Josephine Ricigliano Adamo; and additionally, Lois Hamilton, Bernadette Adams, Sharon McCarthy, and Michele Ebaugh as well as Faith Schaub Custer and Hope Schaub Murphy. And the many women in my life whose motherlove is a joy to watch, especially Nora Maginnis. Finally, for the three who made me mother, David, Tirzah, and Harry Baker.

Contents

List of Figures List of Tables Preface Acknowledgments 1 An Invitation

xi xiii xv xix 1

2 The Good Mother Goes to School

12

3 The “Good Childhood” Is a Delicate Balancing Act

28

4 The Institutional Invasion

48

5 The “Good Mother” Is an Engaged Parent

70

6 Parenting and the Social Construction of Achievement Gaps

87

7 Before the Invasion

103

8 The Invited Invasion as a Joint Project with the Family

116

References Index

125 147

Figures

1.1 Percent of Age Cohort Enrolled in School, 1900–2018 4.1 Year State Began Funding Kindergarten 4.2 Percent of 4-year-old children enrolled in State Pre-Kindergarten 2018–2019 6.1 NAEP Reading Scores by Race/Ethnic Background and Year (students 9 years old) 6.2 NAEP Mathematics Scores by Race/Ethnic Background and Year (students 9 years old)

7 55 67 93 93

Tables

4.1 Curricular Content Area Change in Kindergarten Math Textbooks, 1974 to 2001 4.2 Topic (Arithmetic) Expansion in Kindergarten Math Textbooks, 1974 to 2001 4.3 Measurement and Geometry in the Kindergarten Textbook, 1974 to 2001

59 59 60

Preface

At some point in young adulthood, I noticed that each time I visited my parent’s home, my mother had collected yet another mother and child statue. Ethnically diverse and from different parts of the world, the main thing they had in common was a celebration of motherhood. It was as if my mother was paying tribute to herself, creating a little museum devoted to the most important role of her life. This shrine to herself was the symbol of a role bound by an older set of expectations because by today’s standards, she had neglected big parts of the job. My mother never read a book to me, never checked my homework – to be honest, she never even told me to do my homework – and only occasionally and begrudgingly went to back to school night. Cognition, academic achievement, and an effectively managed, robust school career were in no way part of the mother role she was enshrining. And yet, she was a confident mother, certain that she was better at it than most. I began writing this book when my mother first started showing significant signs of dementia. It seemed a cruel joke when the disease was ravishing her brain, stealing her memories, taking from her the very essence of her life. “I’m your daughter” meant nothing to her – she had returned to a place where she was the daughter, and somehow I was the mother. The strange role reversal during the grief of losing her in slow-motion plunged me into deep reflection on her life, shrines and all; on how things as enduring as motherhood and childhood could also be so changeable in just a generation or two. I am similar to my mother in many ways, including a growing shrine of my own. Yet, along with my generation of mothers, I am also considerably different as a mother. She embraced the “good mother” of her time, my generation added a whole new set of complex responsibilities to that construct; raising the bar on the “good mother” and the well-developed child to what would have been considered over-the-top crazy by many of my mother’s peers. Along with safety, care, and socialization, the tasks now associated with motherhood include guiding cognitive development and managing long school careers as well as encouraging the necessary

xvi Preface

psychological skills. The duration of these components of parenting has also extended over time to ever younger and older children. Childhood is now a busy developmental stage requiring thoughtful, conscious monitoring that continues to spiral out to new heights. For instance, the increase in parent engagement has led to new concerns such as the over-scheduled child as well as the identification of new disorders such as ADHD. From stories about scary Tiger Moms to guilt-ridden, to-do lists in the heads of mothers, mothering and the child have been culturally transformed in a short time. Yet, why has this happened? Certainly, many conditions of motherhood and childhood change over time. For example, an average woman now has children later in life and fewer in number than in previous generations. And mothers increasingly work outside the home, even when children are very young. With fewer children and more established parents, childhood development has become the main focus of the family. Yet, although each of these demographic trends is part of the answer, in and of themselves they are not enough to explain the broad transformation. One significant and often overlooked contributor to these changes is the relentless growth in a culture of schooling that permeates parenting and childhood as never before. This book is about the ever-increasing challenge to parenting presented by schooling expansion. And moreover, the growing centrality of schooling within our culture so that it is transforming the very essence of motherhood and childhood. In doing so, a whole new regime of parenting behaviors has emerged as well as a more complex childhood. Childhood is so celebrated in contemporary US cultural that the public discourse continually perceives threats to this sacred developmental stage. Nostalgic assumptions of a better, freer time and concerns over the demise of childhood mingle with two contrasting culprits to blame. The first is that schooling has invaded the lives of children, diminished the family and family time, and destroyed the carefree childhood. And second is that parents, particularly mothers, are overly engaged and demanding, consuming the free time of children with educational and scheduled activities. Yet, both of these accounts miss the point. Parents have invited schooling into the family. These two powerful social institutions have joined together in the joint project of child development because schooling is the socially legitimated way to stratify society. Schooling has transformed our construction of both motherhood and childhood, changing the actions and behaviors associated with each. Beyond the addition of specific activities, schooling shapes both motherhood and childhood. I often reflect back on my mother and her vantage point as a woman lucky to have had children in what was probably the “golden age of the American family.” She relished the opportunities that came with motherhood and upward mobility. She was also limited by them. For example,

Preface xvii

in her generation, the distinctiveness of motherhood and fatherhood was much clearer. The line is much blurrier today. I, by no means, mean to leave out fathers and in many instances in the book, refer to parenthood. But I am particularly interested in the primary parent role that continues to be motherhood. My vantage point is so different yet also the same. I was molded not only by my mother but also by my contact with schooling including as a teacher-in-training in Washington DC, a PhD student in sociology, and now as an academic studying early childhood, education policy, and cultural change around them. Motherhood, Childhood, and Parenting in an Age of Education: An Invited Invasion is a mixture of research, both mine and others, with insights from historical images of motherhood and childhood, time diaries of early childhood activities, and observations of mothers and children. To make sense of both the differences and commonalities in the motherhood experience, I have interviewed typical American mothers and also women from the Amish farmlands of Pennsylvania. All evidence points to the growing role of education in redefining motherhood and childhood.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Mayli Zapata, Seyma Dagistan, Kayla Kemp, Wan Yu, and especially David Baker, for their editorial help.

Chapter 1

An Invitation

A couple of years back, the New Yorker had a cartoon on the front cover of a giant baby wearing a backpack holding the hands of two miniature parents. The image is both funny and disturbing; it also seems to capture the feeling of our time. Schooling has invaded the lives of very young children, diminishing the family and therefore family time, and destroying the idyllic childhood in its wake. At the same time, we are all too familiar with accounts of runaway parenting and the unending escalation of tactics to ensure a young child’s future academic success. We accept both accounts, yet together they do not make sense. This book is about the invasion of schooling into the family, but not from just one or the other of these paradoxical views. Instead, it describes the changes as an “invited invasion,” one in which parents have not been diminished by assertions of schooling, but rather are swept up by them, and intensify them in the ever more demanding job of child rearing. There has been a profound change in the parenting of young c­ hildren, particularly by mothers, as the centrality of schooling grows in society. Schooling, our largest social intervention ever, draws families in and enlists parents to participate in the cognitive development of their ­children. With the intensification of cognitive performance and educational attainment in adult opportunities, parents and schools have been joined together in a joint project of cognitive development of children. Their many critiques and complaints aside, parents have embraced a more school and cognitively based developmental approach to childhood. Their attitudes and behaviors continue to reify schooling in the lives of even very young ­children. Schooling has seeped into childhood, in part because it is also shaping parenting. The growing institutional strength of schooling over the contemporary period has led to a fundamental transformation of motherhood and childhood. The collective meaning attached to parenting in the US has come to include expectations associated with the “good parent” role and especially the “good mother” role. Parenting is often thought of as a natural process, something instinctive that we refine by watching our own DOI: 10.4324/9781003325949-1

2  An Invitation

parents as well as others. Or alternately, some academics now argue that parenting is book and expert driven. Regardless, we rarely describe parenting as something that is time and culturally specific, often opting for the “good old days” framing instead. But like all roles in life, parenthood is socially constructed, its collective meaning has changed over time in the US. By the middle of the 20th century, cognitive developer or “parent as teacher” had been added to the list of expected roles for the contemporary American parent and especially mothers. The rise is evidenced in predictable activities such as parental engagement in academic activities and monitoring school as well as in growing trends such as academic redshirting and special education referrals as parents continually invent new ways to encourage growth and create advantage for their children. As the connection between parents and schooling escalates, so too does the growing concern over the increase in cognitive demand and overscheduling of young children in combination with intense oversight by parents. In fact, the dramatic change in parenting has inspired terms like “helicopter parent” and “lawnmower parent.” These terms describe an extreme group of parents who are seen as too engaged. The dramatic name “helicopter parent” conjures visual images of mothers and fathers hovering over their children in school and monitoring their daily lives closely. The similar “lawnmower parent” actively smooths paths and life’s rough patches even for grown children. Recent extreme examples in the media go well beyond the typical “tiger mom” to the criminal behavior of 33 parents who were arrested in March of 2019 in the college admissions scandal. Included were two actors, Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman. Lori Loughlin was accused of paying $500,000 in bribes to get her daughters admitted to the University of Southern California via rowing although they were never on the team. After maintaining her innocence for over a year as well as claiming the investigators fabricated evidence, Loughlin and her husband Mossimo Giannulli pled guilty to cheating in the college admissions process. They received short prison sentences – two months and five months, respectively; fines – $150,000 and $250,000, respectively; and community service. In contrast, Felicity Huffman quickly admitted guilt. She pled guilty to honest services fraud after being accused of paying $15,000 to have a proctor change wrong answers on her daughter’s SAT exam. She spent 11 days in jail, and she was also fined and ordered to do community service. Somewhat comically, Huffman wrote, “I talked myself into believing that all I was doing was giving my daughter a fair shot” (Fernandez, 2019). Huffman and her husband William Macy are millionaires; their daughter has grown up in extreme privilege. Ironically, they could have bought their way into many colleges with perfectly legal actions. Instead, she chose to inflate her daughter’s test performance. Huffman’s actions could be interpreted as the arrogance of someone who is completely out of

An Invitation  3

touch with the common experience of an American adolescent. However, they could also be interpreted as the actions of a mom who wants to create the time-honored experience for her daughter: application and acceptance to college. Setting aside the arrogance or privilege, she merely took common over-parenting behavior to an extreme. Like the typical ­parent, she was well aware of her child’s academic abilities because she had been monitoring her school experiences over many years. Unscrupulously, ­ she took the “good mother” role one-step further than what is legally acceptable. Examples like this have resulted in what many see as a trend in over-parenting so threatening that a countermovement, “slow parenting,” has sprung up. Slow parenting is the purposeful choice by parents to allow children room to grow naturally and explore independently without too much scheduling. The similar “free range parenting” encourages independence. Both slow and free range parenting appeal to our nostalgic belief that sometime in the past, there was a better childhood filled with freedom and exploration, an idea that frequently bumps up against “intensive” parenting.1 Concern about over-parenting has also produced a plethora of recent titles such as How to Raise an Adult; Break Free of the Over-Parenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success (2016) by Julie LythcottHaims and The over-scheduled child: Avoiding the hyper-parenting trap (2010) by Alvin Rosenfeld and Nicole Wise. These titles, and many others like them, lament contemporary parenting. At the same time, they emphasize the critical role of parenting and the power of schooling in the creation of modern lives. Their appeal also harkens back to a “Leave it to Beaver” 1950s style childhood. It is nostalgia reminiscent of Rousseau’s 18th century romantic ideas of childhood and human development. Rousseau believed that children are born innocent and need protection from the evils of society in an isolated place where learning unfolds organically and children develop their interests at their own pace. Like Rousseau, freedom and independence are central to contemporary countermovement versions of childhood but the “evils of society” are typically focused on parents and schools. As a problem, they threaten child development through intrusive and overbearing behaviors. In this telling, schooling has profoundly and detrimentally altered the lives of children and is responsible for a host of negative outcomes and unfulfilled potential. For example, Allison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist at UC Berkley and author of The Gardener and the Carpenter (2016), argues that parents should create a healthy environment and then get out of the way. She believes that creative and ­problem-solving development is encouraged when children are able to grow naturally and develop their interests independently. Moreover, Gopnik sees contemporary American parenting as formulaic, a deliberate attempt to mold children that is largely the fault of achievement-oriented schooling.

4  An Invitation

However, parenting is not an either/or binary, all parents live in the tension between the nostalgic free childhood and the schooled society. Although the helicopter/lawnmower, slow/free range parenting philosophies appear to be at opposite ends of a spectrum, they share important cultural beliefs and represent a general trend in parenting that purposefully contemplates schooling and cognition. Regardless of the many differences, the intention is similar, strategic parenting for maximum child development as parents employ tactics devised to enhance the future lives of their young children. Ironically, the term parenting is currently getting some attention as a relatively newly coined verb that, for some, implies less than undesirable behavior.2 Regardless, contemporary parents continue to choose engagement and amongst all the pomp and flair over what is the “right way” to foster child development, one anomaly is clear: parents, far from denouncing schooling, are increasingly participating in the process and goals of schooling. For contemporary American culture, school performance is the socially legitimated path to status and later opportunities. One byproduct of a schooling culture is that even the wealthiest of parents know that they must present the accomplishments of their children as legitimate. Therefore, even the most privileged families who could buy their way into college legally wish to maintain their child’s merit publicly. Of course, there are a number of legal ways that wealthy parents create advantage for their children and a plethora of research describing them but the path is typically through schooling. For example, enrollments at the most competitive and prestigious universities are overwhelmingly comprised of students from very privileged backgrounds (Carnevale & Strohl, 2014). These students are typically aided by college admissions consulting. It is a booming industry that requires significant financial resources and creates advantage for some students. Schooling is the socially legitimated way in which inequality is created. Parents, therefore, invite schooling into the family to assist in the creation of the “good childhood.” Moreover, families routinely exploit existing opportunities and create new avenues of advantage in schooling for their children. Like all roles in life, parenting is socially constructed. Although a common narrative describes parenting as a natural process, something instinctive that is refined by watching our own parents as well as others, in this book parenting is described as time and culturally specific. The framework emphasizes the collective meaning attached to parenting and the cultural process that expands and defines new expectations for the “good mother” in the creation of the “good childhood.” From this perspective, the “good mother” is a cultural barometer who gauges changes in the shared meaning of parenting: a reading of the normative pressure that builds among parents, encourages parenting behavior to move in a similar direction, and eventually results in converging trends between parent

An Invitation  5

groups. While not all parents conform, all parents are influenced by the reigning ­construction of the “good mother.” Accordingly, the “good mother” is not my moral judgment nor is it my prescription for parenting. It is a cultural goal, what the founding German sociologist Max Weber called an ideal type. The “good mother” is an everyday theory of how to be a mother and how to raise children. It is a role that historically was assigned to women and therefore, I use the term motherhood. But men, as well as gender non-conforming individuals, are increasingly engaging in this cultural role. A main theme of this book is the intensification of the “good mother” role over time as they, as well as their children, are increasingly shaped by schooling. As a result, cognitive development and schooling have become main ingredients in the recipe for creating the “good childhood.” Furthermore, the adjective “good” is used with some irony because neither the “good mother” nor the “good childhood” is a cultural absolute. In fact, they may be quite different in other places and at other times. In addition, they are not averages. Instead, the “good mother” and the “good childhood” are examples of how norms are established and then moral judgments are layered around them. The result is a powerful cultural message about a holy trinity that continues to grow to new proportions as the relationship between the school, parent, and child further solidifies.

The Education Revolution There is ongoing chatter among parents, the media, and society at large about the changes in childhood. As if the Great Oz was behind the curtain reconstructing childhood unbeknownst to the rest of us, parents marvel at the meaning attached to childhood as if somehow it is being imposed from the outside. Children are enrolled in school at younger and younger ages and parents lament over-scheduled children while standing in line to sign them up for extra-curricular activities. The contemporary parent seems baffled, as if they have no agency. However, parents participate, not because it is being imposed from the outside but because they have come to believe education is the main way to have a positive impact on their child’s future. Several hundred years ago, formal education played almost no role in the process of intergenerational mobility; instead, family of origin determined adult status. Grown children were likely to remain in the same social class as their parents and even enter the same occupation. For example, male children of farmers were likely to become farmers and male children of aristocrats were likely to remain aristocrats. All of that has steadily changed. In the middle of the 20th century, educational attainment emerged as a significant causal factor in adult status attainment (Blau & Duncan, 1967). In the next few decades, the strength of the relationship

6  An Invitation

between family of origin and adult status attainment, net of individual education, declined further, some estimates showing that the relationship declined by a full third from what it had been in the 1960s (Hout, 1988). For example, in the late 20th century, family of origin grew less important in the social mobility of those with a college degree. In other words, evidence showed that adult status was increasingly based on the educational attainment of the individual rather than family of origin, especially for college-educated people. This trend has continued since the late 1980s (Brand & Xie, 2010; Torche, 2011). Although the US has higher inequality and lower mobility than many of its peer nations (Corak, 2013), for some education is “the great equalizer” and, in particular, for those in the bachelor’s degree category – a category that has steadily grown in the last 100 years. Social histories typically attribute the transformation of Western societies to large social movements such as capitalism and Protestantism but the growing strength of education as a social institution also contributed to the changes in the day-to-day lives of individuals and general societal conditions. Increasing educational attainment has weakened the link between family of origin, and adult income and occupational status. Figure 1.1 illustrates the remarkable expansion of mass education in the US over the 20th century. By 1900, a large segment of the population was already enrolled in elementary school but high school and kindergarten enrollments were low. However, over the 20th century, we reached near universal enrollment in all three of these levels of schooling. In addition, we gained significant enrollments in preschool as well as tertiary education. Preschool enrollment reached 60% by 2018 and tertiary education is approaching 50%.3 This is a remarkable change in the population that should not be minimized. Human populations change with significant increases in average educational attainment (Baker, 2014). For example, educated populations live longer, have fewer children, and do fewer behaviors associated with high health risk. Educated populations also reconceptualize roles such as parenthood and childhood. Far from a formality or fallacy, participation in schooling transforms populations and individuals. In most instances, schooling expansion has meant the upward and outward expansion to older and older individuals as well as larger and larger segments of the population. Parenting exists within that dramatic shift in human populations because the upward and outward expansion of schooling results in greater and greater segments of the parent population having more and more education. Of equal significance, schooling also expands downward to ever-younger children. That downward expansion represents a fundamental transformation in the day-to-day lives of children. It is also an indication of the parental and societal transformation in the conception of childhood from family dominated to joint project between family and schooling.

An Invitation  7

100%

80%

60%

Preschool Kindergarten Elementary

40%

High School College

20%

0%

1900

1920

1940

1960

1980

2000

2018

Figure 1.1  Percent of Age Cohort Enrolled in School, 1900 –2018. Sources: US Census Bureau. CPS Historical Time Series Tables on School Enrollment. Retrieved March 2, 2020, from https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/ demo/school-enrollment/cps-historical-time-series.html NCES. Digest of Education Statistics. Percentage of the population by age group, 1940 through 2018. Retrieved March 2, 2020, from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/ digest/d19/tables/dt19_103.20.asp US Census Bureau. Statistical Abstract of the United States. School and College Enrollments and Expenditures, for Continental United States: 1900 to 1940. Retrieved March 2, 2020 from https://books.google.com/books?id=fdiMlinGyM4C&num=13 US Census Bureau. 2010 -2018 Resident population estimates – by single year of age. Retrieved April 8, 2020, from https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/ tables/2010 -2018/national/asrh/PEPSYASEXN.pdf?# US Census Bureau. 1990 -2020 population estimates - by single year of age. s urveys/ Retrieved March 2, 2020 from https://www2.census.gov/programs-­ p o p e s t / t a b l e s /19 9 0 -2 0 0 0 / i n t e r c e n s a l /n a t i o n a l / ? s e c _ a k _ r e f e r e n c e =18 . e60fea5.1513312272.7c8b70 US Census Bureau. 1980 census of population. Retrieved March 2, 2020, from https:// www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1980/1980censusofpopu8011u_bw.pdf US Census Bureau. National Intercensal Tables: 1900 -1990. Retrieved March 2, 2020, ht t ps://w w w.census.gov/dat a /t ables/time -series/demo/popest /pre -198 0 -­n ational. html This is a line graph depicting the rise in preschool, kindergarten, elementary, high school and college enrollments from 1900 to 2018.

What Is the Invader? Social scientists have long examined norms, or the rules and expectations of the social world, in explaining human behavior. However, normative behavior, such as going to school, does not live in a vacuum. Instead, it has

8  An Invitation

the potential to be transformative. For example, mass schooling emerged in the modern period and as an invited invader into the ­family, it has transformed both parenting and childhood. More than a daily ­routine, schooling has altered the shared meaning attached to motherhood and childhood and all the expectations, behaviors, and activities associated with them. Popular books on the role of schooling in contemporary society generally come in two flavors. Either they warn of the perils of an overeducated population or they describe education as a sorting mechanism giving opportunities to some but not others. In both scenarios, the likely explanation comes under the social reproduction umbrella – a theory of society that attempts to explain the transmission of inequality across generations. The fact that schooling participates in the reproduction of the social world is a painful but well documented reality of contemporary education in the US. However, sorting is not the only outcome of schooling. This book utilizes a relatively new way of thinking about society and culture that draws on theories of social construction and neo-institutionalism and describes how schooling and family overlap and intertwine. An Invited Invasion is about the fundamental change in parenting to a more school and cognitively based developmental approach, not just more demands but a change in the parenting role and also childhood. Through the creation of new roles and the evolution of norms, schooling has altered both parenting and childhood. School-related behaviors have become normative and as a result have transformed social constructions like the “good mother” and the “good childhood.” There is no one “natural way” to parent nor is there one “right way” to foster childhood. Instead, dominant parenting approaches and their impact on childhood emerge through shared meanings attached to developmental stages. However, shared meanings are not stagnant, they evolve over time. The world is “socially constructed” by the culture of social institutions that shape what individuals do, feel, and express (Berger & Luckmann, 1966).4 As important sets of norms and roles in society, social constructions like motherhood and childhood are not fixed rather they change over time. From this perspective, social institutions shape modern life. They do not merely exist and slowly evolve, instead institutions also create social meaning. This insight gives us a unique way in which to understand the creation of roles and norms. Other approaches may view education as a process of socialization, training, allocation, and social reproduction, but a central assumption of neo-institutional theory is that through these processes education shapes society by classifying people into categories with distinct social status.5 In other words, schooling creates new identities and cultural blueprints for modern society in a number of expanded ways over time (Baker, 2014; Meyer, 1977; Parsons & Platt, 2013).6 For example, education is the lead institution in the validation of

An Invitation  9

the domain-specific expert – such as early childhood educator or pediatric psychiatrist, and the creation of new areas of knowledge – such as early childhood development. Extended to schooling and the family, neo-institutional theory adds a new lens in which to examine motherhood and childhood. Schooling, our largest social intervention ever, increasingly penetrates the lives of individuals and populations, and in the process shifts fundamental meanings attached to different stages of human life. Human society is made up of a series of overlapping and interlocking – or intersectional – roles and norms (institutions), but the shared meanings (social construction) we attach to those roles and norms change over time. Childhood, as a socially constructed developmental stage, is a prime example. Our norms and expectations about childhood were transformed as the dominant institutions in society shifted from community and extended family, to nuclear family and then the individual. First, schooling creates new identities like preschooler or kindergartener but also more broadly, engaged parent or “­parent as teacher.” Schooling draws families in, enlisting parents to participate in the cognitive development of their children and also consuming family time. With the intensification of cognition and educational attainment in adult opportunities, parents and schools have been joined together in a child development project. Education, as a powerful institution, defines the norms around these roles that result in labeling extreme expressions such as “helicopter parent” and “lawnmower parent,” but also contrasting roles such as the unengaged parent. Second, increasing amounts of schooling have also changed the population of parents and how they construct the parenting role as well as childhood. An everyday theory of the child is transformed with more educated parents, as is the parent’s relationship with and participation in schooling. For example, more educated parents increasingly choose to enroll young children in formal schooling and for longer parts of the day, and in addition, they engage in the schooling process in new and different ways. The next two chapters explore shared meaning and the development of roles and norms. The contemporary construction of the “good mother” and the creation of the “good childhood” are examined both prior to mass schooling and as result of schooling expansion. In the modern and contemporary periods, education grew as a normative experience and increasingly defined the “good mother” and the “good childhood.” Their evolving constructions have been influenced by demography but are the result of the growing power of education as a social institution. Next, the invited invasion is illustrated through early childhood ­education. Chapter 4 examines the expansion of schooling downward to younger children – kindergarten and preschool. Unlike upward expansion, there is little human capital logic in the expansion of schooling to younger children. Instead, widespread cultural ideas about the benefits of

10  An Invitation

education and the enhancement of the individual draw parents and their young children into the realm of schooling at earlier and earlier ages and for longer parts of the day and year. Chapters 5 and 6 examine two consequences of a schooled society. First, parental involvement in schooling is a main consequence of the invited invasion. Schooling has increasingly drawn families in over the last 100 years, creating the role of “parent as teacher” and the expectation that all parents should be engaged in their children’s schooling and cognitive development. Motivated by the belief that parents play an important part in the education process, research on parental involvement in schooling has grown. The research literature makes a strong case that parental involvement in children’s schooling, both in terms of guidance and supervision of cognitive tasks, can have an important impact on children’s school success. Chapter 5 juxtaposes a social reproduction lens with a normative lens to demonstrate the two-step process where as behaviors become normative, parents exploit or invent new ways of creating advantage for their children. The schooled society also creates negative identities such as the unengaged parent and the deficient student as well as achievement gaps. Public concern over the achievement gap between poor children and their more privileged peers has existed since President Johnson’s War on Poverty. The construction of this social problem has led to extensive research that repeatedly shows that the gap in cognitive achievement is persistent and exists between White and Black children, and White and Hispanic children, as well as poor children and their more privileged peers. There is extensive empirical evidence that achievement gaps begin before the start of formal schooling, persist throughout schooling, and have long-term consequences for students. Yet, as a society, the will to eliminate achievement gaps seems to continually escape us. There are, however, counterfactuals to schooling as a primary institution. For example, Chapter 7 explores how the Old Order Amish purposefully limited the role of schooling in their children’s lives. Amish children go to school for eight years, usually in multi-age one-room schoolhouses. The main thrust of the curriculum is limited to reading, writing, and arithmetic. Families and the community are supportive of the school and teacher, but schooling does not encroach on the family. Instead, the Amish missed the 20th century transformation of schooling by intentionally isolating their schools from public and secular influences. Finally, the book offers concluding thoughts on the transformative power of education as an institution. Some scholars have questioned the effects of education, calling it a myth that sorts and reproduces the social world. Others see education through a more realist human capital lens where education produces a workforce with the skills and knowledge necessary for a successful economy. This book develops a cultural rather than economic model. In the US, schooling is the largest social intervention,

An Invitation  11

so powerful that it has transformed the family. First, by expanding both upward and downward and, as a result, consuming larger portions of the life course. Second, by creating new identities, for example “parent as teacher” or the deficient student. And finally, by changing norms associated with the roles of motherhood and childhood. Capitalism and the Reformation set the stage for education. Through them, an individualistic, human development model emerged.

Notes 1 “Intensive motherhood” is a term coined by Sharon Hays to describe the expectation for contemporary mothers to “spend a tremendous amount of time, energy and money in raising their children” (Hays, 1996, p. x). 2 See Allison Gopnik, for example. 3 Tertiary education is a conservative estimate of 18–21-year-olds because the numbers include all kinds of post-secondary education including graduate education and is calculated as a percent of 18–24-year-olds. 4 In The Social Construction of Reality, one of the most influential sociological works of the 20th century, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966) argue that shared meanings evolve through an interactive cultural process that results in slow persistent change. 5 Neo-institutionalism or a cultural approach is used to explain the origins and expansion of mass schooling, the institutional underpinnings of education in ­society, and the ways in which schooling alters important social constructions and institutional arrangements in modern society. For example, the rise of mass schooling illustrates the power of education. Regardless of local political or economic conditions, there has been a rapid worldwide rise in mass schooling spurred by the belief that education has a positive impact on national development and individual lives. 6 This work relies heavily on the extensive neo-institutional work that has come before it including the work of sociologists John Meyer, Francisco Ramirez, and David Baker.

Chapter 2

The Good Mother Goes to School

In the 1990s when I had my two children, I took notice of something I had never thought much about before. The responsibilities associated with motherhood had somehow changed over time. I would have been bliss­ anging around fully in the dark except that I made the rookie mistake of h parks and joining baby groups. It was there that I first heard remarks like “She has 153 words,” and “He understands two! I mean not just that he can count to two but he understands that when you put two ones together, they are two.” In the coming years, when parenting tools like Baby Einstein and Baby Mozart appeared, I sensed something profound had changed in motherhood. Everyone around me seemed inexplicably engaged in the added dimension of mother as monitor and guide of ­cognitive development, not only in school age children but from the very start. The moms I encountered in the park had fully grasped the reigning definition of the “good mother,” and they were in hot pursuit of the “good childhood.” Like me, they had a lot of education, especially in comparison to their own mothers and grandmothers. In a relatively short period of time in the 20th century, the typical mother and her role had changed significantly. For example, in 1950, 35% of adult females had a high school degree or more. The typical female married at age 20, had three or more children, and was a full-time, stay-at-home mother. By 2021, this picture had changed dramatically. Ninety-two percent of adult females had a high school degree or more. The typical female married at age 29, had less than two children, and worked outside the home (US Census Bureau, 2018, 2021a, 2022). While these general trends are broadly known, they are usually linked to implications in the changing availability of the mother. For example, how do motherhood and childhood change when the mother is working outside the home? Or, how do these roles change when there are less children? Little attention has been given to how these roles change when mothers have more education. Although social scientists have consistently found that mothers spend more time than fathers caring for children, there has been relatively little discussion of its companion finding DOI: 10.4324/9781003325949-2

The Good Mother Goes to School  13

that education attainment is a strong predictor of how mothers interpret and act on the role. Furthermore, the limited research that does exist is typically a cross-sectional comparison of the most educated with the least educated mothers and therefore fails to appreciate the growing impact of mass education on all mothers. Motherhood is a sacred institution in modern society, so sacred that it can be difficult to identify those parts of the role that are dynamic. And yet, motherhood is socially constructed. Of course, there are elements that are consistent over time, perhaps even instinctive, but the role of mother as well as the space between mother and child that constitutes their relationship is evolving. That role and that bond, which we assume are so sacred, have a history that has expanded and intensified over time. Although it may appear to be a natural or biological process, in fact, there are significant cultural influences that shape motherhood. Chief among these is education. The growth of mass schooling altered conceptions of motherhood as greater proportions of mothers were exposed to more education. To demonstrate the socially constructed aspects of motherhood, this chapter examines the role through examples of shared meanings of the “good mother” both prior to the onset and after mass schooling emerged. The emphasis is on the ongoing historical development and shift in dominant social institutions toward the individual and schooling. The chapter begins by establishing the symbolic importance of motherhood through our emerging notions of what constitutes the “good mother.” It then digs deeper into the culturally adaptive “good mother” with examples that demonstrate the construction over a long historical period: first, through artistic images of Mary from the Middle Ages that portray an early version of the Western “good mother” and then through wet nursing and social histories of the Western family that offer examples of how motherhood changes through time and space, and finally with the contemporary example of the educated “good mother.” The chapter closes with the 20th century growth in scientific fields that have helped define the contemporary “good mother” including the emerging disciplines of developmental psychology and neurobiology, both products of the education revolution, as well as demographic trends that are also tied to education. Just as educated women initiated large demographic shifts such as the decline in the fertility rate, they also changed the family by partnering with schooling in the joint project of child development, and education was invited into the family.

The Social Construction of the “Good Mother” Although hard to define, we are all sure we know the “good mother.” She is always concerned for her children and engaged in their development.

