American Childhoods

Preface

There is no single comprehensive text on American childhood. While materials exist for writing such a history, the matter of structuring the grand narrative remains challenging. The term “American” suggests unity, and surely at any point in time the national environment has confronted all children with common issues. But ethnic, racial, class, and regional (not to mention gender) differences have led to a diversity of experiences during childhood, and thus we must approach the topic as American childhoods. I have attempted to capture this diversity in this structure of this book, while also recognizing the changes childhood has undergone over time. The narrative thus proceeds chronologically while focusing on particular social groups. I first address childhood among the resident American Indians, the first European immigrants, and the imported African slaves. (I begin these narratives in the seventeenth century. Since significant cultural traits, most notably among the American Indians, persisted for centuries, I follow these stories toward the present .) I then look at the newly emergent middle and working classes of the nineteenth century in the context of an industrializing society. Finally, I contrast the disparate childhoods of suburban, urban, and rural America in the context of a modern, consumption-based society. Despite the varieties of childhood, as we enter the third millennium it appears that Americans are agreed on the primary goal of child rearing : forging an independent and competent adult from a dependent, naive child. Doesn’t every good parent today want to raise autonomous progeny? However modern we are, some bit of the past always creeps into the present. Seventeenth-century Puritans, for example, were intent on breaking the will of the infant, an aim that reappears in the child-rearing literature of the religious right today. Certainly one virtue of studying the past is that it helps explain the present. (Another virtue: As we view the varieties of past childhoods, we may work up more empathy toward, or at least tolerance of, the diversity that exists today. We may even become less accepting of the poverty in which a quarter of the nation’s young are living.) Preface 00Front.qxd 4/25/02 3:10 PM Page ix Even if Mom and Dad wish to promote Junior’s autonomy, they face limits. Public policy is only one of several forces outside the home (the media would have to be cited as another)—forces neither neutral nor impersonal but representing special interests—which are apt to diminish the power of parents, especially those lower in the class structure. Undaunted, many parents wrestle with the issue of how children should be prepared for adulthood. No longer do we send seven-yearolds into the workforce, though the inclination of some parents to subject their youngsters to intensive academic toil reminds us that such an approach has not been laid to rest. It also makes us wonder whether there was ever a time of carefree childhood. All of these items—parental practices in the past, ethnic rivalries, social forces outside the household—bear on the matter of childhood autonomy, an issue that logically arises in a modern democracy. It is of concern not solely to historians and political scientists but to psychologists as well. Freud confronted it and, later in his career, was able to muster some optimism about it. Of course, the behaviorists, given their devotion to environmental determinism, never doubted that parents could create the conditions for it—if they so desired. Erik Erikson, whose early training took place in Vienna, features autonomy as the positive counterweight to shame and doubt in the second of his eight stages in human development. And no one in the field of psychology has paid it more attention than the Scottish psychiatrist John Bowlby, who defected from orthodox psychoanalytic theory to a perspective he labeled attachment theory, the major tenet of which is that consistent attachment to a caregiver promotes autonomy. The consideration of autonomy when dealing with childhood is appropriate in a nation which has put so much emphasis on individual freedom. Needless to say, all parents limit the liberty of children to some degree but would disagree about what manner of restraint on behavior should be exercised and for how long. Some cultures in the American past (and present) have valued independence more than others, and some cultures have possessed a surer sense than others of how to nurture it. Yet even assuming a certain parental desire and competency with respect to fostering autonomy in youngsters, there have always been social...