A Child's Christmas in America

God rest you, merry Innocents,

While innocence endures,

A sweeter Christmas than we to ours

May you bequeath to yours.

-Ogden Nash, A Carol for Children

Who are these heirs and assigns of the season? Their identities are as varied as their geographies. A few Christmas candids:

-- In Seattle, a four-year-old boy tries on a surgical mask for the role of doctor. Instead of playing nurse, a little girl assumes a doctor's mask herself. The boy glowers, and she asks, "Why not?" There is no reply. They begin to operate on a broken doll.

-- In St. Louis, ten-year-olds suit up for karate class. "This will teach you inner discipline," says their teacher. "Gonna teach 'em not to rip me off," murmurs a disciple. "Like A Clockwork Orange."

> In Brooklyn, a boy scarcely old enough to go to school composes a graffito with a spray can against a handball court. The word: NIXON-with the X in the form of a swastika.

-In Anaheim, Calif., a group of preschoolers ponder the wonders of Disneyland. "I'm going to live here when I grow up," one of them vows. Why? "Not a pollution anywhere."

-In Detroit, a small child is admitted to the hospital, his eyes swollen with blows, his mouth devoid of front teeth. The assailant: his mother.

> In Westchester, N.Y., an eleven-year-old technical director announces: "You're on." The television camera begins to hum, and some ten-year-olds start their little-league Today Show: a closed-circuit broadcast to their schoolmates.

-In the Amish country of Pennsylvania, a family sits down, as it has for four generations, to a holiday dinner. All of them have arrived by the same sort of vehicle: a horse-drawn carriage.

-- In a California commune, the children celebrate not by decorating a tree but by planting one, then singing the un-Christmas carol Shantih, Shantih, Shantih around the seedling.

The American child is in fact many children; most are firmly rooted in their own time, a few wandering in the 19th and 21st centuries. Sylvia Ashton-Warner, a New Zealander who recently taught five-year-olds in Colorado, finds U.S. children "the advance guard of technology, with their long legs, proud faces and elongated bodies, the thrice great brains." But living as they are at what she calls "the spearpoint" of civilization, bombarded by TV and stereo sounds, they are becoming, she says, "psychic mutants."

Few observers go so far as to characterize American children as totally new beings, but they are living in an epoch when even the basic assumptions can no longer be taken for granted. It is a time when sexual roles are no longer sharply delineated. It is a time of assaulted institutions, among others the family, which has long since become in Margaret Mead's words, "totally isolated, desperately autonomous." When a family exists at all, that is.

It is a time of crime by and toward juveniles, when the battered child has risen from incident to epidemic. It is a time when the behavioral pendulum is swinging uncertainly from permissiveness toward discipline. It is a time when the mere mention of Watergate brings unaccustomed cynicism to schoolyard conversations. It is a time when children are being warned against the ecological dangers of having children of their own when they grow up, when they are hearing almost as much about ZPG as about ABC.

Not long ago Columnist Art Buchwald wrote humorously of a day when a poll would show that 67% of all adults over 30 years of age "said they would rather have a good time than have children." Something like that may be happening. For whatever reasons, personal, political, economic (it costs $34,500 to support a middle-class child to college age), the birth rate has fallen to the lowest level in U.S. history. In one year, from 1971 to 1972, the number of live births declined by 9%, to 15.6 per 1,000 population. This year it dropped to 15.1. Childless couples, customarily quiet about their choice, now proudly call themselves "child free" and are the subject of interviews. "I don't see many children who want to be with their parents more than a dutiful hour or two," one child-free mother explained.

Many fathers and mothers today see themselves more as individuals and less as just parents, according to Detroit Psychoanalyst Peter Martin. And says Cornell Psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner: "The growing number of divorces is now accompanied by a new phenomenon: the unwillingness of either parent to take custody of the child." All this suggests that the U.S. is beginning to be less child centered than it used to be.

But the American child is still the focus of attention for armies of psychologists as well as teachers and parents. At Christmas, 1973, these are some of the forces they see affecting the American child:

WORKING MOTHERS. According to Psychologist Kenneth Keniston, the most recent dramatic event in the history of the American family is the entrance of large numbers of women into the work force. Almost half the mothers in the U.S. now work outside the home (one in every three mothers with children under six). Meanwhile, the number of live-in relatives who could care for the children has drastically decreased, while the cost of baby sitters and nurses has soared. Thus the new emphasis on proliferating day-care centers, good, bad and mediocre.

