A cultural historian discusses the changing image of childhood in an interview and a new book.
An interview by Samuel Hughes
Sidebar | A Child’s Garden of Scholarship—Excerpts from Beyond the Century of the Child
Dr. Michael Zuckerman C’61, professor of history, is sitting in my office, talking with gentle urgency about the phenomenon known as childhood.
“I’ve always, simply as a student of culture, been interested in childhood,” he is saying. “Because childhood is such an extraordinary prism for everything going on in the culture.”
Zuckerman has a unique take on the subject, and not because he is himself a father of five. Having dissected Dr. Benjamin Spock and his Baby and Child Care in a 1993 profile titled “Dr. Spock: The Confidence Man,” he has just co-edited a book of essays with Dutch psychologist Willem Koops, titled Beyond The Century of the Child: Crossroads of Cultural History and Developmental Psychology, to be published this fall by the University of Pennsylvania Press. And as he notes in his summing-up essay—“The Millennium of Childhood That Stretches Before Us”—“A disturbingly large company of our authors … remain persuaded that something has gone awry in relations between the young and their elders.
“We sense, dimly but disturbingly, that we have conceded too much to our children,” he adds. “They become increasingly the bearers of our civilized discontents, because we have allotted to them what we now think we want, which isn’t civilization after all.”
The book’s intellectual forebear is The Century of the Child, an international bestseller written in 1900 by a Swede named Ellen Key. It argued, with a sort of Nietzschean fervor, that the world’s children should be the “central work of society” in the century just dawning.
Though Key herself “never thought her century of the child a plausible prospect,” notes Zuckerman, it turned out to have more resonance than she would have imagined. And so, a few years ago, he responded to Koops’ invitation to examine “whether we had actually enjoyed (or suffered) such a century,” and to see “what the evidence of the century past portended of the century to come.”
The essays they have gathered are pretty evenly balanced between historians and developmental psychologists—the “two great domains of scholarly inquiry” devoted to the study of childhood. For some, the point of departure is Philippe Ariès’ 1962 book, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, which maintained that the very concept of childhood—with all its implications of innocence—was a relatively recent development. (Before the 15th century, Ariès argued, they were simply regarded as small young people with some modest physical limitations.) For others, it is Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist, who believed that children’s logic and modes of thinking are entirely different from those of adults, and whose work influenced a generation of developmental psychologists.
But, as Zuckerman points out: “Everything we thought we knew a generation ago—the most exciting, the most sophisticated ideas about childhood—were now being called into question.” And so the book—and this interview.
Gazette: The proposition that gets the most attention in your book is Ariès’ assertion that, as you put it, “modern youngsters live in an isolated enclave unto themselves.” Could you explain that?
Zuckerman: In both domains there have been people who have been wondering whether this is a good thing, to have made children so central, so beloved, to have isolated them from adult life. That’s the real core of the Ariès proposition: that the modern middle class and modern Western life in its entirety is really predicated on the preservation of childish innocence from the corruptions of the world. It’s an attempt to create a purer place, where children can be insulated from the contaminations of adult society.
So you begin to get the enshrinement of children as angelic creatures in their own right, and you begin to get the withdrawal of the family from immersion in the wider society.
Gazette: How does that manifest itself?
Zuckerman: You begin with the child being parked in places where his innocence can be protected—like schools and eventually kindergartens, to catch the child even younger. Then there is the refusal to allow child labor and to exploit children economically and physically in a host of ways. And all of these things have been viewed by the participants as unequivocal benefits, great gains, wonderful reforms that are good for the child, that appreciate his real nature and allow him to fulfill his real nature.
What has begun to look worrisome in all of this is that children thus isolated from the world of adults and from the larger society become children with a very shaky understanding of adult life—unable to handle adult responsibilities, and without much eagerness for adult life, quite preferring a world of irresponsibility and spontaneity and playfulness to a world of discipline and hard labor and regularity and responsibility.
Gazette: What did Ariès himself think of all this?