14  The Good Mother Goes to School

She is self-sacrificing and devoted. And the media and popular culture are full of examples of her. It is a role that can feel timeless yet there are many aspects of motherhood that change over time and with place, including how we describe the “good mother” and what we expect of her. In The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother (1994), the psychologist Shari Thurer describes the modern “good mother” as “a woman who puts aside her own desires to rear and inspire her children” (p. 141). In fact, every generation of television seems to produce a “good mother” from June Cleaver, to Carol Brady, Edith Bunker, Clair Huxtable, and even the cartoon version, Marge Simpson. But the “good mother” has been around much longer than American television as have cultural iconography of her. Since the mid-20th century, social historians have used texts and other remnants of the past to study motherhood through a constructionist lens. A central theme to emerge from this work is the shift in dominant social institutions away from the extended family and toward the nuclear family including a heightened focus on the development of the child. Motherhood from this prospective is neither biological nor instinctive, it is a socially constructed role with dynamic shared meaning that runs through a c­ ulture. Accordingly, our expectations of the “good mother” are spatial and temporal, evolving with time and place. For example, the Christian icon Mary is a familiar maternal symbol in the West and the subject of a tremendous amount of artwork whose motherly essence was transformed over time. Demonstrating the evolution of cultural constructs, artistic representations of Mary changed from a royal detached figure to a protective, emotionally engaged parent from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. Because I grew up in a large Catholic family in suburban New York, I never questioned the significance of the relationship between Mary and Jesus. The weekly message we received: he sacrificed his life for us, we were his flock, she was his mother, and they had a special bond. My own mother, as the mother of eight children, summoned them in her most desperate moments; she could regularly be heard moaning “Jesus, Mary and Joseph.” Mary was so revered and yet so accessible to us that most of the girls I knew were named in her honor, Mary or Mary Something – some common like Mary Ann, Mary Jane, or Mary Beth and some rather unusual like Mary Ignatius. We were an army of Marys-in-training. And, of course, images of the Madonna abound in my childhood, not the royal images of the Middle Ages but a common Mary that appeared in art around the 14th century. Mary, as a symbol of motherly devotion, was a constant presence in my life but it was not until I became a sociologist and then married a protestant with no capacity for Mary worship that I contemplated her significance as a cultural construct. Far from the symbolism of the Virgin peddled by the puritanical 1950s and 1960s with every

The Good Mother Goes to School  15

protestant baffled by her place in the Catholic Church, the Mary that emerged in art during the Renaissance is the forerunner of the m ­ odern “good mother.” The significance of Mary in Western parenting should not be underestimated. From the 3rd century forward, her theological significance was to guarantee Jesus’ humanity (Miles, 2008). From the Early to the High Middle Ages, the cult of Mary as a heavenly queen grew in Western Europe, but in the 14th century, Mary’s appearance in art depictions changed from royalty to commoner. The throne, crown, and jewels were replaced by loose, billowing clothing and a head covering. Her new humble demeanor made Mary accessible to all women; she became familiar and unassuming. The remnants of the formal, mournful Mary were also giving way to a more emotionally engaged relationship between Mother and Child (Goffen, 1999). Marian images from the Late Middle Ages onward portray a mother protecting, feeding, and emotionally supporting her Child. Through her simple clothing, tender facial expressions, and gentle actions, art renderings of Mary from the 14th to 18th century were representations of an evolving notion of the “good mother,” a suggestion for women in the West to redefine motherhood. For example, many great Italian masters of the Renaissance created ­representations of the relationship or the space between Mary and the baby Jesus, commonly depicting a Mary that is focused on and tender toward her Child. In Leonardo da Vinci’s depictions of Mary from the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the baby Jesus is on her lap. She is gingerly embracing and gazing at him; she is affectionate and attentive but controlled. The baby Jesus is chubby and playful. Together, they are warm and loving. She enjoys motherhood and the connection to her Child. Michelangelo also created art representations of the Mother and Child in roughly the same time period, however, they are less playful and more intimate. Mary’s aura gives the viewer access to an added dimension in their relationship. She is tender and worshipful. This Mother recognizes the unique qualities and potential of her Child; she anticipates his future impact on humanity. In an account of Mary’s motherhood, art historian Rona Goffen (1999) argues that Michelangelo portrayed a new dimension in the relationship between Mary and Jesus through Mary’s intense devotion for her Child. Moreover, both da Vinci and Michelangelo offer the contemporary viewer a window into the time period. Both of these masters, as well as other Renaissance artists, captured the expanding maternal role through the sentiment in their artwork. They anticipated the evolving construction of the “good mother” and “good childhood” as the dominant social institution slowly shifted away from the extended family and toward the individual. Mary’s focus on the Child foreshadows emerging parenting norms as the nuclear family asserted itself and children slowly moved to

16  The Good Mother Goes to School

the center of family life. Their art renderings are the first appearance of the “good mother” and the intense maternal commitment to her Child. Both da Vinci and Michelangelo also illustrated another dimension of the evolving construct of the “good mother” through images of a particularly interesting Mother and Child called the “Madonna lactans,” or “nursing Mary.” Both the symbolic meaning of Mary nursing Jesus and the sheer number appearing from the 14th to the 18th century suggest that it was a significant image for women in this time period. With the looming threat of malnutrition and disease, the Madonna lactans was a cultural symbol of nourishment and nurturance. These images stress that Mary not only gave birth to Jesus, she also supplied all the essential elements for survival and existence. In one common version of the Madonna lactans, she and the baby Jesus are gazing at each other with a warmth and intense connection that portrays the unique Mother-Child bond. In these paintings, there is a palpable connection and affection between the two. In later images, Mary gazes at the baby Jesus, but he gazes at the viewer. His gaze is so inviting that it establishes a connection with the viewer and an invitation to participate in the nourishment (Miles, 2008). This is a powerful relationship for both Mother and Child, she is focused on him, and his needs and development; he is focused on the broader world and his connection to it. He is communicating his pleasure to the viewer and encouraging all viewers to emulate their intense relationship. Mary, as the model of motherhood, is providing him with the essential elements for existence. Much like a Gerber baby food ad, she is the idealized “good mother” in all her devotion, providing the sustenance for life. But it is a mistake to think that the “good mother” flows uncontested, rather other social phenomena push against the family including power, class, and inequality that challenge the “good mother.” For example, it is curious that images of the Madonna lactans emerged during this period because in Europe during the Middle Ages and into the modern period, wet nursing was used as a tool for advancing family interests. Wet nursing, or the practice of nursing another woman’s child, has been around since antiquity but in ancient times, wet nursing was practiced out of necessity, when a mother died or was unable to produce milk or breastfeed. During the Middle Ages, a highly stratified system developed where wealthier families bought the services of middle status women who in turn had to buy the services of less well-to-do women. As a result, wet nursing became an established occupation that was well organized and often run by men – the husbands of the mother and wet nurse (Fildes, 1988). It was so successful that the increase in fertility beginning in the 11th century is at least partially attributable to its use because wet nursing enabled mothers to reproduce more frequently. And wet nursing endured

The Good Mother Goes to School  17

for many centuries. While it was abandoned by the upper classes by the late 18th century, during the Industrial Revolution wet nursing enabled working-class women to work outside the home. Although art renderings were subtly advocating for breastfeeding by the “good mother,” the tug of family as the dominant social institution prevailed for much of the medieval and early modern period which led many women to choose wet nursing. And unfortunately, some social historians from the 1960s and 1970s incorrectly interpreted the use of wet nurses. They claimed that the high infant mortality rates of some groups of wet nursed children were evidence of infanticide, an attempt by mothers to rid themselves of unwanted children. As a result of newly discovered texts about the day-to-day life of common people, scholars published accounts of foundling hospitals for poor children where women wet nursed multiple children in over-crowded and often unsanitary conditions. Even upper class children encountered practices that by today’s standards seem like child abuse. They were often sent to the country to live with a wet nurse and her family and visited infrequently by parents. The high rates of infant mortality during this time period, especially among wet nursed children, led some scholars to promote a “bad mother” thesis of neglectful mothers who purposefully sent children to likely death. This is particularly obvious in the work of the social historian Edward Shorter (1975) who, in describing the late 18th century, wrote, The point is that these mothers did not care, and that is why their children vanished in the ghastly slaughter of the innocents that was traditional child-rearing…When the surge of sentiment shattered this grip, infant mortality plunged, and maternal tenderness became part of the world we know so well. (p. 204) But this over-interpretation of the harsh conditions mothers found themselves in during the early modern period (Wilson, 1984) is blatantly sexist. Rather, demographic trends are powerful indicators of the social conditions of a time and place; they help paint a picture of daily life and tell a lot about the conditions of motherhood. For example, high rates of infant mortality and wet nursing reveal a lot about the stress and tragedy of daily life in earlier times. However, the available data point to familial responsibilities rather than indifference as the most likely explanation for the use of wet nurses. Using the services of a wet nurse increased the likelihood that wealthy women would reproduce annually and potentially produce an heir. It also increased middle- and working-class families’ financial security because women were available to work in a family business or outside the home. These very practical reasons likely trumped the individualistic

18  The Good Mother Goes to School

desire for intense bonding with offspring encouraged by breastfeeding because, at the time, family was a dominant social institution. Scholars like Shorter somehow failed to grasp the insight of their own lens, that roles are spatial and temporal, and instead applied current social standards to past behaviors. As a result of their overly zealous interpretation, early social histories of the family are regarded with disrepute and often ignored in academic circles but this is unfortunate because they documented the real conditions of daily life in the Late Middle Ages and early modern period. In doing so, they brought to light the realities of Western day-to-day life for the commoner as well as the wealthy in a time of social, political, and economic expansion. They have also provided important conceptual advances to the study of motherhood and the subtle shifts taking place in the Western family. In particular, their evidence suggests that the movement toward a sacred mother-child bond started first in the upper classes then slowly worked its way down to the working classes as new economic conditions enabled dominant social institutions to slowly shift. Although the Late Middle Ages was plagued with widespread famine and disease, there was also a decline in feudalism. Then, the gradually improving social conditions of the 16th century proved ripe for the evolving mother-child relationship and the spread of the “good mother.” At the time, two broad social movements were emerging, capitalism and the Reformation. As a result, in the early modern period, a long needed increase in the population was accompanied by economic expansion and an interest in globalization. Together, capitalism and the Reformation transformed day-to-day life in the West, including improved demographic conditions, new e­conomic opportunities, and emerging ideas about the individual in relationship to God and government. Motherhood too was affected including an expansion and intensification of the norms associated with the “good mother.” For example, the family was reconfigured; community and extended family slowly gave way to a new smaller, more intimate, child-focused configuration of the family that favored the nuclear family and the individual (Stone, 1975). In particular, the mother-child bond deepened as the economic conditions improved and household incomes increased, allowing mothers to devote less time to production and more time and energy to childcare (Shorter, 1975). First, the economic advances of the capitalist system of the early modern period, combined with the Reformation and new ideas about work, encouraged the male-dominated nuclear family. Then, the Industrial Revolution further reinforced the work-away father and homebound, family-focused mother (Thurer, 1994). The first appearance of our contemporary notion of the “good mother” may have originated in Marian art but it was established during the modern period as the social and economic conditions allowed her to flourish.

The Good Mother Goes to School  19

The Educated “Good Mother” Much like the cultural creation of the child-centered nuclear family, ­education has been embraced as a dominant social institution in modern life. In the West, the strong belief in the benefits of education has resulted in universal participation in formal schooling and for long segments in the life-course, including early childhood. As a result, over the course of the 20th century, the cognitive development of children was added to the list of responsibilities of the “good mother.” In addition to the earlier ­constructions of motherhood that included the physical and socioemotional development, self-sacrifice and devotion in the 20th century construction of the “good mother” expanded to include the creation of an environment that fosters the growth of cognitive processing and abilities in her children. Less discussed, yet well-established, is the fact that the creation of that environment is strongly associated with mothers’ educational attainment. However, education has a greater influence than just individuals being processed, that is, the effects are not merely symbolic or instrumental. Education also changes populations and the social roles within them. For example, along with the broad demographic changes noted above, from 1940 to 2010, there was a dramatic increase in the educational attainment of mothers with children under the age of 5 (Ruggles et al., 2015). There was both a slow steady rise of mothers with children under the age of 5 who held a bachelor’s degree or more and also a rapid decline in mothers with children under 5 who had a high school degree or less. Since the middle part of the 20th century, the typical American mother has gained more and more education. As mothers gain more education – that is, have more exposure to the institution of education – their ideas about motherhood change as do their ideas about childhood. One result is the expansion of education into both early childhood and the mother-child relationship. Mothers increasingly see cognition and academic learning as part of the “good childhood,” with the “good mother” acting as developer/ supervisor. Furthermore, well beyond schooling and narrow definitions of advantage, the “good mother” contemplates the expanded properties of the individual which include art and music appreciation, sport participation, civic engagement, and much more. As the development architect, the “good mother’s” engagement in the cognitive growth of her children goes well beyond academic skill building. As the typical American mother’s educational attainment increases, so does parents’ interest in early childhood cognitive development and school readiness. So, it is not surprising that research finds that more educated mothers are more likely to engage in a host of behaviors that are considered beneficial to child development. For example, mothers’ educational attainment is positively associated with frequent conversation and

20  The Good Mother Goes to School

interaction with children (Daneri et al., 2019) as well as high quality interaction with children (Bernier et al., 2016). In their ground-breaking work on language and child outcomes, psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley (1995) showed that children of more educated parents are spoken to more frequently than children of less educated parents. They have higher ­quality language experience including exposure to more vocabulary, complex sentence structure, and open-ended questions. They also hear more affirmative feedback such as encouragement and approval of behavior, and less prohibitive directives such as “don’t” or “stop” (for a near replication see Gilkerson et al., 2017). In short, the educated “good mother” is associated with the creation of an interactive home environment that fosters cognitive growth in children. Furthermore, mothers’ education is associated with a host of school related activities including direct engagement in academic instruction as well as visiting the library, museums, and cultural performances (Hsin & Felfe, 2014) and many forms of parental involvement in schooling (Park & Holloway, 2017). My own scholarship, which is further discussed in later chapters, is focused on the impact of schooling on society, and in particular, how increasing amounts of education transform the roles of motherhood and childhood (Schaub, 2010, 2015). For example, in tandem with the expansion of education, over the second half of the 20th century, parents increasingly engaged in cognitively based activities with young children. Moreover, engagement grew so much among parents that it reached normative behavior by 2000. That is, although families with the most educated mothers were consistently the most likely to read to their children and teach specific skills such as letters, words, and numbers, it is also the case that participation increased for all parents. In the second half of the 20th century, the “good mother’s” participation in cognitive development was extended to include the creation of a stimulating environment and engagement in cognitive activities for young as well as school age children. In addition to direct instruction, the educated “good mother” has also expanded the types of opportunities available for children’s cognitive development. For example, the strong link between motherhood and the growth of early childhood education is demonstrated in the 20th century expansion of the Kindergarten that happened first in states with high proportions of mothers with a bachelor’s degree (Schaub, 2016). However, in similar fashion to engagement in cognitively based activities, beyond the fact that highly educated mothers led the way, access to early childhood education was expanding for all children. Although states varied in the timing of their adoption of kindergarten into the elementary school program and their rate of expansion, over the second half of the 20th century, kindergarten enrollments reached near universal rates in all 50 states because nearly all families were participating. Schooling is another

The Good Mother Goes to School  21

component of the multi-faceted approach the “good mother” uses to encourage child cognitive development. In short, schooling expansion has a robust impact on parenting both in terms of behavior and influence. As schooling expanded upward in the second half of the 20th century and mothers’ average education rose, her actions and engagement associated with cognitive development in her children also increased. Schooling is a powerful contemporary example of how parenting roles get culturally defined. The subtle 20th century additions to the “good mother” role included cognition-related interests and behaviors even for very young children as the norms of mass schooling infiltrated the family. The changes were subtle but not trivial. They are part of an ongoing historical process rooted in cultural constructions of the “good mother” that are identifiable in earlier time periods, both prior to the onset of mass schooling and as the institutional strength of education grew.

She’s a 20th Century Mom The rise in educational attainment is intimately tied to fertility rates as well as political activism and access to newly created knowledge including child development. Therefore, as educational opportunities were expanding for women, demographic trends, social movements, and new scientific fields were also shaping the context in which motherhood unfolded in the 20th century. For the 20th century mom, conditions improved dramatically in comparison to the prior century. In 1900, the US was experiencing rapid economic growth, the progressive era was in full bloom and there was increasing social awareness. In addition to obvious social activism like the suffragettes, more subtle forms of women’s interests were gaining traction in the political and economic arenas that coincided with the demographic improvements. Together, they changed the landscape of motherhood as schooling expansion redefined the cultural construction of motherhood. As a result of the education revolution, self-sacrifice and devotion of the “good mother” typically meant fewer children and greater investment in each child. For example, women were giving birth to fewer children and children were more likely to survive childhood. Often referred to as the First Demographic Transition, a phenomenon first described in 1929 by American demographer Warren Thompson (Thompson, 1929), a population shift began in the US with a sharp decline in fertility somewhere around 1800 (Greenwood & Seshadri, 2002). First Demographic Transitions are typically characterized by declining mortality rates followed by declining birth rates and predicated on the strong association between declining fertility and improving economic conditions. In the US in 1800, the typical woman gave birth to seven children but by 1900,

22  The Good Mother Goes to School

that number had declined to about four (Roser, 2017a). Children were also increasingly likely to survive over that time period. In 1800, 46% of children died in the US before their 5th birthday; by 1900, the child mortality rate had been cut in half to 23% (Roser, 2017b). The growth in the economy in combination with less physical demands from giving birth and less emotional stress from losing children was beneficial to the “good mother.” By the 20th century, the increasing availability of time and resources resulted in improved day-to-day life conditions for the “good mother” and her offspring. Although social conditions were improving, at the turn of the c­ entury, the direction motherhood would take was still unclear. In the late 19th century, the “good mother” gained an advocate in the maternalist movement, which promoted female interests through the belief in women’s unique abilities in nurturance and child rearing. Its central message elevated motherhood, but the movement lacked a cohesive mission. As a result, over the first half of the 20th century, the political agenda of the maternalist movement was slowly splintered by the creation of several government agencies. The establishment of the Children’s Bureau, the Women’s Bureau, and the Office of Education created three agencies advocating slightly different versions of the maternal role and, therefore, different policies for mothers and their children (Zylan, 2000). For example, the Children’s Bureau advocated for children and, therefore, often for stay-at-home mothers, claiming that maternal care was preferable whenever possible (Rose, 1999). But the Women’s Bureau pushed back on the feasibility and even desirability of a stay-at-home mom and therefore advocated for women’s labor rights (Zylan, 2000). As a result, physical presence became an essential question defining the “good mother” in the 20th century. Should she make a contribution to the economic stability of the family or should she always be available? Many of the later dilemmas around childcare in the US stem from this basic dispute over the physicality of the “good mother.” In addition to social movements, social sciences with an interest in defining motherhood were also emerging. For example, the expansion of schooling had created the discipline of psychology in the prior century, but in the early 20th century, psychology became an outspoken advisor to parents and the educated “good mother” increasingly listened. Like the maternalist movement, motherhood for psychologists contained essential child rearing duties, but it had no special place in the psychological theories of the first half of the 20th century. In fact, Thurer (1994) describes the 20th century evolution of the mother in psychology from lectured to and left out, to center stage and often blamed. In the early part of the 20th century, developmental psychology paid little attention to human relationships, instead focusing on behavior and positive reinforcement. Then, after a brief flirtation with the subconscious and

The Good Mother Goes to School  23

drives, human relationships came to the foreground in the second half of the century. Starting in the late 19th century, the study of human behavior dominated parenting advice, and child rearing experts such as Luther Holt and G. Stanley Hall recommended a scientific, sometimes authoritarian, approach to parenting. By the late teens, behaviorism and the work of John Watson dominated American psychology. Watsonian behaviorism emphasized human behavior over consciousness. Together, the men of the child study movement recommended “the strict, routinized care of the child” (Holt, 1912) that made child development a scientific process and mothers’ technicians. Mothers were discouraged from acting on inclinations and instead encouraged to learn effective training strategies that did not include hugging, kissing, or holding your children in your lap but did include such things as monitoring bowel movements. The new science had defined the “good mother” as a rational actor obligated to be a disciplined overseer. In contrast to behaviorism, Freudian psychoanalysis, which emerged at roughly the same time but explored hidden meanings rather than training, essentially gave mothers little space on the couch. Freud wrote extensively about the central role of fathers in psychological drama while mothers remained quietly behind the scenes performing the humble tasks necessary for survival but apparently not development. Freud believed that the loss of the father is the single greatest loss in life. According to Thurer, mothers were peripheral in Freud’s most famous case histories; instead, he emphasized the role of fathers in child development. For example, the scholar of psychoanalytic history Patrick Mahony (1986) criticized Freud for concentrating too much on the father at the expense of the mother in the case of “the Rat Man.” Psychology, both behaviorism and psychoanalysis, had emerged with a shared meaning of the “good mother” as a self-sacrificing and devoted but supporting character. It would be several more decades before the mother-child relationship took center stage in psychological research. In the mid-20th century, the significance of lived experiences in psychological well-being was not fully appreciated. But psychology was moving in a new direction, away from training and the subconscious, and toward bonding. As a result, the maternal role grew in stature in psychological research. In fact, many critics believe that the increased significance led to a generation of psychologists who were prone to blaming all problems on the mother-child bond (Ladd-Taylor & Umansky, 1998). Even today, the centrality of maternal care in development remains disputed but, in the second half of the 20th century, research in developmental psychology was committed to finding a relationship between “maternal deprivation” and “child maladjustment.” And so, scientific research was again defining the “good mother” role. But this time, instead of a supporting role, the mother

24  The Good Mother Goes to School

became the essential ingredient in producing a happy, well-adjusted child for the modern child-centered family. In the late 1940s, mothers got pushed to the center of psychology when new research claimed a strong connection between physical contact and psychological well-being. First, following two groups of children, one in an orphanage and the other in a prison nursery, the psychoanalyst Rene Spitz (1956) showed that institutionalized children fared much better when they had consistent physical contact with their mothers. Soon after, the psychologist Harry Harlow (1958) concluded that infant attachment is dependent on the routine physical contact we usually attribute to mothers. Using rhesus monkeys, he demonstrated that, above and beyond feeding, children crave “contact comfort” in the mother-child relationship. As a result, the essentiality of the physically and emotionally available “good mother” was reinforced in the broader culture. The “good mother’s” ascension to this unique position of significance has been a double-edged sword because with the recognition came a sense of irreplaceability. For example, the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby (1997) believed that the mother-infant bond is an evolutionary adaptation and that infant breastfeeding sets the stage for all future relationships. With these ideas, he developed attachment theory or the belief that humans are predisposed to form a bond with their primary care-giver(s). But mothers got tangled up with caregivers and the message was frequently one of maternal deficit. For example, Bowlby argued that life-long psychological health is dependent on a strong maternal bond and full-time maternal employment is the equivalent of maternal deprivation. The scientific research that followed has repeatedly shown that poor attachment is associated with mental illness including depression, bipolar disorder, and alcohol and other substance abuse. As a result, mothers were put on a pedestal similar to the maternalist movement but in the second half of the 20th century, attachment theory frequently made it a lonely place, often blaming mothers for any and all psychological problems. Similar to the social histories discussed above, psychology in the second half of the 20th century had sexist accusations with “bad mother” overtones. At the same time, the steep decline in fertility continued in the US. By 2020, the fertility rate was less than two children per woman, measured at 1.66 according to the CDC (Hamilton et al., 2022) and well below the required 2.1 per woman for population replacement. The child mortality rate also continued to decline; in 2020, less than 1% of children died before their 5th birthday. Similarly, in the US the infant mortality rate (prior to first birthday) declined from 16% in 1900 to about one half of one percent in 2020 (Murphy et al., 2021). And other significant demographic changes have accompanied families and motherhood in recent years. A trend that is often referred to as a Second Demographic Transition of less-than-­ replacement fertility, increased out-of-marriage fertility and new styles of

The Good Mother Goes to School  25

living arrangements emerged in the US around 1960 (Lesthaeghe & van de Kaa, 1986). Marriage rates declined, cohabitation increased, and rates of single mothers and childless women increased. For example, the proportion of children living with two parents fell from 85% in 1968 to 70% in 2020. Additionally, by 2020, 21% of moms were raising their children alone (Hemez & Washington, 2021). As the mother-child bond came to the foreground of American psychology and the portrait of the American family changed, the economy moved in another direction. Over the second half of the 20th century, women increasingly worked outside the home, including women with children. In 2021, more than seven out of ten women with children under 18 worked outside the home (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022). Particularly notable are the trends for women with very young children. In 1975, 34% of women with children under the age of 3 worked outside the home (Parenting in America, 2015). By 2021, that number had jumped to 59% (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022). In addition to increasingly working outside the home, mothers continued to have the primary responsibility for childcare and household chores as the demands of motherhood grew. There is, however, a significant body of research showing that fathers’ time on these activities has increased recently as gender lines continue to soften but fathers still spend more time than mothers on work outside the home while mothers spend more time than fathers on family-related activities (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, n.d.). In addition to work outside the home and the lion’s share of childcare and household chores, new expectations were added to the mother’s responsibilities in the 20th century. For example, in a content analysis of articles appearing in widely available magazines, Julia Wrigley (1989) describes the changing expert advice to parents. Expert advice to parents started in the 20th century focused on health and hygiene, but as threats to physical well-being diminished, child development took center stage. First, experts began writing on the social/emotional well-being of children but, by the 1930s, cognitive skill development was a frequent topic and by the 1960s, nearly half of all articles in parenting magazines addressed issues related to children’s cognitive development. The popular media was reflecting a new addition to the “good mother” role as her list of responsibilities grew. In addition to years of schooling for the “good mother,” the expansion of education was reaching her young children as the “good childhood” increasingly included cognition. The cognitive message to parents was intensified in the 1990s with newly packaged brain research that took three separate strands of neurobiological evidence,1 wove them together into one omnibus model, and then applied it to early childhood (Bruer, 1999). The ensuing campaigns by various foundations promoted cognitive stimulation for very young children, threatening that the first three years of life set the stage for all future

26  The Good Mother Goes to School

success. Couched in neurobiological terms like synapse growth and c­ ritical periods, parents were told that the brain development of their ­children was in their hands and that missed opportunities were gone f­orever. According to these early childhood education advocates, human brains produce ­trillions of brain connections in the first three years of life, and without appropriate stimulation, the potential of those connections disappears forever. Armed with these newly packaged neurobiological results, the definition of enriched environments and appropriate stimulation rapidly expanded. Once again, the essence of the “good mother” was tied to emerging scientific results that were often only partially understood but nonetheless used to define the socially acceptable space between mother and child. Self-sacrifice and devotion became intimately tied to consistent, purposeful cognitive engagement even with very young children. In the 20th century, the “good mother” had more education and less children; her responsibilities expanded as her parenting intensified. Motherhood of the 20th century, to some extent, was shaped by a changing economy that increasingly encouraged the work-away mom but also by new scientific evidence that promised an improved child. The 20th century had opened with strict recommendations from the child study movement on behavioral training for young children and closed with early childhood education advocates recommending cognitive training for young children as new scientific fields attempted to define the “right way” to parent. But the societal phenomenon of expanding education that resulted in new scientific fields and emerging evidence, also reached mothers directly. The educated “good mother” continues to be the recipient of new knowledge as well as advice. She is also the subject of social movements. The education revolution reaches her both directly and indirectly and transforms the conceptualization of the maternal role as well as the “good childhood.”

Conclusion In an ironic twist to the research on parenting, the essential but peripheral mother reemerged in The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (1998). In it, the psychology researcher Judith Rich Harris argues that parents are not a main ingredient in human development. Instead, Harris believed that genes and peers have the largest impact. In a reaction to the growth in the cultural belief that parents are responsible for the outcomes of their children (Hays, 1996), Harris wrote: “The idea that we can make our children turn out any way we want is an illusion… You can neither perfect them nor ruin them” (p. 349). Harris was reimagining the “good mother,” removing her irreplaceable status, perhaps even trying to bump her off the lonely pedestal that psychology had created in the middle of the 20th century. But there is no evidence to suggest

The Good Mother Goes to School  27

that this is a widely held belief. Instead, the self-sacrificing and devoted “good mother” continues to hold an important place in the creation of the “good childhood” as her role continues to grow. The shared meaning we attach to the motherhood role evolves with time and place. Although the “good mother” likely made her first appearance in the upper classes, she spread to other social strata (Hays, 1996) aided by major social movements like capitalism and Protestantism and the improving living conditions of the early modern and modern periods. In more recent history, the combined effect of a First and Second Demographic Transition has led to a new portrait of the American family. And demographic transitions are tied to the status of women in a society including access to education, employment, and birth control. In addition to significantly fewer pregnancies and nearly all births surviving childhood, motherhood is now frequently accompanied by new living arrangements that reimagine traditional definitions of the family. In the current moment, the “good mother’s” list of responsibilities typically includes both paid employment and availability to her children. The motherhood role was propelled by the growing expectation of a strong emotional bond between mother and child as the individual slowly replaced the family as a dominant social institution. In addition to the individual, mass education has also emerged as a dominant social institution in the modern period. And the norms of mass schooling have changed the “good mother” and the “good childhood” along with her. Far from a sneak attack or even a hostile takeover, the education revolution has been invited into the family with parents as active participants. In the first decades of the 21st century, the “good mother” remains a powerful social construction. Armed with degrees, scientific research, and professional advice, her culturally constructed role comes with a long list of responsibilities that goes well beyond monitoring vocabulary growth or number sense. She is actively creating the “good childhood.” Three decades into the 21st century, the collaboration between the family and schooling for maximum individual development is still growing.

Note 1 First, in childhood, there are periods of rapid synaptic development and ­pruning. Second, there are critical periods in development. Third, enriched environments impact brain structure.

Chapter 3

The “Good Childhood” Is a Delicate Balancing Act

When I was a young child, I remember hearing my grandmother regularly say, “Children should be seen and not heard.” Her name was Josephine Maria Ricigliano Adamo, the fourth child of Francesco Ricigliano and Angela Russo Ricigliano to be born in the US – the first three were born in southern Italy and there was one more after her born in the US. She was very smart, and as a girl, she had dreamed of becoming a teacher. Instead, she married the boy next door at a young age and had seven children with him. So, between the norms of the time, my macho grandfather and perhaps a mild case of agoraphobia, any fantasy of outside adventure was instead focused on her family. She cooked, cleaned, and welcomed her 7 children and 24 grandchildren into her home at any time. Although young, poor, and a recent immigrant, my grandmother had high expectations for her children, but she was far from the modern mother we think of today. I spent a lot of time with my grandmother. We sautéed zucchini flowers from my grandfather’s garden, moved the three kings closer to the baby Jesus as January 6th approached, and occasionally took the bus from Merrick Avenue to Uniondale, Long Island to shop at Abraham and Strauss. But there were no toys in my grandmother’s house, no children’s books, and leaving the backyard was forbidden. I spent a lot of time alone without much to do when I went to stay with her, but that did not seem to worry her. She had embraced protection as a main component of modern parenting, but not deeper development, and particularly not cognitive engagement. In all the time I spent with my grandmother, she never read to me, and as far as I know, she never read to her children either. Compare that with the typical American child today who is regularly engaged in literacy activities. For example, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 85% of 3- to 5-year-olds were read to several times per week by a family member in 2019 (Cui & Natzke, 2021). Charged with both protection and encouraging development, modern parents regularly contemplate the “good childhood.” Popular titles like David Elkind’s The Hurried Child (2001) warn parents of the perils of DOI: 10.4324/9781003325949-3

The “Good Childhood” Is a Delicate Balancing Act  29

childhood that are reminiscent of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 18th century treatise on the philosophy of education. In fact, Rousseau’s romantic ideas about the threats to childhood innocence lurk in the background of our contemporary notions of the protected childhood. For example, a recent article in the journal Pediatrics suggests that doctors hand out “prescriptions for play” citing children’s loss of free time including a reduction in school recess (Yogman et al., 2018). All around us there are insinuations that childhood, as a special developmental stage entitled to freedom, exploration, and play, will be swallowed up without sanctuary. It is such a pervasive belief that Article 31 of the United Nations human rights treaty Convention on the Rights of the Child is devoted to play and leisure (UN Commission on Human Rights, 1990). As a testament to just how long there has been a cultural focus on loss in the “good childhood,” consider this nostalgic quote from the journal Childhood Education in 1938: In the complexities and pressures of modern life, our children’s leisure is in grave danger of extinction. So insistent are the many demands upon their time and attention that unless we do plan a so-called ­leisure program, their leisure is likely to disappear altogether beneath the rushing waves of doing things and going places. (Frank, 1938, p. 389) It is such a common point of view that scientific research conducts complex brain research on the topic. For example, Yuko Munakata, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder, and her colleagues link unstructured time with self-directed executive functioning in children. According to their research, children who spend more time in less structured activities are also better able to plan and execute goals independently (Barker et al., 2014). Moreover, the results imply that freedom, exploration, and play are more than the work of the “good childhood,” they are essential to the skills needed for a successful adult life. Overscheduling deprives children of the opportunities to practice those skills. But there is pushback to the notion that children are overscheduled. In fact, there is a fair bit of evidence to suggest just the opposite. In 2008, Child Trends, a Washington, D.C. research organization devoted to improving the lives of children, published “The Overscheduling Myth.” The report begins, “contrary to popular belief, research rejects the notion that most or even many children and youth are overscheduled and suffering as a result” (Mahoney et al., 2008, p. 1). It turns out that only between 3 and 6% of children participate in scheduled out-of-school activities more than 20 hours per week. Furthermore, at any given time, only 60% of children participate in out-of-school activities and time spent

30  The “Good Childhood” Is a Delicate Balancing Act

on these activities averages less than 10 hours per week total. In a­ ddition, participation in extracurricular activities is associated with favorable ­ ­outcomes. For example, most children attach positive emotions such as pleasure, support, and companionship to scheduled activities. The long list of benefits for children who participate also includes higher self-esteem and academic achievement as well as higher high school graduation rates. And participators have lower rates of drug and alcohol use (Mahoney et al., 2006; Mahoney & Vest, 2012). Furthermore, contrary to media images, free time, on average, seems not to be threatened. One time use study of children 6–12 years old found that the typical child spends about 69 hours per week sleeping, 32.5 hours per week in school, and less than 3 hours per week studying. In addition, the typical child also spends at least 24 hours per week in free time outdoors, playing, and watching TV – not including time spent on eating, personal care, chores, church, visiting, hobbies, sports, reading, art activities, and conversation (Hofferth & Sandberg, 2001a, 2001b). While the variation between students can be wide, time use research estimates that at any given time, about 40% of children are not involved in any activities. Moreover, many of those children are filling their free time watching a screen, estimated at an average of 13 plus hours per week for 5–18-year-old children (Mahoney et al., 2006) (see Hall & Nielsen, 2020 for similar time use distributions). The message about the “good childhood” that emerged in the 20th century and continues to grow stronger, often feels incongruous. Parents are now simultaneously bombarded with two versions of the “good childhood”: (1) Childhood is freedom and innocence that are threatened by schooling and overscheduling, and (2) a successful childhood contains cognitive stimulation including exposure to a variety of group activities and organized lessons for development. Although the two components of this dual message can feel as if they are wrestling to dominate the decision making of contemporary parents, it is, in fact, balance that parents seek. Each is an essential component of the “good childhood.” Contemporary parents have the complex job of fostering the nostalgic, carefree childhood as well as the contemporary, cognitively engaged childhood. The goal of any number of parenting tasks is the goldilocks effect: not too much and not too little, but just right. They must routinely wrestle with what constitutes the “good childhood.” For example, how scheduled should children be? Michael Thompson, a clinical psychologist and the author of “The Pressured Child,” says, “As a general principle, there is a line between a highly enriched, interesting, growth-promoting childhood and an overscheduled childhood, and nobody knows where that line is” (Feiler, 2013). As a result, the cultural message is often laden with expectation and judgment, some strange combination of cutting-edge research plus nostalgia that amounts to a complex message about childhood. It is a paradoxical combination of neglected and under-stimulated children as well

The “Good Childhood” Is a Delicate Balancing Act  31

as overscheduled and burdened children. In it, parents are the a­ rchitect as well as wrecking ball of the “good childhood.” As a result, parents, and particularly mothers, are left to walk the fine line between not enough and too much. At the core of concerns in overscheduling is the social construction of childhood and our shared meaning of this sacred developmental stage. Regardless of actual behaviors, we have strong cultural myths about childhood that effect parent behaviors. Choices in scheduling, as well as many other parenting decisions, do not happen in a vacuum; instead, they are motivated by constructions of the “good childhood.” My grandmother would have been astounded and probably troubled by new definitions of the “good childhood.” She likely would have believed that some components of the contemporary definition of the “good childhood” would actually ruin children. It would be absurd to think that she ever worried about my cognitive engagement or neurological composition, or her children’s for that matter, and my grandmother did not seek the advice of so-called experts. Instead, she had a different and perhaps narrower construction of childhood. So, how did we get here and what contributed to the changes? This chapter examines the socially constructed aspects of childhood. First, it describes the emergence of childhood as a sacred developmental stage entitled to protection prior to the emergence of mass schooling. Then, the chapter explores the growing influence that mass schooling has on shaping childhood including a contemporary example, the medicated “good ­childhood.” Finally, through notions of the “good childhood,” two examples of growing societal norms are discussed: school readiness and child rights.