Ironically, the exodus of mothers from the home coincides with a spate of new studies on the importance of the first few months and years of childhood. The most important of these is an unfinished trilogy by British Psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who has devoted most of his life and over 800 pages to demonstrating the need for little children to have a consistent mother figure. "Formerly, adolescence was thought to be the most critical age; the very early years are now being recognized as such," says Jane Judge, director of Sarah Lawrence College's Early Childhood Center. Can day-care centers serve babies well? The debate rages. Pediatrician Benjamin Spock tends to think not. Dr. Virginia Pomeranz, a Manhattan baby doctor, thinks so. "I haven't noticed any ill effects whatsoever except for an increase in the number of colds they catch."

BROKEN FAMILIES. The notion of the American family as a mommy, a daddy and 2.4 towheads may always have been a confection of Norman Rockwell. Today it looks particularly fictitious. As divorce rates rise (one in four marriages now breaks up), single-parent families become increasingly common. In 1970 a fourth of all children were living with only one parent, almost twice the number who were doing so ten years ago. Over the same period, reports Bronfenbrenner, the number of families headed by women who have never been married has tripled. There are almost a million (out of 54.3 million families in the U.S.). "Children's literature, schools, toys, movies, and of course TV bombard children with images of mom and daddy, daddy at work, mommy in the kitchen. How does the single mother deal with this situation?" asks the new magazine MOMMA, aimed at the nation's 7,000,000 mothers-unmarried, separated, widowed or divorced-who are living alone with their children. How do the children react? Said one California eight-year-old whose parents were getting a divorce: "Families are good when they get along but they are not when they make children cry."

Many teachers and psychologists report increasing tension in classrooms and on playgrounds. Says Peggy Harris, first-grade teacher at Edward Devotion School in Brookline, Mass.: "It is very difficult to have a classroom situation in which the kids all sit down and do something together, which you could do if not five, then ten years ago. The children today tend to be very much more upset. The teacher has to be very understanding of the problems that the children have to deal with at home."

POLITICAL CYNICISM. The fatuities and corruption in high places are not beyond the grasp of even the smallest U.S. children. "My daddy said they would arrest me if I said again what I think of Mr. Nixon," said an eleven-year-old in Atlanta. "But Presidents don't lie," a confused five-year-old Californian told his father. Says Robert Wayne Jones, child psychologist at Georgia State University: Watergate has led children to believe "politicians are the guys we don't want to be like."

New York Child Psychologist Rita Frankiel is harsher: "Our political fathers are failing kids today," she says. "The values that one strives for in one's self and encourages in one's children are corrupted in the highest places." As proof she cites the child thief who asked, "Why not? Mr. Agnew did it."

Even on the lowest level, kids have begun to treat politics the way Johnny Carson does. Among preteens, a favorite magazine is Mad, with its juvenile japes on the themes of the Watergate follies ("Nixxon-the same old gas").

VORACIOUS CONSUMERS. Children have long been enthusiastic collectors of bottles, tin cans and newspapers for neighborhood recycling efforts. Some enjoy "survival" classes, finding acorns in the woods and grinding them into flour-in comfortable, all-electric kitchens. Like their elders, they are beginning to be aware of the new shortages ("Next winter we might all freeze to death") and they have their own solutions. Suggested a first-grader: "When the astronauts get all those pictures, then we can sell them and get money and pay it to the Arabs for oil."

Yet the new "use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without" philosophy that inspired some of the young in the '60s has not yet kept the kids from being voracious consumers. "Can't really remember what I want for Christmas. There are so many things," said a six-year-old. Remarked her teacher: "It's unbelievable how much they've already had. In their own way, they are looking for their next high."

