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A Child’s Garden of Scholarship Excerpts
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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.”
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