The History of Childhood The child-centered family and mass schooling that permeate contemporary life are so familiar that it is hard to imagine a time when other social institutions dominated daily life. Both childhood and schooling have grown in institutional strength over the last several centuries, intertwining their paths so tightly that the expansion and intensification of the relationship can feel natural and often goes unnoticed. Although the concept of childhood as a sacred developmental stage preceded mass schooling, new constructions of childhood emerged in the modern period and have continued to unfold and expand, aided by mass schooling. In the 60 years since the landmark yet controversial Centuries of Childhood (Ariès, 1962), historians have wrestled with the limited physical and written artifacts documenting childhood in earlier eras. The scarcity of evidence has left gaps in our knowledge and resulted in multiple interpretations of the demographic circumstances of earlier eras. For e­ xample, some histories have emphasized adult cruelty and indifference toward

32  The “Good Childhood” Is a Delicate Balancing Act

children while others have emphasized the similarities between medieval and contemporary childhood. Nevertheless, within these two extremes, most agree that the care and conditions of children have been enhanced over time. Our conception of childhood, which attaches special meaning to this stage and places children at the center of family life, is a modern invention. The disagreement about what caused the enhancement of children’s status stems largely from the vantage point from which day-to-life in earlier times is being examined. Common explanations in the literature point to the influence of changing family demography, including decreasing child mortality and fertility rates. However, as we saw in Chapter 2, the sole use of demographic trends as a causal mechanism has led to circular arguments in many social histories. For example, infant mortality rates fell between 1550 and 1950 in England from about 20% to about 3.5% over the 400-year span. But there was fluctuation between 1550 and 1750 and then a slow steady decline began before a rapid decline starting about 1900 (Woods et al., 1993). Some scholars claimed that high infant mortality rates were evidence that “mothers did not care” in the early modern period (e.g., Shorter, 1975) while others saw the decline in infant mortality rates in the latter part of the early modern period as evidence of the growing sentimentality toward children. But these hypotheses lack causal mechanisms necessary to effect change and therefore infant mortality rates, along with other demographic trends, are better thought of as indicators of the time period rather than a cause or result of the status of children. A few social historians note that the gradual changes in children’s lives were brought about in part by the rise of broad social movements such as capitalism and the Reformation and more recently, mass schooling. Schooling has created a separate domain for children devoted to their development. By the second half of the nineteenth century, education dominated the lives of many children and led to heightening distinctions between age groups. Schooling, like the nuclear family and the individual, was gaining dominance as a social institution, and growing increasingly inextricably linked to childhood. The Ariès Thesis

In the 1960s, the aforementioned work of Phillip Ariès launched a new area of study for social historians. Centuries of Childhood (1962), a major work of the French Annales School of histories of everyday life, is significant as a founding social history of the family and an example of a new way of thinking about social institutions. Although Ariès conclusions remain controversial, his approach provided a new vantage point from which to view the history of childhood. Ariès was wrestling with broad theoretical issues associated with institutional change and the social construction of

The “Good Childhood” Is a Delicate Balancing Act  33

reality as he traced the social origins of childhood as a distinct phase of life in pre-industrial Europe. According to Ariès, in the feudal West, life was communal, the family served important functions such as giving life and name, and passing on property, but important intimate elements of daily life were public for most of the population. Children joined adults in dayto-day life soon after weaning, and for the most part were viewed as small adults. Ariès argued that “the modern family” emerged during the 17th century as the centerpiece of daily life through a new orientation toward childhood that removed children from day-to-day adult life and created the modern protected childhood that includes schooling. However, Ariès work is both frequently cited and often criticized. It is foundational to understanding the dynamic nature of institutions as well as the difference between children and childhood. As Cunningham (1998) acknowledges, “It was Ariès’ achievement to convince nearly all his readers that childhood had a history: that, over time and in different ­cultures, both ideas about childhood and the experience of being a child had changed” (p. 1197). Following Ariès intellectual tradition, other social historians continued to develop a historical account of childhood as a distinct culturally constructed developmental stage. One main insight that materialized from this scholarship is that there has been a gradual, growing distinction between the developmental needs of children and adults, which has resulted in the growth of a separate, heightened status for children (Ariès, 1962; Demos, 1970; Firestone, 1971; Illick, 1976; Shorter, 1975; Stone, 1977; Tucker, 1976; Zelizer, 1985; Zuckerman, 1970). Additionally, a number of social historians explored what is perhaps the most controversial component of the Ariès thesis: that in medieval times the idea of childhood did not exist (e.g., deMause, 1974; Demos, 1970; Shorter, 1975; Stone, 1977; Tucker, 1976). But as Cunningham (1998) points out, at least some of the controversy around Ariès work is attributable to a mistranslation of the French “sentiment,” which is most closely translated to “feeling,” to the English “idea” which has a different connotation. Still, a flurry of research in the 1970s developed a new lens through which to examine childhood that described it as cultural rather than a biological construction. However, unlike Ariès, they often described a very dark past for childhood. Perhaps the boldest claim came from deMause (1974) who wrote that “The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of care” (p. 1). Looking past the overly dramatic claims of the quote, it does reflect what is an otherwise reasonable observation and one that was also made by a number of other scholars. That is, as social and economic conditions gradually improved, children increasingly became the focal point of family life and the general care and concern for them improved. This happened first among urban

34  The “Good Childhood” Is a Delicate Balancing Act

bourgeoisie and then spread, not penetrating the poor until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Moreover, there are many examples of how the lives of children have improved in the modern period. For instance, just 150 years ago, work dominated the lives of many children in the US. In addition to family businesses such as farms and stores, many children worked away from home. According to the US census, in 1870, one in eight children was formally employed, and by 1900, that proportion had increased to more than one in five children. The industries varied by region and urbanicity but included factories, mills, and mines with dangerous conditions. Of deeper concern, children had higher rates of injury and death at work than adults. Therefore, of the approximately 30,000 deaths and 1 million injuries occurring on industrial jobs in 1900, it is likely that many of the victims were children (Alkin, 2018). In the US, work diminished as a main activity for children with the introduction of laws that prohibited child labor, and coincided with the expansion of mass schooling, in the early part of the 20th century. In an updated version of the Ariès thesis and an exceptionally creative social history, the sociologist Viviana Zelizer (1985) identifies what she calls the “sacralization” of children’s lives. She demonstrates the growing conflict between the economic and sentimental value of children in the late 19th century that led to the decline in child labor. Her examination of legal and legislative change around children’s life insurance, child labor, black market babies, and wrongful death/birth lawsuits in the US between 1870 and 1930 illustrates the link in the rising social value of children and their break with the market economy. Although child labor was essential to the working-class family at the turn of the 20th century, Zelizer notes that socially progressive reformers at the time “introduced a new cultural equation: If children were useful and produced money, they were not being properly loved” (Zelizer, 1985, p. 72). Moreover, Zelizer’s work is evidence of the growing connection between schooling and childhood, and the victory of the developmental childhood as schooling won out over work as a main childhood activity. The dark interpretation of childhood by some social historians led to a strong reaction to the Ariès thesis among other scholars who have continued to find new evidence of childhood in earlier time periods and across many cultures. This perhaps began with Linda Pollock, a social historian who specializes in childhood and family, who argues simply that childhood did indeed exist in the 16th century much as it does now. Using diaries and autobiographies from earlier centuries, she claims society was well aware that children passed through identifiable stages and had specific developmental needs. While Ariès and others have suggested that the status and treatment of children have been greatly enhanced over time, Pollock argues that the concept of childhood in earlier societies was merely

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different from today, not absent (Pollock, 1983). In addition to Pollock, others (e.g., Graham, 2000; Macfarlane, 1970; Orme, 2001; Wilson, 1980) have also concentrated on evidence demonstrating consistent aspects of parenting. They illustrate the interest and concern parents demonstrated for their children, as well as grief at the loss of a child and specialized child items such as bibs and shoes. Evidence now goes back as far as Ancient Greece (Golden, 2015) and led the sociologist Suzanne Shanahan (2007) to jest, “Indeed, historians delight in identifying earlier and earlier seeds of that which we today call childhood” (p. 411). The historian Nicholas Orme was even bolder when he wrote in Medieval Children (2001) “It cannot be over-emphasized that there is nothing to be said for Ariès’ view of childhood in the middle ages” and then adds “Ariès’ views were mistaken: not simply in detail but in substance. It is time to lay them to rest” (also see Metcalf, 2002). Paramount to reconciling these two very different descriptions is understanding the lens through which each examines childhood. Pollock and other consistency social historians maintain that there has always been an acknowledgment of the differences between children and adults, that parenting changed very little from the 16th to the 19th centuries, and, further, that some basic features of human existence never change (Graham, 2000; Macfarlane, 1970; Pollock, 1983, 1987). On the other hand, Ariès and others in the change camp are exploring culture. With a wide array of historical evidence about infant mortality rates, wet nursing, swaddling, and apprenticeship as well as infanticide, abandonment, child abuse, and severe discipline, these historians, although at times making too much of the evidence, demonstrate the changing status of children since the medieval era (Ariès, 1962; Badinter, 1981; deMause, 1974; Hunt, 1972; Lyman, 1976; McLaughlin, 1976; Pinchbeck & Hewitt, 1969; Shorter, 1975; Stone, 1977; Thompson, 1974; Tucker, 1976; Walzer, 1976). Of course, it is possible for both perspectives to be true. It is also likely that this debate will continue into the future as new evidence comes to light and we gain better understandings of social history and past eras. However, these two very different descriptions are not mutually exclusive, and neither should be ignored. Moreover, important theoretical questions arise about why, for example, in one era mother-love is protection, and in another, it is worrying about neurological development. The power of the change thesis, or a cultural argument, lies in the analysis of institutional change; the socially constructed process capable of shifting fundamental meanings attached to different stages of human life. Human society is made up of a series of overlapping and interlocking roles and norms (institutions) but the shared meanings (social construction) we attach to those roles and norms change over time (e.g. Foucault). Childhood, as a socially constructed developmental stage, is a prime example. Our norms and expectations about childhood were transformed as the

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dominant institutions in society shifted from community and extended family, to nuclear family and then the individual. As the social policy historian Patrick Ryan (2008) notes “What the developmental scientists and sentimental romantics had taken as the nature of childhood became in Ariès’ hands the result of the internally disciplining school, and the privatizing middle-class family” (p. 564). Through an institutional lens, it is possible to love your child as well as possess a basic understanding of the developmental differences between children and adults yet make decisions that are not in the interests of individual development. The paradoxical message about the contemporary “good childhood” as both carefree and cognitively engaged mirrors the complex evidence about childhood in earlier time periods. However, it is time to move past the extreme interpretation of Ariès’ scholarship. Childhood existed prior to the early modern period and, in addition, it is a dynamic cultural construct. Prior to the early modern period, childhood was a weak institution, secondary to family and community, but not absent. With the support of improving social and economic conditions, its institutional complexity grew over time. For Ariès, the rise of mass schooling is one example of the loss of communal life in the modern period. As the nuclear family and then the individual emerged as dominant institutions, so too did education. And there is no doubt that the rise of education as an important social institution helped define childhood by creating a separate space with age-specific definitions. In the latter half of the 19th century, the rise in age stratification in schooling, even within one-room schoolhouses, linked learning expectations with age categories. Then, at the beginning of the 20th century, an intensification of age grading separated children into first, second, third grade, and so on (Chudacoff, 1989). For better or worse, school as a new environment enabled the developmental childhood to flourish.

The Growth of Schooling Providing access to schooling for all children marked a new, expanded construction of childhood that included ideas about development, universality, and rights. At the beginning of the 19th century, the lives of working-class children were dominated by work. By the end of the century, as a result of the common school movement and ideas about social mobility, schooling had inserted itself into the lives of most children in the US. Incorporation was slow; the upper classes gained access first, and the middle and working classes were included later. But mass schooling, or the requirement that the government provides access so that all children can attend some specified number of years of school, was completed in the US in 1918 when Mississippi was the last state to enact a compulsory attendance law. Prior to that, schooling was gradually incorporated into

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the lives of children as the obligation to educate children slowly shifted from the family to schools, and the notion of a separate space devoted to children and their development evolved. Ideas about gender, age-appropriateness, and parental involvement evolved with schooling. For example, Linda Pollock (1987) demonstrates the interest English parents took in the education of their children prior to mass schooling. She presents journal entries and letters written between 1624 and 1889 by the middle and upper classes, those capable of reading and writing as well as providing education for children in the form of tutors and private schools. As Ariès argues, these were the very people who led the way during this period to a new orientation toward childhood. The written documents reveal several noteworthy things. First, parents through the centuries are consistently interested in the future well-being and opportunities of their children. However, as we might assume, the financing, encouragement, and type of education received by girls, was very different from the education of boys, and this remained relatively constant over the documented time. In addition, Pollock’s archive also suggests that several important issues around children’s education changed over time. For example, the early journal entries and letters were mostly written by men expressing interest in a child’s education; however, after 1800, most were written by women. These documents suggest that the supervision and monitoring of children’s cognitive development was increasingly incorporated into the mother role during the 19th century and paralleled the slow expansion of schooling in England. Moreover, earlier letters largely speak of tutors as the actual educators, while later letters often describe mothers’ involvement in the education process as well, as she increasingly assumed this role. The journal entries and letters demonstrate the growing active engagement of mothers in teaching children to read, write, and do arithmetic because parents were increasingly focused on development of the individual as well as creating opportunity and advantage for their children. These historical descriptions illustrate the intersection of parenting, childhood, and education. In the pre-mass schooling stage of the early modern and modern periods, able parents took on much of the responsibility and supervision of their children’s education. With only rudimentary constructions of developmental stages, the logic of education was largely oriented to future opportunities. Yet, the demonstration of care and concern for children through education also extended to new experimental sites such as the colonial US of the early modern period (Demos, 1970). For example, in Plymouth Colony, founded in 1620 by the Pilgrims of the Mayflower, parents were required by law to educate children. Learning took place in the home, but education mostly took the form of reading the Scriptures and providing some form of job training. In this period before mass schooling, apprenticeship was an important feature of skill

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development and occupational training. Educating children was part of a family’s communal responsibilities and children were frequently contracted with master craftsmen for a period that typically lasted between seven and ten years. However, as education gained institutional strength, it increasingly dominated the lives of children, and parents increasingly surrendered the primary responsibility of educating their children. First, mass schooling aided in the redefinition of children as students rather than laborers, then it stratified children by grade, and, finally, it increasingly associated age with grade as well as specific cognitive and psychological developmental markers. The growing influence of schooling has resulted in its steady capture of larger proportions of the population as well as larger portions of children’s lives. In the first half of the 19th century, the common school movement was spreading in the US as we negotiated the features of a state-sponsored public system of education. From its beginnings, the US public school system was designed for “everybody,” but in reality, we had to expand our ideas of the “everybody” to include immigrant and African American as well as indigenous children. In 1785, John Adams said, “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it.” We have been inching toward greater educational equity ever since. Providing access was our first step in the “whole” people. For example, by 1850, about half of all White 5- to 19-year-olds were enrolled in school, including roughly equal proportions of males and females.1 However, enrollments hovered around 50% until 1900 as the US experienced large waves of immigration from poor European countries who were significantly less likely to attend school. After 1900, there was a steady increase in the enrollment rates of White children in school. In addition, in 1850, the US enrolled very low proportions of African American children in school. After Reconstruction, rates rose rapidly as the South established a public system of education that included Black as well as poor White children, although low quality for many children and brutally segregated (Snyder, 1993). In addition, in the second half of the 19th century, the age graded Prussian school model was also adopted by the US. It represents a growing belief in not only a separate child space but also a heightened sense of development that is connected to age. The laws governing school attendance, including compulsory laws as well as number of years and days offered, also changed rapidly after 1850. Massachusetts was the first state to enact compulsory school attendance laws in 1852. Thereafter, compulsory laws were steadily enacted, first rapidly by Northern states, then more slowly by Southern states. After 1900, even Southern states began requiring all children to attend some schooling. However, school attendance did not immediately replace child labor for all children. Instead, state child labor laws steadily increased after 1850,

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but school terms were initially so short that children could both work and attend school. Many states also had laws allowing working children to leave school early – typically at age 14 (Clay et al., 2012). Finally, by 1900, the average school term had inched up to 144 days as schooling slowly won out over work as the main childhood activity. School now averages 180 days per year in the US. Schooling has changed the landscape of childhood through its separate space and age grading, through its slow expansion to greater number of days and years as well as proportion of the population included, and through its increasing focus on the development of the individual.

The Managed Student Gets Medicated The infiltration of schooling into the lives of children did not stop with access. Instead, schooling has intensified and increased its focus on performance, even for very young children. In contemporary childhood, multiple aspects of the child are scrutinized, including physical, psychological, social, and cognitive abilities, as developmental markers grow more ­specific and ingrained in the construction of the “good childhood.” As a result, performance enhancement has emerged as a main goal for families, including common strategies like buying private lessons and tutors but also growing trends such as medicating children. The growth in newly defined medical problems associated with learning and the potential pharmacological solutions are illustrations of a cultural construction of childhood that includes growing concerns over school performance. For example, on the Center for Disease Control (CDC) website, four national surveys using parent reports of diagnosis and treatment of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), a brain disorder characterized by inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity in the US, indicate a dramatic increase since 1997 (CDC, n.d.a). According to the National Survey of Children’s Health, in 2016, nearly 10% of US children ages 2–17 had ever been diagnosed with ADHD (Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative, 2017b). The percentage has increased steadily in the last several decades but the most recent data suggest that the percentage of children and adolescents ever diagnosed with ADHD is leveling off. Perhaps the most notable increase has been in very young children, it appears that the three- to five-year-old category is on the rise (CDC, n.d.a). While most agree that ADHD exists, there are serious concerns about the rapid rise, potential over-diagnosis, and appropriate treatment, because diagnosis exists at the intersection of a physiological disorder, an intensification of schooling, and a range in the rate of individual human development. In addition to its rise in prevalence, the data also show that diagnosis of ADHD varies by age, gender, and location. First, evidence suggests

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that some percentage of ADHD diagnoses are influenced by context and ­associated with maturity. For example, Timothy Layton of Harvard Medical School and his colleagues find that in districts with an August 31st birthdate cutoff for kindergarten entrance, students born in August are 30% more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than those born in September (Layton et al., 2018). In other words, the youngest students in the kindergarten classroom are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than the oldest students suggesting that diagnosis is linked with immaturity. The rise in ADHD diagnosis also parallels the rise in the academic kindergarten. There is a strong possibility that kindergarten diagnosis is associated with the increasing demands of early childhood education and managed with medication. This is particularly problematic for boys who are more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as girls – 13 and 6% respectively (CDC, n.d.a) with estimates reaching 20% of high school boys ever diagnosed with the disorder. Academic pushdown and the associated requirements to sit still, follow directions, and work quietly likely disadvantage boys more than girls. For example, the average boy is developmentally behind the average girl in the early years of schooling (Soderman et al., 1999) and is outperformed in reading and writing, a difference that remains throughout schooling (Reilly et al., 2019). However, research shows that young boys respond to active learning environments (King & Gartrell, 2003), but these opportunities remain limited perhaps as a result of standards based education as well as an ingrained model of schooling. Possibly the most dramatic variation in prevalence is demonstrated in regions of the US. The southwest US has the lowest rate of diagnosis and the South and Midwest have the highest rates of diagnosis. In 2016, parent reports showed that 5% of children were ever diagnosed with ADHD in New Mexico, while in Mississippi, nearly 19% were diagnosed with the disorder (Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative, 2017a, 2017b). University of California, Berkeley psychologist Stephen Hinshaw, and coauthor of the book The ADHD Explosion: Myths, Medication, Money, and Today’s Push for Performance, says: I believe that ADHD is a real condition, but it’s on a spectrum, just the way that high blood pressure and autism are. It’s always a bit arbitrary as to who is actually above the cut and who is below because we don’t know exactly where the cut is. (Novotney, 2014) As a result, demographic variables such as age, gender, and location as well as organizational culture play a role in diagnosis. Use of stimulant medication in children to treat ADHD is also rising. Although behavioral therapy is recommended as a first treatment, in fact, evidence suggests doctors frequently prescribe medication first.

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The most rapid increase in use of medication occurred from 1987 to 1996 and although it has now slowed, it is still growing. According to the CDC (n.d.c), almost 5% of US children were taking ADHD stimulant medication in 2007; by 2016–2019, that figure increased to nearly 10% with roughly two-thirds of all children diagnosed with ADHD taking medication (n.d.a).2 Boys and non-Hispanic White children are the most likely to take medication but rates are similar across income groups and highest amongst children 6 and over (Zuvekas & Vitiello, 2012, also see Morgan et al., 2022) suggesting that parents are most concerned about the interaction of diagnosis and school performance. For example, kindergarten data also show that in addition to increased diagnosis rates, the youngest students in the classroom are more likely to be medicated than the oldest students in the classroom (Layton et al., 2018). In ADHD Nation: Children, Doctors, Big Pharma, and the Making of an American Epidemic, Alan Schwarz (2016) blames the high rates of diagnosis in the US on a disorder with a vague set of diagnostic traits and a pharmaceutical industry happy to provide a cure. Prior to writing the book, Schwarz wrote a series of articles for The New York Times exposing the link between the pharmaceutical industry, and the diagnosis and treatment of ADHD. Amongst other things, Schwarz chronicles the career of Dr. Keith Conners, a psychologist who while at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the early 1960s, conducted the first clinical trials of Ritalin. The results suggested that the drug benefitted some children because they were better able to follow instructions and pay attention in ways that improved their lives. He also developed two behavior-rating scales used to identify and treat the condition. Throughout his career, Conners remained an active advocate for the identification and treatment of ADHD, but late in his life, even Conners saw the over-diagnosis of ADHD as a “national disaster of dangerous proportions.” Conners’ early research with Dr. Leon Eisenberg on the treatment of children with emotional and behavioral problems was funded by the Swiss drug company CIBA, the maker of Ritalin. In the years that followed, the social construction of a brain disorder included several name changes and a new medication with a name that promised universal life improvement. Attention-Deficit Disorder (ADD) was first described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1980. Prior to that, the syndrome was commonly referred to as Minimal Brain Dysfunction or Hyperkinetic Reaction of Childhood. According to Schwarz, these early names lacked the alarm of a “deficit.” Similarly, in 1994, Obetrol, formerly a popular weight loss drug, was reformulated, renamed, and marketed as a treatment for ADHD. The new name, Adderall, is a contraction of “A.D.D. for all” meant to signify the drug’s many benefits for a large swath of the population. It was a carefully constructed campaign by the pharmaceutical industry meant to expand the population of users.

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ADHD is a construct as much as a developmental disorder. Regardless of scientific conclusions about prevalence, it is clear that the invited invasion is influencing diagnosis and medication decisions for children. Variation in diagnosis by gender, location, and age including age at entry to formal schooling indicates how little agreement exists about the disorder. Take, for example, that the diagnosis rate among adults is less than half the diagnosis rate for children (National Institutes of Mental Health, n.d.). The focus on children’s school performance is also painfully obvious in the current concerns over the rise in anxiety and depression in the last several decades. According to the CDC (n.d.b), 5.4% of 6–17-year-olds had ever been diagnosed with anxiety or depression in 2003. That percentage increased to 8.4 by 2012. While we do not know if the increase in diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorders are related to the pressures of schooling, we do know that barriers to strong school performance are a growing concern for parents and teachers alike. The “good childhood” is inextricably linked to schooling, and therefore, parents are motivated to address potential barriers and to enhance performance.

School Readiness for Young Children In addition to enhanced performance during the school years, the years prior to school entry have also been impacted by the growth of schooling as an institution. In the span of one century, a main challenge to education in the US went from providing some access to all children to promoting the preparation of all 5-year-olds before entering a long formal schooling career. As schooling has grown in institutional strength and become a larger part of children’s lives, cognitive development has grown as a legitimate pursuit in the creation of the “good childhood.” As a result, the typical daily activities of young children now include things specifically aimed at cognition and skill development. Prior to the start of formal schooling, the school agenda is already well-established in the lives of most young children. Moreover, evidence suggests that participation in these activities creates school advantage for children. For example, emerging literature from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Kindergarten shows that children who start kindergarten with greater cognitive knowledge and skills, and who are read to frequently have an academic advantage over children who start kindergarten without these resources (US Department of Education, 2000). In fact, school readiness is so institutionalized in the “good ­childhood” that it is the first goal in Goals 2000: Educate America Act, which became law in 1994. Goals 2000 is a long-term, broad-based reform initiative to improve American education by setting clear and rigorous standards for what every child should know. Objective Two of Goal One reads, “Every parent in the United States will be a child’s first teacher and devote time each day

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to helping such parents’ preschool child learn, and parents will have access to the training and support parents need” (Goals 2000: Educate America Act, 1994). Initiatives have gone further than just posing school readiness as a goal by also providing parents with skill development guidelines for preparing children to enter school. The America Reads Challenge promoted by President Clinton, for instance, made “Ready, Set, Read” activity kits available to all families and caregivers of children age five and under (Koralek et al., 1997a, 1997b). And the second Bush administration made guidebooks available for parents and families such as Helping Your PreSchool Child that included recommendations for encouraging cognitive development in young children (US Department of Education, 2005/1993). Perhaps most significantly, the Obama administration promoted the integration of early childhood education into ­federal policy with the expansion of high-quality preschool through federal grants, and President Biden is committed to universal prekindergarten for all. Social constructions, however, are not just a top-down reflection of federal policy. My grandmother never contemplated school readiness; for her, school was where academic learning took place. However, before these policies were enacted, the moms I met in the park were already fully on board and actively pursuing cognitive development in their children. Rather than leading, policy is a reflection of current and emerging constructions within the population. Therefore, it is perhaps not surprising that developmental psychology finds that in addition to maternal warmth, cognitively stimulating, patient/nurturing, structured, and responsive parenting styles are associated with social and cognitive school readiness (Connell & Prinz, 2002; McGroder, 2000; Radin, 1971). School readiness is also associated with a host of specific behaviors that are common amongst some parents including high achievement expectations, high-quality mother-child interaction during early childhood (Hess et al., 1984), the availability of play materials in the home, and early language development (Bradley & Caldwell, 1984a, 1984b; Forget-Dubois et al., 2009). The park moms were acutely aware that success in school is a main component of the “good childhood” and they had the means to actively pursue cognitive development in their children from many angles including attitudes, actions, and purchases on their part. Social constructions, however, are not monolithic. Instead, groups with varying resources pick them up at varying rates. Therefore, despite government initiatives, school readiness activities are associated with demographic characteristics as well. For example, household income is positively related to the quality of cognitive stimulation young children receive at home (Votruba-Drzal, 2003). As a result, economically disadvantaged children are less ready for school than their middle-income peers, and Black and Hispanic children are less ready for kindergarten than White children (Rock & Stenner, 2005; Stipek & Ryan, 1997).

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My scholarship is focused on changes in the social construction of ­parenting and childhood as a result of schooling. In one research project, I  investigated a range of school readiness activities and their rise in the population of parents in a relatively short period of time (Schaub, 2015). Data came from the National Household Education Survey reports of ­parent participation in five behaviors that support young children’s cognitive development and school readiness. They are common to early childhood education classrooms and include reading to your child; teaching letters, words, and numbers; singing and making music; telling stories; and drawing, painting, and other arts and crafts activities. 3 I found that in just a ten-year period, the percentage of parents who reported participation at least three times in the past week with their 3- to 5-year-old child increased for each of the five activities. Remarkably, more than 50% of parents were engaging in most activities with their child by 2001, demonstrating that a significant percentage of parents see cognitive stimulation and skill building as part of the “good childhood.” Most parents have incorporated cognition into family-time activities and routinely engage at home in goals similar to those of formal schooling. The data show that new constructions of childhood spread through the population of parents quickly. The data also brought me back to the moms in the park. I wondered if there was a difference between moms of varying education levels, so I also compared families with mothers with a high school degree or less and a bachelor’s degree or more. Far from being the domain of children of well-educated parents only, engagement increased for both education categories for all activities. Families with the most educated mothers were always the most likely to engage in each activity in 1991 and they maintained that advantage in 2001 in all activities except music. However, all families, regardless of mothers’ education category, were increasing their engagement in all five of the activities. Over time, childhood is changing to include increasing cognitive activities for young children from all social categories. More educated people might pick up new social constructions more rapidly, but they spread through the entire population at a remarkable rate.

