American Behavioral History: An Introduction

2 The Cute Child and Modern American Parenting

2 The Cute Child and Modern American Parenting Gary Cross Few would immediately think of the “cute” as shaping modern parentchild relations and behavior. But the “cute”—defined as particular ways that children interact with adults, suggesting at once dependence and vulnerability as well as vitality, innocent charm, and impishness—has for a century been central to modern American child rearing. Of course, children , because they are new to most experiences and have few strong learned responses to these encounters, quite naturally behave similarly over time and place. To a degree, three-year-olds have always been “cute.” But until the twentieth century, they have seldom been represented as such in literature or visual arts. Even more, adults did not cultivate the “cute” in the young; instead, they seem to have punished or ignored it. A marker of modern child-adult relations is the adult expectation that children should be “cute.” Modern adults not only look for the “look” of the cute and encourage cute behavior in children, but, in many cases, cultivate cuteness in themselves and in their relationships with other adults. The cute challenges other behavioral modes, with important social and personal consequences . This is a behavior that cannot easily be explained by psychology but is instead a response that is rooted in social and cultural changes that appear only in the twentieth century. Evidence for the historically recent emergence of the cute is everywhere . Today we pose children for photographs (with about half of amateur photos featuring children), dress up toddler girls for beauty pageants, and are attracted to images of desiring and desirable children in about a third of advertisements, no matter the subject. We buy in the millions  photos of babies and toddlers dressed as bunnies or gazing out at the sea with outstretched arms in sheer delight. A century ago all this would have been considered strange, if not perverse and immoral. These images suggest that children are capable of wide-eyed wonder at what jaded adults no longer see or of blank-eyed indifference at what frightens, obsesses, or disgusts the experienced. Grownups often love the way that children look and respond, even though adults feel superior to their naiveté. The cute is far more than a curious obsession of modern Americans. It shapes family life, gender development of children, and even the identities of adults. The longing for “cuteness” permeates the life-changing decision to bear or adopt children. Having a child is so important that Americans spend two billion dollars a year on fertility drugs and test-tube fertilization . Childlessness is, for many, a tragedy, not for the traditional reasons— desire for an heir or for economic assistance—but because of the longing for the emotional satisfaction of evoking a child’s delight. Adoptions have steadily shifted since the 1930s, from the practical choice of the older productive child to the charming infant. A major part of adults’ relations with children is the attempt to evoke cute responses by giving children toys, dolls, and even Disney vacations. The longing for that look has helped to create mass demand for consumer goods and the transformation of holidays into rituals of giving to children. The cute also is expressed differently by gender. In boys, the “naughty” side of the cute is often a naive rebellion from domesticity and responsibility , while in girls that side is often coquettish, an innocent or unintended sensuality, and even sexuality. This contrast not only contributes to later gender identity but also explains why adults may respond to the cute in boys differently (often with great toleration) than the cute in girls. Cute behaviors often reappear in adults both as ways of winning positive responses from others (especially the opposite sex in courtship games), but also as a personal identity with appeals of its own. Sometimes called the Peter Pan Syndrome in popular psychology, the cute takes both adult male and female forms and contributes to a contemporary tendency to discount behavioral markers of maturity (responsibility, muted emotions, and deferred gratification). The adult longing for the cute in children seems to have led those children as they grew older to reject the cute for a rebellious culture of the cool. The cool today may mean simply a kind of cutting-edge fashion or, more subtly, emotional restraint. But here I am using it in the sense of the opposite of the parent’s cute, often a challenge to middle-class sensibilities.           [18.218.168.16] Project...