Advice on parenting dates as far back as the first mother-in-law, but around the turn of the 20th century it became increasingly scietificized. Not scientific in the sense that it is a subject that resists true scientific study for practical, ethical, and temporal reasons, but with an increased desire to find a techne to parenting based on scientific disciplines like medicine, psychology, and anthropology.

Around the same point that the Boomers were booming, the style that came into fashion was called Permissive Parenting. As titles go, meh. The name is laden with baggage that suggests a sort of laxity, and it implies that all parenting before was rigor and authoritarianism. Neither is true. But it did emphasize self-development as self-determination and tolerating a sort of rambunctiousness as useful and important.

It was also very white and very male. But expressly small-d democratic and civic.

Where the Wild Things Were (and as titles go, stellar), looks at Permissive Parenting through media of the era. Most, but not all, was not consciously constructed in terms of the Permissive style, but it reflects its values. It is self-reflective in the the sense that the author himself is of the generation raised in this tradition, and the book includes pictures from him as a youth that advance his themes. It is also self-reflective in the sense that it is about you. This is what you read and watched as a child. Few of the works here are memory-holed. Most of them are baby shower staples. The exceptions tend to be television, which are not forgotten as much as drowned in today's multi-vector environment.

The book has less of a singular argument as much as a reading of a diverse set of works from the post-war period employing Permissive Parenting as a critical framework. these works in terms of the Permissive model. The standout is the section on Dennis the Menace, both as comic and as television show. As the archetypal 'boy in the striped shirt' (until Calvin at any rate), the author is able to find the workings of the Permissive style and the (real) virtues it aimed at, particularly in a work that I would otherwise dismiss as trivial.

The weakest section is the one on Fred Rodgers. It is full of amazing detail, but as the author himself notes Rodgers is inimitable, and while drawing from the same well is at right angles to everybody and everything, before, then, and since owing to his singular capacity and unimpeachable vision.

The wildest section is the redemptive reading of Lost in Space. The author contends that the show is misunderstood in terms of its focus (directed towards kids themselves) and discussing it also allows a greater discussion of science fiction and the nature of a changing imagination of the era.

The writing itself is cloyingly clear, employing a method straight out of a college essay formula of tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you have told them. There is plenty of explanation of Permissive Parenting, through quotations from Dr. Benjamin Spock, the person most closely associated with it, but also his predecessors and contemporaries. There is a lot of Freud, but of course there is. And often enough, there is supporting evidence from the creator themselves.

What makes the book a strong recommend is its contextualizing race and gender in terms of Permissive Parenting and the media covered. This is much more than pointing out that the past was less aware, (but particularly when it comes to American Indians, it ******* out to). It will stop to consider the role of race in the patter, but also includes Black-focused works, and how that resists the Permissive style due to its danger and deadliness within a larger confine of structural racism. Permissive Parenting was not blind to race, but was at a loss about how to deal with it; alternately it saw it as a cultural project in the context of the Cold War.

For masculinity, the model arises out of psychological theory. But also war. Specifically the experience of the first half of the century and the importance of resisting oppression within and without. How do we make good American citizens? How do we get our boys to be ready to punch Nazis, now that we've already killed all of them? How do we make our boys able to act out Freedom of Speech in a nation of Freed from Want? In that context, the answer, and even its white- and boy- centered nature, seems vaguely reasonable. But the domino there falls to end with today's masculinity grifters and some of the more obscene answers to the masculinity crisis. Maybe even modern political dysfunction, like, all of it.

My thanks to the author, Henry Jenkins, for writing the book (and voluntarily shared his childhood pictures, which makes him a bolder person than I), and to the publisher, NYU Press, for making the ARC available to me.