1. In the United States, the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth was the best organized, with a national membership and annual meetings. One of the best Web sites: http://www2.h-net.msu.edu

2. For examples of such efforts to re-create the lives of children in the past, see Calvert, Karin, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood (Boston, 1992)Google Scholar; Chartier, Roger, ed., A History of Private Life: The Passions of the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass., 1989)Google Scholar; and Dixon, Suzanne, The Roman Family (Baltimore, 1992)Google Scholar.

3. Could written records help? Adults, after all, have written and continue to write the vast majority of autobiographies. However, it is worth remembering that only three or four decades ago, many historians dismissed the possibility of writing plausible, carefully documented histories of slaves, or women, or native tribal groups. For an introduction to the scholarly literature about the existence of children's cultures, see Waksler, Frances, ed., Studying the Social Worlds of Children: Sociological Readings (New York, 1991)Google Scholar.

4. Full disclosure: my most recent book attempts such a larger synthesis. I leave it to critics to judge its success. Sealander, Judith, The Failed Century of the Child: Governing America's Young in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. It is not my intention here to survey this literature, only to state its nature. Whether they praised or condemned the PRA, for most analysts even the 1935 Social Security Act was ancient history. For examples, see Hayward, Steven, “The Shocking Success of Welfare Reform,” Policy Review 4 (1998): 6–9Google Scholar; Duncan, Greg and Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne, “Welfare's New Rules: A Pox on Children,” Issues in Science and Technology 14 (1998): 67–69Google Scholar.

6. Much scholarly commentary on PRA is heavily politicized. An example: Feminist Studies devoted its Spring 1998 issue to PRA. The authors, including Eva Kittay, Gwendolyn Mink, and Sonya Michel, described themselves as “historians of welfare,” but they provided remarkably little long-term chronological perspective. Sonya Michel attacked a program that enabled the government to “attempt to provide childcare ‘on the cheap’ by forcing welfare recipients to do the work instead of making available sufficient funds and personnel to create … high quality services.” “Childcare and Welfare (In)justice,” Feminist Studies 24 (1998): 50. When had governments ever sought to provide anything else? Eva Kittay warned that “the organized Left” had to defend the rights of poor women. Such women “won't have the chance to sit in our women's studies courses unless we are out there for them.” Kittay, Eva, “Dependency, Equality, and Welfare,” Feminist Studies 24 (1998): 33, 42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. When had the American Left ever been well organized? Women's studies classes?

7. Two scholars who have viewed the topic through the longer lens this essay advocates are Barbara Beatty and Maris Vinovskis. Beatty, Barbara, Preschool Education in America: The Culture of Young Children from the Colonial Era to the Present (New Haven, 1995)Google Scholar; Vinovskis, Maris, “Do Federal Compensatory Education Programs Really Work? A Brief Historical Analysis of Title I and Head Start,” American Journal of Education 107 (1999): 187–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Foner, Eric, Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (New York, 2002), 152–160Google Scholar.

9. During the ten years I spent researching and writing The Failed Century of the Child, I created such a bibliography. Space considerations here prevent its inclusion. Readers interested in this particular topic or any of the others used as illustrations throughout the essay should contact me at: [email protected]

10. In fact, all historians seeking the elusive, actual voices of historical children would be well advised to look to adjudicatory hearings, judicial rulings, and other legal documents. Gerald Gault's case, for instance, famously changed the legal rights of children in the United States. Hundreds of historians have cited in re Gault. Almost no one has used the legal documentation available to see Gerald himself, but he's right there, a bored fifteen-year-old kid living in an Arizona trailer court.

11. The March of Dimes campaigns alone deserve a book-length history, as do the President's Birthday Balls in the 1930s. Both were brilliant prototypes of mass-marketing schemes used by interest groups interested in influencing public policy.

12. Feldberg (New Brunswick, N.J., 1995); Rothman (New York, 1994).

13. The reference is to Rodgers's, Daniel prize-winning Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1998)Google Scholar.

14. Klaus (Ithaca, 1993). Michel, Sonya and Koven, Seth have produced an edited collection, Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Policies and the Origins of Welfare States (New York, 1993)Google Scholar, which provides cross-country comparisons between various European welfare states and the United States. However, the quality of analysis and writing within essays is very uneven.

15. There is a growing literature written about the U.S. experience. For examples, see Holt, Marilyn, The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America (Lincoln, Neb., 1992)Google Scholar; Gordon, Linda, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, Mass., 1999)Google Scholar; O'Connor, Stephen, Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed (New York, 2001)Google Scholar. Each of these books is worth reading, and The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction is magical, but none emphasizes the fact that orphan trains were a global phenomenon.

16. Cunningham, Hugh, The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood Since the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1991), 94Google Scholar.

17. Mothers' pensions have spurred particularly sentimental analysis among American policy historians. A really good book-length history of the phenomenon between 1910 and 1939 remains to be written.

18. For discussion of the UN resolution, see Miles, Rosalind, The Children We Deserve: Love and Hate in the Making of the Family (London, 1994), 263–264Google Scholar. Amnesty International reported that between 1979 and 1998 only eight juveniles under the age of eighteen were formally executed by states. Three of those eight were Americans. The other five were executed in Pakistan, Rwanda, Bangladesh, and Barbados. Watkins, John, The Juvenile Justice Century: A Sociolegal Commentary on American Juvenile Courts (Durham, N.C., 1998), 221Google Scholar.

