MOTHER'S HELPERS.(Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children)(Book Review)

"Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do."That is how Dr. Benjamin Spock opened his famous child-care manual of 1946, and according to Ann Hulbert's new book, "Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children"(Knopf; $27.50), such reassurance was badly needed. As Hulbert explains, the idea that the development of children might be a subject in itself, something for people to study and write books about, was largely a twentieth-century invention. Before then, parents in the United States, like parents elsewhere, saw their offspring as people who were either going to take over the farm or marry somebody on the farm next door. The wisdom ...