Is the “Good Childhood” a Child Right? Another way to examine recent changes in our shared meaning of childhood and how ideas spread is to look beyond the family at the broader dialogue and global pursuit of the “good childhood” through child rights (Ramirez, 1989). For example, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has spurred a lively debate about child rights worldwide. The CRC, a human rights treaty first adopted by the United Nations in 1989, obtained the required country signatures within a year. However,

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several scholars have expressed concerns over the treaty and the notion that ­children possess individual rights that are indifferent to family ­interests. They question the “good childhood” as a global social construct and instead see the CRC as representing a Western construction of childhood. Working from a non-Western vantage point, some scholars point out that the world’s children have a diverse set of experiences that call into question the “good childhood” (Boyden, 2003; Burman, 1994; Pupavac, 2001). They argue that a one size fits all construct neglects the social and economic reality of many children worldwide. For example, Western values place individual child rights over those of family and the CRC implicitly requires that both the family and the state implement those rights (Oestreich, 1998; Pupavac, 2001). Of particular concern to these scholars is that the CRC is globalizing a particular model of child development based on Western developmental psychology and individualism that assumes all children need a similar style of childhood (Burman, 1994; Woodhead, 1997). For example, there is ample evidence to show that many children live in difficult circumstances that preclude a Western version of the “good childhood.” For many children worldwide, localized constructs of childhood include the necessity of child labor (Boyden, 1997). My colleagues and I were interested in how ideas spread across the world and are promoted by global agencies (Schaub et al., 2017). As an illustrative example, we examined the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) because it is a world humanitarian leader with a far reach. Although UNICEF started out as a temporary, emergency organization, in the 1950s, it quickly moved into permanent status focused on the physical well-being of children in developing nations. Within a few more decades, UNICEF had fully blossomed into an aid organization advocating for the full rights of all children. Our examination of the agency’s documents revealed two broad trends about the construction of childhood: (1) the image of the child and the requirements for an effective childhood expand over time, and (2) aid dialogue expands over time from children in certain places and under specific conditions of need to all children everywhere and always. Following WWII, UNICEF advocacy initially concentrated on the physical well-being of the child and protection for survival was the dominant image of childhood. But by the 1960s, human capital’s influence was evident in the new future-oriented aid dialogue. Now, the child was a symbol of the nation’s future and therefore advocacy focused on preparing the child to become a productive citizen and a potential national asset. Still, UNICEF was slow to develop its education agenda, and in the 1960s, it advocated for educational expansion similar other aid organizations (Heyneman, 2005). However, by the 1970s, UNICEF abandoned concurrent expansion of all levels of education in exchange for primary education for all children and later, in a demonstration of the growing

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link between childhood and schooling, supported this mission by arguing that some children were being denied their fundamental rights. The shift opened the door for multilateral aid policy to increasingly address the needs of the individual rather than the nation. By the 1990s, UNICEF was advocating for the “whole child” and their entitlement to full rights as an individual. The organization defined childhood as a complex process of self-actualization through physical, cognitive, and psychological development. Moreover, as a testament to the expansion of childhood, in recent years, spiritual development was added to the list of child rights. For UNICEF, childhood is no longer a period to be survived, but rather a special developmental stage endowed with specific rights that include education. The analysis in many ways reveals the spread of the “good childhood” globally. However, the nature, intensity, and legitimacy of the “good childhood” including education are constantly evolving within the global realm. Seen in this way, UNICEF has chosen to sponsor a specific construction of childhood that is linked to schooling and has gained momentum and spread globally. Nation-states increasingly must espouse and implement policies that protect and develop child rights regardless of national or local economic conditions.

Conclusion My grandmother would be astounded by new constructions of motherhood and childhood. Likewise, her conceptions of both the “good mother” and the “good childhood” would be considered old-fashioned by today’s standards; nonetheless, her ideas illustrate important concepts about childhood as a socially constructed developmental stage that changes over time and spreads rapidly. In the 1960s, social historians made childhood a legitimate topic of study. While the time and place of these social histories varied, some important themes emerged from this scholarship. Their unique contribution lies in how they describe childhood. Rather than seeing notions of childhood as consistent across time, they frame the developmental stage through shared meanings. They demonstrate the change over time in aggregate ideas of the needs and appropriate activities for children, as well as the strategies and obligations of parenthood. This literature demonstrates the shift in dominant institutions in society away from the extended family and community, and toward the individual and education. As schooling gained institutional strength in the US, it replaced other main activities for children such as work. For better or worse, it has also likely pushed out other childhood activities and therefore threatens our strong cultural belief in the childhood filled with freedom and exploration. Education is now such a pervasive institution in contemporary life that it has reached in and taken time away from family activities as

The “Good Childhood” Is a Delicate Balancing Act  47

cognitive engagement has grown as an activity outside the boundaries of schooling. As it gained momentum, education transformed the mother’s role by incorporating children’s cognitive development into the domestic domain. Parents now routinely see engagement in cognitive activities with young children as part of daily life as they walk the fine line in the creation of the “just right” “good childhood.” Far from a usurper, schooling is an invited invader of childhood. Social constructions change over time and spread rapidly. For example, ­education’s growing institutional strength around the world has resulted in multilateral aid organizations such as UNICEF promoting education as a right for all children, regardless of national origins or family circumstances. Therefore, when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) declares of education, “there is a human rights imperative for people to be able to develop their capacities and participate fully in society,” (Field, et al, 2007, p. 12) the global community can assume there will be sustained pressure on nations to deliver high-quality education to all children. UNICEF and OECD, as well as many other international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), are likely to continue their documentation of both overt and covert violations of equity and inclusion in all nations. For example, due to the widely acknowledged poor quality, there is likely to be sustained pressure on Latin American countries to reform overt policies that result in upper class and even middle-class families limiting their participation in public education. Similarly, Western European countries and the US will increasingly be held responsible for their covert policies – including streaming, tracking, integration, and funding – that reproduce inequality within a framework that appears equitable and inclusive. Access to education and individual human development is a universal right in the “good childhood.”

Notes 1 Attendance rates were often lower than enrollment rates. 2 Survey age groups vary slightly. In 2007, children age 4–17 and in 2016–2019, children age 3–17. 3 For example, reading to your child is an important activity that contributes to the cognitive development and reading readiness in young children. Research shows that reading to your child builds reading skills along with stimulating imagination, building vocabulary, and introducing the parts of story (Moss & Fawcett, 1995; Saracho, 1997; Snow et al., 1998). Likewise, teaching letters, words, and numbers imparts specific skills needed for literacy and numeracy. Singing encourages phonological awareness and encourages language and rhythm awareness (Bryant et al., 1990; MacLean et al., 1987; Moss & Fawcett, 1995). Telling stories has been linked to better reading skills because it stimulates the imagination, builds vocabulary, and introduces the parts of story (Glazer, 1989; Moss & Fawcett, 1995; Sonnenschein et al., 1996). And finally, arts and crafts activities build fine motor skills, improve math learning, and support discovery (Armistead, 1996; Baker, 1994).

Chapter 4

The Institutional Invasion

The educational story of my father is the quintessential example of ­schooling expansion in the 20th century US. Born to a working-class family in Queens, NY, my father’s father had 6 years of formal schooling. My father, like many other smart Catholic kids, was awarded a scholarship to a good Catholic high school. After graduating, he started at General Foods as a mail boy and went to Stevens College at night, eventually completing a Bachelor’s Degree at Saint John’s University. By the time he finished law school, he was the father of four children (with four more to come) and working in the Tax Department at General Foods. He would later go on to attend summer graduate programs at Penn State and Stanford University. Nineteen plus years of schooling, a lot for a man from humble beginnings. He ended his career as the Corporate Vice President of Tax at General Foods. Of course, there are many other similar examples of tremendous success from the depression era working-class kids of recent immigrant families in greater NY. But this is a palpable demonstration of schooling expansion for a generation that likely began school at 1st grade and witnessed the shift in the norms and opportunities created by education as schooling became increasingly available, at least for some people. As a population, Americans are getting more and more education, staying in school longer and longer. For example, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (De Brey, 2021), in 1910, slightly more than 1 in 10 adults graduated from high school, by 2021, it was over 9 in 10 adults. A bachelor’s degree, once considered the gold standard, is now a minimum requirement for entry into most white-collar jobs. In 1910, only 3% of the adult population had a bachelor’s degree or more, but by 2021, that number had risen to 38% (De Brey, 2021). Moreover, these figures will continue to rise as high school graduates seek further education. For example, in 2018 69% of high school graduates went on to some form of tertiary education (De Brey, 2021).1 The typical American student now stays in school into their 20s. With the upward expansion of schooling, adolescence and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003325949- 4

The Institutional Invasion  49

young adulthood have also expanded to include a greater part of the life course. Although the upward expansion of schooling is clearly visible in my father’s education career, he attended no early childhood education. Yet, the downward expansion of schooling to younger and younger children is a leading edge of the invited invasion. Parents and their young children are drawn into the realm of education at earlier and earlier ages as the power of education as an institution grows in the US. As schooling expands to include younger and younger children, it changes the composition and expectations of childhood. It also alters cultural definitions of the “good mother” and “good childhood.” The justifications for the downward expansion of schooling to younger children usually incorporate widespread cultural ideas about the benefits of education and the enhancement of the individual. Over the 20th century, parents increasingly opted to send younger and younger children to school as one expression of their increasing interest in cognitive development as an essential early childhood activity. Figure 1.1 from Chapter 1 depicts the rise in the percent of the population enrolled at various levels of schooling over the course of the 20th century. Central to the message of the figure is that schooling expands both upward to older and older children and also downward to younger and younger children. For example, from 1900 to 2018, early childhood education expanded to include increasingly larger proportions of young children’s lives. In the first half of the 20th century, kindergarten growth was sporadic as it was slowly incorporated into the public school schedule. But after 1950, enrollments took off just as preschool enrollments were gaining momentum. By the end of the 20th century, nearly all children attended kindergarten and more than one in every two children went to preschool. This chapter describes the slow expansion and transformation of three types of early childhood education: kindergarten, Head Start, and preK. Once considered an intervention for poor kids from urban areas or a luxury experience for wealthy children, early childhood education – and kindergarten in particular – is now considered an essential experience for children. And nearly all children attend some early schooling even though it is not required in most states. The beginnings of these three types of early childhood education are rooted in their distinctiveness from formal schooling and a strong connection to the mother, such as child saving,2 parent training, and job opportunities. At first, these new spaces were often characterized as a separate type of schooling with multiple goals, only some of which were cognitive, and often included social reform. But the path of each has led in a similar direction, toward the dominant model of traditional formal schooling and academic achievement.

50  The Institutional Invasion

Schooling Expansion for Young Children Unlike the established public education system that has defined b­ oundaries between school and family, successful early childhood education initiatives in the US begin with close ties to the mother. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other romantic philosophers assigned the “good mother” a new task as engaged overseer of child development. Spurred by the publication of Emile, a study by Rousseau on protecting childhood innocence in the face of societal evils, cultural notions about the connection between mothers and children surged in the modern period (Rousseau, 1762/1921). Emile is a fictitious boy Rousseau created to illustrate his ideas about childhood and education. He believed children should live close to nature and develop both curiosity and moral character. In his writing, Rousseau relegated the “good mother” to the domestic sphere, designating her as homemaker and assigning her household, childcare, and early education responsibilities. For the “good mother,” the new responsibility of early childhood ­education came with the opportunity to shape at least parts of this emerging level of schooling. In Preschool Education in America (1995), Barbara Beatty, a historian of education and childhood, describes several early childhood initiatives attempted in the US, only some of which stuck, while others either disappeared or evolved. For example, the Infant School3 of the early 19th century was a European import that failed to survive in the American educational landscape, in part because it was seen as a threat to the family. However, it motivated a competing model called the “family school” that encouraged mothers to be the first teachers of their children in an early version of what amounts to the homeschooling movement. In a backlash to the formal structure and large classes used by the Infant School, the “family school” discouraged the development of precocity in young children, instead opting for less structured, more intimate early childhood education. Prior to the 19th century, fathers had taken the educational lead in the family, but as Romantic notions of motherhood surged, responsibility shifted from fathers to mothers in an evolving construction of the “good mother.” As a result, mothers had the opportunity to influence this emerging level of school and subsequent successful early childhood education initiatives began with a strong connection to the mother and the “good childhood.”

Kindergarten I had the quintessential mid-20th century kindergarten experience  – two and one half hours per day that included a snack and rest. We learned one letter a week and played. Our teacher, the universally loved Mrs. Fisher, even had a giant train in the middle of the classroom where

The Institutional Invasion  51

students could climb in and through or just sit. There was also a play kitchen and trucks. Kindergarten of the 1960s and 1970s had multiple goals, including an introduction to schooling and socialization as well as cognitive development. By 1970, 8 in 10 kids attended kindergarten (US Census Bureau, 2021b). But just three decades earlier, neither of my parents attended. In fact, between 1930 and 1940, less than 3 in 10 children went to kindergarten. Three decades after me, both of my children went to kindergarten, but gone were the snack and rest as well as the kitchen and trucks; kindergarten felt very much like the other grades in elementary school. My daughter attended the traditional half-day schedule but the curriculum by the mid-1990s was rapidly evolving and there were very specific learning standards attached to kindergarten. Four years later, my son went to all-day kindergarten in a time when even recess was being questioned; it was hardly a “child’s garden” anymore. Over the course of the 20th century, kindergarten emerged as the first formal grade of public schooling, and cognitive development emerged as the core purpose. The very name kindergarten, or “child’s garden,” evokes images of sacred places that encourage growth and development in specially designed early childhood spaces. The inventor of the kindergarten is said to have grappled over a name for this new invention until one day the name suddenly came to him and he shouted “Eureka! I have found it! Kindergarten shall be the name of the new institution!” (Beatty, 1995, p. 41). While the story could be myth, the name kindergarten fit perfectly because it is ripening and romantic; something set apart from schooling, although not for long. As a testament to the power of schooling as a modern institution, kindergarten has conformed to public education over the last 150 years. It is no longer a separate play-based experience or first grade preparation, it is the first year of formal schooling. The kindergarten is a German invention; however, the kindergarten movement was much more successful in the US. The first Englishspeaking kindergarten or “child’s garden” in the US was started in Boston in the mid-19th century and was based on the ideas of Friedrich Froebel, a German pedagogue. Froebel and his 19th century creation were influenced by 18th century Enlightenment and Romantic education philosophers like Rousseau and Pestalozzi, both of whom promoted reasoning and self-awareness as the foundation of human development. The original kindergarten philosophy promoted a unique set of learning objectives with child-sized learning materials and specialized training for teachers in a separate space designed specifically for children. Kindergarten has been a curious year of schooling from its beginnings in the US. Transformed from its original mission as a separate play-based experience with goals that once included moral education and Americanization, kindergarten is now the first formal year of public

52  The Institutional Invasion

schooling in the US. It is a unique example of schooling expansion because it was not originally part of formal schooling nor is it an American ­invention, yet it took hold in the US (Beatty, 1995). The goals of kindergarten have evolved with its expansion and incorporation into the public system. Although historical investigations often emphasize social reform goals in the early years and academic preparation later on, elements of both were present from its beginnings. In fact, the diverse set of goals helped promote Froebel’s revolutionary play-based curriculum for young children within two very distinct populations. In the 1870s, middle- and upper middle-class Easterners and Midwesterners adopted this child-centered style of schooling. But in the 1880s, kindergartens were founded in large urban areas as an intervention for low-income and immigrant families. As a result, after its incorporation into the public system, the kindergarten struggled to find a core purpose, a connection to formal schooling and the primary grades. After a meandering history through several cultural justifications, cognitive development eventually won the common ground. A sample of articles from the New York Times at the end of the 19th century illustrates the several early goals of the kindergarten in the US, including parent training, aid to poor families and Americanization, as well as a beginning to formal schooling, all used in support of the expansion of early childhood education to all children in New York (“Doing a grand work,” 1891; “Exhibiting good results,” 1891; “Friends of the kindergarten,” 1893; “Teaching the mothers,” 1895; “They favor the kindergarten,” 1890). For example, one important goal was parent training. According to Ann Taylor Allen (1988), the scholar of German history, the inclusion of mothers in the kindergarten uniquely joined public and private domains and resulted in a distinct role for this new level of schooling that worked in cooperation with the family. To support mothers, kindergartens offered parent training as described by Mrs. Lyman Abbott of the Kindergarten Department at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, on the Kindergarten Mother’s Course: Mothers come to us and want cut-and-dried rules for bringing up their children but we cannot give them. There must be a perfect understanding between the mother and child. The child must feel so sure of the mother’s love that it is a pleasure to do what she wishes (…). Among the things by which mothers say they have profited have been the ability gained to judge a child more by its whole character than by a single act, to deal more wisely by taking a long-range view of life, to discriminate more wisely between imagination and untruthfulness, and to see the significance of learning how to meet each impulse of the child. (“Teaching the mothers,” 1895, p. 13)

The Institutional Invasion  53

Another goal of early kindergartens was aid to poor families. In large cities in the 1880s, kindergartens were an important intervention that provided services to poor and immigrant families including home visits and parenting instruction, as well as feeding, bathing, and nursing children (Beatty, 1995). This is illustrated by Secretary of the New York Kindergarten Association Mr. Daniel S. Remsen in the First Annual Report: The value of such work as this association has undertaken for the less fortunate children of New York has only to be understood to be appreciated. When we consider that nearly three-quarters of New York’s population live in the tenement houses, and when we realize the depth of hardship and demoralization this implies, it will be ­readily appreciated that the work of saving and educating the children is more important than anything else; for the child will be a man by and by, and experience has proved that unless trained early in life he may be a useless, and even a dangerous, element in society. (“Exhibiting good results,” 1891, p. 8) A third goal of the kindergarten was Americanization. As large waves of southern and eastern European immigrants entered the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, justifications such as the creation of productive citizens helped to spread the kindergarten to the public system (Beatty, 1995). Richard Gilder, President of the New York Kindergarten Association, supported this at a meeting of the organization, as reported by The New York Times: Mr. Gilder had been requested to speak on the relation of kindergartens to true citizenship, and in a few words he showed how education should begin as soon as the mind was formed in the child and how the foundation for good citizenship rested on the foundation of a proper early education. Such a training, he said, was equally necessary among the children of the rich as among those of the poor. (“Doing a grand work,” 1891, p. 8) But these goals obscure the broader significance of kindergarten as the beginning of formal schooling revealed by Reverend R. Heber Newton at a New York Kindergarten Association meeting in 1890: “The mass of educated and wealthy people of this city did not realize that the kindergarten was the beginning of education” (“They favor the kindergarten,” 1890, p. 8). A similar purpose was identified by Richard W. Gilder, the President of the New York Kindergarten Association when he stated: The fact that the Kindergarten has a ‘philanthropic’ side should not be considered as militating against the further fact that it is regarded as

54  The Institutional Invasion

a general educational necessity, and as such imperatively a part of the system of public instruction. (“Friends of the kindergarten,” 1893, p. 5) From its very beginnings, kindergarten was viewed by its advocates as an essential educational experience and therefore an important addition to the public system. Nevertheless, the full incorporation of kindergarten into the public school system was slow. Large cities were the first to adopt this new year of schooling, but in the first half of the 20th century, kindergarten growth was sporadic. In addition, many cities eliminated kindergartens during the 1930s or raised the entrance age (Reavis & Shanner, 1937). As a result of historical events and ambivalence toward early childhood education, it took nearly five decades for all 50 states to begin contributing to the financing of kindergarten. Figure 4.1 is a map of the US that groups states by the decade in which they first began contributing state-level funds to kindergarten. A large proportion of states began funding kindergarten prior to 1950, especially in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, but much of the South was late, with several states beginning contributions after 1970. Moreover, a contrast of individual states further illustrates the slow establishment of kindergarten into state budgets. For example, Ohio began state funding of kindergarten in 1935, while Mississippi began nearly 50 years later in 1983. However, the evolving goals or the lack of state-level financing did not slow the growth in enrollments over the second half of the 20th century. Kindergarten continues to transform before our eyes notwithstanding the considerable variation that remains in compulsory requirements, contact time, and curricular standards by state and local school districts (Education Commission of the States). For example, as of 2020, only 11 states and the District of Columbia required children go to school at age five (Cassidy Francies, 2020). This is surprising given that nearly 91% of 5-year-olds attended school in 2019 (NCES, 2022).4 In addition, only 17 states and the District of Columbia required age-eligible children to attend at least halfday kindergarten, and although attendance is not compulsory in all states, 42 states and the District of Columbia require school districts to offer half-day kindergarten programs at a minimum (Kelley et al., 2020). Perhaps surprisingly, most states offer kindergarten but do not require children to attend which suggests, in the eyes of policy makers, that kindergarten still hovers in the space between public service and essential experience. In addition, until recently, few states had specific kindergarten curricular standards, and even fewer required districts to adopt the standards. However, kindergarten standards are rapidly evolving as an official acknowledgment of the changing status of kindergarten. And, although the state laws mandating kindergarten vary considerably, most children attend at least half-day and,

The Institutional Invasion  55

Figure 4.1  Year State Began Funding Kindergarten. Source (supplemental to Newspaper reports): Cascio, E. U. (2009). Maternal labor supply and the introduction of kindergartens into American public schools. Journal of Human Resources, 44(1), 140 –170. Dhuey, E. (2011). Who benefits from kindergarten? Evidence from the introduction of state subsidization. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 33(1), 3 –22. Knight, E. W. (1952). Fifty years of American education, 1900 –1950: A historical review and critical appraisal. Ronald Press Co. Morphet, E. L ., & Lindman, E. L . R . (1950). Public school f inance programs of the forty-eight states (No. 274). US Government Printing Office. Munse, A . R . (1961). Revenue programs for the public schools: In the United States, 1959–1960. Albert R . Munse,… US Government Printing Office. Steiner, A . K. (1957). A report on state laws: Early elementary education. School Life, 39(8), 7–9. Tanner, L . N., & Tanner, D. (1973). Unanticipated effects of federal policy: The kindergarten. Educational Leadership, 31(1), 49 –52. This is a shaded map of the United States showing when state governments began funding kindergarten. Shading grows darker for later start dates in four categories: before 1950, 1950 –1960, 1965 –1970, and after 1970.

56  The Institutional Invasion

increasingly, full-day kindergarten. In total, the 20th century transformation of the kindergarten signals a general agreement between parents and school administrators that 5-year-olds should go to school. Moreover, the downward reach of schooling expansion is clearly ­v isible in the current push for full-day kindergarten. In 1980, only 30% of ­k indergarteners were in full-day programs, but that percentage has steadily risen; in 2018, 83% of kindergartens attended full-day programs (DeBrey, 2021). Furthermore, 14 states and the District of Columbia required all districts to make full-day kindergarten available to all c­ hildren. Of the other states, 28 require school districts to offer a half-day kindergarten option. Currently, only eight states do not require districts to offer kindergarten (Kelley et al., 2020). However, there is little agreement about what constitutes full-day kindergarten. According to the Education Commission of the States, only 16 states define full-day kindergarten in statute, and there is tremendous variation in those definitions. For example, Illinois defines full-day as four hours per day, while Oklahoma and South Carolina define full-day as six hours per day; Florida defines full-day as 720 hours per year, and Alabama defines full-day as 1,080 hours per year (Kelley et al., 2020). So although most children attend kindergarten, there is still significant variation in the context and content of kindergarten. But these statistics have all steadily increased in the last two decades. Although variation exists, it is important to note that all 50 states and the District of Columbia are moving toward the same model of compulsory full-day kindergarten for all 5-year-olds, which represents a significant change in formal schooling and the evolving construction of the “good childhood.” Although kindergarten is not universally compulsory, in the second half of the 20th century, most parents adopted it as the first formal year of schooling. In most states, the compulsory school age is older than 5, and kindergarten attendance is not required, but 5-year-old school attendance is widespread. There has been a longstanding assumption amongst scholars that early childhood education attendance is driven by maternal labor force participation; that is, parents adopt kindergarten based on availability, and availability is associated with working mothers and the need for childcare. However, in an analysis of the rise in kindergarten enrollments, I compared mothers’ labor market participation with mothers’ educational attainment and found that rather than workforce participation, in fact, it is mothers’ education that is associated with state-level kindergarten enrollments. Although states varied in their initiation of kindergarten and the rate of expansion, over the second half of the 20th century kindergarten enrollments reached normative rates in all 50 states, which was driven at least in part by the proportion of mothers with bachelor’s degrees (Schaub, 2016). Kindergarten’s connection to motherhood entered a new phase in the second half of the 20th century. The institutionalization of

The Institutional Invasion  57

mass education changed the population of mothers and their conceptualization of early childhood, leading to the expansion of early childhood education as American parents increasingly decided that kindergarten was an essential experience for their children. As kindergarten enrollments grew, the focus on cognitive and academic skill development also grew in the kindergarten. Kindergar ten as the First Formal Year of Schooling

In the late 19th century, kindergartens fought to preserve their unique approach to early childhood education, but by the early 20th century, kindergartens increasingly began to look like the public school system to which they were increasingly linked. Froebel’s educational ideas slowly lost favor to a more Americanized, secularized early childhood pedagogy. Then, as the public system slowly incorporated kindergarten into the ­primary grades, the intervention component of large city kindergartens was abandoned, and teachers stopped making home visits. As a justification for the incorporation, districts began organizing kindergarten as the formal grade preceding first grade through a curriculum that included silent, individual work and reading readiness and the requirement of ­formal training for kindergarten teachers similar to primary grade teachers (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). But early primary grades were also impacted by the unique kindergarten philosophy of learning through play. For example, the old, strict, teacher-centered curriculum and emphasis on rote learning was softened with some kindergarten techniques as primary grade teachers added child-centered methods to their classrooms, used grouped tables instead of bolted down desks, added play and active learning in the classroom, and allowed students to move about the classroom (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). But this only deepened the kindergarten’s ongoing struggles over a permanent identity. Was its main purpose a bridge between home and school, socialization, or academic preparation? And as children increasingly went to school prior to kindergarten, were some of those purposes shifting downward to other levels of schooling? The ensuing tug-of-war over the soul of the kindergarten has led a ­number of scholars to document the 20th century shift in kindergarten focus. Using memorable titles such as “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade,” they have shown that the academic kindergarten grew over the second half of the 20th century as the focus increasingly targeted first grade preparation (Bassok et al., 2016; Cuban, 1992; Dombkowski, 2001; Russell, 2011). For example, in 1998, 30% of kindergarten teachers believed children should learn to read in kindergarten, but that jumped to 80% by 2010. And kindergarten teachers changed their behavior as

58  The Institutional Invasion

well. They reported doing more complex math and reading instruction and more teacher-centered instruction but less art, music, and student-­ initiated activities by 2010. Teachers also held higher expectations for students entering kindergarten in 2010. For example, they were much more likely to believe children should enter kindergarten knowing the alphabet (Bassok et al., 2016). One popular media-driven image is that schooling in the US has been dumbed down to the point that it is no longer challenging for the average student. To test this claim, David Baker, the sociologist of education, and his research team created a large data archive of elementary mathematics textbook content over the 20th century. They found that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the American elementary mathematics curriculum of the late 20th century increasingly became both more mathematically and cognitively demanding than in earlier time periods (Baker et al., 2010). Next, to further test the claim, David Gamson and Robert Stevens created a similar data archive of elementary reading and language arts textbooks over the 20th century and similarly found that students were increasingly asked to do more cognitively complex tasks with printed work in the second half of the 20th century (Stevens et al., 2015). Using the Baker team’s mathematics data archive, I examined kindergarten curriculum changes. There are several significant things to note here. First, there were no textbooks devoted solely to kindergarten mathematics prior to 1974. Kindergarten had been slowly losing its unique, play-based approach to early childhood education over many decades, but a formal textbook for kindergarten mathematics marked a new level of acceptance for the academic kindergarten. Second, from 1974 to 2001, the kindergarten mathematics textbook expanded in number of pages, general topics, and specific content area. Table 4.1 shows that the number of pages slowly expanded from 96 to 167 as textbook use became established in kindergarten pedagogy. In addition, early textbooks contained five content areas but that number expanded to 15 by the end of the ­century. Since the introduction of the kindergarten mathematics textbook, arithmetic has consistently been the most sustained content area but as Table 4.2 shows, in the 1970s, arithmetic was number work. By the 1980s though, addition and subtraction made their way into the kindergarten textbook. Finally, grouping and set theory disappeared from the kindergarten math textbook by 2001. As these basic skills disappeared from the kindergarten mathematics textbook, more sophisticated topics like geometry and measurement appeared. Table 4.3 shows the rapid increase in several topic areas over the 27-year time period. Cognitively complex topics such as money, measurement, and statistics all became an established part of the kindergarten curriculum by 2001. These results are consistent with the Baker team who

The Institutional Invasion  59 Table 4.1  C urricular Content Area Change in Kindergarten Math Textbooks, 1974 to 2001 Year

Pages

#Content

% Basic Arth %Geo&Mea

%Reasoning

1974 1975 1981 1985 1987 1991 1999 2001

96 90 128 160 252 284 160 167

5 9 9 12 14 12 15 15

47(45) 44(40) 59(76) 53(84) 41(104) 27(78) 35(56) 48(80)

38(37) 27(24) 18(24) 23(36) 15(38) 42(119) 18(29) 18(30)

0(0) 4(4) 4(5) 9(14) 12(30) 10(27) 15(24) 29(48)

Number of pages(percentage). Source: Baker, D., Knipe, H., Collins, J., Leon, J., Cummings, E., Blair, C., & Gamson, D. (2010). One hundred years of elementary school mathematics in the united states: A content analysis and cognitive assessment of textbooks from 1900 to 2000. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 41(4), 383 – 423. Author’s analysis. This is a table depicting the curricular content area change in kindergarten math textbooks from 1974 to 2001 in five categories including total number of pages, and number of content areas as well as number and percent of pages basic arithmetic, geometry and measurement, and reasoning.

Table 4.2  T  opic (Arithmetic) Expansion in Kindergarten Math Textbooks, 1974 to 2001 Year

Pages %Numbers %Addition %Subtraction %Add& %Grouping %Set Sub Theory

1974 1975 1981 1985 1987 1991 1999 2001

96 90 128 160 252 284 160 167

47(45) 44(40) 52(67) 46(73) 33(83) 20(56) 23(36) 35(59)

0(0) 0(0) 2(3) 4(6) 4(11) 3(9) 6(10) 4(6)

0(0) 0(0) 5(6) 3(5) 3(8) 5(13) 6(10) 2(3)

0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 1(2) 0(0) 0(0) 7(12)

11(11) 2(2) 5(7) 4(7) 3(8) 18(51) 0(0) 0(0)

17(16) 0(0) 0(0) 1(1) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0)

Number of pages(percentage). Source: Baker, D., Knipe, H., Collins, J., Leon, J., Cummings, E., Blair, C., & Gamson, D. (2010). One hundred years of elementary school mathematics in the united states: A content analysis and cognitive assessment of textbooks from 1900 to 2000. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 41(4), 383 – 423. Author’s analysis. This is a table depicting the topic expansion in kindergarten mathematics textbooks from 1974 to 2001 in seven categories including total number of pages, plus number and percent pages in numbers, addition, subtraction, addition and subtraction, grouping, and set theory.

also found that the elementary curriculum expanded to incorporate more topics and more complexity. The results suggest that the elementary and kindergarten curricula were working in concert, leading to kindergarten mathematics becoming more established and complex.

60  The Institutional Invasion Table 4.3  M  easurement and Geometry in the Kindergarten Textbook, 1974 to 2001 Year

Pages %Money %Measure %Stats&Prob %Geometry %Informal Geometry

1974 1975 1981 1985 1987 1991 1999 2001

96 90 128 160 252 284 160 167

0(0) 2(2) 1(1) 3(4) 6(16) 3(9) 4(6) 9(15)

0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 3(4) 2(4) 3(9) 6(9) 11(19)

0(0) 3(3) 0(0) 0(0) 1(2) 5(13) 4(7) 8(13)

0(0) 2(2) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 2(3) 4(6)

6(6) 4(4) 10(13) 8(13) 6(14) 8(22) 4(6) 5(9)

Number of pages(percentage). Source: Baker, D., Knipe, H., Collins, J., Leon, J., Cummings, E., Blair, C., & Gamson, D. (2010). One hundred years of elementary school mathematics in the United States: A content analysis and cognitive assessment of textbooks from 1900 to 2000. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 41(4), 383 – 423. Author’s analysis. This is a table depicting the measurement and geometry in kindergarten mathematics textbooks from 1974 to 2001 in six categories including total number of pages, plus number and percent pages in money, measurement, statistics and probability, geometry, and informal geometry.

Kindergarten in the US is unique, because although it is free, available and part of public schooling, it is not compulsory in most states. Its long ties to the mother originate in parent training and child saving but also include her important role in the expansion and state financing of kindergarten. The institutionalization of kindergarten into formal schooling in the US is atypical: rather than state compulsory laws driving enrollments, formal schooling became the dominant model and absorbed the kindergarten, transforming it from its original mission into something more compatible with typical public schooling. Its expansion represents parents’ increasing belief in the benefits of schooling and their growing willingness to transform childhood through school attendance as they strive to create opportunities for their children in both childhood and adulthood. Born in 1929, my father was swept along to a professional degree by the upward expansion of schooling that continually creates new upper levels of education and includes greater proportions of the population. Similarly, young children are swept into schooling at new lower levels of education that expand to greater proportions of younger cohorts.

