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CHAPTER ONE The Nature Assumption (Excerpt)When my children were toddlers, I, like many parents, used to show them a book with pictures of a mother pig and her piglet, a mother cow and her calf. Understandably obsessed with "big" and "little," they seemed to love these pictures. But the illustrations also served to reassure them that childhood and the tie between mother and child are immutable facts of nature. Mommies and babies are on the farm, in the woods, in the trees, in the jungle, under the water. Everywhere. Childhood is a fact of nature: the young of mammals have to depend on their mothers for survival. Yet scholars have also come to understand that different societies have different notions about how long the young should remain dependent and how they should be treated. Childhood, as current academic argot would have it, is "culturally constructed." In some societies, twelve-year-old girls are being prepared for their weddings; in others, children are still leaving their laundry around well into their teens--and that's if you're lucky. Some seven-year-olds spend their days herding cows, planting corn, or working in factories, while elsewhere on the globe they are corralled into buildings and seated at desks in rows while they copy the notations an adult makes on a blackboard. The bazaar of human childhoods is an interesting, if sometimes distressing, curiosity, but it would be a serious mistake to dismiss it as arbitrary. Humans "construct" childhood not to indulge their whims or, as it sometimes seems, to drive women crazy. Human beings fashion the childhood their culture needs. Childhood prepares the individual for life inside his or her specific culture, for living according to its expectations and grasping its values. Compare a tribal or premodern culture whose children need only learn ancestral methods of hunting, weaving, marrying, and worshipping with a modern democratic society whose children must learn to find work that conforms to their own inclinations, to choose their own spouses and leaders, and simultaneously to adapt to rapidly changing conditions. The former is fairly straightforward: children can learn a great deal of what they need to know through simple imitation and unembellished verbal commands. The latter is an enormous project requiring years and years of technical training and psychological preparation. "Give me other mothers and I will give you another world," St. Augustine wrote, and although they might want to change mothers to a more current term like childrearers, modern anthropologists have found this statement to be true from Samoa to Kabul to Boston. Professors and philosophers have not been the only ones to grasp this concept. In the earliest days of the republic Americans intuited that families--especially, but by no means only, mothers--provided the essential breeding ground for the democratic, adaptable, creative, energetic, entrepreneurial, self-regulating individual the new country needed. Deliberately and with a sense of optimism, they concocted a recipe for this personality, which remained, despite some tinkering, part of the American creed for well over a century. Somewhere around the middle of the twentieth century, however, Americans began to lose sight of the recipe for some of these qualities. In fact, they began to lose sight of the meaning of childhood altogether. They began to forget the nearly universal idea that childhood is the time to mold individuals out of raw human material and to believe instead that the child, far from needing shaping, is already a complete individual. Though only a few radicals said it quite this way, childhood seemed passé. Even so, Americans continue to have rather distinct ideas about how to treat children. Consider our approach to the infant. While almost universally babies sleep with their mothers throughout infancy and sometimes well into childhood, Americans insist upon putting their babies in their own crib in their own room. While babies in many cultures are strapped to their mother's back and spoken to, if at all, in a calm, soft voice with little facial expression and minimum eye contact, American parents put their babies in infant seats and high chairs and chatter, laugh, and frown with them as they would with their best friend at lunch. They frequently use their baby's name: "How big is Megan?" "Where is Megan's mouth?" In many cultures, it is common to tease an older infant by holding food or a pacifier just out of reach, but this is relatively uncommon among Americans. While mothers in other cultures hold their babies for most of the day, American parents "childproof " their homes so that their young can move around and explore. In general, American babies--and their older siblings--are held and touched less than their counterparts in most other cultures. Cultural psychologists, scholars who combine the disciplines of anthropology and psychology, see in these American customs of infancy the seeds of a specifically American way of construing experience. In all of these instances, parents send their babies an unspoken message: You are an independent and autonomous individual Compare this outlook to that of the Gusii tribe of central Africa: In order to discourage independent emotional expression in their children, Gusii mothers deliberately turn away from their infant's excited laughter. Anthropologists have