Beyond the Century of the Child: Cultural History and Developmental Psychology

6: Historical Perspectives on Twentieth-Century American Childhood

Chapter 6 Historical Perspectives on TwentiethCentury American Childhood PETER STEARNS Given the number of factors that shape childhood, it is not surprising that key twentieth-century developments took a variety of directions (Elder, Modell, and Parke 1993). Prior adult roles were rethought, amid growing criticism ofpast repression, and some previous latitudes were also reined in, particularly for boys (Rotundo 1993; Hawes and Hiner 1982). At the same time, novel developments were complicated by the persistence of earlier patterns. Long-standing American emphasis on children's independence and voice, amid unusual labor needs and frontier alternatives, continued to affect the experience of childhood, though in new ways. No simple model of liberation or regulation works well; there was no coherent package. Nevertheless, a new tension in the experience of children did emerge from the early part of the century onward. Adult constraints on children became more detailed and demanding even as children's outlets through consumerism expanded. The New Dualism This central tension informed basic childhood experiences, socialization results, and adult-child contacts. Its distinctive interplay between constraint and release differed from the most widely articulated nineteenth-century patterns and constituted the most important new twentieth-century framework. On the one hand, earlier assumptions ofchildren's strength, accompanied by considerable freedom from adult supervision, yielded to new anxieties and new efforts at parental and adult control (including, of course, the expanding role of schools). Childhood became associated with a host of potential problems as novel forms of expert advice blended with changes in the actual structure of childhood. On the other hand, opportunities for escape from worried guidance, particularly through new consumer outlets available for children and new forms of peer culture, increased greatly. Childhood became divided Twentieth-Century American Childhood 97 between stricture and latitude, preparing an interaction that would be carried to adulthood. Subsidiary innovations in childhood, such as changes in familial work responsibilities, flowed from efforts to accommodate this tension. This framework was different from that of the nineteenth century, although nineteenth-century idealizations persisted and caused confusion . (The idealizations were those discussed byJohn Gillis in Chapter 5, but their durability was far more qualified than his essay suggests.) To take an obvious instance, Victorian middle-class insistence on morally uplifting reading and entertainments for innocent children (though admittedly incompletely carried through in practice), now yielded to a more uninhibited media culture, catering to interests in violence and incipient sexuality. Ofcourse moralizing materials remained available, and even more obviously fears about corrupting children, inspired in part by Victorian continuities, responded to the change. The fact was, however, that change predominated. Most of the leisure fare offered to children escaped parental control. Or, to take a more subtle instance, though parents continued to echo nineteenth-century praise for children (while bemoaning, as Victorian observers did, actual problems with the current younger generation ), the place of children in family life slipped. Rising divorce rates, the ultimate decisions of mothers to enter the workforce (Chafe 1991), and, after the 1950s at least, actual polling data all reflected growing adult interest in other goals, which meant that the undeniable commitment to a semi-Victorian rhetoric embraced an important values dilemma. A New Context Several factors shifted the framework in which adult-child interactions occurred. The three major birth rate periods in the twentieth century set up distinctive issues. During the initial decades of the century, and particularly the 1920s and 1930s, the intensification of earlier reductions in rates led to many families with only one or two children, which increased parent-child contact, and reduced available sibling relationships . The result enhanced parental anxiety about their own adequacy and increased the demands individual children placed on parents, developments that reflected adult concern for children but also created a potential source of dissatisfaction. The baby boom period, largely a product of positive decisions for a more child-centered family environment , led to crowding offamilies and growing competition for adult attention, particularly because the spacing between children was characteristically dose-another basis for new adult concerns and childhood 98 Peter Stearns tensions. Finally, the subsequent decline in birth rates was marked by a measurable reduction in the valuation ofchildren, at least compared to other indices of family success; both genders began to cut back their claimed appreciation ofchildren as against the importance of the marital tie. The fact that Americans did not move as readily as Europeans to alternative systems of child care...