Head Start As kindergarten gained stable footing in the public school system and was expanding to reach a larger proportion of the 5-year-old population,

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Washington was considering a new type of schooling for even younger children that was revolutionary in many ways. First, the federal government was both creating and funding this new type of schooling. This is a big deal for the US, since our constitution designates education as a state and local matter. In 1964, when Johnson began the War on Poverty, the federal government had no formal role in public schooling and the US Department of Education did not exist. Second, the policy targeted early childhood education for low-income 4-year-olds, an attempt by the federal government to alleviate the effects of poverty by leveling the playing field. But like the earlier kindergarten movement, the original intentions of Head Start were distinct from formal schooling and connected to parenting, especially to the mother. In a two-step process, Head Start encouraged the expansion of early childhood education to all children, then got more academically focused in reaction to the emerging preschool network. In the middle part of the 20th century, social scientists provided the justification for more and better schooling when they began questioning the dominant view that IQ is a fixed trait. Until the publication of The Organization of Behavior by Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb (Hebb, 1949), most academic research argued that heredity was the sole determinant of IQ. In his book, Hebb proposed what is now a widely held belief: a rich, stimulating environment is essential to learning. He believed that experiences are the foundation to assembling and strengthening the neuron pathways that promote learning. Similarly, J. McVicker Hunt, the notable American educational psychologist who published Intelligence and Experience in 1961, admitted that the process of writing pushed him to confront the shortcomings in the dominant belief that intelligence is fixed (Hunt, 1961). As a result, he defined intelligence as “the adaptive ­abilities, habits, knowledge and skills which can be observed and ­measured,” emphasizing early experience in the development of intelligence. Putting this new idea to the test, in the 1950s and 1960s, a few scholars supplied scientific validation for early childhood education when they began demonstrating that environment, and especially early childhood experiences, had an impact on IQ. As a result, the “good mother” gained new motivation to deepen her influence in the cognitive development of her children. She could no longer blame fate, instead the “good mother” had to actively create the “good childhood” by shaping the environment. Emerging at the same time that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were developing new policies to promote greater social and economic equity, this new evidence laid the groundwork for a program that would provide enriching early childhood experiences, especially for low-income children. The War on Poverty was ripe for an early childhood

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intervention when Project Head Start emerged from Community Action Programs (Title II of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964). Several academic advisors, including Urie Bronfenbrenner from Cornell and Edward Zigler, director of the Yale Child Study Center, argued that Head Start should start out as a small pilot program. But President Johnson, along with Sargent Shiver, the politician/activist who created many social programs and is considered the architect of the War on Poverty, wanted a large-scale early childhood intervention with broad public support and chose to sacrifice clearly defined goals in exchange for a program that was up and running quickly. Head Start began in 1965 as a federally funded compensatory program meant to give low-income children an introduction to the school ­environment as well as provide other services. It started as an eight-week, part-day summer program serving 560,000 children but quickly grew into a school-year, part-day program. In 2019, Head Start enrolled nearly one million children and offered full-day and full-year classrooms (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2022).5 The program was designed as a federally funded but locally administered community-based project. Importantly, it was designed when few American children attended preschool. For example, in 1965, 11% of all 3- and 5-year-olds in the US attended school. By 2019, that number had grown to 54% (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022).6 As more and more children attended some type of preschool, the expectations of Head Start slowly shifted to its ability to compete with the many cognitive opportunities that middle-class young children encounter, resulting in the original multi-goal design continually being challenged and threatened. Unexpectedly, Head Start sparked the “good mother’s” interest in early childhood education, only to have the subsequent growth of preschool push Head Start to become more academic. In 1975, 5% of 3- and 4-year-olds attended Head Start. The program grew slowly and 25 years later in 2000 Head Start enrolled 11% of 3- and 4-year-olds but 80% attended the program for only one year, usually as a 4-year-old (Ripple et al., 1999). However, as state-sponsored pre-K enrollment has grown, national Head Start enrollment rates have declined. In 2021, 7% of 3-year-olds and 7% of 4-year-olds attended Head Start nationally. The new state-level schooling expansion to younger children appears to be competing with Head Start enrollments even though Head Start student spending per child is about 30% higher than state spending. Average Head Start spending per child enrolled, over $11,300 in 2021, is higher than state-sponsored pre-K programs that averaged about $8,100 per child in the same year (Friedman-Krauss et al., 2022). Criticism of Head Start has been around almost as long as Head Start itself. As early as 1969, Arthur Jensen, the American psychologist who believed heredity played the primary role in intelligence, proclaimed that “compensatory education has been tried and it apparently has failed”

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( Jensen, 1969). Head Start administration is decentralized and this leads to tremendous variation in the quality of delivery. In fact, some have argued that there has never been a “Head Start” program to evaluate but rather many different versions based on the specific community and its needs. Although Head Start was originally designed to have multiple goals, including health, nutrition, socialization, and family well-being, most evaluations of Head Start concentrate on cognitive gains. These evaluations often lament what is commonly called “fade-out” or the disappearance by third grade of any academic gains made from participation in Head Start (e.g. Puma et al., 2010). This means that comparisons of children with similar family backgrounds who attend and do not attend Head Start find that they score similarly on tests of achievement by third grade. In addition, Head Start is often compared to the more intensive, better-funded early childhood programs like Perry Preschool Project and Abecedarian that have shown more consistent and sustained effects (Barnett, 1995, 1998, 2011; Barnett & Belfield, 2006). But even those Cadillac programs did not close the achievement gap between poor c­ hildren and their more privileged peers (Barnett, 2011; Gomby et al., 1995). However, Head Start does have important benefits for its attendees. Head Start has shown meaningful short-term increases in cognitive ability and motivation, improved social behavior, greater access to and participation in health care and improved parenting (Puma et al., 2010). Moreover, some studies have found lasting effects in reduced special education referrals and grade retention rates as well as increased graduation rates for Head Start participants (Bauer & Schanzenbach, 2016; Deming, 2009). Additionally, there is evidence of assimilation into schooling culture. Head Start parents show greater involvement in school at the end of the kindergarten year. They are also more likely to be involved in schooling if they perceive the school climate to be less positive than similar parents whose children did not attend Head Start (Seefeldt et al., 1998). Still, the lack of sustained long-term cognitive benefits has made Head Start a controversial program (Vinovskis, 1999). “Fade-out” has been a concern for educators and policy makers since the program’s beginnings and has raised questions about efficacy. Reflective of the broader movement in early childhood education toward an academic model, there have been many attempts to make cognitive achievement the main goal of Head Start. For example, in 1998, the main emphasis of the program was changed from socialization to school readiness. Less than ten years later, teacher qualification was the centerpiece of the Improving Head Start for School Readiness Act of 2007. It required that all Head Start lead teachers hold an early childhood-related associate’s degree by 2011 and that half of the lead teachers must hold a bachelor’s degree by 2013. In 2016, new Head Start Performance Standards brought the accountability movement of the public school system to the program by requiring the collection and analysis of data that fosters program improvement.

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Challenging the justification of an academic Head Start, some research suggests that “fade-out” is not the result of some deficit in the program but rather what happens to Head Start attendees afterward. In an important examination of Head Start, Lee and Loeb (1995) argue that “fade-out” is the result of the inferior public schools that Head Start students go on to attend. According to their findings, children who attend Head Start go on to public schools that have lower overall academic achievement, less academic support, weaker staff-student interactions, and where they feel less safe. Similarly, Currie and Thomas (1995) find that academic gains are lost especially quickly for Black students, who are also more likely to attend inferior public schools (Currie & Thomas, 2000). This means that many of the positive gains made by Head Start attendees are likely to be lost when they go on to attend the decentralized US education system, where quality varies by location and results in middle- and high-income students having access to significantly better education experiences than low-income students. Like other forms of early childhood education, Head Start also began with strong connections to the mother, including encouraging volunteering and offering parent training courses as well as hiring parents to teach in the program. In addition, some locations have encouraged the “good mother” to be an activist. The best-known example of this is the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM). In a rich social history, Crystal Sanders (2016) describes the Mississippi freedom fighter’s foray into early childhood education in A Chance for Change. From 1965 to 1968, the CDGM sponsored a broad and holistic interpretation of parental involvement that included empowering poor parents and resulted in the inclusion of Mississippi’s Head Start parents in every aspect of organizing and running the schools. According to Sanders, Black women were at the center of this new extension to the civil rights movement as they used early childhood education to instill racial pride in young children, create jobs and opportunities for adults, and engage in community building and social reform as activist “good mothers.” The federal government piqued the interest of the “good mother” in preschool education when low-income children gained access to a new level of schooling. As a result, the creation of Head Start also created a gateway to expanding early childhood education to all young children and schooling quickly became a fixture in the “good childhood.” Head Start remains an important anti-poverty program and an attempt by the federal government to reduce the inequity created by the decentralized US system of education. In its nearly 60 years of existence, it has come to look much more like the public school system. Cognitive achievement is increasingly the main goal, teachers are increasingly required to have similar credentials to public school teachers and although parental involvement remains

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an important component, it has taken on the more conventional definition of participation.

Pre-K In the middle part of the 20th century, more than a hundred years after the first introduction of early childhood education into the US, the US still had a hodgepodge of early childhood education initiatives for young children. Some were temporarily funded by the federal government, some specifically targeted at low-income children, and most had a diverse set of goals (only one of which was cognition), but all were intimately tied to the mother. The goals included parent training, home visits, and childcare for working mothers, all services that grew from the notion that there is a deep mother-child connection and that child rearing is primarily her responsibility. Yet, as a testament to the power of education as an institution, the path of early childhood education in this country is toward the dominant school model and academic learning. As described above, by the early part of the 20th century, kindergarten was an established 5-year-old program slowly making its way into the public school system. As a result, emerging early childhood advocates focused on younger children. Unlike the earlier kindergarten movement that was staffed by reformist women, the nursery school movement attracted younger, professional women interested in a more scientifically oriented approach to early childhood. The kindergarten movement also had roots in a single pedagogy, but the early 20th century nursery school movement was a diverse collection of experimental curriculums and research interests. In the beginning, nursery schools attempted to meet the needs of diverse families through hours that were longer than the late 20th century half-day program for young children and a curriculum that was broader than just academics. But one unifying goal of the nursery school movement was the creation of “better parents” (Beatty, 1995). In contrast to the kindergarten movement that encouraged women to define motherhood broadly by devoting time and providing care to less fortunate children, the nursery school movement encouraged the “good mother” to focus on better parenting for her own children. As a powerful cultural message, the nursery school movement offered the “good mother” parenting literature and classes as well as scientific advice on being a better parent. There were multiple starts and stops to programs for 3- and 4-yearolds in the first half of the 20th century and government sponsorship of early childhood education initiatives helped preschool programs to catch on. In the 1930s, the federal government-funded emergency public nursery schools in an effort to create jobs and promote daycare for working ­mothers. Just as that program was ending, WWII prompted many women

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to enter the workforce, and the Lanham Act allowed the federal government to fund childcare centers. Then, in the 1960s, the federal government sponsored Head Start as part of the larger War on Poverty. So, in addition to the small percentage of middle- and upper-class children exposed to nursery school because their parents were able to pay for it, in the first half of the century, many less fortunate children were exposed to early childhood education through government-funded programs. Then, in the second half of the 20th century, preschool enrollments expanded rapidly. In particular, programs funded by the federal government that attempted to reduce social inequalities by leveling the playing field through early exposure to schooling for less-advantaged children (e.g., Head Start) also piqued middle-class parents’ interest in early schooling. As a result, in the second half of the 20th century, a complex network of private early childhood education programs grew in the US. Thus, many of the American children who went to preschool through the 20th century went at their parents’ expense. The federal government did not supply early childhood education to most American children, and there was even a shortage in supply for those eligible for government-funded early childhood education. Now, preschool programs, and in particular pre-K, are increasingly being adopted by state departments of education as a means to expand access to public schooling and reduce the achievement gap. Figure 4.2 shows that eight states plus the District of Columbia now enroll over 50% of 4-year-olds in pre-K, five of which enroll more than 70%. Twenty-one more states enroll between 20 and 50% of eligible children. As a testament to schooling expansion, both Washington, D.C., and Vermont also enroll more than 50% of 3-year-olds (Friedman-Krauss et al., 2022). But unlike kindergarten expansion, the South has been a leader in pre-K expansion. In total, 11 states plus the District of Columbia have open eligibility for all 4-year-olds; however, due to limited funding, many states have limited access. In comparison, 33 states continue to maintain targeted programs for low-income students only, and six states have no pre-K program (Friedman-Krauss et al., 2022). The landscape of US public schooling is being transformed by the addition of a new grade and all 4-year-olds to formal schooling just as kindergarten and 5-year-olds were added in the 20th century. A new public debate about whether pre-K should be added to public schooling has many advocates, policy makers, and scholars weighing in on this topic by asking the important question: Should public schooling expand to incorporate 4-year-olds, or should schooling prior to kindergarten remain the obligation of parents? Not surprisingly, there are legitimate points on both sides. For example, in The Sandbox Investment, David Kirp (2007), a professor of public policy at UC Berkley, argues for universal public pre-K as a way of delivering high-quality pre-K to low-income children that

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Figure 4.2 Percent of 4 -year-old children enrolled in State Pre-Kindergarten 2018 –2019. Source: Friedman-Krauss, A . H., Barnett, W. S., Garver, K. A ., Hodges, K. S., ­Weisenfeld, G. G., & DiCrecchio, N. (2019). The state of preschool 2018: State preschool yearbook. Table 2: State preschool access by state. p. 23. National ­Institute for Early Education Research. Retrieved from http://nieer.org/wp-content/­ uploads/2019/08/ YB2018 _ Full-ReportR3wAppendices.pdf This is a shaded map of the United States depicting the percentage of 4 -year-old children enrolled in State Pre-Kindergarten in the 2018 –2019 school year. Shading grows darker for higher percentages attending in four categories: 0, up to 20%, from 20 up to 50%, and 50% and greater.

will help in the reduction of the achievement gap. He demonstrates that quality ­matters and including middle- and upper-class children will likely improve the overall quality because the public is more willing to pay for programs that benefit everyone. He also argues that universal pre-K is a wise investment because investing now will save us from paying down the road in the form of unemployment, health care, and incarceration. But the question of how pre-K will get incorporated is not so clear. Many observers disagree that a universal program is the best way to deliver early childhood education to children whose families could not otherwise afford it. For example, in Standardized Childhood, Bruce Fuller (2007), professor of education and public policy, envisions a more limited, decentralized but publicly funded network of early childhood programs. Fuller argues that preschool benefits children from low socioeconomic

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backgrounds far more than middle-class children and that targeted ­programs more effectively reduce achievement gaps. He also questions the wisdom of creating a system that includes children from middle- and upper-income families when those parents can afford to pay for preschool. For Fuller, the inclusion of all children in a tidy, uniform state-sponsored program comes at the expense of sensitivity to diversity in families, parenting, and neighborhoods. In the US, we maintain a lot of variation in public education by state and local government. Pre-K is a good example of this. Even among the handful of states with universal access, there is still significant variation in implementation. Therefore, it is likely that the debate between universal and targeted access will continue into the future as the US weighs the benefits of each. Additionally, there is evidence supporting both. For example, in an analysis of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia, my colleagues and I found that state funding of pre-K programs was associated with both increases in student achievement and reduced gaps for all students but the effect of state funding was stronger in states that provide targeted pre-K access to low-income and minorized students (Pendola et al., 2022). However, kindergarten currently appears to foreshadow pre-K and movement toward the dominant model of the formal education system and academic performance. It is a process of education expansion where new levels of schooling become institutionalized as cognitive performance increasingly becomes the main avenue for later opportunity.

Conclusion The institutional invasion of childhood is an invited addition, a voluntary take-over of large segments of the early years of life that has altered the “good childhood” in its wake. There are very few laws requiring young children to attend early childhood education, yet most do. For example, parents rarely question whether to send their children to kindergarten even though it is not compulsory in most states. Over the course of the 20th century, schooling expanded dramatically in the US; it expanded to include not only larger proportions of the population but also increasing levels of attainment. In addition to the upward expansion of schooling, there has been a slow but steady expansion of schooling downward to younger and younger children. Early childhood education initiatives were initially distinct from public schooling, had strong ties to the mother, and had a diverse set of goals. But as each new form of schooling became increasingly institutionalized, it also came to look more like the public system of education, and cognitive development increasingly became the main goal. There is no reason to believe that this trend is complete. In fact, the future of the “good childhood” will likely include even more

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schooling. State-sponsored universal pre-K programs are growing but early ­childhood education expansion is not likely to stop there. For ­example, in 1970, only 21% of 3- and 4-year-olds attended pre-primary programs but by 2019, 54% of the age cohort was attending early childhood education (NCES, 2022). In addition, in 1970, a little more than a quarter of 3- and 4-year-olds in preschool were attending full day programs, by 2018, 83% of kindergartens were attending full-day programs (De Brey, 2021). It is a growing trend that is not confined to the US. Enrollments for young children have expanded worldwide in the past 50 years and especially since 1995 (Wotipka, et al 2017). Parents have decided that schooling is an integral part of the “good childhood.”

Notes 1 These percentages dipped a bit during the pandemic. 2 The child saving movement began in the US in the late 19th century. Its focus on delinquency resulted in separate juvenile courts. It has been criticized as an attempt to control poor and immigrant children. 3 The Infant School was founded in the early 19th century in Scotland by Robert Owen. Owen wanted to use his progressive ideas about early childhood education to help the poor with child care and opportunity. 4 During the pandemic, this percentage declined to 84%. 5 Head Start enrollments declined during the pandemic. 6 During the pandemic, this percentage declined to 40%.

Chapter 5

The “Good Mother” Is an Engaged Parent

According to a Pew Research Center survey (2015), 54% of American parents say that you can never be too involved in your children’s education. Amazing, more than half of parents say that spending unlimited amounts of time on your children’s education is okay! This may be current popular parent behavior, but it certainly was not my family experience as number six of eight children. I have a very clear memory of me as a small child with my seven siblings crowded in our family room. My father was reading from the middle, children’s section of an otherwise adult encyclopedia. The evening is burned in my memory, perhaps because it is my only memory of a parent reading to me. My ­parents did not remind us to do homework, let alone check homework, they did not come to our sporting events or performances, and they avoided school contact. Once my mother even sent my older sister to back-to-school night in her place. Nevertheless, they were pretty typical parents, perhaps a little low on school engagement, but otherwise similar to most parents of the time period. Fast forward 30 years and things look different. I spent many hours on the sidelines of soccer fields and sitting on a remarkably uncomfortable wood bench in a dance studio, not to mention the endless parent-teacher conferences, back-to-school nights, homework supervision; really, I could keep going. These things represent activities expected of me as well as activities I opted to engage in. I did all of this, I think, to support the development of my children. In fact, the Pew Research Center reports that 77% of adults say that women face a lot of pressure to be an involved parent, and 56% of American adults say that men face a lot of pressure as well. Interestingly, the statistics imply that the pressure is external. But consider that more than half of parents also say they would be very d­ isappointed if their child was an average student (Pew Research Center, 2017). Together the responses give a different impression. There are notes of comparison and competition, and the motivation for involvement seems to shift from support for development to expectations for achievement.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003325949-5

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Much has been written about overly involved American parents and the consequences of their actions. Their motivations are often trivialized as merely overbearing and selfish. For example, in The End of American Childhood, a social history rich with descriptions of early American childhood, Paula Fass (2016) argues that as a country, our reaction to authority and aristocratic class structure resulted in a uniquely American parenting style that encouraged freedom and independence. In her telling, for a couple of centuries, the democratizing independent spirit of the country filtered all the way down to parenting but somewhere in the middle part of the 20th century, we lost our edge and “protection became more important to parents than independence, more important than giving children the freedom to choose their own futures” (Fass, 2016, p. 266). According to Fass, American parents now “worry too much and provide their ­children with too little space to grow” (Fass, 2016, p. 271). The nostalgic account by Fass in combination with the current statistics paints a bleak picture of American parenting and childhood. From this perspective, it would appear that American children are suffering at the hands of parenting gone awry. But as a sociologist, I am instinctively suspicious of stories of the “good old days.” For example, my own parenting career might have been very short. I could easily have been a no-start, dying in childbirth prior to the wide use of penicillin in the mid-20th century. Definitely not the “good old days.” Indicators of well-being have also improved dramatically over the last couple of centuries. In 2019, Americans could expect to live about 79 years (National Public Radio 2022).1 In addition, teen births have declined over the last several decades, along with smoking and the homicide rate, while literacy, educational attainment, and leisure time have steadily increased. From many vantage points, there has been slow, steady progress in the human condition. It is, therefore, a paradox that life has both improved and gotten more demanding. With the obligation to maximize development, the “good mother” has new stresses that my parents never had. The rise in life expectancy and other indicators of well-being, along with the emergence and elongation of developmental stages, contribute to new constructions of the “good childhood.” In addition, many observers and scholars argue that the new norm of intense parenting has significantly changed childhood for the worse. For example, there is growing concern over the increase in demand and overscheduling of young children in combination with intense concern and oversight of development and safety by parents (Furedi, 2001; Hays, 1996). Furthermore, humans are prone to nostalgia and often suppose that sometime in the past there was a perfect childhood that parents somehow lost sight of and need to rediscover. Instead, as Chapter 3 discusses, the typical parent experiences engagement with the “good childhood” as a delicate balancing act. I see the current American construction of parenting as purposeful and strategic and childhood, while different

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from other eras, in some ways has never looked so good. Moreover, the increasing demands of parenting are associated with the expansion of ­education. Schooling is an integral part of the evolution of both the “good mother” and the “good childhood.” Parental involvement in schooling is a major consequence of the invited invasion. This chapter first describes American parental involvement comparatively, linking changes in involvement to the rise of schooling as a dominant institution. Next, the strategies for child development and resource investment in children are examined through two lenses. The more popular social reproduction lens describes parents as at least two distinct groups – based on income, occupation, and/or education – who conceptualize their role in the creation of the “good childhood” very differently. On the other hand, a normative (neo-institutional) lens characterizes parents as one heterogeneous group moving in a similar direction. From this perspective, time is an important variable, with parental involvement increasing over time for all parents even if more educated mothers lead the trend. The normative pressure results in converging behavior because the “good mother” is a cultural archetype whose role now includes parental involvement in schooling as part of the creation of the “good childhood.” Finally, this chapter speculates on new ways in which parents attempt to create advantage for their children as older strategies become normative.

The Tiger Mom Isn’t from the US? Far from the over-parenting Americans are often accused of in the media and popular books, some people argue that Americans do not demand enough of their children. Take, for example, the Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua’s book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011). Chua, a ­self-identified Chinese mother,2 describes two very different styles of ­parenting: the Chinese mother and the Western parent, essentially what Chua sees as two contrasting versions of the “good mother.” The Western parent is well meaning but weak, worrying too much about the child’s psyche to produce the level of success aspired to by the Chinese mother. Instead, the Chinese mother uses any strategy available to produce her desired results. The strategies might include humiliation, threats, deprivation, insults, and lots of yelling, and the desired results are always top students and accomplished musicians (piano or violin only). The book is a collection of stories Chua knows are outrageous by Western standards, yet she feels compelled to tell them anyway. In many ways, it is a book about a recent immigrant group’s struggles to create advantage for their children. The process of writing the book appears to have been a kind of therapy for Chua, a way in which to work out the Western guilt that has crept into her psyche for her preference for an Asian

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style of parenting. As justification, she repeatedly holds up her two very successful daughters. The book is also her way of getting the last word for anyone who questions her parenting methods. Therefore, perhaps unfortunately for Chua, rather than getting the last word she ignited a debate about the merits of Western parenting and Chinese mothering. Many reviews have described her extreme parenting style as harsh as well as intriguing (e.g., Chang, 2011; Hulbert, 2011; Maslin, 2011). She is convinced that Chinese parents want more for their children: “Chinese parents have… higher dreams for their children” (Chua, 2011, p. 8). But what does “higher dreams” mean? Chua’s book ultimately lacks any real analysis or discussion of the many questions she raises. For example, why can Chinese parents get away with things that Western parents cannot? And in the Chinese model, what happens to the child who does not excel? Or, how is success defined or measured? Chua has strong opinions about Western parenting. She paints a vivid image of mediocre parents who are weak, too accommodating, and anguished. For example, she writes “I’m not sure they’re [Western parents] making choices at all. They just do what everyone else does” (p. 227); “Western parents try to respect their children’s individuality” (not to be read as a compliment, p. 63); “Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they’re not disappointed about how their kids turned out” (p. 51). She throws in a couple of statements like, “All decent parents want to do what’s best for their children” (p. 63), ostensibly to convince the reader that she believes Western parents are not total losers. And then concludes, in a very unconvincing epiphany, “It’s just an entirely different parenting model” (p. 54). However, Chua misses the dominant social institutions in each model. In both the Western and Chinese models, schooling is a primary institution, an essential and pervasive component in the creation of a successful adult life. Regardless of the actual benefits, there are strong cultural beliefs in schooling as an essential experience and legitimate creator of adult opportunity. Over the last several centuries, schooling has grown in institutional strength and has come to dominate the lives of modern individuals. With the expansion of enrollments and curriculum, came the expansion of the family’s role in education and their expectations of schooling as an agent of human development. The role of schooling in the model Chua describes is limited to academic success, but for Westerners, the expectations are much broader, including the expanded properties of the individual, including personality and cognition. Academic success is only part of cognitive development. Furthermore, the difference between Chinese and Western parenting partially lies in the complementary primary institution. In the Chinese model presented by Chua, family is a dominant social unit. Chinese parents are free to use any means necessary

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because the goal is family honor and academic success is the vehicle. In the West, the individual is the complementary dominant social unit; the ultimate goal is the creation of a complex person. The child is not “in the process of becoming” (e.g. an adult, an esteemed family member). The child is an individual in a developmental stage endowed with rights and privileges. The Western “good mother” is engaged in a complex process that includes schooling as an enhancement of the individual. With the individual as the dominant social unit, individual rights are paramount to the development of a successful person. At some level, Chua understands this; she laments, “America seems to convey something to kids that Chinese culture doesn’t” (p. 24). She expresses concern that “they [children] will feel that they have individual rights” (p. 22). Of particular concern for Chua is the possibility that a child might make a choice, that the choice might be contrary to parent wishes, and that somehow his/ her life will be ruined. By contrast, Chua observes, “Western parents are extremely anxious about their children’s self-esteem” and therefore more concerned with the psyche of the child than measurable successes (p. 51). In the Chinese model presented by Chua, family is the basic social unit. Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything….the understanding is that Chinese children must spend their lives repaying their parents by obeying them and making them proud…(they) believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their own desires and preferences. (p. 53) This model is based on family honor, placing the family above individual expression and self-directed development. One explanation for the Chinese cultural preference for measurable ­success is the country’s history with Imperial examinations. By 605, the Sui Dynasty had created a system of upward mobility based on high-stakes testing. The Imperial examination was designed to identify the best candidates for government service. Although only about 5% passed the test, this system had a lasting impact on Chinese culture because it theoretically allowed any man to become a high-ranking government official, regardless of family origins. The potentially huge rewards for success encouraged families to devote time and energy to children studying for the exam as a strategy for upward mobility. Families invested heavily in the success of one child for the betterment of the entire family (Elman, 2002), thus perpetuating the family as the primary social institution and eliciting Chua’s “good mother” binary. Chua is wrestling with her own conflicted feelings about control over her children. For her, the first moment of reckoning comes when Lulu hacks off her hair. Only then does Chua begin to see her daughter as a

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separate individual so fundamentally immersed in Western culture that she is willing to not only fight her mother but also damage herself for recognition. The second major incident happens in Red Square. Lulu smashes a glass on a café floor when Chua tries to force to her eat caviar. She laments, “When Chinese parenting succeeds, there’s nothing like it. But it doesn’t always succeed” (Chua, 2011, p. 212). Chua has convinced herself that there is a Chinese mother and a Western parent rather than a continuum of modern parenting. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011) is an illustration of the how social institutions, including schooling, family, and the individual, overlap, and intertwine in a global world. Following the incident, Chua allows Lulu to make a few choices and applauds herself for it by proclaiming, “I couldn’t lose Lulu” (p. 212). Clearly, Chua is still struggling with Lulu’s point, allowing her some ­freedom of choice more for herself and the relationship rather than an ability to see Lulu as a separate individual with her own dreams and ­preferences. Ironically, the book amounts to a slow reckoning for Chua that the Western model of the “good mother” is a complex orchestration of many moving parts that includes both the universal desire to nurture an academically successful student and the acknowledgment that children are complex individuals. She too, as a citizen of the West, has been influenced by that construction. She is fighting against her own fears that she, along with her awareness of cultural differences and the “good mother,” is not perfect. Chua is also calling attention to the fact that someday in the future Lulu may pursue a very different version of the “good mother.”

The Engaged Parent The stark contrast of parenting styles between the Western and Chinese mother does not completely explain our fascination with Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. The typical American parent has by no means traded in school success for high self-esteem. In fact, evidence abounds that the Western version of the “good mother” role includes a host of activities related to schooling and cognitive development. Research consistently shows that the typical American parent is very engaged in the development of their children. For example, our fascination with high-achieving cultures is not new. Much like our current fascination with Finland, 40 years ago we were hailing Japanese education as the standard-bearer. Numerous reports and publications attempted to unveil the secrets of Japanese success. Japan boasted high quality schooling and high average achievement, focused and motivated students, and high graduation rates (OERI, 1987). We searched for ways to emulate Japanese culture and transpose the lessons of Japanese education onto the American system. For example, in 1983, the report A Nation at Risk essentially compared the US to its peer nations and then

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called for a host of school reforms aimed at creating a more competitive labor force (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). It recommended a longer school day and school year, more graduation requirements and high-stakes testing at critical school points to fix what some were calling “a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people” (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983, p. 1). Intense family participation in the education careers of children is not new either. Over-parenting has been around a long time. In one comical example that is perhaps part folklore, the celebrated WWII general Douglas MacArthur’s mother Pinky was so determined that her son would be a success that she moved with him to West Point in 1899. In a zealous interpretation of the “good mother,” she took a suite in Craney’s Hotel overlooking the campus while he was a cadet and, rumor has it, watched him through a telescope (Gibbs, 2009). Pinky’s choices, although extreme, fit with the US’s former fascination with Japanese education as well as our current interest in the Chinese mother; parents look for ways to maximize child development and sometimes the choices are shocking. As cognitive development and educational attainment become more prominent in the construction of the “good childhood,” parents look to other models for ideas on encouraging and motivating their children. The typical American parent is familiar with the many forms of parental involvement expected of the “good mother.” For example, the National Household Education Survey finds that the average American parent attends multiple school meetings and activities each school year including the Parent Teacher Association or Parent Teacher Organization (PTA/ PTO), parent-teacher conferences and school fundraisers as well as other academic and social events (McQuiggan & Megra, 2017). In addition to visiting the school, the typical American parent also engages in school-­ related activities at home such as setting aside a place for homework and checking that it is done (McQuiggan & Megra, 2017). Remarkably, even though parents are engaged in many aspects of the schooling of their children, nearly half of parents wish they could be more involved (Pew Research Center, 2015). In fact, in the US, parents across all social classes prefer child-­centered, high-involvement child rearing (Ishizuka, 2018). Still, research consistently finds that parental involvement in schooling in various forms ­including help with homework, volunteering in school, attending school events, and discussing school with children is linked to SES as measured by parents’ education, or more specifically mothers’ education (e.g. Kim & Hill, 2015). In other words, the educated “good mother” is leading this cultural change. Hoping to explain why some kids seem to have a distinct advantage in school, in 1989, the sociologist Annette Lareau published Home Advantage, a founding qualitative study on parental involvement in

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schooling. Using a reproduction lens, Lareau argues that class differences are the foundation for differences in how parents interact with schools. Although there is a persistent belief that some parents just do not care, Lareau shows that all parents value education and want their children to succeed in school. Yet, working-class and middle-class parents conceptualize their role in the education process differently. Working-class parents are more likely to see their role as simply getting the child to school and ready to learn. They are also less likely to intervene on behalf of the child, less likely to have a presence at school, and less likely to let schooling carry over into the home. Therefore, the school successes of working-class children are often the result of the child’s own abilities and efforts. Lareau calls this a “single education career.” In contrast, middle-class parents are much more likely to be involved in their children’s schooling and actually assume a supervisory role in the education process. Typical middle-class parents help ­children navigate the school environment in what Lareau calls a “two-person single career.” The addition of a second person, usually a parent, helps to shape the experiences of the child by tailoring school events and circumstances to the child’s temperament and abilities. These parents are more likely to have access to a host of resources that they can activate to create advantage for their child. In her second book, Lareau takes a step back, looking more broadly at how parents engage in the development of their children that results in advantage for some. Unequal Childhoods (2003, 2011) is a widely read, thoughtfully executed qualitative study that compares the parenting and childhoods of poor and working-class children with middle-class ­children. She finds that poor and working-class children are more likely to experience parenting that encourages the “accomplishment of natural growth” while middle-class parents practice what Lareau calls “concerted cultivation.” The “accomplishment of natural growth” is associated with the free time and spontaneity that allows children to grow without too many structured activities and lessons. “Concerted cultivation,” in contrast, is characterized by the conscious attempts on the part of parents to foster their children’s talents and development through structured activities, lessons, and exposure to experiences that parents anticipate will create advantage and opportunities (see also Bodovski, 2010). Children also gain knowledge and experience interacting with institutions in the “concerted cultivation” parenting style that, according to Lareau, prepares them for white-collar work later in life. Both of Lareau’s books made big splashes. Using a social reproduction lens, her books illustrate important differences in parenting, children’s school experiences, and the production of inequality in current constructions of childhood. However, there are additional ways to read the literature on parental involvement. For example, rather than differences,

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a normative lens highlights parenting trends that illustrate similarities between parenting groups. From this perspective, there are wealth and occupational as well as other measurable differences between parent education groups. However, all parents are increasingly engaging in strategic parenting even though educated parents are leading the way. Rather than the constancy of differences implied through the reproduction lens, a normative lens focuses on change over time for diverse groups that results in converging trends. From this vantage point, the “good mother” is the cultural symbol pulling everyone in the same direction and making stark ­d ifferences between groups less common as parenting and the “good mother” evolve along with the invited invasion. In the next section, the resources that parents activate to create advantage for their children are explored from both a social reproduction and a normative lens. Resources such as fertility, time, and money are the bailiwick of the “good mother” but the longevity of new innovations like academic redshirting and special education is yet to be determined as the population moves in the direction of greater parental involvement. Resources and the Engaged Parent

Much of the scholarly work in parental involvement focuses on parent differences in access to resources and their ability to create academic advantage for children. However, another part of the story lies in how schooling changes the social construction of parenting. For example, ­h istorically fertility has had a strong association with mothers’ education level (Livingston & Cohn, 2013). In addition, lower fertility is associated with enhanced ability to invest in each child and therefore, the declining fertility rate over the past two centuries has meant that a growing proportion of parents are able to increase their investment of time, energy, and money in each child as the “good mother” role expands. In the past 50 years, women have cut their number of pregnancies in half so that in 2020, the global fertility rate was 2.4 births per female or an average of approximately two and a half children per woman over a ­lifetime (World Bank, n.d.). In the US, the total fertility rate hit an alltime low of 1.66 births per female in 2020, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 (Hamilton et al., 2022). While there are a number of factors that contribute to the declining fertility rate worldwide, one important contributor is the rise in educational attainment for the “good mother.” In many Western countries, women have caught up with and are even surpassing men. For example, college completion rates for women are higher than for men in most OECD countries; in the US, this has been true for more than 20 years (DiPrete & Buchmann, 2013). In the US, highly educated women led the phenomenon of declining fertility, however, greater proportions of women are increasingly participating in this strategy.

