At the turn of the century, the Western world, but especially the United States, went through spectacular changes in how we viewed society, behavior and childhood. These were massive shifts in history, but the changes they brought have become so integrated into our culture that we no longer recognize that they are brand new in the history of humanity. In today’s essay, I’m going to briefly outline a handful of these changes that I think are the most consequential for our conversation about child development.

Essay #2.

Today’s post is brief, because I believe these handful of historical contexts cannot be overstated in their influence on us today. I want them to stick out, without being watered down with other information.

Arnold Gesell is a name I never would have known a decade ago, but he’s the reason I’m doing the work I do, and the reason you’re reading this now. I’ll circle back around to him in a moment.

In the late 1800s, we became obsessed with data. We wanted to know everything we could know about everything. Statistics had become popular, and scientists became fascinated that future trends and patterns could be detected based on past trends and patterns. Birth rates and death rates, crime and illness, etc – these data told a story.

Around the same time, the industrial revolution had led us to an era of being newly – and highly – aware of time and scheduling. Factories and railroads shattered our relative ambivalence toward time – resulting in a new consciousness of being “on time” or “late” or “early.” 

As we moved into becoming more aware of our daily schedules, we took it a step further and started to become aware of our life schedules. Were we doing things in our life “on time?”

In this same cultural milieu, social reformers at the turn of the century began to fight against child labor, advocating for children to be in school. 

Simultaneously, science began to turn its attention toward children. Babies were surviving infancy at much higher rates, and birth rates were declining as such. 

Children began to be valued on their own terms, as special and separate from adults. Although there’s more to be said about this, suffice it to say here that most children had formerly been expected to contribute to the family economy; this shifted entirely for middle-class American children.

Due to the resulting increased enrollment in public schools, and the need to devise an efficient way to manage them, children began to be sorted into grades based on age (where previously they had moved along through texts based on their readiness and mastery of skills). And with age-sorting came grade standards – what should children know as they advanced from one grade to the next? 

Pretty soon, it became clear that many children did not meet “grade standards.” They were… “behind.”

Undeniably also swirling around the societal context of the time was the eugenics movement. In short, eugenics promoted the ideas around “improving a race” (often the “White race”) by promoting reproduction among those deemed “most fit” to carry the best genes forward…and restricting reproduction of those considered “unfit.”

Whole histories have been written on the horrors of eugenics, of which I cannot explore entirely here. But, for our purpose, you should know a major member of the American eugenics movement was Stanley G. Hall – the founding president of the American Psychological Association, first president of Clark University, and “father” of the child study movement in the United States.

Hall had a number of influential students who studied under him, including Dr. Arnold Gesell, as mentioned at the beginning of this post.

Dr. Gesell deserves his own post, which we will get to next week. But to end this today, know that he is why we have developmental milestones at all. It is his work from which all developmental checklists have been born, and from which has shaped our current popular ideas about how children develop.

EDITED ON 9/24/2025 – In my ongoing research I have discovered an explicit connection between Dr. Gesell and eugenics. I’ll discuss this more in a future essay, but suffice it to say that when this essay was written, I had read a substantial amount about him without learning of this connection. I’ve left the original text I wrote here, in brackets.

***original essay text [It should be noted here – there is no known explicit connection between Arnold Gesell and the eugenics movement. However, I think it still important we are aware of what has influenced those who have most influenced where we are today.]

As I’ll note in each post: 

These are not my original ideas, but rather a synthesis of what scholars in a variety of fields have learned and written. I often do not have answers to the tensions I see – my aim is not to be another expert in a field already over-run with them. Instead, I want to shine a light on knowledge we take for granted but shouldn’t.

In each essay I write, I’ll link the relevant sources when possible as well as cite them at the end. I hope you’ll join this conversation.

REFERENCES

Chudacoff, H. P. (1989). How old are you?: Age consciousness in American culture. Princeton University Press.

Ehrenreich, B., & English, D. (2005). For her own good: Two centuries of the experts’ advice to women. Anchor Books. 

Grant, J. (1998). Raising baby by the book: The education of American mothers. Yale University Press

Hardyment, C. (1983). Dream babies: Three centuries of good advice on child care. Harper & Row.

Hulbert, A. (2003). Raising America: Experts, parents, and a century of advice about children. Alfred A. Knopf.