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

4. Mixed Messages about Responsibility: Children’s Duties and the Work of Parenting

Chapter 4 Mixed Messages about Responsibility Children’s Duties and the Work of Parenting I have looked online for different [chore] charts, chart systems for the kids. One of my daughters actually made up a chart, not that anybody has looked at it one time yet. But it is there. It is exhausting trying to implement it for me. —Deborah [My biggest challenge is] just trying to get children to be self-motivated. That is real difficult for us in our household. To get our children to be self-motivated is constantly, “Did you do this? Did you do that? Your lunch is on the table. If I had not said anything you would have been going off to school and I would have had to bring it to you.” That kind of thing is really just having to be alert and focused. I know they are young but I did not come home from school and have my parents sit down with me and say, “Okay, let’s do homework.” I just did it. So to me that is really, really stressful. —Naomi In this chapter, I explore the decreased recognition of children as public participants and contributors through the twentiethcentury cultural construction of childhood as a period of sharply limited responsibility. At the beginning of the twentieth century, American culture was accepting the notion that the proper social role of children was not work, but education. Even taking into account this starting point, popular advice reveals substantial historical changes in children’s opportunities to experience meaningful independence and responsibility 89 in their homes and communities. To be sure, children do still have many duties: they are required to go to school and do homework; many are expected to help out at home by doing chores; increasingly, children and youth are required to perform community service; and for a growing number of children, even extracurricular “leisure” activities can become one more “have to” in busy schedules. Although children’s lives are full of duties, I argue, however, that contemporary parenting advice offers very mixed messages about these duties; while advice claims that children need to be responsible, suggestions undermine those opportunities to demonstrate responsibility with a persistent focus on necessary adult supervision. This advice, then, contributes to the very limited public recognition of children as capable members of their communities who might make autonomous and meaningful contributions to the common welfare. Sociologist Viviana Zelizer describes a major transformation that took place in the social valuation of children at the turn of the last century , as the “economically useful” child of the nineteenth century was replaced in the twentieth century by the “economically useless but emotionally priceless” child.1 Zelizer argues that this transformation, which included an intense battle over child labor, was about not only changing economic interests but also new cultural understandings of childhood as children were sentimentalized and sacralized. By the beginning of the twentieth century, middle-class childhood was already well-established as economically unproductive, and by 1930 legislation prohibited most forms of child labor, thereby establishing working-class and poor children , too, as “useless.” Prohibitions on child labor and the advent of mass schooling greatly altered most children’s experience of childhood by establishing it as a period of education and training for future productivity . In the popular parenting advice I examine, it is clear that from the beginning of the twentieth century the transformation from child worker to child scholar was complete in the middle-class family ideal. These magazines include very few references to children’s paid work. Some discussions of paid work, like a 1966 article titled “Girl Dropouts,” problematize paid work as a barrier to sufficient education, explaining that “a few years ago a girl could drop out of school and drop into a job. Today automation is steadily decreasing the number of unskilled A d u l t S u p e r v i s i o n R e q u i r e d 90 jobs—the kinds that don’t require a high-school education or special training.”2 Most other articles that mention paid work acknowledge that kids need ways to earn spending money, but that their opportunities for earning money are severely limited. For example, a 2006 Good Housekeeping article featured “Jobs for Kids,” explaining: “Lots of jobs aren’t open to kids until they turn 16. So what if your child...