Rethinking Childhood

Introduction: The Imperative and the Process for Rethinking Childhood

Introduction 1 1 OUR ATTEMPT IN this book to rethink childhood is based on assumptions about why such a project is necessary at this point in history and about how such a project can be carried out. Once our purpose and methodology were determined, we could find the common underlying themes of our work, could decide on the kinds of questions that need to be asked, and could reflect on what exactly we are looking at when we study children and childhood. Why Rethink Childhood? The need for rethinking childhood grows out of both our social ambivalence about children and the particular problems children face in society today. SOCIAL AMBIVALENCE ABOUT CHILDHOOD The year is 1912; the setting is Scene 3 of The Music Man. Professor Harold Hill is warning the citizens of River City, Iowa, that their children are headed toward a decadent and unpromising future. He tells them, in his best apocalyptic voice, that they fail their children when they refuse to recognize the moral bomb ticking in their midst: a pool table has just been installed in the local café. Professor Hill is a traveling salesman. He knows the way to make his living as a total stranger in town: “First you shake them up, then you shake them down.”1 Adults perennially get shaken up—feeling something between anxiety and despair—when they confront disturbing trends in the present and contemplate the uncertain futures of their children. Sadly, their troubled thoughts are often fully warranted. Violence happens to children, whether imposed by strangers, acquaintances, friends, or family members. Children become the innocent The Imperative and the Process for Introduction Rethinking Childhood PETER B. PUFALL RICHARD P. UNSWORTH 2 PETER B. PUFALL AND RICHARD P. UNSWORTH victims of other persons’ HIV infections. Advertisers focus on children as a market and persuade them to buy the goods and accompanying life-style that are pitched to them. In some nations, children are drafted into the military, handed guns, then frightened into using them. And everywhere, being sure of their invulnerability , children themselves frequently abandon good sense in favor of testing the limits, only to discover that living beyond limits can exact a high price. Yet in the face of these vulnerabilities, the human race continues to set great store by its children’s potential, counting on them to restore a measure of the justice and civility that has been eroded from society by their parents’ generation . When the prophet Isaiah speaks his memorable vision of the “Peaceable Kingdom,” where the lion lies down with the lamb, his recitation ends with the epigram “and a little child shall lead them.” That view of the child has a certain power to stir hope. In the process, however, it has led some to romanticize children by portraying them as embodiments of innocence, as did the American painter Edward Hicks in his Peaceable Kingdom series. In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1755) viewed children as “noble savages” whose inherent sense of morality could be either enhanced or corrupted. But Isaiah’s insight still has power. It resists the idealization of children as innocent exemplars of a return to well-being by the whole natural world. Rethinking childhood makes sense only when it is not driven either by our fears or by our idealizing visions. It is not a call to a romantic view of children that equates respect and active listening with handing over the keys to the kingdom . Rethinking requires a thorough examination of the validity of both sides of this apparent ambivalence in society’s estimation of its children—patronizing on the one hand and idealizing on the other. It is a challenge to understand children as they are and where they are by listening to them and understanding the ways in which they act to create their own futures. This vacillation between darker and lighter estimates of children and childhood has been around from time immemorial. So rethinking childhood is hardly new; it is a perpetual experience and a perpetual challenge. Why then write a book with such a title? The reason is both simple and complex. The simple part is the fact that our puzzlement about childhood never quite subsides. It begins anew whenever the child grows up and has a child. As Erikson (1963) observed, when family works, infant and parent form a healthy attachment. The child has the first experience of trust, and the parent experiences a rebound of hope. But the...