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June 23, 2009
Exclusive: Whatever Happened to Childhood?
While the New York Times can no longer be relied on for unbiased accounts of political matters, it remains the leading authority on fads and fashions, what’s new and where the buzz is. Some of its indicators appear in its aptly named Styles section, but Times reporters can be trusted to smoke out trends in other areas as well. For example, in the Real Estate section a few weeks ago (May 24, 2009) a story headed “The Poet of Property” described a specialist in writing real-estate ads, “these come-ons and those tantalizing, excitement-packed agent biographies.”
If people old enough to be hunting for New York apartments aren’t savvy enough to distrust the adjectives of the typically overwrought ad for an expensive co-op or condo, that’s their affair. Caveat emptor. But the article tells us that the real-estate bard’s popularity “has led to some unusual assignments,” among them various sorts of ghost writing. And while profiles posted on on-line dating services and professional resumes might be said to carry their own buyer beware cautions, one area where her expertise is put to use is unconscionable. Having been hired by a couple “to ghost-write the parent essay required with their son’s application to the Dalton School, she has since written a number of college-application essays for agents’ children.”
Unethical? Immoral? Just plain unfair? Not a problem in this woman’s mind, nor does the Times reporter press the point, simply reporting his subject’s comment that “It’s a very competitive world, and everything you’re writing about yourself [sic], you have to sell yourself [italics mine].…If that child can’t write an essay – that’s not my business.” Readers old enough to remember the songwriter-satirist Tom Lehrer will be reminded of his lines, "’Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?/ That's not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”
That this stunning example of cheating should go unchallenged seems remarkable. Not only is it accepted that a child should profit from this dishonesty, what about the child who writes his own essay and, having to compete with a grownup, is denied admission? Not her business indeed. It’s a competitive world, right?
The high stakes competed for by urban middle-class parents through their children encourage not only dishonesty but a tendency to program every hour of a child’s life.
In the same issue of the Times, in the Sunday Styles section, there is an article about a new addition to the family of American Girl dolls, this one a Russian-Jewish immigrant of the early 20th century who joins such other historical characters as a Hispanic, an American-Indian, and an African-American child in the inventory of the Mattel-owned company which, according to the article, generated $463 million in revenue last year.
The idea of dolls with a specific identity is hardly new. I sold subscriptions to the Ladies’Home Journal to all my mothers’ friends in order to win a Shirley Temple doll. What’s unique about the American Girl line is that every one of the approximately $100 dolls comes with her own back story, her characteristics carefully laid out by the research and marketing staffs and interviews with focus groups. An accompanying set of books by an author of young people’s books (at extra cost, of course, as are costumes and accessories) lays out just about everything you could want to know about the doll.
What is left to the imagination? The whole point of playing with dolls, if I remember correctly, is making up the story yourself. My doll may have looked like Shirley Temple with her curls and her little polka-dotted dress, but the life she lived and the things she said and did were scripted by me myself, not some hired author.
Along with the planning of children’s lives today – the testing and the over-scheduling of extracurricular activities, all designed to make sure they are properly prepared for entrance to Harvard – there seems to be a kind of conspiracy to rob them of any free time or free thought. What used to be called play. Child labor has been vanquished in the developed world, but it sometimes seems, ironically enough, as though a different kind of work has been imposed in children’s lives.
Children as a special group, requiring different kinds of living arrangements, considerations, clothing and privileges, is a relatively new concept in the history of mankind. Until well into the 19th century, attitudes toward children were determined by socioeconomic conditions. In the pre-industrial world sons were important as workers on the family-owned land or providers working for others. Daughters were helpers in the household and, in higher circles, instruments of forming marital alliances of benefit to the family or the clan. Sons and daughters were expected to care for their aged parents in later life.
It was only with the burgeoning Romantic Movement and the growth of the bourgeoisie in the 19th century that children began to take on a sentimental significance. More of them lived longer, thanks to advances in obstetrical care and understanding of childhood diseases. And there was less need for their labor within or outside the home.
In earlier times, children had been thought of as little people. They were dressed in clothing like that of their elders and the only activities designed just for them were lessons in religion and obedience.
