The New York Salon in association with The Rose & Erwin Wolfson Center for National Affairs, The New School presents a series of 4 public forums, Fall 2006/Winter 2007:
 

Parenting – why are we afraid to let go?

Tuesday, September 19, 2006, 7-8.30pm
Theresa Lang Center, The New School,
55 West 13th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10011

Webcast Part 1; Part 2; Part 3. 

 YouTube Video Playlist

Parenting is fast becoming an activity organized around fear. Whether it is angst about some external threat or worry about the unintended psychological consequences of their own actions, parents are under pressure as never before. Why has raising children become so fraught with difficulty? How did we come to view childhood as so dangerous? What are the consequences of insulating children from risk?

Participant Biographies

Paula S. Fass is the Margaret Byrne Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley, where she has taught for the past thirty-one years. Her books include Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (1989), The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (1977), Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America (1997), and Childhood in America (2000, edited with Mary Ann Mason). Most recently, she was the editor-in-chief of the award-winning Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society (2004). A forthcoming collection of her essays on children will be published as Children of a New World: Essays on Society, Culture and the World, by New York University Press in 2006.

Frequently interviewed in newspapers and journals, she has also appeared on television and on radio on matters concerning children, the family, and on American culture generally. Most recently she has been interviewed in the Washington Post, New York Times, The San Jose Mercury News, The Chronicle of Higher Education, ABC News, and National Public Radio. She currently holds a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship to continue research and writing on her newest project, Parents and Children in American History, a study of generational relations in the United States since 1800 in the context of the history of parents and children in the Western world. She will be spending the coming year as a Fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Nancy McDermott writes about public policy, private sphere and personal autonomy – when she’s not taking care of her two young sons.
Read Nancy McDermott’s article Making sense of the ‘mommy wars’

Sharna Olfman, Ph.D. is a professor of clinical and developmental psychology at Point Park University, the founding director of the Childhood and Society Symposium and the editor of the Childhood in America book series for Praeger Press. Her books include Child Honoring: How To Turn This World Around (with co-editor Raffi Cavoukian, 2006), No Child Left Different (2006), Childhood Lost (2005), and All Work and No Play: How Educational Reforms Are Harming Our Preschoolers (2003). Dr. Olfman is a member of the Council of Human Development, and a partner in the Alliance for Childhood. She has written and presented widely on the subjects of gender development, women’s mental health, infant care, and child psychopathology.

Peter N. Stearns was named Provost of George Mason University effective January 1, 2000. He also regularly teaches courses in world history and social history. Stearns received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, and previously attended Harvard College.

Prior to coming to George Mason, Stearns taught at Harvard, at the University of Chicago, at Rutgers University (where he chaired the New Brunswick History Department), and Carnegie Mellon University, where we was Heinz Professor of History. He served as Dean of Carnegie Mellon’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences from 1992 to 2000.
Past Vice President of the American Historical Association, in charge of the Teaching Division, Stearns chaired the Advanced Placement World History committee from 1998-2006. He founded and continues to serve as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Social History.

Author or editor of over 90 books, Stearns has also published widely on world history and on related teaching issues, including several texts and readers, thematic books on industrialization, on gender, and on consumerism; and three recent books include American Behavioral History, Childhood in World History, and American Fear.

Author Anxious Parents: A History Of Modern Childrearing In America

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