Parents and Personalities: Standardizing children's socioemotional development in the 20th century

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Our panel investigates mid-twentieth century theories of childhood socioemotional development and their role in creating and reinforcing standards of the normal and the pathological in children and adults. We will investigate childhood development science from both sides of the parent-child relationship as well as the larger family, looking not only at how it created standards for children’s behavior and well-being, but also was used to define ideal parenting and explain “deviant” adults. These theories and standards of development were used to articulate expectations of care just as they were also used to define, isolate and pathologize undesirable behavior, dynamics, environments and communities. Across the papers, we consider how these theories built on and interacted with considerations of race, gender, sexuality and class to form images of both the “good” and “bad” or “normal” and “pathological” parent and child. Kelsey Henry looks at how child development science generated racially distinct theories of emotional development, including how Black developmental psychologists challenged the primacy of the family as the most influential scene of Black emotional development and disturbance. Sarah Knott then returns to theories of the adult lifecycle and child development emerging in the 1960s to think about the underlying histories of maternal labor implicated in the works of Erik Erikson. Hannah Zeavin exposes connections between parental “fitness” and media theory at mid-century by looking at how “bad mothers” were described and understood as harmful to a child’s emotional development. Finally, Angélica Clayton considers theories of violence during the 1980s and 1990s, unpacking how ideas of “deviant” or unhealthy socioemotional development and fantasy were used to construct the figure of the “violent offender” and consider solutions to violence and trauma in American society.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Ellen Herman, University of Oregon

Individual Presentations

• Middle Care: Carework, Children and Child Development in Britain and the United States - Sarah Knott, Indiana University Bloomington

• Bad Mothers, Bad Media - Hannah Zeavin, Indiana University

• Dangerous Dissociation: Origins of violence, childhood development, and the public good - Angelica Barbara Clayton, Yale University

Session Organizer

• Angelica Barbara Clayton, Yale University