Adult Supervision Required: Private Freedom and Public Constraints for Parents and Children

2. Seen and Heard: Children’s Growing Freedom at Home

40 Chapter 2 Seen and Heard Children’s Growing Freedom at Home The way I was raised it was children were seen and not heard. These days children are heard, seen, and everything else. It is so different. . . . There is no authority figure in some of these homes other than the child. —Katina When discussing discipline, the parents I interviewed often noted the increasing outspokenness of children and the decreasing sense of both boundaries and parental authority at home (usually, though, in reference to other families’ homes). Though such assertions were typically anecdotal, these parents’ sense that something has changed is corroborated by historical changes in popular advice. In many activities of daily living—especially diet, sleep schedules, elimination, grooming, and dress—the twentieth century saw children come to be regarded as the best experts about their own needs while a more childcentered approach displaced behaviorism in parenting advice. Popular advice also recommended greater autonomy for children over their behavior and general comportment at home, especially in relation to their parents, as more democratic models of family began to be favored over those based on positional authority. Additionally, the current widespread disapproval of corporal punishment underscores children’s rights over their own bodies. These changes represent not only a transformation of childrearing recommendations aimed at parents, but they also represent children’s increased autonomy over their own bodies and behavior at home. At the beginning of the twentieth century, in popular advice experts expressed the dominant view that children should be trained to respond obediently to parents. By the 1930s, however, a new strain of advice appeared that began to view the child as the expert on her own developmental needs. By the late 1940s, the challenge to behaviorist tendencies had become common in expert advice in magazines, and during the latter half of the twentieth century recommendations remained consistent that parents should follow their children’s lead in such matters as eating habits, toileting, and personal appearance. Furthermore, parents in the second half of the twentieth century were advised to be largely tolerant when children challenged their authority, were contrary, or expressed disagreement about many routines of daily family life. The portrayal of children’s greater autonomy over activities of daily living, however, should not be characterized as disappearing discipline. Instead, recommendations about discipline issues shifted from regulating activities of daily living toward regulation of interpersonal relationships; more rules focused on getting along well with others. Behaviorist Child Training—Strict Routines and Firm Discipline In the earliest years of the twentieth century, a recognizably behaviorist approach is evident in popular parenting advice: children were often described as requiring training, routines, and strict schedules. Daily activities such as feeding, diapering, and bathing of infants were proclaimed to establish the basis upon which childhood and adolescent discipline were founded. A 1911 article explained: “The training of the child should begin on the day of his birth,” says a thoughtful mother. This is unquestionably a correct statement of the case, for the child doubtless begins at once to receive impressions from the big, wide world into which he has come. The seemingly mechanical acts of moving the little body about for the purpose of providing nourishment and comfort, at once begin to impress the unscarred nervous system and to leave their forms. So the little life should at once begin a rhythmical movement. To give the infant his nourishment at exact and measured periods and to provide for his sleep, his bath, and the like, in the same careful way, is to impart his first lessons of obedience.1 Seen and Heard 41 A d u l t S u p e r v i s i o n R e q u i r e d 42 Another clear summary of the behaviorist approach appears in a 1929 article, “How to Get Obedience”: “By discipline we mean the reasonable regulation and supervision of the fundamental habits of a child throughout all stages of his development and a consistent plan for having him obey simple rules such as regular meal-times, regular bed-times, training in elimination, eating what is placed before him, wearing the clothes that are provided, observing certain proprieties of conduct.”2 Activities of daily living such as eating, toileting, dressing, and sleep were presented as disciplinary challenges, and any difficulties presented by children in such matters were understood as disobedience. In popular advice literature, children...