In department stores, magic sets are big along with ten-speed bikes and all sorts of arts and crafts, including candlemaking outfits. Boys want Evel Knievel ($ 15) as well as Big Jim and Big Jack dolls, and girls ask for Baby Alice, a creature who eats gel, which then comes out on its diaper, and a Barbie doll with a real hair dryer run by batteries ($15). The subteen set also wants records: the Osmond Brothers, David Cassidy, The Jackson 5, Andy and David Williams, and the Carpenters. Unlike their hard-rock counterparts, the young idols come on as shy homebodies, and their songs tend to be sweet and wholesome, like Rick Springfield's latest: "Cos having someone believe in me,/ Is all I need to know."

DECLINE OF RELIGION. In the '40s, the slogan was broadcast nationwide:

THE FAMILY THAT PRAYS TOGETHER

STAYS TOGETHER. But the family has become fragmented, and so has the sense of religious continuity. Today, Catholic parochial school attendance totals 2,870,859 pupils in grades one through eight. That compares with 3,606,168 just three years ago, and some 4.5 million only a decade ago. The American Association for Jewish Education admits to a decline of 17.5% in synagogue class enrollment between 1966 and the beginning of the '70s. In Protestantism, save for the most conservative congregations, church and Sunday school attendance have dropped sharply.

FAILING SCHOOLS. The schools, on the whole, seem to be serving middle-class children well. But in the inner cities, the all too familiar results are dismal. Explains Psychiatrist Robert Coles, who has made a study of the "children of poverty": "Many ghetto schoolteachers will tell you, if you interview them directly, that they see little hope for their pupils. Why, then, make a herculean effort? These children will be leaving school anyway, with little future ahead of them. What a contrast to the warmth and hopefulness of the teacher in the middle-class suburb!" Most schools, says Ron Edmonds, director of Harvard's Center for Urban Studies, act on the theory that "incoming social class is the principal predictor of pupil performance. If the child does not learn, say the educators, then it is not the fault of the school. I do not think it is possible for poor people to change in the way the schools want them to," Edmonds theorizes. "To feed, clothe, sustain a child in conformity to the stereotype middle-class expectations takes more money than most poor people can hope to have. Clearly we arrive at an impasse, given the economic and political reality in this country."

The economic and political reality suffered yet another wrench when President Nixon dismantled the Great Society programs that contained provisions for child development and family services.

CHANGING SEXUAL ROLES. One of the most heartening aspects of recent years, says Harvard Developmental Psychologist Jerome Kagan, is the "removal from children of the inhibitions and timidity that have been an unfair burden for Western women-the freeing up of sex consciousness. In this sense children under ten are less anxious than their counterparts of a century ago."

Lollipop Power and other groups dedicated to expunging sexist stereotypes from children's literature are hard at work. Even the popular, didactic Doctor Seuss has been taken to task for portraying all his animals-even hens-as male, and for giving only one woman an occupation: the royal laundress in Bartholomew and the Oobleck. Many textbooks are being rewritten to erase sexist bias (TIME, Nov. 5), and in real life children and parents are coping -sometimes ludicrously-with the change as best they can.

Lelia Taratus, 9, the daughter of an Atlanta orthodontist, wears jeans and plays football with the boys at recess three days a week. But she has also made a deal with her mother to wear a dress and play with the girls the other two days. Dr. Spock is reordering the pronouns in his classic book Baby and Child Care, but he has a few qualms about rearing sons and daughters with minimal sex distinctions: "No country I know of has tried to bring them up to think of themselves as similar. Such an attempt would be the most unprecedented social experiment in the history of our species."

RETURN OF DISCIPLINE. Dr. Kagan believes that parents are confused about discipline. "They now believe at least in part that if you discipline a child you may be creating a well of guilt which will not contribute to his happiness." Therefore, he believes, discipline is still relaxed, as it has been since the '50s. However, Kagan predicts a change away from permissiveness as today's 19-year-olds start having children. "They will look back on their childhood and interpret part of their Angst to the fact that their parents seemed confused about what to teach them. And they will vow that this will not happen to their children."

Other observers believe that the swing back to stronger discipline has already occurred. Child Psychologist Zan-wil Sperber notes that "we are beyond do-good permissiveness," but are in a "very flux-y situation. Some people undoubtedly are going back to the idea of role-authoritarian discipline. That is when you say to a child, 'Why should you listen to me? Because I am your mother, that's why.' " Says Psychiatrist James Anthony: "There's definitely been a return of discipline. And with the emergence of a stronger parent has come 'the model child.'" To Anthony this spells trouble. "Personally I am much more worried about the quiet child than the rebellious child. The conformist child goes along for years, and then suddenly trouble comes in some big, dramatic action."

