Raising Citizens in the Century of the Child brings together major scholars to examine important themes in the development of twentieth-century approaches to child rearing and parenting. In fact, one of the most engaging and sustained debates that emerges in the essays collected here is the fraught relationship between parents and the external forces shaping their roles: social workers, schools, experts, and the state. The book argues convincingly that despite clear developments in the management of childhood in the twentieth century, there was never a linear development of “state and expert influence” (p. 19), but instead ambiguity was the defining feature as parents, children, state officials, and child-welfare advocates negotiated different agendas. While each of the essays is engagingly argued and carefully researched, Dirk Schumann's edited collection on childhood in the United States and German central Europe does, however, lack cohesion as a volume. It demonstrates well the difficulty in writing comparative histories of childhood in the twentieth century, especially in the German-speaking regions of Europe, which saw major political upheaval. Certainly common themes emerge, and the editor and authors highlight these experiences throughout the book, but the social and political context of the United States is far different from the fragmented and changing contexts of the Wilhelmine and Habsburg empires and their successors. Despite this problem of cohesion, the essays are excellent, and most tap into the major debates in the history of childhood today. Schumann frames the collection with a short introduction that focuses on the ways in which notions of citizenship shaped ideas of child rearing and child education in the last century. He points to several important shifts in this period that will be echoed in many of the essays, most notably the rise of scientific interventions into childhood and the encroachment of the state into family life. His short overview is accompanied by a second introduction of sorts, in the form of a historiographical essay by Sonya Michel and Eszter Varsa. The essay is good in its explanation of the legal and political trajectory of the development of childhood up to the end of the nineteenth century, but it does not extend into the period covered by the other essays. Indeed, this particular chapter stands alone as an anomaly in the volume, partly because it includes all of Europe, not the specific geographical areas of the other essays. Scholars of childhood will want to read this essay on its own terms, however, and graduate students entering the field might find it particularly helpful as an introduction to major debates.

The individual contributions to the volume pick up on the themes laid out in Schumann's introduction, and the majority of the works focus on the first half of the twentieth century rather than the later period. The four essays that deal more explicitly with the post-1945 period are Lynne Curry's fascinating piece on the “Joshua” child-abuse case in the 1980s, Rebecca Jo Plant's examination of fears about overbearing mothers in the post-World War II U.S., and Schumann's and Till van Rahden's essays on postwar West Germany. These latter two essays together suggest the complicated debate that emerged about questions of parenting in the aftermath of the Nazi period. Van Rahden's work uses visual and textual sources to demonstrate the rise of a new notion of fatherhood in Catholic and Protestant publications of the 1950s and 1960s, while Schumann explores the ways in which parents’ “natural rights” emerged as part of the redesign of education after the war. Other essays also explore the fraught relationship between state control and parental rights within the debates on citizenship, democracy, and modernization. Tara Zahra's chapter on Habsburg Bohemia and its successor states takes a long view (1900–1948) of the question of collective education and nationalism, with a specific focus on the Nazi occupation and parental action in this period. Charles Israel also looks at parental reaction against state encroachment by examining a famous legal case, the Scopes trial in 1925 Tennessee. Israel's work is complemented by Katherine Bullard's and Ellen Berg's chapters on the Children's Bureau and the U.S. kindergarten movement, respectively. The three chapters combine to show both the strengths of U.S. Progressivism and its faith in the power of the state and experts, and the problems the Progressive movement faced in creating citizens, especially given parents’ divergent views of moral and religious education. The final theme in the book is the rise of scientific experts in child welfare and education, and it is reflected in many of the essays already mentioned. Perhaps the two that address this theme most specifically are Andrew Donson's work on German “war pedagogy” in the period of World War I and Carolyn Kay's chapter on early twentieth-century German advice literature. Donson looks at the war period as an exceptional time that saw the contradictory impulses of pro-war education and educational reform work together in German classrooms. Reform-minded teachers were able to institute more child-centered approaches by arguing that these reforms reinforced patriotism. While Donson looks at teachers themselves, Kay focuses her attention on expert advice literature of the same early twentieth-century period. She found a pervasive influence of bourgeois child rearing ideals in advice literature aimed at all classes. This literature was bolstered and legitimated by its “scientific” experts, and it featured the major international debates on childhood of the period, specifically the question of discipline versus nurture.

Taken together, the volume offers a rich look at the important dialogues that surrounded the question of the child in the twentieth century. The book lacks a conclusion or comprehensive bibliography, but each essay offers an up-to-date historiographical survey in its endnotes, and the index allows for quick scanning for specific topics. Scholars interested in childhood studies, state control of families, educational reform, and social welfare will find this a wonderful resource with lively and well-informed essays from top scholars.