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For example, in 1960, women with less than a high school degree had an average of 2.5 children, while the average for women with a b­ achelor’s degree was 1.5. Although this has remained about the same over time (Isen & Stevenson, 2010), the average number of years of education has risen for the female population and therefore, the overall birthrate has declined because the proportion of women in each category has shifted. Time

For the “good mother,” the allocation of time to child rearing is a fundamental expression of her construction of childhood. In the US, the ­t ypical mother spends a significant portion of her time on household duties including childcare. The Pew Research Center study Modern Parenthood (2013) shows that although the number of hours in childcare has increased for both mothers and fathers since 1965, mothers still spend more time in housework and childcare while fathers spend more time in paid work. For example, from 1965 to 2011, mothers as a whole increased their average time spent in childcare from 10 to 14 hours per week. More specifically, less educated mothers increased their average childcare time by more than 4 hours per week and college-educated mothers increased by more than 9 hours per week (see also Ramey & Ramey, 2010). Furthermore, this is in a time of declining family size so the average number of hours per child has significantly increased. Time in childcare is a salient indicator of the increasing focus on child development as a main component of parenting as well as an expression of privilege. The increasing allocation of time to childcare in the second half of the 20th century occurred along with growing opportunities for women. As women’s access to schooling expanded, the educational attainment of mothers rose and her exposure to schooling transformed her ideas about childhood and the associated activities. This connection is repeatedly demonstrated in the strong association between mothers’ educational attainment and parents’ interest in early childhood cognitive development and school readiness (Bradley & Caldwell, 1984b; Brooks-Gunn et al., 2002; Forget-Dubois et al., 2009; Hess et al., 1984; McGroder, 2000; Schaub, 2010, 2015). As schooling expansion changed the lives of women, new expectations for the “good mother” emerged including new aspects of childcare that require significant time commitments. Many of the increased childcare hours are now devoted to activities associated with cognitive development. For example, in a research project on the social constructions of ­parenting and childhood, I looked at trends over a long historical arch in ­parent engagement with young children in cognitive activities using several datasets from the second half of the 20th century (Schaub, 2010). They are age-appropriate cognitively focused activities that researchers and

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practitioners believe promote cognitive development and school readiness in young children before the start of formal schooling. Teaching letters, numbers, and words and reading to your child require parent time and interaction with the child as well as representing parents’ interest in cognitive development and its role in the creation of the “good childhood.” The data show that parental activities related to teaching young children increased over the several decades of the latter half of the 20th century. Parenting in the 1950s was quite different; the typical parent did not attempt to teach a child things like reading words or writing the alphabet. In 1951, nearly half of all parents said that they made no effort to teach their young child while only 8% reported teaching their young child a considerable amount before they entered formal schooling. But constructions of the “good childhood” changed over the next 50 years. In 2001, only a small proportion of parents did not engage in teaching activities with their young child (6%) while the majority of parents (74%) reported engaging in teaching activities three or more times in the past week. Even an activity like reading that seems ubiquitous had increased. In 1963, a significant proportion of parents already reported reading to their young child at least a couple of times per month but by 1991, nearly all parents reported reading to their young child at least a couple of times per month, increasing from 85% in 1963 to 97% in 1991. To further illustrate this trend, note that by 1991 72% of parents reported reading to their young child three or more times in a week and that figure rose to 85% by 2019 (De Brey et al., 2021). In the second half of the 20th century, parents reported increasingly participating in the cognitive development of their three- to six-year-olds. I call this phenomenon parenting for cognitive development. Its rapid rise in the latter half of the 20th century suggests that American parents increasingly viewed education as an important institution in the creation of the “good childhood.” As the upward expansion of schooling created greater access to education for the “good mother,” she changed the activities she engaged in with her young children. The cultural shift was led by the most educated but the diffusion reached parents from all education categories. As the behaviors spread through the population, gaps between groups of parents narrowed. During the second half of the 20th century, parenting for cognitive development flooded into the general population in the US, so that by 1991, it had become normative behavior for parents; in other words, the role of “parent as teacher” is an institutionalized role for American parents. Past studies have typically emphasized one part of this historical process, the production of inequality, that is, that more educated parents on average do more behaviors associated with the creation of academic advantage for their children. However, the normative process is also an important component of the invited invasion. Parenting for cognitive development is a dynamic process and a main responsibility of the “good mother.”

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Money

With access to money, the “good childhood” expands beyond the traditional boundaries of family and schooling. Parent spending on children’s development can take some very familiar forms. For example, American parents are increasingly investing in extracurricular activities including sports, music, and dance as well as specialized lessons and tutors. According to the US Census Bureau (2014), nearly 6 out of 10 school-aged children participated in at least one extracurricular activity in 2011. Again, children from all income categories participate but the higher the income ­category, the more likely a child will participate in an extracurricular activity (Knop & Siebens, 2018). However, spending on development incorporates more than just the extracurricular activities of school-aged children. Parental spending on children has increased since the 1970s especially in the top income groups (Kornrich, 2016; Kornrich & Furstenberg, 2013). Yet it is not merely that higher-income parents are spending more. Instead, wealthy families now spend seven times more than low-income families on their children’s development. In addition, spending has shifted; in the 1970s and 1980s, parents spent the most on teenagers. Now, parents spend the most on children under six as well as children in their mid-1920s (Kornrich & Furstenberg, 2013). Wealthy families are able to invest significantly more in the creation of advantage and opportunity for their children and, in addition, spend significant amounts on new developmental stages. Moreover, parental investment can go to the extreme and it can also be disguised. Recently, three colleagues and I were interested in how context influences parent spending as well as government policy. In a paper called “The Reformer’s Dream,” we explored education in South Korea and the US (Schaub et al., 2020). South Korea enjoys both high family resource investment in schooling and an unusually large amount of federal policy aimed at equity. We were interested in the synergy between family and policy. We found that in South Korea, parents are deeply engaged in creating advantage for their children in schooling. Starting with preschoolers and up through secondary school, families spend significant amounts of money on various forms of private supplementary education services, including after-school cram schools, one-on-one tutoring, and online services. Importantly, spending is not limited to the wealthy or even merely the upper classes, instead, 75% of the population participates although higher household income is associated with higher education expenditures and participation rates (Statistics Korea, 2020). Nicknamed “shadow education,” this is a growing, multi-billion-dollar worldwide industry. In the US, shadow education includes familiar after-school tutoring franchises like Kumon Math and Reading Centers and Sylvan Learning as well as many local businesses.

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As a testament to their commitment to equity, the South Korean ­government has made a concerted effort to minimize the impact of families and wealth on schooling. Recognizing parent attempts to create advantage for their children, the government initially responded to the rapidly expanding shadow education industry by abolishing middle-school entrance examinations in 1968 and secondary school entrance examinations in 1974, replacing them with an equity-minded lottery system. The government also funded the Educational Broadcasting System’s public TV channels presentation of free shadow education lectures by star tutors and later added popular open-access e-learning (Kim, 2007). In addition, the government initiated laws to eliminate the private tutoring industry that were in effect from 1980 to 2000 and forbade all acceleration beyond the official curriculum starting in 2014. This dance between family spending and equity policy has a synergy that has propelled each forward and changed the Korean education system along the way. In the US, the decentralized system of education produces a mixed bag of federal, state, and local policy aimed at equity. Title I and Head Start are the main federal programs, but state and local governments also have policies and programs aimed at equity. However, the extreme variation in education expenditures, resources, and quality from community to community results in family engagement in schooling partially being captured by district choice with wealthier parents able to purchase expensive real estate and therefore access to better schools (Downes & Zabel, 2002). The US has a similar dance between family investment and equity policy but neither is as obvious as in South Korea in large part because in the US family investment is masked by residence. Spending more time and money as well as limiting family size are familiar strategies used by parents in all income and education categories in the creation of the “good childhood” even if wealthier and more educated parents are more likely to employ them. However, they are no longer at the cutting edge of parent attempts to create advantage and opportunity for children because the “good mother” is well aware of trends and ­participates as she wishes and/or is able. Instead, newfangled strategies arise. Research suggests two familiar school policies, previously used only for remediation, may now be employed by parents as strategies for ­creating advantage. Academic redshirting and special education demonstrate that once again highly educated parents are at the forefront of the trend. Moreover, they give glimpses into how a broad trend gets started and then spreads to other parents as a familiar policy is slowly reconstructed. Once entertained with reluctance, both delaying school entrance and special education are now tactics for creating advantage in the “good childhood.”

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Redshir ting

In the fall of 2010, 6% of kindergarteners were delayed entrants (De Brey et al., 2021). For most of the 20th century, delayed entrance to school was reserved for extreme cases. However, academic redshirting, or the decision to delay kindergarten entrance, has slowly grown in popularity with parents over the last several decades. The name is derived from a similar practice in college athletics where a player sits out for a season to develop skills and extend eligibility. Academic redshirting currently implies strategy on the part of parents that is often greater than developing maturity and concentration, there are also notes of creating advantage. As a strategy, it has slowly seeped into the general population of parents but its efficacy as a long-term creator of advantage is currently being challenged. Concern about physical, socioemotional, or cognitive maturity leads some parents to consider academic redshirting as an academic strategy for a child. Many parents worry that a disadvantage that gets established early may never be eliminated and could potentially grow over time. For example, if a child enters school less able to sit still and concentrate, parents fear they may learn less in kindergarten than their peers. As an alternative, some parents have turned to academic redshirting and consider it a “the gift of time” (Graue & DiPerna, 2000). They are motivated by the belief that older children may gain an advantage early and maintain that advantage throughout schooling. Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that academic redshirting has benefits and is associated with privilege. For example, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, in the 2010–2011 school year redshirted kindergarteners scored higher than on-time entrants in r­ eading, math, and science. They also had more educated parents and came from wealthier households than other kindergarteners (NCES, 2013b). The strong association with SES suggests that academic redshirting is a strategy only some students can activate. Redshirting is also most common for children with birthdays close to the cutoff date, that is, parents with the youngest entrants to kindergarten are the most likely to delay entrance. It is associated with gender and race as well. In sum, academic redshirting is more common for boys, who are often considered less mature, Whites, and affluent families, who can afford the additional year of childcare (Bassok & Reardon, 2013). However, a number of new research studies are challenging the “gift of time” construction. Often mistakenly attributed to the journalist Malcolm Gladwell, parent interest in academic redshirting has steadily grown since the 1980s. In Outliers, Gladwell (2011) boldly speculates that in a variety of competitive situations, the older person generally has the advantage. But new research challenges this idea. In fact, several studies find that the

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benefits of being older at the start of kindergarten decline over time. For example, in the early grades, older children have an advantage on standardized tests but the advantage diminishes rapidly as children progress through school (Cascio & Schanzenbach, 2016; Elder & Lubotsky, 2009). Some research has taken it even further, arguing that academic redshirting represents a one-year loss in the labor market and therefore a loss of wages later in life (Schanzenbach & Larson, 2017). With this emerging research, it is likely that some parents will abandon this strategy as they look for new ways to create the “good childhood.” Special Education

Quite like academic redshirting, once upon a time special education was a last resort for parents searching for the right place for their child. However, the shared meaning of this school resource is looking more and more like gifted and talented programs. Now, affluent parents are increasingly using special education services as an opportunity for creating a learning ­environment tailored to their child. Special education is transitioning to a tool for creating advantage. While it is true that some groups of parents are still apprehensive about special education placement, even suspicious that special education is an example of racist school policies; others are actively requesting services (Artiles & Trent, 1994; De Valenzuela et al., 2006; Feinberg et al., 2011; Fierros & Conroy, 2002; Harry & Klingner, 2014). First enacted in 1975, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) entitles students with disabilities who qualify for special education services a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) in the LeastRestrictive Environment (LRE). However, the process of being placed into special education remains subjective, with the procedure varying by disability and location, and parents and teachers playing important roles in the identification and referral of eligible participants. Since access to knowledge is key to the process, it is no surprise that many American parents feel deprived of the necessary information about special education services. For example, in a Public Agenda survey (2002), 55% of parents responded that parents must independently investigate what help is available to their children and 70% agreed that too many special needs ­children do not receive services because their parents do not know about the s­ervices they are entitled to. The mystery around eligibility of services is coupled with a growing need. In the decades between 1976 and 2021, the number of students with disabilities as a percentage of the total public school enrollment increased from 8% to 15% (NCES, n.d.b.; Snyder & Dillow, 2013). That amounts to the number of student eligible for services nearly doubling in less than 50 years. Moreover, although poor children experience the highest rates of disability, in recent decades, the largest increases were found among

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the most privileged children. High SES parents, those parents with the ­g reatest comfort with the school environment and the greatest familiarity with the language of school, are actively engaging in the identification process. For example, from 2001 to 2011, parent reports of children with disabilities from privileged households increased by 28% compared to children from poor households who increased by less than 11% (Houtrow et al., 2014). It is therefore no surprise that the percentage of the total student population receiving special education services has slowly inched upward. In the US, special education placement is associated with school SES and academic achievement context because affluent schools are more likely to refer students for special education (Hibel et al., 2010). This is partially the result of the greater resource availability in affluent schools that enable them to have more support services. It is also the result of empowered parents demanding those services for their children as the social construction of disability is transformed through individualism. The educated “good mother” is comfortable requesting access to limited school resources for her children in the creation of the “good childhood.”

Conclusion The “good mother” is the leading edge in a shift in parenting that ­strategically contemplates the “good childhood.” She is continually evolving and refining her practice. She is not weak, ineffective, or merely worried about self-esteem; on the contrary, the “good mother” is a sophisticated consumer of research and architect of strategy. However, the “good mother” is not the winner of a zero-sum game, rather, she is a cultural marker that parents approximate to the best of their abilities given their access to knowledge and resources. In the US, the normative trend toward greater parental involvement is sometimes lost to our concerns about the production of inequality. Although it is generally highly educated parents who first invent and implement new strategies, trends spread like wildfire through word of mouth, social media, and journalism, all in pursuit of the “good childhood.” Therefore, strategies that were once seen as extremism can quickly become expectation. Moreover, strategies that are not productive, can be abandoned. Contrary to images of some families as deficient and others overly exuberant, all families are increasingly engaging in a range of activities aimed at the school success of their children. For example, most parents are engaging in cognitive activities with their young children and the proportion of parents engaging is increasing in all education categories. However, education is a powerful and dynamic institution and payoffs for success are high. Therefore, as strategies become part of the expected (i.e. institutionalized) parenting role, parents invent new strategies for creating

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advantage for their children. The evidence shows that it is more educated and ­a ffluent parents who acquire these behaviors first, in some instances spending p­rivate resources on their children and in others, capturing scarce public resources for their children.

Notes 1 In the US, life expectancy dropped during the pandemic. 2 Chua is actually a Chinese American mother via the Philippines.

Chapter 6

Parenting and the Social Construction of Achievement Gaps

Standardized testing exploded over the course of my children’s school careers. Suddenly, every spring seemed to incorporate a stretch of time when all of the usual school activities were suspended and the American school day was devoted to standardized testing. The dramatic shift in time allotment sparked complaints from parents and teachers across the country over the value of so much testing as well as concerns over what was being sacrificed in exchange. A long heated public discussion followed as well as a valiant effort by the Obama administration to salvage an unpopular law by fixing some of its flaws. But it was clear that the American public did not believe excessive standardized testing was part of the “good childhood” and therefore No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the 2001 s­tandards-based education reform had to go.1 In what amounts to the irony of reform, NCLB is often described as a policy failure but it had at least one important success: bringing achievement gaps to the forefront of public discussion. This alone is a bold opinion because achievement gaps are a controversial metric and are best thought of as a proxy for the disadvantage some groups experience both inside and outside of school. Furthermore, some advocacy groups and policy ­makers would like to eliminate the disaggregation of achievement results by subpopulation because they have the potential of labeling some groups as deficient. However, used properly, knowledge of achievement gaps tells us a lot about US schooling as well as the broader society. One enduring legacy of NCLB is the long overdue acknowledgment, at least by some people, of the inequity built into the US education system. The American public was forced to face the implications of the US schooling structure and policies when large quantities of data were put at the fingertips of all citizens. Under the NCLB law, and now the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), states are required to break out test results by both the student population as a whole and demographic subgroups of students. These data are available at both the state and district level. With NCLB, we were able to compare students eligible for Free and Reduced Lunch with those ineligible, Black and White students, and Hispanic and DOI: 10.4324/9781003325949- 6

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White students for the first time. And we were able to see the association between student achievement and district characteristics such as per pupil expenditures. What researchers had known for years immediately became obvious to the public: Black, Hispanic and low-income students perform significantly below White and more privileged students on standardized tests of achievement. A new construction swept through the public dialogue; it was about groups of children and achievement gaps. This, however, is only part of a complex story, because schooling does not cause achievement gaps but it has the potential to intensify or reduce a gap. If we randomly sampled 100 3- and 4-year-old children prior to entry into formal schooling, evidence of achievement gaps would already be present. Even at that young age, there is already a performance difference between groups of children. Dressed in phrases like the “soft bigotry of low expectations,”2 schooling participated in the construction of a social problem that changed childhood in its wake. Standardized testing policy has quantified acceptable performance and placed new demands on childhood. The public rally against NCLB was enough to transform the law into ESSA and give a considerable amount of power back to states but thus far, frequent testing remains a part of US public schooling. The slow, quiet growth of schooling as a force in the creation of a modern childhood began with school attendance but has grown in stature over time. As a gatekeeper to adult opportunities, belief in the benefits of schooling has led to its expansion downward to younger children and now emphasizes childhood school performance as well as attendance. Achievement comparisons of demographic groups have two distinct consequences. First, they brand groups that deviate from the normative trend in the schooled society. That is, late adopters of a cultural shift to a more educationally and cognitively based childhood, as well as those who are unable or unwilling to fully conform, are labeled as deficient. Ironically, labeling some groups as underperforming as a result of achievement comparisons challenges us to push past the overly simplistic yet often comfortable characterization of some groups as blameworthy and instead recognize the barriers pressing upon them. Therefore, second, achievement gaps foreground the glaring inequity built into the education system as well as the broader society. The growth of schooling as a powerful institution pulled childhood into its grasp and along with it, parenthood. As a result, academic learning is now an essential feature of the “good childhood” and developer/­ supervisor is part of the expected role of the “good mother.” In the US context, achievement gap comparisons have resulted in underachieving labels being placed on some groups of students. They also insinuate that

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some childhoods are not “good childhoods” and some mothers are not “good mothers.” To demonstrate the dimensions of a cultural ­process in the schooled society, this chapter explores the benefits and harms of “achievement gap politics.” It begins with the social construction of achievement gaps in the 20th century and pushes back on this expression of inequality in society. The chapter next asks the provocative question, “Is schooling the answer?” by offering current research, policies, and programs associated with achievement gains and gap reduction.

The Gap in Cognitive Achievement Is Persistent The term “achievement gap” in no way captures the depth of concern or urgency the nation should feel over academic performance differences between groups of students in the US. Achievement gaps are usually measured as standardized test score differences between groups of students categorized by ascribed characteristics such as gender, race/ethnicity, or socioeconomic status (SES), but they can also be measured by advanced course selection and graduation rates. Public concern over the achievement gap between poor children and their more privileged peers has existed since President Johnson’s War on Poverty. Since then, research has repeatedly shown that the gap in cognitive achievement is persistent and exists between White and Black children and White and Hispanic children, as well as poor children and their more privileged peers. There is extensive empirical evidence showing that achievement gaps persist throughout schooling and have long-term consequences for students. To appreciate the full extent of achievement gaps requires an understanding of two moving parts. One main goal of schooling is to create opportunities for the success of all students but a second important goal is to minimize the differences children bring from home. That is, successful schooling should bridge the divide between groups of students, by accelerating the learning of students who come to school with low academic skills, and therefore reduce achievement gaps. To successfully accomplish both goals requires a faster rate of growth for traditionally marginalized students than middle and upper income, and White students. Therefore, the absence of an achievement gap does not automatically indicate successful schooling. For example, the fact that Detroit has no racial achievement gap is of no comfort because it is the result of low rather than high average achievement for all students (Reardon et al., 2019). On the other hand, the large racial achievement gaps identified in some affluent communities, such as university towns, are of deep concern because they suggest that the relatively high resources available in those communities are not successfully bridging the academic divide between White and Black students (Reardon et al., 2019).

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The Politics of Achievement Gaps Comparing groups of children slowly seeped into the American educational dialogue in the second half of the 20th century as a result of newly available data about the US system of education. A new generation of thinking about kids’ achievement started in 1966 with the report that is formally named “Equality of Educational Opportunity” but is widely referred to as the Coleman Report Coleman (1966). A first-of-its-kind commission by the US Department of Education, the survey collected and reported on data from almost 650,000 students and teachers in more than 3,000 schools. At the time, little was known about the US school system as a whole, so the report laid the foundation for a style of educational effects research that has carried into the new century. The report had several notable findings including the large effect of family background and ­individual-level variables. Prior to the Coleman Report, it was widely assumed that observable differences in school quality were the main ­instigator in the achievement gap between low-income students and their more privileged peers. In fact, the Johnson Administration was eager to show that school resource differences caused achievement gaps in order to justify a permanent federal role in education and a more equitable distribution of resources. But the between-school differences in resources measured in the survey, such as class size and teachers’ educational attainment, explained very little of the between-school variation in student achievement. Instead, the Coleman Report found that SES, as well as individual motivation and ability, were the main contributors to school success. This, unfortunately, led many scholars and policy makers to conclude that schools do not matter and to focus on individual-level variables that contribute to school success. But the truth is never that simple. Instead, the truth is twofold. One, families have a huge impact on school success. This is an uncomfortable truth; some kids come to school with an advantage that stems from access to many forms of family resources, and thus far, schooling has not been particularly successful at reducing that advantage. Two, the subtle differences between schools are hard to identify and measure. Put another way, everyone gets the treatment (schooling). We are not performing a controlled experiment where some get the treatment and others do not. Instead, everyone gets a base-level school experience and some get varying degrees of better-quality schooling. Large-scale survey data may fail to distinguish the subtle differences between schools and classrooms. The Coleman Report also documented several disturbing truths about performance differences between groups of students that have had a lasting impact on the social construction of childhood. Data were collected at one time point and showed several achievement gaps including gaps

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between White and Puerto Rican students, White and Mexican American ­students, and White and Black students. In addition, the achievement gap between White and Black students was large and appeared to grow from 1st through 12th grade. The possibility that Black students increasingly lose ground over a school career was deeply concerning to researchers, some of whom suggested that it is evidence that schooling makes the racial achievement gap worse. It was a startling wakeup call that summarized 300 years of racial oppression in achievement scores. Several newer research studies have investigated racial achievement trends further using a nationally representative data set called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS). Evidence from these data show that achievement differences in math and reading between White and Black students grow from the fall of kindergarten to the spring of first grade (Fryer & Levitt, 2004). They also point to schooling experiences because the gap grows faster during the kindergarten and first grade academic years than during the intervening summer (Downey et al., 2004). It is therefore not surprising that school quality differences are a main factor in the growth of the racial achievement gap during the early years of schooling (Quinn, 2015). Ultimately, evidence from young students indicates that in addition to having no equalizing effect for Black students, in fact, schooling exacerbates the racial achievement gap. However, not all research finds that racial achievement gaps grow over school careers (Murnane et al., 2006). Evidence from a study of third through eighth graders in North Carolina found that the racial achievement gap is two separate trends. The data showed that at the bottom end of the mathematics achievement gap, differences between low-achieving White and Black students shrank over school careers suggesting that schooling may play a remediating role for low-achieving Black students that results in a reduction in the racial achievement gap in later grades. However, at the top end of the achievement distribution, the gap in mathematics achievement increased between high-achieving White and Black students over school careers (Clotfelter et al., 2009). Either through the accelerated growth of White students or depressed growth of Black students, schooling appears to contribute to inequality at the top end of the achievement distribution as students progress through schooling. In total, data on the racial achievement gap suggests that its contributors include the likelihood that Black children attend lesser quality schools and, in addition, that academically advanced Black children do not get access to the same learning opportunities as similar White children. The Coleman Report was an important starting point for national debates about education policy. From it, educational researchers gained important insight into the US system of education including the huge impact of family background on education success, the documentation

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of achievement gaps, and the possibility that schooling contributes to the racial achievement gap. The Coleman Report created the environment for future national-level data to be included in public debates about ­education. It also brought schooling deeper into the “good childhood” through the legacy of monitoring public schooling and the belief that successful schooling can be measured through testing. The Coleman Report made achievement gaps a social problem to be solved.

The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) The enduring imprint of the Coleman Report is evident in the federally sponsored Long-Term Trend National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) which began collecting data in the 1970s in reading and math. Commonly called the Nation’s Report Card, the data are collected for students ages 9, 13, and 17 and are designed for performance comparisons between groups of students. NAEP scores show that there is a gap in achievement between low-income students and their more privileged peers and between Black, Hispanic, and White students. The cultural construction of achievement gaps has become so strong that new releases of the data are met with extensive media coverage, including newspapers such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal routinely publishing articles on the latest information. Although the public discussion frequently emphasizes the existence of achievement gaps or the small jumps up or down from one survey year to the next, NAEP data also show that there can be sustained periods of gain for the total population as well as gap reductions. For example, Figures 6.1 and 6.2 show NAEP reading and mathematics average achievement scores by race and ethnicity as well as achievement gaps for nine-yearolds from the early 1970s to 2022. Although there is setback for everyone from 2012 to 2022,3 the main story for the Long-Term Trend of NAEP scores is slow, steady progress. In addition, both the race and ethnic gaps are in a slow, somewhat steady decline for mathematics and especially for reading from the 1970s to 2012. In fact, the Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA) at Stanford University estimates that the achievement gaps between White and Black students and White and Hispanic students have shrunk 30–40% since the 1970s, putting Black and Hispanic students about three years ahead of their parents’ generation in math skills and two to three years ahead of their parents in reading as of 2012 (Center for Education Policy Analysis, n.d.). Even further, achievement gaps as a construct have permeated the ­culture so deeply that geographic regions are compared as well. For example, the NAEP data show that the race and ethnic achievement gaps vary

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260 240 220 200 180 160 1971 1975 1980 1984 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1999 2004 2008 2012 2022 White

Black

Hispanic

Figure 6.1   N AEP Reading Scores by Race/Ethnic Background and Year (students 9 years old). Source: National Center for Education Statistics. (n.d.a). The Nation’s Report Card. Retrieved from https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/dashboards/achievement _ gaps. aspx. The graph reports scores from the original assessment format until the year 1999. From 2004 onwards, it reports scores from the revised assessment format. This is a line graph depicting the slow rise in NAEP reading scores from 1971 to 2022 for 9 year old White, Black and Hispanic students.

260 240 220 200 180 160

1973

1978

1982

1986

1990 White

1992

1994 Black

1996

1999

2004

2008

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Figure 6.2  N  AEP Mathematics Scores by Race/Ethnic Background and Year (students 9 years old). Source: National Center for Education Statistics. (n.d.a). The Nation’s Report Card. Retrieved from https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/dashboards/achievement _ gaps. aspx. The graph reports scores from the original assessment format until the year 1999. From 2004 onwards, it reports scores from the revised assessment format. This is a line graph depicting the slow rise in NAEP mathematics scores from 1973 to 2022 for 9 year old White, Black and Hispanic students.

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substantially across states with gaps narrowing in some states over time but widening in others (Hemphill & Vanneman, 2011; Vanneman et al., 2009). For example, in 2015, White students outscored fourth and eighth grade Black students in both reading and mathematics in all participating states and the District of Columbia. However, the range in gap size between states was large suggesting that some states are significantly more successful in creating the kinds of environments needed for all students to be successful in school. In the construction of a social problem, successes are less of a focus than new problems. For example, there has been widespread coverage in the last several years of a widening income performance difference in the US. Sean Reardon’s research group at CEPA has studied the two extremes of the income achievement gap by using large quantities of data over time and across data sets as one way in which to demonstrate performance differences. Using data from all school age groups and for both reading and math, they document the existence of an achievement gap between the wealthiest and poorest ten percent of the population as early as the 1950s. And strikingly, Reardon finds that in the US, the income achievement gap has grown significantly in the last three decades. The achievement gap between children from low-income families and their very privileged peers grew by approximately 40% from the 1970s to the early 2000s (Reardon, 2012, 2013). That is, some families have the resources at their disposal both inside and outside of school to successfully create advantage for their children and that advantage is growing. Although culturally the US has adopted achievement gap crisis rhetoric, we not only tolerate a large gap in achievement between low-income children and their more privileged peers, but in recent history we have allowed the problem to grow. Somehow, despite readily available data, US schooling has failed to adequately create the conditions under which all children thrive regardless of the differences students bring to school. In other words, US schooling fails to successfully level the playing field for students of varying backgrounds. Achievement gaps are encased in the rhetoric of social problems that become national projects. The cultural construction of schooling as performance as well as attendance for young children strengthened the connection between childhood and schooling, and labeled some groups of children as underachieving. The labels are also symbolic of the alienation some groups feel from the agenda of schooling as well as their struggle to gain equity in resources and opportunity in schooling and the broader society. Ironically, achievement gaps as well as underachieving labels result in the intensification of education as a dominant institution, in turn deepening the connection between parenthood, childhood, and schooling.