found that by six months the placid babies rarely initiate any sounds and respond only to commands. Or compare it to a culture much closer to home. Italian parents often make their infant's own drives yield to the larger needs of the family. Unlike American parents, who defer to the rhythms of their babies, Italians think little of waking a sleeping child if someone wants to play with him or of making him wait to eat until the family dinnertime or of holding him on their lap when he wants to move around. Sociality more than individuality is their goal. American parents are teaching their children to be self-directed and private individuals. We are not born that way. Americans in the early days of the republic grasped instinctively that their new form of government required a new sort of personality. A young democracy called for self-regulating and independent citizens, and a mobile capitalist economy demanded self-starting, industrious workers. Children preparing for such a life could not remain mere passive subjects within an old-world patriarchal family. Unlike European children, who were taught to say "Yes, Papa" from an early age, these children were going to enjoy a more egalitarian and companionable relationship with their parents. They, after all, had to grow up to be "vigilant" toward authority, to use Jefferson's term. Later in the century Walt Whitman chided a visitor who wondered whether American children were duly respectful toward their parents and leaders. "Allons, comrade! Your old world has been soaked in reverentiality. We are laying here in America the basements and foundations of a new era." To lay these basements and foundations, Americans had to break with both their European and Puritan past. It's hard for us to imagine how thoroughly children of the old regime were taught to curb their own desires and ignore their own thoughts. The diaries of Heroard, the doctor of Louis Dauphin, who in 1610 became King Louis XIII of France, offer a startling picture of the extreme lengths to which people went in order to squeeze the child dry of individual urges: If the dauphin showed pleasure in a certain food, he would be denied it. If he disliked a food, it was served to him repeatedly. In order to impress upon him his powerlessness, he, the future king, was taught to serve his father at meals. At age two, he began to be subjected to a regime of whippings, first by his nurse and then, as he grew older, by the soldiers of the guard. He was whipped if he failed to demonstrate adequate affection for his parents. He was whipped even after he became king at age nine. Children, whether they were kings or servants, were to obey parents with the same unquestioning fear with which parents were to obey God. Though they were more solicitous toward their infants than others had been before them, the Puritans transported a similar set of ideas to the new continent. "Children should not know if it could be kept from them, that they have a will of their own," the pastor John Robinson pronounced. "Neither should these words be heard from them, save by way of consent, 'I will' or 'I will not.'" Children should "have never known or felt their own wills till they were one and twenty years of age," agreed Benjamin Rush, writing late in the eighteenth century. Americans today might view these methods as ruinous to children's self-esteem, but that misses the point. Individuals were not supposed to have a self, esteemed or not--at least, they were not supposed to have a self independent of the exacting requirements of their family and community. Children were not being trained to choose an independent career as a doctor, scientist, or tennis coach. They were being prepared to become drones in the family economy. In New England, boys were quickly put to work in the fields herding cattle or planting corn while girls worked in the house weaving, spinning, and caring for younger siblings. "Surplus" children were sent off to neighbors to become domestics or apprentices. Indeed, boys as young as seven were often "bound out," that is, given over to a "master" who, in return for food, shelter, and some scattershot training in reading, could expect a hardworking servant. Wages were given to the child's father. In the Middle Atlantic and Southern colonies, more than half of the population was made up of indentured servants, most of whom were under the age of nineteen. Few children had anything more than the most rudimentary schooling. Why would they? They had no independent economic future to prepare for. They had only to work at the manual jobs allotted to them. But as the idea of republican childhood began to emerge around the turn of the nineteenth century, American ministers, intellectuals, and moralists took another look at this period of life, emboldened by the egalitarian spirit of their new country and inspired by the philosophy of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A free country, they believed, called for a new kind of childhood. The most noticeable change came with the common school movement, starting in the 1820s. Under the leadership of a Massachussetts reformer named Horace Mann, Americans gradually moved children out of the fields, craftsmen's shops, and kitchens and into the classroom. But reformers went further than promoting schools as the proper place for children to spend their days. Far from despising the child's "I will," as the Puritans