Period of Industrialization in America (1750-1900 AD)

Quaker Belief

Religious beliefs remained an important element when it came to methods used to correct a child's behavior. But by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a new kind of religion, namely that of the Quakers, began to take hold in our newly industrialized nation. Quakers believe in searching for one's inner light. If left alone long enough to reflect on one's behavior, children will come to see the errors of their ways.  The early houses of correction and later penitentiaries are grounded in this underlying philosophy.

Rapid Industrialization and Immigration

With the ushering in of massive industrialization, coupled with rapid immigration into American's heartland as well as in the northeast, these new-found religious beliefs would be challenged and would be applied to the management of children. Slowly, the agricultural society with smaller, close-knit communities quickly disappeared and was replaced with highly populated areas with new factories and other massive material producing mechanisms and systems. The division of labor, well defined on the farm and in the countryside, changed almost overnight. Men, women, and children went to work in the factories, and under less than humane and safe working conditions. Children were often left to roam the streets, a heretofore unheard of social phenomenon.

During this time of rapid industrialization, American cities were awash with European immigrants. For the first time in its early history, the country was dealing with pockets of dense populations consisting of people from different cultures, mores, and traditions. Culture conflict was an everyday occurrence as these differences emerged with little understanding or acceptance by different groups of people for those outside the dominant group. Children of the Irish, the Italian, the Polish, the Jewish immigrants found themselves more than a bit unsettled under these conditions. Attitudes about child rearing practices were far from the same from one group to another, for one thing, and for another, the rising middle classes, consisting of those citizens whose families had been settled for the past four or five decades or so, looked upon these immigrants as not "real" Americans at all, and began to seek out ways to get control of this rising class of problem children.