Satisfaction Not Guaranteed, page 22
8
Century of the Child?
Childhood, Parenting, and Modernity
Many American polls from the later 20th century onward suggest that the happiest kind of married couple is childless, a truly striking finding and an obvious change from the good old days, when having children was a fundamental goal of marriage. A study by Daniel Gilbert suggests that the average American mother’s happiness drops steadily from the birth of her first child until the last child reaches eighteen and leaves home (at which point it may pick up again, in the parental equivalent of retirement). And if parenting is a marital goal, recent canvasses suggest that a single child is best for adult happiness.1 Many grains of salt may apply here: people may be confusing a shallow kind of pleasure, based for example on more free time and resources for leisure and consumer pursuits, with deep life satisfaction that polling cannot really capture. But there is also some striking confirming evidence: polling data also show a decline in parental expressions of enjoyment from the 1960s onward: the only parental category claiming that their commitments were improving were divorced dads, possibly because fathers’ rights were gaining a bit or possibly because so many divorced dads did little with their offspring save an occasional amusement park fling. Lots of parents asserted that, were they to do life over again, they might not get involved.
The point here is not to abuse polling data or letters to advice columnists, which might on occasion simply reflect a really bad day. It is accurate to note, however, that parental satisfaction has definitely not matched the many positive gains in modern childhood—gains that were being painstakingly achieved and heralded by progressive folk just a century ago. It’s worth pointing out, as well, that parental anxieties have in many ways mounted, which affects not only opinion polls but basic adult happiness. Seventy-seven percent of contemporary Dutch parents, for example, claim literally daily worry about their adequacy with their own children.2 Here, more clearly than with death, it’s possible to show not only how modernity raises new and unexpected complications but also how new standards really cut into daily life experience as well.
But the comparison with death is useful in a few respects. As with death, childhood in the modern context involves some genuine new difficulties, and though these do not explain the core reactions, they certainly contribute a bit. More problematic, however, has been the emergence of dramatic new expectations. Rather than enjoying clear gains over pre-modern conditions—including the effective conquest of infant death—moderns turned distressingly quickly to more demanding definitions of the successful childhood, definitions that have proved hard to achieve with any degree of satisfaction. Along with new problems and escalating expectations has come a set of misperceptions—areas where parents readily conclude that considerable threats exist without foundation in fact. Problems, misplaced fears, and disappointed expectations add up to a powerful package.
As with death as well, however, modern people continue to experiment. Key modern aspects of childhood and parenting are still relatively new, a century at most in full bloom, and there’s reason to watch a process of continued adjustment, and hopefully to introduce a dash of recent-history guidance.
Childhood, obviously, involves a variety of participants. The most blatant down sides of children’s modernity, particularly on the expectations side, really apply to adults. The process of modern parenting—granting various specific circumstances and personalities—is simply not as pleasurable as it arguably should be. Claiming less-than-happy childhoods, however, is another matter. There are certainly some troubling symptoms at the edge, for example in the rise of suicides among older children in a number of modern societies. But the relationship between many children and modern happiness is complex, and it’s best to let some evidence roll in before returning to this category.
A particular American twist, finally, seems to apply to the modern conundrums of childhood and parenting. Many aspects of contemporary childhood, and their contrast with traditional patterns, apply to all modern societies, and these general features are important. Schooling and limited family size are modern constants, and they do force some issues quite generally. It’s worth noting, for example, that the shrinkage of the birth rate, and the expansion of longevity, automatically reduce the importance of children in modern societies from a purely percentage point of view. Obviously, compensation is possible through higher standards of adult attention and responsibility, and that is indeed part of the modern story, but it’s worth asking if one of the modern tensions doesn’t involve the extent to which adults have to develop non–child-centered interests simply because there aren’t as many children around to involve them, and because a smaller portion of their life will involve child care. Claims of heightened valuation of children—which are common as modernity advances—thus war against the fact of lessened quantitative significance.
Against the modern-in-general, however, emerges the American variant. These teasers:
The United States is the only society in the world that requires traffic to stop when school buses load and unload their charges. The symbolism is intriguing: only in the United States are children regarded as so precious that normal activities should be suspended around them (or, alternatively, only in the United States are children regarded as so incompetent that they must have artificial protection).
And second: as mothers began to enter the labor force outside the home in large numbers throughout the Western world, from the 1950s and 1960s onward, an obvious response was the establishment of day care centers. American parents, however, were far more reluctant to use these services than were their European counterparts, and felt far guiltier when they did so.