had, they began not only to look more benevolently at the child's "I" but to draw it out, massage it, and elaborate upon it. As cultural psychologists would put it, they set out to build in the American child a private and autonomous self that could engage actively in both civic and economic life. The most obvious shift in the new childrearing involved methods of discipline. Parents of the old school thought little of whippings and beatings; now parents were told to use them only as a last resort. Reasoning and love should replace brute force. "Affectionate persuasion addressed to the under-standing, the conscience, and the heart is the grand instrument to be employed in family government," wrote Herman Humphrey in his Domestic Education. In the schools, too, corporal punishment was to be thought of as "a relic of barbarism," in Mann's words. It would be naive to conclude that just because children were subjected to pleas and cajolery, instead of the other side of the whip, they were free to make their own choices. The point of the new "gentle" methods of discipline was not to empower children in any contemporary sense. Mothers were still expected to control their children through their "affectionate persuasion," through appeals to the child's "heart," or, failing that, through threats to withdraw love and approval, a punishment that children know can be tearfully harsh. But it would be equally foolish to assume that these new disciplinary methods didn't amount to much or that their subtle coerciveness made them equivalent to old-regime brutality. Rather, the very fact that parents rejected the language and gestures of their absolute authority and relied instead on reason and persuasion meant that they were changing the way their children would come to understand themselves. The parents wielding these new methods had absorbed Locke's lesson that the child who lives in quaking fear of authority cannot become free. Fear deprives its subjects of the experience of self-sovereignty, as any victim of childhood abuse can attest. On the other hand, the new discipline, dubbed by one historian "the gentle revolution,"" gave children the tools with which to experience themselves as rational and free beings and prepared them to become autonomous moral and economic actors. "As the fitting apprenticeship for despotism consists in being trained to despotism," wrote Mann about the new theories of discipline which he prescribed for schools as well, "so the fitting apprenticeship for self-government consists in being trained to self-government." Training for self-government was the point of it all. Seen in this light, the ideals of republican childhood represented a profound moral achievement and, like the Revolutionary War itself, a giant step forward for freedom. This achievement is also evident in the other ways in which the republican theorists sought to enliven and enrich the child's inner life. Some child experts were particularly interested in ways to draw out the child's mind and perceptions. In her 1831 Mother's Book, Lydia Child exhorted parents to encourage their children to explore and to be active, observant thinkers. "All the faculties of a child's mind should be cultivated," she wrote, advising parents to encourage "habits of attention and activity of mind." Her contemporary Bronson Alcott, father of the author Louisa May Alcott, went further: "The child must be treated as afree, self-guiding, self-controlling being," he announced." Mann also sought to bring to the schools respect for the child as an "active, voluntary agent" rather than "a passive recipient." The future citizen, Mann wrote, "must do more than admit or welcome; he must reach out, and grasp, and bring home." This new respect for the child's individuality is evident in Americans' changing attitude toward babies. The old world barely noticed infants. People forgot their ages and their names; they casually transferred the names of recently dead babies to newborns. Many European infants were sent away to wet nurses and were often bound inside tight, dirty swaddling clothes for hours on end. Beginning with the Puritans, however, Americans had shown more solicitude toward their babies by avoiding swaddling and endorsing maternal breast-feeding. By the nineteenth century, 95 percent of infants were breast-fed by their mothers until they were between two and four years old. In fact, parents began to demonstrate a new affection and sensitivity toward their youngest children, forging a pattern that continues to this day. Parents now made a point of referring to their infant by their first name, which was now far less likely to be the name of a parent or dead sibling. They began celebrating their children's birthdays. They avoided the habit of quieting fussy babies by using the sedative laudanum, and they were warned against overfeeding because it promoted lethargy. The republican theorists saw babies as Americans-in-training, and for this they had to be active and alert. In 1830 Jacob Abbott wrote in praise of a mother who allowed her infant to tear the pages of a book. "It is not mischief," Abbott reassured his readers. "A piece of paper is something new and curious to him." It is no surprise that the fertility rate fell steadily throughout the nineteenth century; raising an active, individualized child, as parents today know, is labor intensive.
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