Article 8: Child of the State, Contingency and Progress: White House Conferences on Children and Youth

The way children are valued in the United States changed dramatically from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century (Zelizer 1994). Social changes brought about by industrialization and urbanization at the end of the nineteenth century focused public attention on the welfare of children. Children, seen as a labor resource for the family in the nineteenth century, came to be seen as a state resource vital to the future of the nation. In this process, children were brought under scrutiny as subjects of investigation. Not until the twentieth century was systematic research conducted and widely disseminated in order to determine how children should be reared, educated, and monitored. One measure of the trajectory of these trends and the shifting relationship between children and the state is a series of biennial conferences hosted by seven presidents of the United States over the span of seventy years. The twentieth century was one of rapid change and dramatic conflicts from turn-of-the-century child savers to the climax of the youth movement counter culture and political protests in the sixties (Phillips 1980). The White House Conferences on Children and Youth provide a window into the changing values that mediate the relationship between the state and children (Richardson 1989).