The Moral Project of Childhood: Motherhood, Material Life, and Early Children's Consumer Culture

Throughout history, the responsibility for children's moral well-being has fallen into the laps of mothers. In 'The Moral Project of Childhood', the noted childhood studies scholar Daniel Thomas Cook illustrates how mothers in the nineteenth-century United States meticulously managed their children's needs and wants, pleasures and pains, through the material world so as to produce the 'child' as a moral project. Drawing on a century of religiously-oriented child care advice in women's periodicals, he examines how children ultimately came to be understood by mothers - and later, by commercial actors - as consumers.