Perhaps the most marked change is not in outer but inner discipline-from the children themselves. Having seen the confusion of their older brothers and sisters over a lack of parental authority, kids seem to be seeking their own guidelines. The main concern of 12-year-old Alyce Maddox of Atlanta is typical. She has vowed not to become involved with kids who take drugs. "I'm not living my life that way," she says firmly.

Given such societal and family pressures, the American child often resembles Dr. Dolittle's pushmi-pullyu, the creature whose heads tugged it in opposite directions. It is scarcely any wonder that children, like their older and larger counterparts, seek more and more solace in the fictive world of TV (27 hours a week).

But despite the horrific panorama of television, with its free helpings of violence and the "gimmes" of commercials, the American child is more than a passive victim. Distrust of TV advertisements rises with age-and not every age watches the worst programs. For the first time since the invention of the transistor, TV is offering some attractive alternatives to Astroboy and Popeye. A generation has learned to spell with the Muppets of Sesame Street. The Electric Company has attracted an audience of millions-many of them parents who came to turn on the set and stayed to learn.

Moreover, kids are not quite the new illiterati that is widely supposed. Professor Robert Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College recently supervised a study of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test. The preschoolers of 1971-72 (both middle class and inner city) scored an average of ten points higher than their (solely middleclass) counterparts of the '30s. Says Thorndike: "Today's kids, in general, do better on tests, even with the '50s hoopla over Why Johnny Can't Read. The truth is, more Johnnies are reading better than 20,30,40 years ago." Unfortunately, however, many Johnnies do not continue to do so well when they go on to school.

Says Children's Book Critic Karla

Kuskin: "Each decade we hear that children are changing, pushed by new forces. Children's books come out on every conceivable adult subject: environment, racism, sexism, crime, homosexuality, drugs. Then we look at the lists of children's favorite books. And what's on it? Good old Nancy Drew. The Oz books. The Peanuts series. In many ways, it's the authors and publishers who have changed. The kids have kept their integrity."

Harvard's Kagan points out that "under ten nothing much has been changed. The child has the same concerns he always had: 'Do my parents accept me? Will I be accepted by my peers? Will I be beaten up? Am I afraid of the dark?' "

Poet Kenneth Koch teaches Manhattan children how to write poetry. (The poems accompanying the color spread are by his students.) Koch recalls: "When I began to teach I was reminded how intelligent kids are, that kids talk to animals-and that they are concerned with really important things which they usually won't tell an adult. They are concerned with the same things I'm concerned about-love and lost love, friendship, success, perceptions, and being liked-only perhaps more intensely." They are also nostalgic for the past, says Koch.

It is hardly surprising that The Waltons, a cosmeticized version of Depression childhood before the advent of the Now world, is one of childhood's favorite TV programs. Even for a fourth grader, nostalgia has value -particularly nostalgia for time before his birth.

Yet it is well to remember that the vanished world, as seen onscreen, is indeed a distortion of fact, an illusion sprinkled with Disney dust.

All our yesterdays were not an American dream. There were times when they verged upon nightmare. The children of the privileged, then as now, were surrounded by space and leisure and material goods. But the rest of the youthful nation struggled with rigid doctrines and dire economics. The status of children of the past was, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, that of "Foreigners. We treat them as such."

The realization that yesterday had its miseries does not make the present more pleasant. But it can aid parents -and children-to view themselves and their situation with something less than alarm. Despite the claims of disintegration and despair, the American child turns out to be a good deal more resilient than it at first appears.

A hundred years ago Henry James observed that being an American was a complex fate. Surely in contemporary society, being an American child is even more complex, more challenging and bewildering. Yet at Christmas, 1973, America could do far worse than listen to the notions, the insights, the needs -and even the fantasies-of its littlest and most traditional citizens. At Christmas 1973 it is well to remember that Ebenezer Scrooge himself was rescued by a dream and restored by a child.

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