19. See, among their many other writings, Demos, John, Past, Present, and Personal: The Family and Life Course in American History (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Vinovskis, Maris, “Death and Family Life in the Past,” Human Nature: An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective 1 (1990): 109–123CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Indeed, Maris Vinovskis need not read this essay. He is already a paragon, whose work combines sophisticated chronological perspective with an understanding of several different disciplines outside history.

20. Only in the twentieth century, and only in the developed world, did societies begin to register average ages over twenty-one. Moreover, after World War II people in Europe, Canada, and the United States retired at earlier and earlier ages. If separated by gender, the statistics were even more startling, as men led women in the abandonment of paid work. By the end of the twentieth century, fewer than five percent of French or German males worked after the age of sixty-five, and the crushing burden of pension and disability benefits was already apparent. In the summer of 2003 strikes over proposed reductions in pension payments erupted throughout France. Did twentieth-century welfare states leave an unwitting legacy of future bitter conflicts over divisions of resources between young and old? For a review of such questions, see Peterson, Peter, Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave Will Transform America and the World (New York, 1999), 7–38Google Scholar.

21. The U.S. Congress, for instance, “double-counted” Social Security reserves by immediately borrowing funds—replacing them by nonsecured claims on future public revenues. Peter Peterson plausibly argues that this fact effectively negated the intent of the 1983 revisions to the Social Security Act. Peter Peterson, Gray Dawn, 161. Economists measure persistence as well as mobility when examining change over time in standards of living. For instance, more Americans left poverty in the twentieth century, but stayed, economically speaking, quite nearby, moving from a first to a second decile in relative mobility calculations. In the nineteenth century, in contrast, economic historians calculate that rates of poverty persistence were much higher, but that the smaller numbers of people who managed to escape a first decile were, on average, able to move much higher up the wealth scales. See Steckel, Richard, Wealth Mobility in America: A View From the National Longitudinal Survey (Cambridge, Mass., 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Floud, Roderick and Steckel, Richard, Health and Welfare During Industrialization (Chicago, 1997)Google Scholar.

22. For a summary of the Blair program, see Boshara, Ray and Sherraden, Michael, “For Every Child, a Stake in America,” New York Times, 23 07 2003Google Scholar.

23. Hugh Cunningham argues that the savages/innocents dichotomy persisted long after the Victorian Age ended on both sides of the Atlantic, reflected in the huge popularity of William Golding's 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies. Hugh Cunningham, The Children of the Poor, 97.

24. It is tempting to add classical Greek plays to the wish list, but even I know when to stop.

25. Mills, Kay, Something Better for My Children (New York, 1998), 3Google Scholar.

26. Sissel, Peggy, Staff, Parents, and Politics in Head Start: A Case Study in Unequal Power, Knowledge, and Material Resources (New York, 2000), 10Google Scholar. In keeping with participant-observer traditions, which demanded anonymity for respondents, Sissel changed the names of the center and the people she studied. Rosyln Mickelson and Mary Klenz reported similar angry reactions to their critical assessment of a rural Head Start center. Mickelson, Rosyln and Klenz, Mary, “Parent Involvement in Rural Head Start,” in Ellsworth, Jeanne and Ames, Lynda, eds., Critical Perspectives on Project Head Start, Revisioning the Hope and the Challenge (Albany, N.Y., 1998), 124–126Google Scholar.

27. Failing to find tenurable work in the United States, in 2003 Clancy accepted a temporary professorship at the Business Administration Institute in Managua, Nicaragua. The quotation appears in a larger story about academic reactions to Clancy's work. Grierson, Bruce, “A Bad Trip Down Memory Lane,” New York Times Magazine, 27 07 2003, 38Google Scholar.

28. Just one example, out of many, of a tortured policy problem that demands a gimlet eye, not cant. Who will be brave enough to investigate the possibility that a significant number of sexually abused U.S. children suffered at the hands of other children? What to do with children convicted of sexual abuse against children? Between 1994 and 2000, all fifty states passed versions of New Jersey's “Megan's Law,” named after Megan Kanka, a seven-year-old girl murdered by a sex offender. These laws assumed that offenders were adults, and almost all required individuals convicted of sexually related crimes to register with police. Though few states kept careful records by age, several analysts suggested that one-quarter of Americans convicted of sex abuse against children were themselves under the age of eighteen. Perhaps as many as ten percent were under age fourteen. As law stood at century's end, the records of these individuals received none of the privacy protections that most states' juvenile-justice codes demanded. For discussion of this unexpected consequence of the country's “Megan's Laws,” see Hanley, Robert, “New Jersey Court Gives Children a Way Off Lists of Sex Offenders,” New York Times, 18 07 2001Google Scholar.

29. Three prominent professors of social work, Costin, Lela, Karger, Howard, and Stoesz, David, explore the uses of the Mary Ellen legend in The Politics of Child Abuse in America (New York, 1996), 51–57Google Scholar. Interestingly, however, while correcting simplifications about the rise of state child protection, the authors also demonstrate the absence of cross-disciplinary knowledge this essay bemoans. For instance, they promote the idea, thoroughly discounted by most historians of children, that “prior to … the beginning of the modern era, the idea of a particular nature of childhood that distinguished the child from the adult did not exist. … even very young children were absorbed into adult society and perceived as ‘small scale adults’” (quotation: 50).

30. National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk (Washington, D.C., 1983), 5Google Scholar.

31. Roosevelt, Theodore, “The Home and the Child,” in The Collected Works of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1926), 595Google Scholar.