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Achievement Gaps Appear Before the Beginning of Formal Schooling Because achievement gaps are measured through skills taught in school by achievement tests or other schooling outcomes, it is understandable why the media and the public at large associate achievement gaps solely with schooling. Explanations of the origins of gaps often argue that some kids go to significantly better schools than other kids, which is true, and that this is a main contributor to achievement gaps, which is not true. Instead, evidence across multiple research studies shows that non-school related experiences have a larger impact on achievement gaps (Downey, 2020) including maternal influence on abilities and skills in the early years that create advantage in school (Hess et al., 1984). For example, a great deal of research has come out of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS), which contains three nationally representative longitudinal samples of childhood and schooling, including one birth cohort. These data tell us some important things about differences between children prior to entry into formal schooling. For example, we know that young children from families with highly educated mothers are more school-ready at kindergarten entry than children with less educated mothers, that high-income toddlers score higher on cognitive assessments than low-income toddlers, and that children who attend preschool prior to kindergarten enter school with higher math and reading scores (Halle et al., 2009; Magnuson et al., 2004; West et al., 2000). But we know less about the mechanisms through which early advantage is created. One growing body of research that began with the psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley examines family linguistic style. Their long-term collaboration started with early childhood intervention programs for poor children in Kansas City (Hart & Risley, 1995). Later, their aforementioned ground-breaking work in linguistics showed that middle-class children hear more utterances per hour than working-class children, who hear more utterances per hour than poor children. This pattern, they argue, along with the quality of language heard, accounts for the differences in vocabulary growth and use, as well as IQ, at ages three and ten (see also Golinkoff et al., 2019 for a review of the debate). It is also evidence of the privilege of one generation being bestowed onto the next generation as the ties between the “good mother” and schooling tightened. Other work has shown that race and ethnicity are also associated with vocabulary growth. For example, research suggests that White mothers talk more with their young children than Black and Hispanic mothers (Brooks-Gunn & Markman, 2005). Additionally, among three- to sixyear-olds, Black children’s vocabulary growth is about one year behind

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White children’s vocabulary growth; even after controlling for ­family background, White children maintain a significant early vocabulary advantage, persisting to age 13 (Farkas & Beron, 2004; Jencks & Phillips, 1998). In total, the research in family linguistics demonstrates the critical role of early experiences and one way in which family advantage carries across generations. In addition to linguistic style, families differ in other ways that are believed to promote cognitive growth. In particular, research has consistently shown that parents with greater education and/or financial means are more likely to engage in cognitively stimulating activities with their young children (Kalil & Ryan, 2020). For example, some families engage children in educational activities long before formal schooling begins. The range of activities spans from widely expected parent activities such as reading to your child, as well as direct instruction activities such as teaching letters, words, and numbers. And additionally, it includes creative activities like music, arts and crafts, and telling stories. Although engagement in these types of activities have increased for all parents, families with highly educated mothers most frequently engage their children, resulting in significant early academic exposure for some children (Schaub, 2010, 2015). They also illustrate the normative alignment of some groups of parents with the academic press of schooling. In the US, schooling is the main social intervention. In the last 70 years, as data about achievement gaps became increasingly available, the education system was charged with solving a culturally constructed social problem rooted in deep societal inequities. Research consistently demonstrates the ways in which skill development at home is translated into longterm advantage at school. And therefore, the education system faces the ­enormous challenge of minimizing the differences children bring from home that are the result of strategic parenting as well as long established structural equities. That is, in the US, there is a strong cultural belief that American public schooling should level the playing field between children of varying backgrounds as much as possible. Unlike most of our peer nations who sponsor a host of social policies that support families, in the US we rely heavily on schooling to remedy inequality originating outside of schooling. One consequence of this design has been the labeling of some families as deficient. And Persists Through Schooling…

The early advantage some children gain prior to formal school reinforces what we already know about families and the impact of experiences outside of formal schooling. It is not surprising, for example, that only 13% of the typical 18-year-old’s waking hours have been spent in school (Walberg, 1984). That means that the typical American child spends the

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vast majority of their time in non-school experiences. Although a main task of childhood and adolescence is schooling, proportionally, schooling is only one of a number of frequently encountered social institutions in daily life that also include family and community. Therefore, one way to better understand the contribution of families and schools to achievement gaps is through time spent inside versus outside school, or school year – summertime comparisons. Overall, “summer setback” research shows that students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds learn at similar rates during the school year (Downey et al., 2004, 2008; Entwisle & Alexander, 1992; Heyns, 1978). For example, although schools with high proportions of low-income children frequently have low average achievement scores, most produce significant levels of learning during the school year (Downey, 2020; Downey et al., 2008). That kind of evidence points to the substantial contribution of factors outside of schooling that contribute to the low average achievement of some groups of students. It also illustrates the failure of schooling to produce the accelerated growth of low-income children needed to close the achievement gap. Going to great lengths to separate the effects of schooling from other predictors of school success, summer setback studies reveal that socioeconomic achievement gaps grow faster during the summer than during the school year. For instance, in Summer Learning and the Effects of Schooling (1978), Barbara Heyns followed sixth and seventh graders in the Atlanta public schools through two years of school and the summer in between. She found that both the racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps grew faster during the summer than during the school year in Atlanta. A s­ imilar study following 790 public school students in Baltimore for 25  years starting at first grade entry found that during the school year, low- and high-income students learned at roughly the same rate but the high-­ income children gained knowledge and skills over the summer (Entwisle & Alexander, 1992). The long summer break for American students results in vastly ­d ifferent out-of-school experiences and those experiences are largely shaped by families. Still, impacted by the schooled society, parents from all income categories attempt to create enriching summers for their children filled with camps, educational trips, and vacations. It is evidence of the power of education to define not only school year activities but also summertime ­activities. However, although the activities might be similar, the quantity differs. For example, the summer activities for poor and working-class children are of significantly less duration. By comparison, middle-class children attend a host of socially and cognitively enriching ­activities  throughout the summer. Assembling that type of summer requires time, knowledge, and money on the part of parents (Chin & Phillips, 2004).

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Overall, school effects and summer setback research suggests that schooling is compensatory for some achievement gaps but not others. In the broadest view, NAEP trend data show slow, steady progress toward closing race and ethnic achievement gaps. However, this appears not to be the case for the SES achievement gap. More specifically, the data are more nuanced when we examine particular groups of students and age categories. For example, Hispanic students enter kindergarten with much lower average math and reading skills than non-Hispanic White students, but the gaps narrow in the first two years of schooling suggesting that schooling has a remediating effect for Hispanic students at least in the early years (Reardon & Galindo, 2009). However, as discussed above, recent analyses of ECLS-K show a disturbing pattern of White students benefitting more from schooling than Black students. This confirmation of what the Coleman Report suggested forces us to question if schooling is the answer to achievement gaps, in particular racial achievement gaps. It suggests that the benefits of schooling are unequally distributed across groups of students. Far from leveling the playing field, the results suggest that schooling may intensify some types of inequality.

Is Schooling the Answer? As our main social intervention, schooling creates the illusion that the range of adult opportunities is available to all students. But family background has a tremendous impact on school outcomes, both directly in the differences students bring to school, and also indirectly in the quality of schooling students get access to. The decentralized nature of US public schooling means that school quality, resources, and experiences vary by place. Moreover, there is ample evidence to show that traditional public schools are not serving all students equally and without additional funds and intervention, many students are left behind. So, it is ironic that the main cause of achievement gaps is often mistakenly attributed to schooling and the proposed solution is often schooling as well. Our strong cultural belief in education results in most attempts to reduce achievement gaps beginning in school. Education has reached into the family and redefined both motherhood and childhood. It is also charged with providing remediation for those who do not meet the “good mother” and “good childhood” expectation. The Johns Hopkins sociologist Karl Alexander (1997) famously argued that in terms of inequality “schooling is more ‘part of the solution’ than ‘part of the problem’” (p. 12). In question is our will to fully fund and implement proven policies and programs as well as explore potential new avenues that will create opportunity for all students. To make significant inroads, we need a better understanding of the mechanisms through which achievement gaps are reduced and greater equality is reached. That requires an education

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system with a desire to create equity for all students that is as great as the “good mother’s” desire to create advantage for her child. There are several ­promising avenues including teacher quality and turnover, class size reduction, increased spending, integration and early childhood education. Teachers: When former US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan proclaimed “It’s all about the talent” (Brill, 2010), he was affirming a long held view that teachers matter, and, without doubt, there is a lot of evidence to support this claim. High-performing teachers are similar to other t­eachers in credentials and experience but The New Teacher Project estimates that they produce two to three months more learning per year than the average teacher and five to six months more learning per year than a low p­ erforming teacher (Kini & Podolsky, 2016; TNTP, 2012). Therefore, it is of deep concern that students in low performing schools experience fewer high-­ performing teachers. For example, in an average performing school, you have a one in six chance of replacing a high-quality teacher with another high-quality teacher, but in a low performing school, the odds change to one in eleven. Moreover, research tells us that low performing schools have more novice teachers, less experienced teachers, and higher rates of teacher turnover (Hanushek & Rivkin, 2012; Henry et al., 2011; TNTP, 2012). In fact, some studies estimate that 20% of teachers leave every year in urban districts creating disruption and expense that is far greater than just teacher turnover. Yet, the US continues to support an every district for itself system of staffing schools that gives significant advantage to wealthy school districts that typically have better pay, facilities, and resources. Class size reduction: Class size is another way the decentralized US ­system of education works against creating greater equity. Since the mid1980s, a number of research studies have shown achievement gains for students in class size reduction programs (e.g., Finn & Achilles, 1990, 1999; Konstantopoulos, 2008; Krueger, 1999; Nye et al., 2000). However, it appears that meaningful benefits are associated with reductions of seven to ten students per class (Chingos & Whitehurst, 2011). This is very expensive both in terms of teacher salaries and school space. Nevertheless, there have been a few initiatives, such as Tennessee’s Project STAR, that demonstrate the benefits of class size reduction for targeted populations. Class size reduction is an important strategy for reducing achievement gaps (Achilles, 2012), especially when used in the early grades and over several years (Konstantopoulos & Chung, 2009). However, there is no coordinated federal effort to reduce class size for all low-income and minoritized students who would benefit. Per pupil expenditures: One way that the federal government has attempted to compensate for the tremendous variation in the schooling experience of American children is through Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Created in the 1960s during the Johnson Administration’s War on Poverty, Title I provides federal funds to local school districts that

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enroll high proportions of low-income children. The majority of Title I funds are aimed at elementary aged students and can be used for either school-wide programs or targeted to students who are at risk of failing. But Title I funding is low, about $550 per student in 2015, and schools are free to use the funds “creatively” and “to meet their unique needs” (Dynarski & Kainz, 2015, p. 3). Although increased spending alone may not change student outcomes, evidence suggests spending early in school careers and targeting to low performing students can produce achievement gains (Wenglinsky, 1997, 1998) and lower gaps. Integration: There is a growing body of research showing that the sincere pursuit of integration in US public schools is a promising policy for reducing achievement gaps through the accelerated growth of low performing groups. In 1966, the Coleman Report found that 11 years after Brown v. the Board of Education, US public schools were still highly segregated; the majority of Black students attended schools that were 90–100% Black and similarly, the majority of White students attended schools that were 90–100% White (Coleman, 1966). In addition, the Coleman Report found that the socioeconomic and racial context of schools mattered for school performance. That is, low SES and Black students benefit academically from attending economically and racially integrated schools. In the following years, racial segregation in US public schools declined as a result of specific policies aimed at integration. For two decades, we enjoyed increasing integration before about 1990 when slow, steady resegregation set in (Frankenberg et al., 2019). A number of recent studies have found that in particular, the socioeconomic context of schools matters for student achievement (Murnane et al., 2006; Rumberger & Palardy, 2005), overshadowing individual and family background effects (Borman & Dowling, 2010). And the positive effects of socioeconomic integration add up over time, resulting in significant reduction in achievement gaps after five to seven years (Schwartz, 2011). There was a time, especially in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the US put considerable effort into integrating school districts, especially through busing. Then, in the 1980s, the federal government attempted to encourage integration through magnet schools but we have never had a coordinated national effort to racially or economically integrate US public schooling. Early Childhood Education: There is longstanding evidence to suggest that early childhood programs have the potential to help remedy persistent achievement gaps. Two intensive early childhood research projects, the Perry Preschool Project (1962–1967) and the Carolina Abecedarian Project (1972), demonstrate the potential benefits of tarh igh-quality early childhood programs. Both show that with geted ­ intensive intervention, it is possible to improve the adult opportunities of low SES children (Campbell et al., 2001, 2012; Heckman et al., 2010). It is unlikely that these high quality, intensive programs will be duplicated on a large scale anytime in the near future, however, the federal

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government does sponsor Head Start, a targeted preschool program for low-income ­children aimed at alleviating achievement gaps early. Head Start has shown meaningful short term increases in cognitive ability and motivation and lasting effects in reduced special education referrals, grade retention rates, and increased graduation rates (Currie & Thomas, 1995; Devaney et al., 1997; see Barnett, 1995 for a review). Currently, states are increasingly moving toward universal early childhood education programs rather than targeted programs although evidence suggests that targeted programs have greater potential to reduce achievement gaps (Pendola et al., 2022).

Conclusion Schooling is a main component of the “good childhood”; over the last several decades, measurable academic success has been increasingly ­ incorporated into ever younger levels of schooling. And research has ­ increasingly reinforced the belief that “good mothers” encourage academic success of young children through the development of complex vocabularies and academic skills. As a result, the increasing availability of data and frequency of reporting achievement gaps has participated in labeling some childhoods and mothers as deficient. But achievement gaps are most usefully understood as a measure of the full breadth and depth of access to opportunity. They are the culmination of the advantage or alienation that groups of students experience both in and out of school. Achievement gaps are the legacy of a strong cultural belief in measurement and comparison as legitimate expressions of the future as well as the hyper rationalization of childhood. In the last 50 plus years, achievement gaps have been framed as a social problem to be solved through science and school policy. The standardization of performance, even for young children, has resulted in some groups being labeled as underperforming. Yet, we have a strong cultural belief that schooling is the answer. The sociologists Douglas Downey and Benjamin Gibbs (2010) point out that “despite the fact that some schools have more resources than others, schools end up being an equalizing force. The key is that the inequalities that exist outside of school are considerably larger than the ones students experience in school” (p. 53). But the prospects of relying on schooling in its current fashion are not great. For example, Eric Hanushek (2016), the economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institute whose primary interest is public policy, estimates that if we continue to close gaps at the same rate in the future, it will be roughly two and a half centuries before the Black-White math gap closes and over one and a half centuries until the reading gap closes. (p. 3)

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There is also a growing trend in the literature to refocus the discussion away from achievement gaps and toward “opportunity gaps.” It is important to acknowledge the complex set of circumstances that result in performance differences between groups of students but “opportunity gap” suggests that it is attributable largely to structural inequity within schools. That is not true. Moreover, schooling could be a significant part of the solution. For that to happen, the US would have to embrace what many of our peer nations already do. For example, in many countries, school funding is centrally controlled by the federal government guaranteeing a more equitable per pupil expenditure. The US also lags far behind in pre-primary enrollments. And many nations have established hardship allowances to encourage high-performing teachers to work in low performing schools. In the US, schooling will be part of the answer only when its citizens choose to embrace equity thus giving all students access to the resources they need to succeed.

Notes 1 Ironically, testing remains part of ESSA. 2 George W. Bush 2000 speech to the NAACP. 3 More nuanced NAEP data show that the main part of this setback occurred during the pandemic from 2020 to 2022 and for the lowest preforming percentiles.

Chapter 7

Before the Invasion

When my children were in school, I was a steadfast participant in their cognitive development who dutifully responded to teacher requests. In my experience, most teachers make reasonable and appropriate requests of ­parents. Still, there was this one teacher, I will call Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Smith was a well-meaning, lovely woman and in many ways a fun teacher. She also had a very specific teaching philosophy that included drawing parents into the education process. She believed that giving students extremely challenging homework was beneficial to their education, because parents would be required to help. Therefore, my daughter routinely had homework that was significantly above her abilities. Consequently, she and I spent a lot of time at the kitchen table that year doing homework together, and I am reasonably certain that she gained zero academic b­ enefit. Nevertheless, we slogged on night after night, spending endless amounts of time doing math problems she barely understood. Rather than putting my foot down, rather than protecting family time or her ­self-esteem, rather than reminding Mrs. Smith that homework should only be reinforcement of what is learned in school, and for a limited amount of time, I allowed schooling to consume a larger share of our home time than was typical for our family. Because formal education has become so ubiquitous in contemporary American society, it can be difficult to recognize the extent to which it affects family and influences fundamental activities such as parenting. As a social institution, the norms that we attach to family have grown to include the education of children. Active, engaged participation in cognitive development is within the realm of expected behaviors for the “good parent” and working to distinguish your child from other children is common. Individualism runs through the US system of education, and therefore comparing children, even ranking them is part of the experience. But the relative standing of one social institution in comparison to others changes over time and across cultures. In the US, for example, education and the individual have grown as important social institutions over the modern and contemporary periods. DOI: 10.4324/9781003325949-7

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One way to gain a deeper understanding of the power of education in contemporary American culture, as described in much of this book, is to compare it with a traditional culture where schooling plays a very different role. For example, the Old Order Amish purposefully limit the role of schooling in their children’s lives.1 For the Amish, the “good childhood” consists of eight years of schooling, usually in a multi-age one-room schoolhouse. The main thrust of the curriculum is limited to reading, writing, and arithmetic. The “good mother” and the local community are supportive of the school and teacher but schooling does not encroach on the family. Instead, the Amish intentionally isolated their schools from 20th century school reform and thus the family and community maintain the ultimate responsibility for the socialization of young children. This makes the Amish a good comparison to the dominant American culture where schooling increasingly encroaches on family time. The Amish give a glimpse at life prior to the invited invasion. They are descendants of the 16th century Swiss German Anabaptist movement who immigrated to North America in the 18th and 19th centuries. Media images depict a quaint 18th century people dressed in dark traditional clothes who ride in horse-drawn buggies and avoid modern technologies. But there is a biblical foundation to this conservative Christian faith. Key components include conscious separation from the larger society, slow, deliberate adoption of modern conveniences, and a nonviolent lifestyle. This belief system is derived from several Old Testament passages that refer to two kingdoms, a “peculiar people” and avoiding worldly pleasures (Hostetler, 1993). As Anabaptists, the Amish join their church as young adults, typically between the ages of 16 and 22, and approximately 85% do so (Amish Studies, n.d.). This chapter juxtaposes schooling as a primary institution in the broader American culture with the secondary role of schooling in Amish culture.

The Old Order Amish and Resistance to Greater Institutionalization of Public Schooling The 20th century education revolution staged an uninvited invasion into the Amish way of life when schooling reform attempted to treat all districts similarly regardless of local conditions and culture. For the Amish, who incorporate change slowly, the rapid changes in public schooling forced confrontations in several states. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most Amish children attended public, rural one-room schoolhouses along with their non-Amish neighbors. However, by the mid-20th century, many school districts were making significant changes to the landscape of rural public education. The Amish rejected the new school reform package including school consolidation, progressive educational philosophy, gym class, and homework. Earlier in the 20th century, the Amish had complied

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with increases in compulsory schooling with minimal resistance, but in the middle part of the 20th century, many states began challenging Amish parents further. As the compulsory age inched upward, Amish parents began resisting additional education (Meyers, 1993). For example, when Ohio implemented a law requiring children to complete 8th grade and be 16 years old before leaving school, many Amish parents had their children repeat 8th grade until their 16th birthday (Buchanan, 1967). In spite of that, several states at least initially ruled against Amish parents and in favor of the State’s interest in an educated citizenry (Knudsen, 1974; Project, 1976; P.T.R., 1967). Some states adopted an additional year of vocational training at home in addition to three hours per week in class to satisfy compulsory school requirements. But battles continued in several states until the 1972 Wisconsin v. Yoder decision when, in a twist in events, the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Amish parents have the right to refuse to send their children to high school.2 Amish rejection of school reform efforts is visible in the rapid rise in Amish schools; in 1940, there were only four private Amish schools but by 2002, there were 1265 ( Johnson-Weiner, 2007). Currently, most Amish children attend a one-room schoolhouse with 25–30 students, ages 6–14.3 Amish resistance to school reform has resulted in a much simpler version of community-run Amish schools shielded from outside influence (Hostetler, 1993; JohnsonWeiner, 2007). In fact, US laws on homeschooling are a result of Supreme Court rulings in favor of Amish parents and represent a partial victory of family over schooling that is closely associated with our nation’s strong belief in religious freedom. Taking full control of their schools enabled the Amish to keep schooling as a secondary institution during a period when schooling was gaining institutional power in the broader culture. For example, Amish schools are usually staffed by young, unmarried women between the ages of 17 and 21 who have completed the typical eight years of schooling. These young women have little if any formal training as teachers, instead learning to teach through experience as well as through their own prior school careers. If they are lucky, they attend a monthly meeting for teachers in the region. Still, the collective wisdom at these meetings is limited since there is high turnover, with most teachers leaving by age 21. While visiting Amish schools, I have observed teachers with only minimal additional understanding of mathematics problems than the 8th graders in the room. Therefore, explaining abstract concepts like interest rates can become a frustrating experience for everyone involved. This is an acceptable limitation for most Amish parents but I cannot imagine a contemporary American parent accepting a teacher who has minimal training and lacks advanced pedagogical and subject knowledge. In fact, typical parents in the US routinely balk at uncertified teachers with a bachelor’s degree as well as trained out-of-field teachers.

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The goals for schooling among Old Order Amish differ substantially from those of the broader US population. The Amish do not welcome schooling into their homes; there is little to no invasion. During a large project on parenting in the US, I did extensive ethnographic work with several Amish communities to highlight the secondary role of schooling in the creation of a successful life for them. Schooling provides a common foundation of knowledge and socialization for the Old Order Amish but with limited parental involvement during the institutionalized eight years of schooling.

A Regular Walk of Life Initially, an Amish farm might feel similar to any other American farm, but the similarities quickly disappear as you cross the threshold of the house. It can be startling because of the unusual sounds, such as the loud buzzing of an old-fashioned laundry wringer, but more than likely, it is the true quiet that you notice first. There are no far-off sounds of television or radio and only rarely are machinery or appliances in use. The ticking of clocks is extremely pronounced. The first floor of an Amish home usually has an open design where kitchen and living space merge without barriers. Homes are clean and tidy, sofas are often covered with a blanket and kitchen tables with a plastic tablecloth, but there are few of the adornments common to the typical American home. The typical Amish family focus is on their house and barn, livestock and crops; their farm (sometimes accompanied by a small side business) is the center of their lives with room for little else. For Amish parents, schooling is purposely kept separate from the main course of their lives. It is to augment their child’s life but not dominate it. In contrast, there is a lot of crossover between home and school the typical American scenario. Parents volunteer, students have homework, and teachers prepare report cards, back-to-school night, and parent ­conferences. Schooling is an important socializing institution in a joint project with the family to develop multiple aspects of the child. Over the 20th century, upward mobility increasingly became linked to educational attainment in the US (Hout, 1988). As a consequence, academic learning, as the main goal of schooling, bled into the family. For example, at the beginning of the 20th century, there was an active national campaign against homework. In fact, home was seen as an inappropriate place to do schoolwork and parents were considered insufficient supervisors (Gill & Schlossman, 1996). However, average homework time increased for all students in the second half of the 20th century and for primary pupils in particular in recent decades (Bennett & Kalish, 2006; Gill & Schlossman, 2003; Loveless, 2014). In contrast, Amish schools are community built,

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funded, and supervised, but there is minimal crossover between home and school. Instead, family remains the primary socializing institution, and schooling has a limited role. Academic learning is left solely to the school, and subjects and content are restricted. Still, schooling serves an important although limited role in the Amish community. For example, one young mom, dressed in the simple dark clothing of the Amish, hair pulled back into a bun with an untied cap sitting at the back of her head told me that, in an Amish school, “you learn enough reading, writing, spelling and arithmetic to be able to have a business; girls don’t need a business, but to do the bookwork. You learn the basics you need in ‘a regular walk of life’” (author’s emphasis). Her comments reveal the important but limited academic goals of schooling in the Amish community. They also reveal intentions; there are no individualistic goals of self-distinction; rather, schooling provides the skills needed by all members of the community to create a common foundation and honest living. Schooling for a “regular walk of life” is a main theme among the Amish parents. An Amish dad I spoke with at a farmer’s market expressed a similar sentiment. He and his family come to town every week during the growing season to sell their vegetables and baked goods. He is a middle-aged man with the typical long beard and no mustache of a married Amish man. He wore black trousers, a white shirt, suspenders, and a straw hat with a broad brim. As he stroked his beard, he told me “to me it’s important that my children learn the 3 R’s, that’s something people use every day.” Both of these parents described the important role schooling serves in the community, but both are also clear about the limited role of schooling. “We also study history and geography but they are not considered the most important subjects,” the young mom told me. The community and the school board4 deliberately limit and control changes to the curriculum as one important way of preserving Amish culture. Subjects like history and geography have limited usefulness for them. These Amish parents see schooling as a way to create a common foundation of useful knowledge within the community and capable, hard-working members. I have never heard an Amish parent brag about “giftedness” or the need for additional, advanced curriculum for their child. Children are prepared only for an Amish walk of life with little possibility for adult opportunities in the broader society.

Learning to Be Amish All schools socialize students, but learning to be part of the Amish community is an important part of schooling. I visited another mom on a

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beautiful summer day when all seven of her children were at home. She was in the garden when I arrived; some of the children were doing chores while others were playing. She was unaccustomed to thinking about the questions I asked and often had a difficult time responding. When asked about the role of schooling in Amish life, she said, “They learn to play with other children, get along with other children. They are not just boys and boys or girls and girls, they get mixed in with others, learn to deal with different personalities.” School, another mom said, is “not only book learning but interaction with others.” Part of this socialization is into the Amish community. She adds, “We like the one room, multi-age school house, it gives us things we can’t even put our finger on.” Embedded within these statements is the high premium Amish parents place on ­learning to be part of the Amish community. Clothing, hairstyle, and horse and buggy are important symbols of the community that set them apart from mainstream American culture, but schools also reinforce the community. Learning to be Amish is such an important part of schooling that it is very difficult to single out or separate a child. A mom tells me the story of two brothers who were having a hard time keeping up with their classmates at school. She thought they were about two years behind. “They are as bright as the other children, but they can’t keep up with their lessons.” She was reluctant to distinguish them as cognitively or developmentally different from the other children and possibly in need of remedial instruction because their roles as members of the community were much more important than their roles as individual learners. She described how the boys were clearly creating a problem in the classroom that the teacher could not handle alone. The community was aware of the problem, and individual families were willing to discuss it, but there was little desire to address it educationally as a community. Unlike Amish schooling, schooling for the typical American child is layered with expectations of individual distinction. Within age-graded schools, elementary classrooms commonly contain ability groups and special additional support for advanced and remedial i­nstruction. Annette Lareau (1989), a sociologist of education who has done extensive ethnographic work with American families, found that middle-class children frequently have an adult helping them navigate the education system and customizing their educational experience. In the schooled society, an important component of the “good parent” role is creating advantage for your own child, encouraging individuality, and highlighting personal successes. In contrast, individualistic goals are not part of the schooling experience for Amish children. Instead, Amish schooling is designed to support and strengthen the Amish community through a common core of limited knowledge and skills, and a shared experience.

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Limited Parental Involvement for Academic Development Amish communities fund, build, and operate their schools, but families have a limited role in schooling on a day-to-day basis. Parents are supportive of the school and teacher; a parent might act as a substitute teacher, participate in the August school clean up, or help with any needed carpentry projects. One dad told me, “Parents take turns to substitute, we do the maintenance, we put on a new roof five years ago. Now no one was paid, we just needed it.” In addition, parents might visit the school two or three times per year for a Christmas program, a conference, or if a problem arises. But children rarely have homework, although sometimes they bring home their lessons if they are falling behind in class. Parents have no clear role in schooling, as one mom told me, “we help along if necessary but more or less it is the teacher’s job…parents work closely with the teacher on discipline or if she is having a specific problem.” Lareau (1989) argued that working-class parents do not take a leadership role in their children’s education, instead seeing their role as getting the child ready to learn while deferring to the teacher’s expertise. Although the outcome is similar, the intention is quite different with Amish parents. The intention is not that the teacher is a professional more capable of dealing with learning than the parent; in fact, the teacher is a similarly educated community member chosen to instruct the children until she decides to marry. Instead, the typical Amish parent believes that school has a limited role in the creation of a successful adult. Schooling is one small part of the development of a community member and therefore to be handled by the teacher unless otherwise necessary. Typical American schooling creates many opportunities for parents to be engaged and indeed typical American parents are highly engaged in the schooling of their children. For example, the 2019 National Household Education Survey found that in the 2018–2019 school year American parents, on average, attended 6.5 meetings or activities at their children’s school (Hanson & Pugliese, 2020). This includes 75% of parents who reported attending parent-teacher conferences and 79% who reported attending an event or activity at school. In addition, 63% of parents reported always checking that homework is done (NCES, 2019). As adult status became intimately associated with educational attainment over the course of the 20th century, the typical American parent increasingly participated in the schooling process of their children. Indeed, the typical American parent sees participation in the schooling process as part of the “good parent” role and is very engaged with their young and school age children. In addition to parental involvement with school age children, the typical American parent spends a considerable amount of time engaged in cognitive activities with their young child prior to entry into formal

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schooling (Schaub, 2010, 2015). Earlier chapters described the US trend of ­increasing parent engagement with young children in cognitive activities. Over the course of the 20th century, parents increasingly read to their young ­children and participate in direct instruction of academic material as well as increasingly engaging young children in arts and crafts, music activities, and storytelling. This is true of all parents, regardless of their education. In contrast, an Amish dad said, “In our way of doing, we include our children in our daily activities, work, play, eating. We don’t spend a lot of time with our pre-scholars (the Amish term for children before school age), they follow us around.” Amish parents do not teach children academic material at home prior to entering school. One mom told me that they might learn to write their names or count, but it is not a goal (“if they pick it up, okay, but we don’t try”), and they do not teach the alphabet at home (“that is what 1st grade is for”). Another mom told me, “the teacher said that she doesn’t like when children come to school knowing their ABC’s; they might be bored in school then or go too far ahead of the other children.” And another said, “Sometimes some come knowing things and it is a problem to keep them busy. In first grade it is important to listen and obey.” When parents listed behaviors that are important for school entry, a dad told me “it’s important to know what yes and no means, [to have] respect for other people and other people’s property.” In a visit to a remote area, a very reserved mom, even for an Amish woman, verified these goals. When I arrived at her family farm, I heard a loud buzzing from the utility room where she was wringing laundry with an old laundry machine. She was wearing a dark blue dress, black halfapron and dark kerchief covering her entire head. She echoed what many Amish parents told me, “We teach them to obey, help work, we teach them good manners [before they go to school].” In fact, obedience as a desirable child quality is a central theme in Amish parenting. The Amish families I spoke with all ranked “obey parents” in the top three and half the families ranked it as the top most desirable quality for their young child. Socially, obedience is an interesting quality. Something about it tugs at our conceptualization of the actualized person. I think my grandmother might have ranked obey as the most desirable child quality and my mother might have ranked it in the top three but, like most of my contemporaries, it would not have been in the top three of my list. Following this general trend, ethnographic research from the late 19th to the early 20th century described a shift in emphasis from childbearing to child rearing among typical American parents. The husband and wife sociologist team, Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd (1929), noted that earlier parents had concentrated on fitting children into society, but by the 1920s, parents had become more interested in enhancing their

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children’s development. Later work has shown a decline in preference for child qualities associated with obedience and an increase in preference for child qualities associated with autonomy or self-direction in the general American population (Alwin, 1984). For example, in 1964, 46% of parents ranked “obey parents” in the top three most desirable qualities from a list of 13 in the NORC national survey and General Social Survey. By 1980–1984, only 29% ranked “obey parents” in the top three (Alwin, 1989). Moreover, in a Pew Research Center Survey (2015), obedience did not rank in the top three most important values to teach children. As an indicator, the shift in parent desire for specific child qualities sheds light on the broader ­education revolution in the US toward individualism and self-actualization. Indeed, the Amish spend a considerable amount of time training their children to respect their authority. For example, at one point during our conversation, I asked a mom to fill out some paperwork. She nonchalantly placed her 18-month-old daughter in the middle of the kitchen table while she spent 15 minutes or so writing. I was awestruck by the ability of the baby to wait patiently for her mother to finish. At no point did she reach for the paper or pen which were less than a foot away from her. When she was finished, the mom put the pen down, opened her arms, and smiled, the baby climbed in. For the Amish, disciplined behavior and obedience are important behaviors for any community member. Schooling is one way in which parents guarantee that children learn to be Amish, but the “good mother” is not actively engaged in the day-to-day school agenda.

Is Eight Enough? Amish children receive eight years of formal schooling. One mom confidently stated, “We are not satisfied with less than eight.” And a dad added, “I feel comfortable sending my kids to school for eight years.” A  third parent said, “That’s how I like it anyway.” In fact, eight years of schooling is so institutionalized in the Amish community that when I mentioned to another mom that well into the 20th century Amish children went to school for four years, she was shocked. It had never occurred to her that there was a time when Amish children went to school for less than eight years. In contrast, in 1900, the median number of school years completed was eight years in the general adult population and rose to over 13 years by 1990. Enrollment in kindergarten, elementary, and high school are universal in the broader culture and all segments of education are expanding rapidly including the GED and graduate education. Nevertheless, for the Amish, the sanctioned level of education attainment will remain eight years unless fundamental rules change within the community.

