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

Epilogue: The Millennium of Childhood that Stretches before Us

Epilogue The Millennium of Childhood That Stretches Before Us MICHAEL ZUCKERMAN It was about time. A century was ending. A new millennium was upon us. It was a time to think about time. Time past, time to come. Where have we been? Where might we be going? And ours are studies of time. History is nothing if not a meditation on time. Developmental psychology is the one branch of psychology that pries into change over time. And it was about time. Considering their convergences and complementarities in sensibility and subject matter, historians and developmental psychologists should have been collaborators from the first. Both try to trace the crystallization of character. Both think it matters in the evolution of humankind. And each supplies the deficiencies of the other: history over-attentive as it is to particularity, developmental psychology to pattern. And it was about time, within each discipline, to take another look at the discipline itself as it bore specifically on the study of childhood. History and developmental psychology are, today, the two great domains ofscholarly inquiry devoted to that study. Both fields found their current form a generation ago, history on the inspiration of Philippe Aries, developmental psychology on the paradigm propounded byJean Piaget. Recent work in both fields has begun to challenge Ariesian and Piagetian assumptions alike. And it was about time, beyond the bounds of these scholarly disciplines , to assess the experience of children in the century that was expiring . A hundred years before, in a bestseller that swept the Western world, Ellen Key had implored a "century of the child." At the end of the twentieth century, it seemed worth asking whether we had actually enjoyed (or suffered) such a century, and it seemed worth wondering what the evidence of the century past portended of the century to come. 226 Michael Zuckerman A Century of the Child? When Willem Koops and I solicited these papers from these distinguished scholars and scientists, we had only a vague anticipation of what they might say. I think that I thought that they would look back on the past in the light of Aries and forward to the future in the dim and distorting refraction of linear extrapolation. I distinctly remember dreading that people would look back on our predictions, fifteen years later, and laugh. As things have turned out, very few of the participants in this enterprise have worried much-or at all-about forecasting the future. (A pity, even if it does absolve us of embarrassment in time to come.) At the same time, quite a number of them have looked at the past and found very little to sustain a premise ofa century of the child. Barbara Hanawalt insists that there was no conspicuous absence of awareness ofor concern for children in the late Middle Ages and so no subsequent emergence of the child in the modern era; in her twentieth century, we have a century of the child only in the sense that all centuries are centuries of the child. Els Kloek sees in the Netherlands of the seventeenth century the great age of Dutch child-centeredness; in her eighteenth century we have a retreat from such fond focus rather than its ever-augmenting elaboration. Karin Calvert finds that in America adults have always set their own obsessions ahead of the needs of the newborn and the young; in her account, we have centuries of the parent, not of the child. John Gillis suggests that, in Victorian Anglo-America and ever since, men and women have preferred their fantasies of childhood to any substantial encounter with its realities; on his interpretation, children are depositories for their elders' anxieties, in a century of the evaporation of the child into virtuality. Peter Stearns maintains that, in modern America, men and women have put their own pleasures before those of their children; in his view, we have had a century of hedonic indulgence that leaves the young too often to their own devices. Gerrit Breeuwsma observes that developmental psychologists attend to children only when they happen to notice a newborn nephew; otherwise, they pass their professional lives in a nearly principled indifference to actual children and a barely disguised antagonism toward actual mothers. Sheldon White inadvertently confirms Breeuwsma's mordant observation, writing ofa century of developmental psychologists rather than of the childhood they study and writing of those developmentalists as "distal bureaucrats" who deal less with "flesh-andblood children" than with "representations" of real children designed to "provide tools" for...