Third and finally: only in the United States did a significant movement develop against homework, based on concerns that teachers were overloading innocent children both physically and mentally. Granted, this particular pattern has largely yielded to modern educational necessities, though there are still flare-ups every so often, but the fact that significant resistance developed, over several decades in the early 20th century, represents an intriguing national hesitation.
Again, there seems to be something distinctively protective about many American responses to children, at least in principle. We will see that the same distinctiveness applies to American variants of many other issues associated with childhood in modernity.
Modernist Hopes and Boasts
A desire to transform childhood was central to the modernist impulse from the Enlightenment onward, and it had as inevitable accompaniment a belief that traditional childhood had been badly handled. We’ve already noted how naming practices changed, including abandonment of the idea of reusing names of dead siblings, signaling a new appreciation of children’s individuality. But there was far more involved. While the larger modern-traditional contrast has faded today—one reason we take less pleasure in basic modern gains than might otherwise be the case—most modern adults probably believe that traditional uses of children were ill founded even though they may also believe that there was an earlier stage of modernity, say the halcyon 1950s, when childhood conditions were superior to what they are today. In other words, to the extent that there is any historical sense at all, many Americans would probably feel some pride in improvements over the bad old days in colonial times, while also worrying about some contemporary declension as against a simpler though definitely already modern recent past.
What was wrong, to the increasingly modern eyes that visioned childhood from the Enlightenment onward, with childhood in the traditional past? The first point was cultural. Western culture had long, and rather distinctively, looked at childhood through the lens of original sin. How ordinary parents acted on this impulse is not entirely clear, but the connection certainly justified uses of anger and fear in calling children to account, given their naturally sinful natures. And there are important surviving subcultures in the United States today, particularly associated with evangelical Christianity, which maintain many of these beliefs. On balance, however, Enlightenment thinking, which by the later 18th century was influencing the emergence of a more moderate Protestantism, argued that children were at the least morally neutral at birth—a blank slate—or (increasingly, when rationalism was supplemented by the glow of Romantic sentimentality) positively and charmingly innocent. The first quarrel between modernists and a sense of earlier tradition, then, involved the conception of the basic nature of the child, and it was easy to slam the past in light of the more positive valuation now attributed to children and childhood. In the United States, a quiet battle took shape in the 1830s and 1840s over the abandonment of original sin, but most mainstream groups picked up the more optimistic approach, which encouraged a sense of cherishing rather than chastising the child.
The idea that traditional parents harbored a mistaken judgment about children’s character often made it easy as well to point accusing fingers at past discipline, and to call for a more humane approach. Reformers, writing for example in a new secular literature on how to raise children, cited several points. First, they emphasized that it was wrong to try to scare children as a means of correction. This attack on fear tactics, including familiar invocations of bogeymen, continued, in the United States, into the 1920s, when it began to trail off, presumably because most middle-class parents had internalized the message. But concerns about scaring kids continued in other venues, for example the 1930s Disney efforts to make classic fairy stories less frightening, with more benign little elves and forest animals and more happy endings. In the West, modern opinion also moved against traditional uses of shame and, at least in part, physical discipline.
A second consequence of the recasting of children’s nature fed a fundamental redefinition of function. During the Enlightenment, education and the appeal to children’s rational capacity became basic building blocks of progress more generally: here was a launching pad for improvements in technology, here was a way to eliminate superstition and put political life on a solid footing. By the early 19th century, emphasis on the importance of educating children was increasingly paired with attacks on children’s traditional work commitments. Learning, not labor, should be the goal of respectable childhood. Increasingly, middle-class families realized that a period of formal education was essential for their offsprings’ future. More hesitantly, child labor laws and, soon, actual primary school requirements moved this redefinition into the experience of other social classes as well. Resistance was inevitable: many workers and peasants resented this intrusion into their parental control and economic expectations, but gradually legal pressure and an understanding of what modern jobs demanded increased the number of parental converts. Less progress occurred in the nature of education: rote learning and strict discipline continued (and in some ways continue still), but even here there were experiments toward more student-participatory systems.