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However, the lure of schooling expansion may even reach the Amish. One conversation with a friendly father of four who smiled often and whose main work is an upholstery shop next to his home and barn told me that in his younger years, he worked alongside non-Amish in construction and in a feed mill, and this gave him a different view of schooling and its connection to job opportunities. He said, “I might do home schooling [of my children] to get a GED because a lot of jobs require high school.” This statement is unusual on several levels. First, it is against Amish rules to homeschool because community is so important, and, in addition, it is difficult to imagine someone with only an 8th grade education homeschooling his children in secondary school subjects. However, it signified his acknowledgment of the increasing likelihood of Amish men obtaining non-farming jobs outside the Amish community and the necessity of their ability to compete. In the second half of the 20th century, many Amish men turned to non-farming jobs as farmland became rare and expensive. Some estimates currently put over half the total Amish population as engaged in non-farming occupations and in some communities this can be upwards of 90% (Kraybill & Nolt, 2004). Later, I mentioned his comment to another Amish man who is adamant that eight years is enough. Rather than seeing expanded education as ­creating opportunities, he saw it as a threat to his culture and a means of creating people who “can’t do anything.” At first, he was shocked by the story and then he rather insightfully said, “I know what he is thinking, that’s a man who is trying to compete in the outside world. I don’t do that.” While interviewing a mom, she told me eight years of school is about right, not less or more, “because we think that is enough. Once they get to that age they are ready to be at home helping.” However, she reconsidered because her oldest daughter was in the room. Both were careful when they admitted that the daughter would have liked another year of school. “You enjoyed it,” her mother gently acknowledged to her. Amish culture is at a significant crossroads. Amish men are increasingly working in non-farming occupations outside Amish communities (Kraybill & Nolt, 2004). This alone changes the tenor of a community. Farming is an around-the-clock occupation that has tremendous physical demands and ties one to home. In contrast, newer occupations for Amish men like construction are nine-to-five style jobs away from the community with higher salaries and more free time than is common in the traditional Amish lifestyle. One Amish woman observed, “In farming you don’t think about hourly pay, just what needs to be done.” Increased dependence on non-farming occupations, as well as increased contact with the outside world and increased free time, will have important longterm consequences for the Amish. With only eight years of schooling, the Amish are at a significant disadvantage that confines them to limited job opportunities. Therefore, they may not be fully protected from the lure of schooling expansion.

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Conclusion The Amish are very conscious of outside threats to their community and general way of life, and they perceive the boundaries between Amish and “English” as important in the preservation of a distinct Amish culture. Included in this is the perception that schooling expansion is a considerable threat. The mention of more schooling provoked strong reactions from several Amish men I spoke with, including disparaging statements about too much schooling: “It kills humanity.” “It’s like hitting a brick wall.” “It makes stupid idiots out of people.” Unlike in the broader American population, the purpose of schooling is not as “the great equalizer” and vehicle for the creation of upward mobility in the Amish community (Mann, 1868). There are no individualistic motivations to school participation or pursuit of advantage. However, although purposefully limited, schooling does serve an important function for the Amish. Through slow and careful consideration before initiating any change, the Amish have maintained the central role of family and community as primary social institutions and held schooling at bay. They have used schooling as a vehicle for reinforcing the community. Through intentional isolation from the broader society, limited number of years of schooling, restricted curriculum, and minimally trained teachers, the Amish have shielded their schools from the educational transformation of the 20th century. Amish childhood, while viewed as a separate developmental stage, has components of a more traditional notion of childhood. Schooling is not age-graded and is fitted to the agrarian calendar. When not in school, children move through the day going back and forth between play and chores; they are expected to participate in running the household/family business to the best of their abilities. For example, data from time diaries show that Amish children as young as two years old spend a substantial portion of their day doing chores like setting the table, washing dishes, hanging or folding laundry, planting or collecting vegetables in the garden, and food preparation. Cognitive engagement of young children is not a priority for parents because schooling does not dominate their lives. The Amish “good mother” raises children to be cooperative, hard-working members of the Amish community. In contrast, typical American parents are highly engaged in the schooling process of their children. This is true for both school age children and young children before the onset of formal schooling. Within the broader American culture, the typical parent assumes that education is the main vehicle for creating adult opportunity for their children. Therefore, schooling comes to dominate the lives of individuals, encroaching on the family through demands on time and resources, and also in the creation of new roles like “parent as teacher.” For example, many American parents now spend a considerable amount of after-school time promoting

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additional development through a chaotic schedule of lessons, teams, and clubs. The  “good parent” of the dominant American culture actively ­participates in the goals of schooling. In theory, Americans love the Amish lifestyle, but it is woefully inadequate for creating the adult opportunities most American parents want for their children. As demanding as the typical US schooling experience can be, when I look at 14-year-old Amish children, I am stunned that there will be no more academic development. Most Amish will never read the “great American novel” because reading is largely viewed as something for children. There are few books in the home; many books are forbidden and there is limited time for reading anyway. There is also limited historical or geographic knowledge, even of their own people. The Amish have successfully created a simpler version of schooling that protects the family and community from the invasion of schooling, but at a price. By limiting schooling, many other opportunities are also limited.

Notes 1 These data come from a larger study of the social construction of parenting and early childhood in the schooled society and were collected from parents of 3- to 6-year-old children living in and near the town of a large university. The Amish subsample was collected from 2007 to 2009 in the rural communities surrounding the university town. Their population is spread across three valleys and several school districts. While the Amish are a common presence in this area, living amongst many non-Amish farmers as well as blue- and white-collar rural workers, they actively use language, dress, traditions, and religion to remain culturally separate from the dominant American culture. The three settlements were founded between 1950 and 1973 when some families migrated from Lancaster, Pennsylvania to escape, in their opinion, the emergence of progressive Amish ideologies in the original settlements. These three settlements vary slightly and represent the range amongst typical Old Order Amish communities. For example, one settlement is in a rather remote area and maintains minimal contact with English while another has much more contact with the outside world. The third community lies somewhere in between but has a rather conservative bishop like the first, and therefore, while they are dependent on non-Amish for a living, they are extremely cautious of interaction other than pleasantries associated with business transactions. There is also constant movement within Amish communities as the population grows and affordable farmland becomes scarce. In this area, most Amish are farmers, but it is common for young men to work construction and some families have small businesses. Five of the six participating families are engaged in farming, and one family runs an upholstery shop. The average Amish family has five or more children; in this study, the number of children per family ranged from 3 to 7 but most women were still bearing children (Amish Studies, n.d.);. The mothers’ ages ranged from 26 to 45. Initially, I  requested only mothers, but some Amish women are very reluctant to engage with outsiders. I witnessed several instances where a husband actively encouraged his wife to participate, but the wife refused. Separation from the outside world is important for all Amish, but Amish

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men are more accustomed to interacting with ”English” (their word for ­non-“plain ­people”), and ­perhaps Amish women fear more indirect punishments for outside contact. This resulted in four instances where the respondent was a mother and in two a father; all spoke English fluently in addition to their mother tongue Pennsylvania Dutch. These data come from the questionnaires, time diaries, and interviews with six Old Order Amish families in one rural region of an eastern state. The questionnaires covered a host of family background variables as well as ­parenting beliefs and behaviors; the time diaries were kept for one designated 3- to 6-year-old child for one 24 hour weekday and one 24 hour weekend day; the interviews took place in Amish homes or at the local farmer’s market and ranged from 45 minutes to an hour and a half. The interviews were semi-structured and covered a number of parenting beliefs and behaviors about the family school relationship especially as it related to the 3- to 6-year-old child. In addition, extensive interviews and observations occurred during whole day outings with Amish families as well as many hours over a three-year period spent informally chatting and observing Amish with their children and learning about their community. 2 Amish resist high school because, they argue, that enough book learning is done in eight years and children should be home or in the community for vocational training afterward. But the high school also removes Amish children from the Amish community and exposes them to the outside world. Some have argued that this threatens the survival of their culture (Hostetler, 1993). 3 About 90% of Amish children now go to Amish parochial schools. The other 10% attend public, rural schools (Amish Studies, n.d.). 4 An Amish school board is usually made up of three to five appointed males who meet once per month. They make decisions about proposed changes to the curriculum, help guide the current teacher, hire new teachers, and ­organize school maintenance.

Chapter 8

The Invited Invasion as a Joint Project with the Family

At first blush, my parenting appears radically different than my m ­ other’s. She was the quintessential mid-century stay-at-home mom. She had lots of kids, kept a very clean house, and cooked a sit down, family meal every night. But she shied away from education; for my mother, active engagement in our schooling was not part of her job. Although I tried to live up to many parts of my mother’s example, I also felt that participation in the school careers of my children was an important component of my responsibilities as a parent. However, it was not that my mother was neglecting a central part of her role as she understood it. Instead, she and I were both interpreting and responding to the “good mother” construct, just a ­generation apart. By the time I became a mother, the demands on the “good mother” had changed, and there were new ingredients in the recipe for creating the “good childhood.” This book explores the collective meaning attached to parenting and the cultural process that expands and defines new expectations for the “good mother” in the creation of the “good childhood.” Parenting from this perspective is not instinctive, rather, it is spatial and temporal. As a cultural marker, the “good mother” is a symbol of the growing status of children and an awareness of the attributes and behaviors that create the “good childhood” of a particular time and place. Both my mother and grandmother had conceptualizations of the “good childhood” but they differed from each other’s and from mine. While there are some similarities, we also had unique components to our understanding of the mother role. The definitions are generational, in part, but they are also shaped by schooling. Education is more than just a main activity for certain segments of the population and periods during the life course. It is a social institution that defines norms and roles including the “good mother” and the “good childhood” that, as evolving constructions, are transformed by schooling. Western culture has placed special emphasis on the mother-child ­relationship. One goal of this book is to establish the long arch of the “good mother” and “good childhood” as culturally pervasive, deeply DOI: 10.4324/9781003325949- 8

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rooted social constructions. The contemporary “good mother” is defined by self-sacrifice and devotion. Chapter 2 traced her from Marian art to psychology and neurobiology. For example, cultural artifacts of Mary from the late middle ages and early modern period were a suggestion to deepen the “good mother” role. Over the next several centuries, social and economic movements made it possible for mothers to devote more time and energy to nurturing children and as a result, the mother-child bond intensified. During the 20th century, emerging behavioral and ­neurological science had a lot of advice for the “good mother.” In the 21st century, she is equipped with degrees, scientific research, and professional advice. The “good mother” role comes with a long list of responsibilities that goes well beyond physical safety and socioemotional growth. She is actively creating the “good childhood.” Similarly, the “good childhood” expands as a social construct. Chapter 3 explored the evolving model of societal notions of the component parts of the developmental stage called childhood. The modern, protected childhood began seeping into the culture in the 17th century and is now a firmly embedded fixture of contemporary life. Since the early modern period, childhood has been increasingly defined by its differences from adulthood. The new orientation encouraged a separate children’s domain. Then, the shared meanings around childhood further intensified in the 19th century when the growing conflict between the economic and sentimental value of children led to the decline in child labor and an increase in school attendance. The “good childhood” is characterized by growing ideas about the special developmental needs of children. As evidence of its robustness as a social construct, the contemporary protected childhood has spread globally. Both my mother and grandmother would have fretted over current constructions of the “good mother” and the “good childhood.” They would have whole-heartedly agreed with concerns about overindulgence, overscheduling, and oversupervision. For them, creating the “good childhood” was simpler, although by today’s standards, woefully inadequate. In this book, education is the catalyst in evolving norms and roles in parenting and childhood. As a primary social institution in contemporary life, education is a driving force in current conceptions of the “good mother” and the “good childhood” constructions. The cultural ­analysis here demonstrates the intensification of the “good mother” role over time as she is increasingly shaped by schooling, and the resulting additions to childhood. Schooling changes the way people think and behave and therefore with an increasingly education-exposed “good mother,” c­ognitive development and schooling have become main ingredients in the recipe for creating the “good childhood.” In the US, schooling is our largest social intervention ever. Educational attainment is a relatively new way to stratify society, one that we believe

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is more meritocratic than, for example, family of origin (see van Noord et al., 2019). Both the “good mother” and the “good childhood” have been beneficiaries of the growth of mass schooling. First, schooling has expanded both upward and downward, and average educational attainment has steadily increased. Typically, we measure expansion at the upper end of schooling, where in 2021, the high school completion rate amongst those 25 and over was 91% and the college completion rate was 38% – in 1940, these figures were 25% and 5%, respectively (De Brey et al., 2021). This means that the typical mother has had growing exposure to the norms and expectations of formal schooling and also has become i­ncreasingly familiar with the organization as well as the grammar of schooling. In addition to the comfort and familiarity that result from exposure to schooling, both of which have obvious benefits for her child’s school experience, the “good mother” has also evolved. The expansion and growing complexity of education has changed her and her ideas about individual development including personhood, motherhood, and childhood. As a result of exposure to experiences and ideas as well as specific training in things like human development, conflict resolution, and decision making, the “good mother” has gained a sense of confidence and empowerment. Participation in schooling is not merely a formality nor is its outcomes a fallacy, exposure to education changes populations, as well as individuals. The spotlight on the upward expansion of schooling that results in a focus on new degrees misses the full breadth of change because, as we saw in Chapter 4, schooling also expands downward. In the last 100 years, more and more children have attended early childhood education, including kindergarten and preschool, as the rise in educated mothers pushed the expansion of early childhood education. One hundred years ago, very few children went to school prior to 1st grade, now nearly all children attend kindergarten and 54% of 3- and 4-year-olds attended preschool in 2019. In fact, in many respects, the 20th century institutionalization of kindergarten into the formal school schedule is currently being replayed by pre-K as school attendance becomes increasingly institutionalized in early childhood. As a result, significantly larger segments of the life course are spent in school. In addition, the downward expansion of education represents new notions of age appropriate activities for very young children. The slow movement toward a highly rationalized childhood dominated by schooling and academically focused activities represents a main cultural component of the parenting project for maximized child development. It  is also often at odds with another well-established cultural ideal, the childhood filled with freedom and exploration. Second, in addition to consuming larger segments of the life course, schooling expansion also creates new norms and roles. For example, with the growing significance of education came a growing expectation that

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parents, and particularly mothers, would participate in the schooling of their children and in addition, that cognitive development would extend past the formal school day and into other segments of life. The strong cultural belief that schooling is a legitimate sorting mechanism has led to new norms including highly engaged, educationally strategic parenting. Stratification based on educational attainment encourages the creation of advantage for your child. As a result, it creates new responsibilities for parents such as monitoring school performance, supervising homework, scheduling extracurricular activities, and acting as a liaison with education officials. Chapter 5 explored the addition of cognitive development to the list of expected parenting activities that have resulted in new roles like “parent as teacher.” The “good mother” has been joined together with schooling in a human development project that represents significant ­additions to the parenting role. Without a doubt, the “good mother” has the potential to be an “opportunity hoarder” (e.g. Lewis & Diamond, 2015) for her children, but she also critiques the organization; sees the problems and push for improvements to the structure of schooling. Through schooling expansion, childhood has been similarly altered and with significant ramifications. For example, the belief in education as a legitimate sorting mechanism implicitly acknowledges that some students will end up at the bottom of the stratification ladder, resulting in social constructions like the deficient student. The US system of education is steeped in a cultural belief in meritocracy. The belief in impartiality of education convinces individuals that they have independently done the work necessary for success – or lack thereof – and furthermore, that the structure is not bent to advantage anyone. Chapter 6 traced the evolution of achievement gaps as a social problem and the potential of schooling to alleviate them. Education as a powerful institution permeating the culture not only creates adult opportunity but also consumes large portions of the life course, defines norms and roles, and in the process changes the “good mother” as well as the “good childhood.” In addition to being expansive, social constructions can also be oppressive. Just ask any parent of a school-aged child during the pandemic of 2020. Parents became the de facto school-house teacher. Not just the supervisor, guide, and general orchestrator of an education career, but the full-time provider. Even under normal circumstances, parents squawk and complain about the responsibilities related to their children’s education but then dutifully engage to the best of their abilities. During the pandemic, parents were the immediate go-to replacement. Things were to carry on as usual, just at home and online. There was no discussion of informal learning or later catch-up. Instead, parents panicked. What did it mean for future opportunities? A quick Google search produces a plethora of advice to parents on how to homeschool. Once schooling is considered an essential experience and a legitimate stratifying agent, then opting out, even

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temporarily, is simply not an option. For example, although the typical Amish parent believes that school has a limited role in the creation of a successful adult, education was powerful enough to reach in a shape family life during “shelter in place.” As a result, teachers in the limited Amish schooling model examined in Chapter 7 felt compelled to home-deliver lessons to each scholar during the pandemic. As education slowly moved closer to the family, it reached in and changed time that was traditionally seen as family time into education time. For example, in 1900, average number of school days was 144, with the typical student attending 99 days (Snyder, 1993). By 2018, average number of school days had risen to 180 and average daily attendance had reached 167 days (De Brey et al., 2021). That is a 68 day or 69% increase in school days experienced by the typical child per year.1 And there are ongoing public discussions about longer school years and longer school days. Time once reserved for the family, often in the form of labor, is now part of education in what is considered the rights of the child (Schaub et al., 2017). Schooling has also extended past the school day itself. For example, average homework time increased for all students in the second half of the 20th century and in recent decades for primary pupils in particular (Bennett & Kalish, 2006; Gill & Schlossman, 2003). As for families, resistance is low, and therefore, the intensification of schooling in the “good childhood” seems inevitable. Large amounts of homework and scheduled activities as well as schooling expansion have secured a place in the daily routine. In fact, parents welcome the joint project with schooling. They are so invested that when their main partner slows down due to obstacles, as in the case of the pandemic, they take up the slack. But nostalgia for a myth is strong. The New York Times opinion piece by Kim Brooks titled “We Have Ruined Childhood” is a good example. Sexy title for sure, but it is nevertheless sensational. Brooks questions our hyperfocus on safety, the undue anxiety it places on parents, and the lack of independence in childhood (NYT, 2019). She makes a strong appeal to our Romantic beliefs about childhood. In Brooks’ words, childhood has become “one long internship meant to secure a spot in the dwindling middle class.” Her opinion piece as well as book Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear (2018) are examples of the cultural spotlight on childhood as a developmental stage, and how it could and should be better. Her ideas are at the nexus of the celebration of Rousseau and the innocence of childhood, and a belief that there was a sustained time when all of our fantasies about childhood were actually realized. Of course, we must question, better for whom, upper-middle class, White children? Or, in which time period, the post-WWII economy when many households were single bread-winner families? Our cultural conviction about childhood as a sacred developmental stage characterized by freedom, exploration, and play pushes up against

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education. These romanticized notions of childhood exist alongside ­cultural beliefs in the right to education and schooling as a legitimate ­vehicle to adult opportunity. As a result, the desire for child-centered, autonomous, discovery-based learning is sometimes at odds with mass schooling. In fact, they are often described as incompatible, with one being highly individualistic, self-motivated, and creative and the other accessible, low cost, and inclusive. But they are not incompatible. Instead, they are synergistic, each pushing the other forward in a dance that results in an intensification of childhood and a melding of child-centered and cognitively sophisticated learning. We continue to create separate learning spaces for young children that are unique to education. We become enamored with new child-centered pedagogies like Montessori and Reggio Emilia then slowly incorporate some of the ideas into mass schooling. The hyperfocus on childhood as a sacred developmental stage encourages a tangle of romantic notions and education that propels schooling expansion. It is therefore no surprise that we fixate on potential threats to childhood. For example, Brooks cites a number of trends that are frequently in the news including high rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide among children. Available surveys certainly point to a change in reports of childhood well-being and it is quite possible that there has been a decline in mental health. Is education the cause as many observers suggest? Maybe, but maybe not in the way that is typically assumed. The “good mother” has a lot of exposure to education. She thinks and talks about her children quite differently than in past decades. The unique differences of her child are not disqualifiers, and they are expressions of individuality entitled to accommodations and services in an inclusive environment. Likewise, the encouraged individuality in childhood is manifested in how children think, feel, and express themselves including a heightened sense of entitlement to express discomfort. Schooling expansion changes the norms around inclusion and self-expression. The individual and schooling are primary social institutions in contemporary American society. The set of norms and roles associated with each results in a unique expression of the “good childhood” at any given time and place. Childhood today is not better or worse than in other time periods, but it is different. Of course, there are implications for the type of parenting explored here. A childhood filled with individualistic, self-actualizing, cognitively advanced activities develops a specific set of qualities as well as sophisticated constructions of the individual. Critiques of this style of parenting often focus on the undesirable consequences such as rigid academic focus and loss of free play but there are some extraordinary consequences as well. For example, the Flynn Effect documents the steady rise in crystalized and especially fluid average IQ scores in industrialized countries over the 20th century (Baker et al., 2015). The rise does not

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make your grandparents cognitively impaired or your children geniuses. Instead, contemporary schooling and parenting have created a much more cognitively sophisticated, academically skill endowed child. That is not to say that there are no problems with the structure of ­education in the US. We have concentrated on including everyone and for long periods of time in comprehensive schooling. As schooling gained institutional power, we slowly raised per pupil spending, lowered class size, and raised teacher training requirements. But we took a test-driven, one-size-fits-all route to measure our success – and failure. We concentrated on academic performance rather than cognitive development, and we assumed that test scores told us something important about individuals as well as groups of students. There is now broad acknowledgment that this is the wrong approach, but there is a deafening silence about future directions. The US system of education is more comfortable with ranking performance and comparing groups of children than with a growth-­ oriented approach that might include goal setting and measuring gains over a school year. Our brand of individualism is better at blaming lack of success on “deficient” students and parents than creating an educational environment that celebrates differences and creates opportunities. Furthermore, both a comparison model and a growth model assume everyone have an equal chance. Our one-size-fits-all model only applies to measuring success, and it stops far short of creating a similar quality of experience for all students. Currently, we prop up the American dream as if it is a race that everyone has an equal chance of winning, but some groups of students start lengths behind others. As described in Chapter 5, family background, especially mothers’ education, is a main predictor of school success. As a consequence, research shows that some children come to school with a significant academic disadvantage. In general, those are the same students that we then send to the weakest schools. A path forward has to include an education system that adequately funds all schools and provides the environment, tools, and experienced teachers necessary for the success of all students. The future of early childhood education is also unclear. We have started down the path of universal pre-K, and we will likely eventually include 3-year-olds as well. There is no stopping that train; schooling is a significant part of the highly rationalized childhood. But delivery is still up in the air. Will it continue to look more and more like elementary education, or will we soften some of the hard edges of formal education by including some early philosophies on separate and play-based early childhood education? As we move further away from No Child Left Behind, will we abandon the academic pushdown to earlier and earlier levels of education and reimagine early childhood education as cognitive, creative, and social but not academic? The “child’s garden” is within our reach but our collective imagination has to accommodate a heightened sense of the developmental

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stage we call childhood that includes a developmentally appropriate ­educational experience for all children regardless of parents’ ability to pay. They are hardly Brooks’ “small animals,” and they are “whole children” endowed with rights that include education.2 Finally, this work has investigated parenting and in particular the intensification of the “good mother” role over time, as they are increasingly shaped by schooling. Historically, the “good mother” role has been the domain of women, but times are changing, and the “good father” is certainly looking more similar to the “good mother” (Shirani et al., 2012). Schooling has likely influenced blending of gender roles. For example, the Pew Research Center reports that fathers’ time in childcare is on the rise. In addition, among stay-at-home dads, caring for family members as a main activity rose from 8% in 1989 to 24% in 2016. More importantly, a majority of fathers and mothers say parenthood is extremely important to their identity (Pew Research Center, 2015). The evolution of the father’s role is another indicator of the growing status of children and the premium placed on the developmental stage called childhood. All indicators point to a continued reduction in strict gender boundaries in exchange for shared responsibilities in the creation of the “good childhood.” This book has a generally optimistic image of education in the US. As a powerful institution, schooling has transformed both the “good mother” and the “good childhood,” mostly for the better. The invited invasion has resulted in women now having more options available to them than at any other time in history. In addition, the rights and experiences of children have grown more similar. As we slowly inch forward, I hope our better angels see the future of education as inclusive and equitable as well as age appropriate. To do that, the “good mother” must be devoted not only to her own children but also to all children. The individualistic pursuit of creating advantage for her children must be balanced with the broader sense of a “village.” She must be invested in creating the “good childhood” for all children. I like to think that future generations of my family will be similarly invested in the “good mother” and the “good childhood,” that devotion will include all children, and that quality education will be universally available.

Notes 1 The typical student in 1900 completed 8 years of schooling and attended an average of 99 days per year amounting to 792 days of schooling. The ­typical student today attends 2171 days of public schooling – kindergarten plus 12  grades at an average of 167 days attended per year (not including ­additional post-secondary education). 2 The Convention on the Rights of the Child argues that “children are neither the property of their parents nor are they helpless objects of charity. They are human beings and are the subject of their own rights.”

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Index

Abecedarian 63, 100 academic redshirting 82, 83–84 achievement gaps 10, 87–102; and class size reduction 99; and early childhood education 100–101; and integration 100; and per pupil expenditure 99–100; and teachers 99 Adams, John 38 Adderall 41 ADHD 39–42 The ADHD Explosion 40 ADHD Nation 41 age grading 36, 39 Alexander, Karl 98 Allen, Ann Taylor 52 Americanization 51–53 America Reads Challenge 43 Amish 10, 104–114, 120; and resistance to school reform 104–105; and school readiness 109 Ariès, Phillip 32–36, 37 attachment theory 24 Baby Einstein 12 Baby Mozart 12 “Bad Mother” 17, 24 Baker, David 58, 59 Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother 72–75 Beatty, Barbara 50 behaviorism 23 Biden Administration 43 Bowlby, John 24 breastfeeding 16–18 Bronfenbrenner, Urie 62 Brooks, Kim 120, 121 Brown v. Board of Education 100 Bush administration 43

capitalism 6, 11, 18, 27, 32 Catholicism 14 CDC 39–42 Centuries of Childhood 31–36 CEPA 92, 94 A Chance for Change 64 Change social historians 35–36 Child Development Group of Mississippi 64 childhood in the early modern period 117 childhood in the modern period 31–36 child labor 36, 38, 39, 45–46 Children’s Bureau 22 child rights 44–46 child study movement 23, 26 Chinese Imperial examinations 74 Chinese mother 72–75 Chua, Amy 72–75 CIBA 41 Clinton administration 43 Coleman Report 90–92, 92, 98, 100 college admissions scandal 2 common school movement 36, 38 Community Action Programs 62 compulsory attendance laws 36, 38–39 Conners, Keith 41 consistency social historians 35 Convention of the Rights of the Child 44 COVID-19 pandemic 119–120 Cunningham, Hugh 33 da Vinci, Leonardo 15–16 deMause, Llyod 33 Department of Education 61 developmental psychology 43, 45 Downey, Douglas 101

148 Index

early childhood education expansion 6–9, 20–21, 48–69, 118–119 Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS) 42, 91, 95, 98 education revolution 5–6, 13, 21, 26, 27, 111 educational psychology 61 Eisenberg, Leon 41 Elkind, David 28 Emile 50 The End of American Childhood 71 Equality of Educational Opportunity 90; see also Coleman Report Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) 87–88 “family school” 50 Fass, Paula 71 fertility 24, 78 First Demographic Transition 21–22, 27 Flynn Effect 121–122 “free range parenting” 3,4 French Annales School 32 Freud, Sigmund 23 Froebel, Friedrich 51, 52, 57 Fuller, Bruce 67–68 Gamson, David 58 GED 111, 112 gender and ADHD 40, 42 gender and education 37, 39 Gibbs, Benjamin 101 Gladwell, Malcolm 83 Goals 2000 42–43 Goffen, Rona 15 “good childhood” 4–5, 8–9, 12, 15, 19, 28–47, 49, 50, 56, 61, 68, 69, 71, 72, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89, 92, 98, 101, 104, 116–117 “good father” 123 “good mother” 1–5, 6–7, 9,12–27, 30, 49, 50, 62, 64, 65, 71, 72, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80, 85, 88, 89, 98, 99, 101, 104, 113, 114, 116–123 “good parent” 103, 109, 111, 114 Gopnik, Allison 3 Hall, G. Stanley 23 Hanushek, Eric 101 Harlow, Harry 24 Harris, Judith Rich 26 Hart, Betty 20, 95

Head Start 60–65, 82, 101; and fade out 63–64 Hebb, Donald 61 “helicopter parent” 2, 4, 9 Helping Your Preschool Child 43 Heyns, Barbara 97 Hinshaw, Stephen 40 history of childhood 31–36 Holt, Luther 23 Home Advantage 76; and single education career 77, and two-person single education career 77 homeschooling 105, 112 Huffman, Felicity 2 human capital 9 Hunt, J. McVicker 61 The Hurried Child 28 ideal type 5 immigration 53 increase in mother’s education 19–27 individuality and schooling 103, 108 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) 84; and Free Appropriate Public Education 84; and LeastRestrictive Environment 84 Industrial Revolution 16, 18 infanticide 17 infant mortality 17, 32 Infant School 50, 69 Intelligence and Experience 61 intensive parenting 3 intergenerational mobility 5–6 invited invasion 1, 3, 9, 10, 11, 42, 47, 49, 68, 78, 80,104 IQ 61 Japanese education 75 Jensen, Arthur 62 Johnson administration 61, 62, 89, 90, 99 Kennedy administration 61 kindergarten 50–60,118 Kirp, David 66–67 Kumon Math and Reading Centers 81 language and child outcomes 20 Lanham Act 66 Lareau, Annette 76, 108 “lawnmower parent” 2, 4, 9 Layton, Timothy 40

Index 149

Loughlin, Lori 2 Lynd and Lynd 110, 111 Lythcott-Haims, Julie 3 MacArthur, Douglas 76 MacArthur, Pinky 76 Mahony, Patrick 23 Marian art 15–17, 18, 117; and Madonna lactans 16; and Nursing Mary 16 Mary and the “good mother” 14–16, 117 mass schooling 32–39, 118, 121, 56 maternalist movement 22 meritocracy 119 Michelangelo 15–16 Modern Parenthood 79 Montessori 121 motherhood in the early modern period 13–18 motherhood in the Middle Ages 13–18 motherhood in the modern period 50 motherhood in the 20th century 21–26 mothers’ educational attainment 19 mothers’ time in childcare 79 Munakata,Yuko 29 A Nation at Risk 75–76 Nation’s Report Card 92 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) 92; see also the Nation’s Report Card National Center for Education Statistics 48, 62, 83 National Survey of Children’s Health 39 neo-institutionalism 8–9, 11, 72 neuroscience and motherhood 25–26, 27 The New Teacher Project 99 New York Kindergarten Association 53 No Child Left Behind 87–88 normative lens 78, 78–85 nuclear family 14, 16, 18, 19, 32 nursery school movement 65–66 The Nurture Assumption 26 Obama administration 43, 87 OECD 47, 78 Office of Education 22 opportunity gaps 102 opportunity hoarding 119

The Organization of Behavior 61 Orme, Nicholas 35 Outliers 83 over-parenting 1–4, 76 over-scheduling 29–31 “The Over-scheduling Myth” 29 parental involvement in schooling 10, 70–86 “parent as teacher” 2, 9, 10, 80, 81, 113, 119 parenting 4 parenting for cognitive development 80, 96 parent money 81 parent time 79–80 parent training 52 Perry Preschool Project 63, 100 Pestalozzi, Johann 51 Pew Research Center 70, 79, 123 Plymouth Colony 37 Pollock, Linda 34–35, 37 Pre-K 65–68, 118 Preschool Education in America 50 “The Pressured Child” 30 Protestantism 6, 11, 28, 27 psychoanalysis 23 psychology and motherhood 22–26, 27 PTA/PTO 76 Reardon, Sean 94 reconstruction 38 reformation 11, 18, 32 “The Reformer’s Dream” 81 Reggio Emilia 121 Risley, Todd 20, 95 Ritalin 41 Rosenfeld, Alvin 3 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 3, 29, 50, 120 Ryan, Patrick 36 sacralization of children’s lives 34 The Sandbox Investment 66 Sanders, Crystal 64 schooled society 4, 10, 97, 108, 109; see also schooling culture school effects 96–98 schooling culture 4; see also schooled society schooling expansion 5–7, 118 school readiness 31, 42–44 school segregation 38

150 Index

Schwarz, Alan 41 Second Demographic Transition 24–25, 27 “shadow education” 81 Shanahan, Suzanne 35 Shorter, Edward 17 Shriver, Sargent 62 “slow parenting” 3 Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear 120 social construction 8 social construction of childhood 31, 32–36, 79–80, 117–118 social construction of motherhood 13–18 social construction of parenthood 2,117–118 social construction of parenting 4–5, 11, 78, 79–80 social histories of the family 17–18, 31–36 social institution 73–75, 103, 116, 121 social reproduction 8, 10, 77–78 South Korean education 81 special education 78, 82, 84–85 Spitz, Rene 24 Standardized Childhood 67 standardized testing 87–88 status attainment 5–6 stay-at-home mothers 12 Stevens, Robert 58 stratification 119 Summer Learning and the Effects of Schooling 97

summer learning loss 97–98 Sylvan learning 81 Thompson, Michael 30 Thompson, Warren 21 Thurer, Shari 14, 18, 22–23 Title I 82, 99–100 U.S. Supreme Court 105 Unequal Childhoods 77; “accomplishment of natural growth” 77; and “concerted cultivation” 77 UNICEF 45–46, 47 United Nations 44 upward mobility 106, 113 vocabulary growth 95 War on Poverty 10, 61, 62, 66, 89, 99 Watson, John 23 Weber, Max 5 Western parenting 72–75 wet nursing 16–17 Wisconsin v.Yoder 105 Wise, Nicole 3 women and educational attainment 78 Women’s Bureau 22 working mothers 12, 56, 65 World War II 65 Wrigley, Julia 25 Zelizer,Viviana 34 Zigler, Edward 62