Zuckerman: Ariès thought that this creation of a Youthland was appalling. Ariès hated modern life; he hated the modern family. What he loved was the rough-and-tumble of medieval life, when kids got picked on, when kids got hurt, when kids got bullied, but when they actually were autonomous, when they actually were self-governing or governing in their own groups. He thought that what we’ve really created was a world in which adults kept kids under surveillance, hovered over them and protected them, and wouldn’t let them be grown-ups. And everyone else who’s interpreted Ariès thought that he loved what he described instead of hated what he described. So they enlisted him on their side for their reforms in 20th-century life. Very few people caught on that he was writing in scorn of modern life. For Ariès, it was all downhill from the 15th century.
Gazette: What’s the more recent thinking on these “reforms”?
Zuckerman: There is a new sense afoot that this isolation is bad for children, because it doesn’t enable them to feel any sense of complicity or participation or citizenship—they understand that they are kept apart in a world of no consequence, and they come to believe that their life is irresponsible. Micha de Winter [professor of child care at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and author of Children as Fellow Citizens: Participation and Commitment] reports on some of his own research into allowing children in schools to have genuinely consequential roles in the design of new programs in the schools and in the community. And not only has it activated the kids in ways that are remarkable—once entrusted with responsibility, they come up with extraordinary ideas—but it also has transformed policymaking in the government and in the schools and in the neighborhoods and in the communities. Because the kids tell the adults things that the adults run down and discover are right, but that the adults had never thought of or seen or noticed for themselves. So we end up with a better understanding as adults of what life is like in the community and in the family. It’s just better research.
Gazette: If the roles and rules for children have changed so much in the last half-century or so, how have they changed for adults?
Zuckerman: What we’ve had in the last 50 years—it’s been coming for a long time, but it’s gotten to be a torrent in the last generation or two—is that adults no longer want to be adults. In the past, the way in which adults were able to retain a sense of playfulness and irresponsibility was to themselves be working 16-hour days, 60-hour weeks —long, hard, Protestant-ethic sort of lives—but creating this projection of innocent, carefree childhood and indulging in the spontaneity and playfulness that they themselves needed— because all of us need that—vicariously through their children. What’s happened most dramatically since the sixties is that adults are no longer eager to do this vicariously through their children—they want to do it in their own bodies, in their own spirits, themselves. And so what we have now is a sense that adults are demanding these prerogatives of childhood for themselves—adults are becoming childish, in every sense by which we have defined childishness in the last two or three centuries.
Also, you see this in the ways they leave jobs, the way they leave marriages, the way they leave kids—you can see this in the ways that they’re allowed to be irresponsible, by the courts that don’t demand that fathers pay their child support for their kids, that let 90 percent of them get off scot-free, and the whole society that is now collaborating to reduce its demands for responsibility.
I think you’ve also got a sense in which the childishness is not only the best part of life—the things we most crave, the things we most value—but we understand that the kids have it and we don’t or that kids have more of it than we do. And I think there are fascinating turns toward resentment of children.
What I think we’re seeing is that it’s no longer these adoring parents and adoring adults who set the cherubic, angelic child at the center. As the child comes increasingly to have what the parents want for themselves, there begin to be all sorts of animosities toward the child. It’s hard to understand policy in the 20th century, institutional structure and behavior, without making room for hostility to children. [Bryn Mawr College History Professor] Michael Nylan’s account of China in the 20th century, which encompasses a fifth of the people of the planet before we even start, is one of increasingly unmitigated hostility to children for that entire country.
Gazette: How about closer to home?
Zuckerman: One sees this in the U.S. over and over and over again. Not just the prisons in which we put our kids that we call schools—with the discipline, the coercion, the compulsory education, and the numbing of creativity and imagination that we inflict on kids there—but also the policies that we pursue. If one looks at the Ronald Reagan budget deficits, which essentially said: “We will sacrifice the youth for present gratification; we want to spend right now, and never mind what this is going to entail for our children and our children’s children.” If one looks at the Clinton welfare reform, which—without blinking, on no evidence whatsoever—puts an entire generation of poor children at unbelievable peril, with no reason to think that we know what on earth we will do with them when the welfare payments run out and the child support runs out, if the parents haven’t found work, if this free-market ideology turns out not to be as wondrous as it cracks itself up to be. We just don’t care. We’re willing to go off into the void and leave the children to pick up the pieces, instead of protecting them, looking out for them, guarding their welfare.