The growing appeal of childish innocence plus the new emphasis on schooling created a growing commitment to childhood as a space very different from adulthood. Here, too, traditional emphases came in for attack. After all, when work was the prime obligation of children in most families, rapid maturation was a desirable goal. Most agricultural societies, and not just in the West, rather liked children who were serious before their time, and found little durable merit in childish qualities per se. They also tended to place a high premium on obedience, and while 19th-century guidance literature continued to drive home the importance of obedience, the theme might already be diluted by goals such as creativity.
By the later 19th century, at least at the rhetorical level, modernist spokespeople were defining a childhood considerably different from the previous, largely agricultural model. Modern enlightenment, so the argument ran, opened the way for acknowledgement of childhood as a separate and blissful stage in life, defined by innocence, free from harsh discipline, and devoted to learning rather than work obligations inappropriate for children’s health and development alike. For the first time in human history, children could be treated as they deserved, to their benefit but also, through expanding education, to the benefit of social progress.
The modernist picture, however sincere, concealed key complications. First, probably inevitably, it oversimplified the traditional past. Doctrines of original sin colored approaches to childhood, but they did not fully define them: lots of parents developed deep and positive attachments to their children—as witness their sorrow at the high rate of infant mortality—untouched by religious niceties. Historians have particularly disputed the disciplinary assumptions associated with modernity. Use of fear and physical punishments were quite real, and of course modern parental advances have not fully eliminated them. But many experts argue that spankings, for example, if administered moderately and fairly, do not necessarily distort a childhood (this is not a recommendation, simply a recognition of the validity of different approaches). And, as we have seen, some historians believe that outright abuse of children was far less common in the premodern context than it has become since, mainly because tight communities monitored the behavior of individual parents in ways that prevented excess. Finally, while it is true that a certain amount of work defined most premodern childhoods, and while (by modern standards) real exploitation undoubtedly occurred, the contrast with the results of modern schooling are not as clear-cut as moderns might like to believe—a point to which we will return.
Furthermore, the modernist version of the past omitted some features of the premodern environment that were arguably more constructive than what has occurred under modernity’s sway. A number of scholars have argued, for example, that opportunities for expressive play were greater in traditional societies than they are now, and that modernity is a villain of the piece in this regard—beginning as early as the first decades of the 19th century. Most children did work, from five years of age onward, but they also had a considerable amount of free time, and they were able (under the general gaze of the village or neighborhood, but without direct adult monitoring) to play with each other quite creatively. Once the idea took root that a prime characteristic of children was educability, this traditional openness began to be restricted in favor of adult-sponsored activities. Already by 1800 middle-class parents were beginning to buy books designed to build children’s character, and the notion of monitoring some recreational activities in favor of constructive learning emerged soon thereafter, though gradually. By 1900 experts were suggesting that even objects around infants should have educational value and that open-air activities should be channeled into properly supervised playgrounds and rule-bound, organized sports and games. None of this was ill-intended, though some of the reform efforts reflected fear about children’s impulses and particular concern about the parenting qualities of the lower classes and immigrants. But it is true that explicit adult oversight did increase and that adult goals began being imposed on what was still, sometimes, called play time. And there may have been losses involved, for the kids themselves and for their creative development.
Modernist hymns to the glories of modern childhood around 1900 also frequently overlooked the slow progress, in fact, of the overall vision. Schooling advanced in the 19th century, but despite legal requirements it remained far from universal. Child labor persisted widely, particularly for young teenagers; the year 1910 saw the largest amount of child labor ever in the United States. In schools themselves, harsh discipline and shaming techniques, like dunce caps, arguably limited learning even for those who did attend.
This was the context, in turn, early in the 20th century, for a fuller modernist transition amid a new reformist push. The lead dog in this accelerated modern mood was the final big thrust against child labor, at least in the United States and Western Europe. Reformers had already succeeded in passing a variety of child labor laws and school requirements in industrial societies, and gradually also factory inspection had put some teeth in the prohibitions in the most modern economic sectors. But children continued to work extensively in agriculture, in crafts and shops, and in street trades such as newspaper vending. The affront to the self-styled definers of proper modern childhood had become too much to endure. Major new associations formed to root out the evil once and for all, with arguments ranging from children’s health and morals—“the ranks of our criminal classes are being constantly recruited from the army of child laborers,” as a new American advocacy group put it—to the transcendent need to free time and attention for schooling. Under this onslaught, plus the ongoing changes in business and industry that reduced needs for children, child labor finally receded. By 1920 in the United States, only 8% of all children between the ages of ten and fifteen were at work, and by 1940 the figure was down to 1%. Premodern traditions finally gave way.
