<p>A really fine, politically evenhanded book on the history of childhood and adolescence in America is “Hucks Raft: A History of American Childhood” by Steven Mintz (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004). This will give you a lot of this material in brief. There are quite a few more scholarly treatments on Puritan mores, sexual and otherwise, including analyses of actual birth records compared with wedding dates, even by town!</p>
<p>What we think of as “Puritan” now is actually a Victorian invention, much as “classical education” approaches are also a Victorian invention, and can be dated with some accuracy to the publication of Matthew Arnold’s “Culture and Anarchy”.</p>