Gazette: And yet you could argue that while that’s a very recent phenomenon, in a way it’s going back to the laissez-faire approach to children that ruled history.
Zuckerman: Oh, for sure! This is what Ariès would argue—that we had gone against everything that was ordinary in human history, and that this was bizarre, this infatuation with the angelic child; that no place had ever done this in any degree like this before; and that children had always been entangled in the hurly-burly of life. He thought that was pretty cool, because it was so different from the world that he knew in 20th-century France and the West. He thought it was great that kids wore the same clothes as their parents, that kids heard the same rumors and gossip and scandal as their parents—heard the same dirty jokes, played the same games, worked the same work—just with the obvious adjustments for their physical capacity.
Gazette: Where would you tie someone like Bruno Bettelheim [the child psychologist and author of The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales] into this? My 11-year-old gets frustrated with “happy-ending” stories. He feels very talked down to. I think kids prefer what’s real.
Zuckerman: Real is a great word, because all of the critics of Youthland argue that that world is unreal. That adult life is real. That kids need reality and don’t have to be protected from reality the way the reformers and the pedagogues would have it. That kids are tougher than you think, and in any case, kids need to be treated as adults even if they don’t get the whole message that you’re trying to convey to them. They’ll get some of it; they’ll file away some of it; they’ll come back to it later; they’ll mull it over; it will lurk in their minds.
Bettelheim is clearly of a piece with the other critics of this cleansed, purified preserve, this kindergarten in which children are confined. Bettelheim says that’s not an effective way to grow up—that life contains gore, tragedy, loss, inequity; it doesn’t come out with happy endings; you don’t have to sanitize. In fact you do harm to kids in their ultimate psychological maturity if you sanitize their lives and make everything end happily.
Photo by Candace diCarlo.
Gazette: You’re part of a generation that did not grow up completely inundated with television. How does TV fit into the equation?
Zuckerman: Television is clearly another one of these appalling things we do to children. And we know it’s appalling; we know that it’s turning them into things we don’t want. The evidence is now incontrovertible. Robert Putnam, in his celebrated book, Bowling Alone, trying to figure out what’s gone wrong with the decay of American civic life, concludes that by far the greatest part of it can be attributed to television. He draws on hundreds if not thousands of studies that all demonstrate the deleterious effect of television. But the alternative to television is that parents would have to spend their own time with their kids, in amounts similar to what the kids spend in front of the TV four, five, six hours a day.
Gazette: In the summertime it used to be that kids would be sent outside and turned loose all day. I don’t think adults were playing with their children.
Zuckerman: That’s fair enough, Sam. But I think what you had when you sent the kids out to play was a gaggle of other kids, some assurance of care-taking. It was a shaky one, to be sure; you didn’t know where your kids went, and your kids didn’t tell you where they went. I wasn’t about to let my parents know where I went, but they knew how to track me. They knew where we were likely to be.
But what we have now is television as babysitter. It’s unmistakable. You can go into day-care home providers and see three or four kids in bassinets with the TV on, and the woman is taking her break from doing anything for the kids. You can see this in the sheer statistics, in the hours that kids watch television in a day. In lots of these homes now where the kids are watching television, it is what they do until their parents come home. Because now both parents are working, so the kid comes home—and we’re not just talking poor kids, we’re talking middle-class kids as well—and the kid watches TV for two-to-three hours until the parent comes home and begins thinking about dinner. So I think that television in that regard has become a piece of equipment that we need in order to manage our kids—for our own convenience as parents.
Gazette: At one point you ask whether Youthland “vanishes or metastasizes to encompass us all?” Could you elaborate on that?
Zuckerman: There is this body of very powerful, very interesting literature that goes back to Edgar Friedenberg and The Vanishing Adolescent 50 years ago and comes forward through Neil Postman [author of The Disappearance of Childhood] and [Alex] Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here, which argue that kids are being forced prematurely to grow up. Particularly ghetto kids, black kids, poor kids. But the indictment is wider. It’s the alternative of the argument that we’re all becoming childish, that we’re all craving sensual pleasure, that we’re all craving irresponsibility, which is exactly the thing that dozens of very sophisticated, empirically based analyses have found. This is the sort of thing that Robert Bellah in Habits of the Heart finds when he does really extensive, probing interviews with a couple of hundred Americans all around the country. What he finds is that they have no sense of citizenship, no sense of community obligation, and fairly little sense of obligation to anything or anybody—that they’re overwhelmingly self-centered and what he calls “radically privately validating,” and that they make their lives up as they go along, then walk away from past lives and past responsibilities with impunity and think this is part of personal growth.