All that began to change with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose ideas about children’s innocence and the need to permit the untrammeled flowering of their natures led directly over time to the progressive educators and child-care experts who have been telling parents what to do about everything from toilet-training to discipline to classroom methods.
Every decade or so journalists and authors of books (disclosure: I’ve written my share of these and seen the pattern repeated for each new cohort of parents) rehearse the history of the accepted teachings of the past. The emphasis on repression in the 1920s, the postwar loosening of rules and strictures by Dr. Spock, the concern that the rebellious children of the ‘60s were a product of over permissive parenting, the return to the traditional and the basics – all these swings of the pendulum follow each other through the years although no one seems to know to what extent they really influence childrearing practices and how much the way we treat our children is determined by family background and our individual personalities.
Only one thing has remained constant since the middle years of the last century and that is the increasing degree of anxiety about children’s futures and the concomitant increasing demands placed on them in activities designed to improve their intellectual and social capacities. The middle-class urban child of today is programmed for success from the crib onward, in school and seemingly in every other waking hour. Anecdotes flood the media about the over-scheduled child and pleas are heard for a return to a less structured more carefree childhood.
Did it ever exist? Or has the kind of pressure placed on the young just changed over time from the demands of laboring to the demands of learning?
There has long existed in American culture a voice arguing for greater
freedom for children. Huck Finn is the iconic youth at home with nature. Around the same time that Mark Twain was spinning his tale of the good-hearted youngster untrammeled by scholastic or moralistic strictures, Wordsworth was lamenting how “shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy.”
In that tradition, and in a time many today look back on with nostalgia, a time that predates pre-kindergarten entrance exams and soccer moms and when only about half of American households had television sets, there was already a poignant ode to childhood’s lost spontaneity.
In 1957 Robert Paul Smith published a little book titled “Where did you go?” “Out.” “What did you do?” “Nothing.” In it, he evokes memories of his own untrammeled youth (he was born in 1915) in a landscape dotted with vacant lots that could become pirate ships or Western corrals; the games with rules unknown to grownups (“What we learned we learned from another kid”); the freedom to roam the neighborhood without adult direction; even the uses of boredom – what we would call downtime today and fill up with something useful.
So already in the 1950s Americans were bemoaning the over-supervised life of the child – in this case, typical of the time, the suburban child. Smith, who was a novelist and playwright as well as a father, thought his sons (no girls in his story) were missing out not having time “to sit on the front steps and watch some grass growing.” He says, “It never occurred to us that there was nothing wrong in doing nothing, so long as we kept out of the way of grownups.”
As a child Smith read Mark Twain and Kipling. I remember being enthralled by Dickens’ plots and characters even though many words were unfamiliar to me. Like Smith but in a later decade, I remember just sitting and thinking about what I’d been reading, maybe in one of the sequels to Little Women. And with no test looming, because the book wasn’t assigned, it was just found and enjoyed; no one had yet thought of giving us books written with a vocabulary designed specifically for our age group.
In those unenlighted times kids made things up – boys ran around challenging each other to feats of one sort or another, girls acted out their fantasies playing house and dressing their dolls. Of course we know now there is something very wrong with this picture, and we take care that our boys are introduced to gentler pastimes and our girls learn to throw a fast ball. And we worry if the little boy who isn’t allowed to play with guns shoots enemies with his pointed index finger and the little girl still prefers the dollhouse to the dump truck.
The private quiet life of childhood days that Smith and I remember is no more. Whether children are better or worse off being prepared “to take their place in a global economy,” as the educators put it, is hard to say. All we can be sure of is that every generation looks with dismay on “kids today” and looks back on a childhood Eden that may or may not have existed the way we remember it.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Rita Kramer is an author and freelance writer. She has written for the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Partisan Review, Commentary, City Journal, and numerous other publications in the U.S. and abroad. Her books include Maria Montessori: A Biography; In Defense of the Family: Raising Children in America. Today; At ATender Age: Violent Youth and Juvenile Justice, and Ed School Follies:The Miseducation of America's Teachers.
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