Part of what’s really interesting is the extent to which you can’t even make that split between Youthland vanishing and metastasizing, because at some sense adulthood and Youthland coalesce, so that it isn’t one or the other. It’s that who we are now as adults are people who work too hard at work, who have experienced the speed-ups that come with technology, that come with electronic technology in particular. When we’re at work we work too hard, so when we’re not at work we’re desperate for some surcease from work, and that’s our consumerism and our sensualism. And in crucial ways that’s the life that we give to kids as well.
[George Mason University History Professor] Peter Stearns argues in his essay that on one hand, kids go to school, and school is a cruel discipline. It certainly is not freedom or irresponsibility or childishness or anything like that. On the other hand, kids are encouraged in every possible way to be precocious consumers. Is being precocious consumers childish? Or is it exactly preparation for the adult life that we anticipate our kids leading? That’s what we’re about now.
When the terrorists fly into the World Trade Center and take it down, and the country is in crisis, what does Bush tell us to do? Our president says: Go to the mall. Our president says: Affirm your Americanism by buying. Go on vacation. Keep those airlines flying. And have a good time—indulge and pleasure yourself. That’s how we respond now as adults to the most intense political crisis of our moment. How one separates adulthood from childishness in those conditions is beyond me.
Gazette: Bush also talks about how we’re this deeply religious country. But to what degree does our really intense consumerism stifle our spirituality, which is something that’s sometimes more open in children than adults?
Zuckerman: That’s a great question, because we have not a single essay in the book that ever confronts it—and I think that’s revealing. Children’s spirituality is off the charts; it’s just not a topic that anybody looks at. That is precisely not to say that it’s not there. But it’s given no cultural amplification. It’s not a subject of questioning, not a subject of answering; it’s just not something we dwell on. You could look high and low on television for spiritual stuff, and you’re just not going to find it. The advertisers don’t want to touch it; the producers don’t think of it. It’s just not on our roadmap of childhood to think about spirituality.
Gazette: Where do you as a parent fit into the Ariès worldview?
Zuckerman: [Laughs] Sam, at some level that’s the $64,000 question, and at some level it’s irrelevant. I am schizophrenic about this; I am perfectly capable of disassociating my scholarly studies from my life. So I confess, I am exactly what Ariès scorns. I adore my kids; I enshrine my kids; I put them on a pedestal; and the family circles around the kids. And at some other level I try to keep something ticking in the back of my mind that says: “Don’t do that all the time; make sure that they understand that they are not the center of the universe; make sure that they deal with my arbitrary authority now and then and that they don’t get the illusion that I will always be just with them and always be generous to them.” I try to work some sort of crazy-quilt, irrational equipoise between Ariès and anti-Ariès.
SIDEBAR
A Child’s Garden of Scholarship
Excerpts from Beyond the Century of the Child
Adults in colonial America viewed infants as rather inadequate creatures, extremely vulnerable to accident and disease, irrational and animalistic in their behavior, and a drain on the family’s resources and energy. To the seventeenth-century mind, human beings were literally made, not born. The newborn infant appeared as unpromising material, a shapeless “lump of flesh,” “a round ball” that had to be molded into human form by the midwife. Adults believed that such unpromising material would not develop on its own but had to be humanized through direct adult intervention …
Many influential American theologians of the nineteenth century no longer regarded children as tainted by original sin, but as essentially pure and innocent gifts of God. The perceived innocence of children made them distinctly different and separate from adults, who had been corrupted by the world. Middle-class parents, influenced by the pervasive sentimentalized image of the child as cherub, felt pressured to raise children who lived up to that ideal. Any failure on the part of the child was automatically the fault of the parents … Wise parents protected the inherent angel and suppressed the inherited devil in their children …
The twentieth century seems a jumbled mixture of sensible reform and inexplicable obsessions. It is common in any age to compare the present to the past, and for most modern Americans “the past,” “tradition,” or “the good old days” referred to America of the Victorian era. Children were then kept childish for a long time, their innocence predicated on isolation from and ignorance of the adult world. In comparison, we fear that modern children grow up too fast, are exposed to the adult world too soon, and lose their innocence too quickly. Yet viewed from a broader perspective, children of every era except the Victorian have mixed in adult society from an early age … The modern child’s world includes not only parents but also other caregivers, teachers, coaches, and a mind-numbing range of media models. Children are once again being raised by and in a community of adults, for good or ill. —Karin Calvert, “Patterns of Childrearing in America.”
The conclusion is as painful as it is enlightening: our children will be, and will remain, necessarily and unavoidably the product of our imagination. No scientific feat will be able to change this. I call this painful because it removes the last remains of optimistic progressive thinking of positivism. I call it enlightening because it places the responsibility where it belongs: with adults. —Willem Koops, “Imaging Childhood.”
[O]ne of the great paradoxes of our times [is] that western society has become an extraordinarily child-centered culture, even in the absence of children. Never have children been so valued, yet rarely have so many adults lived apart from children. The childless couple is no longer a rarity, and, given the longevity revolution, parents spend a smaller fraction of their lives actually living with their children. Rates of biological reproduction have been falling since the Victorian era, but what I want to call the rate of cultural reproduction has moved in exactly the opposite direction. Never have the symbols and images of the child been so pervasive. Our politics, commerce, and culture all depend on them. We are extremely attentive to these virtual children, even as we neglect, even abuse, real children. The virtual child has become so luminous that it threatens to blind us to real children. —John R. Gillis, “Birth of the Virtual Child: A Victorian Progeny.”
Parents who worried about vulnerable children could warily ally with sales pitches designed to make children’s lives easier. This alliance may account for some otherwise odd exceptions to the regime of careful discipline. American parents and experts alike, for example, were notoriously lax in regulating children’s eating habits, save in urging more food; and American children grew fatter as a result, particularly after the 1950s. Here was a clear contrast to European standards, which did not regard ubiquitous snacking as a logical prerogative of childhood. Relaxation of posture standards, after a flowering of programs through the 1940s targeting schoolchildren, flowed from a desire not to add further burdens to childhood plus a recognition that new leisure patterns required a more relaxed body style.—Peter Stearns, “Historical Perspectives on 20th-Century American Childhood.”
Contemporary society seems to threaten childhood in a paradoxical way. Children can be held apart through sentimental infantilization or isolated in a “virtual” world. At the same time, the pressure-cooker of societal expectations hurries them prematurely into adulthood and consumerism. And that may be the best case. At worst, considerable numbers of marginalized young people are left without any affirmative social bonds at all …
Participatory pedagogy is aimed at the triangular relation between a child, a responsible adult, and the social world … For example, a participatory school would not view itself as a safe haven for children moving from a state of social incompetence toward the full demands of mature citizenship. Rather, it would be organized as a social training ground in which children’s active involvement—in their own learning process and as organizers of school life—is both an instrument and a goal of education … A participatory curriculum would provide children instead with the opportunity to experience and address everyday social dilemmas in a context rich in guidance and support. The key to participatory pedagogy thus is that people learn through interactive experience and communication. —Micha de Winter, “On Infantilization and Participation: Pedagogical Lessons from the Century of the Child.”
[A] host of things that have happened in developmental research since the 1920s have had hardly any direct relationship to the public interest … Within the field of developmental psychology, practitioners and researchers went their own way and created their own lines of work. They also found their own means of financial support. For experimentalists, the university, more or less independent of the practical demands of child welfare, became the place to be.
The result is that experimentalists have grown reluctant to speak about a particular child. They prefer to speak about a population and its members … Quite often there seems to be an enormous gap between the children we know (and have been) and the little statistical rat which is called “the child” in the textbooks on developmental psychology. —Gerrit Breeuwsma, “The Nephew of an Experimentalist: Ambivalences in Developmental Thinking.”
