Growing Up in America--Then and Now

By ROBERT COLES

The following Bicentennial Essay is the fifth in a series that will appear periodically into 1976 and will examine how we have changed in our 200 years.

Childhood in America 200 years ago began at home; boys and girls were born there, most likely delivered by a midwife or simply a neighbor woman. There were virtually no obstetricians. Commonly the infants were delivered in a room specifically set aside for the purpose: the "borning room"--much used because the children came one after the other and, alas, died far more often than is now the case. Historians estimate that year in, year out, about a third or more of all children died in infancy--in typhoid and smallpox epidemics, of diphtheria, dysentery and respiratory ailments. Measles exacted a frightful toll. And, of course, parents were helpless to do much except pray and wait. The medical "treatments" of the day were themselves a major source of sickness and even death: bloodletting, purging and bizarre concoctions.

For those children lucky enough to survive, life was not without its pleasures--and its points of similarity to the life of our own children. Two centuries ago, as with many of us, a child's birth was an occasion of pride. Christening blankets were a traditional gift; often quotations from Scripture were embroidered on them, and they were handed down over the generations. The children were breast-fed--or if their parents were rich and interested in emulating the latest London trend, a wet nurse was hired. The child was wrapped in "flannel sheets," as the homespun blankets or quilts were usually called, and bedded in a cradle; diapers in the modern sense were unknown.

When the children were old enough to begin walking, they were helped out by a colonial version of a gocart. They were also put in a "standing stool," a small playpen of sorts. Bathing, as we practice it, was unknown. The bowl and pitcher were available, but children were not constantly washed and covered with powder or oil. As for play, some of the sterner, Puritanical parents were suspicious of games--especially so in New England --and indeed of anything that prompted laughter and enjoyment. Nevertheless, children were permitted to play sports, receive toys and in general behave at times rather like our own children do today. In colonial America girls had dolls, crude or simple ones, elaborately dressed and expensive ones. Boys rolled marbles and obtained jackknives as they became older. Both boys and girls had drums and hobbyhorses, tops and small animals carved out of wood, and alphabet blocks, not unlike the kind our own children still use. And colonial children played the same games some 20th century American children do: hopscotch, tag, blindman's buff, dominoes, cards. Slowly, as with our own boys and girls, hobbies, diversions or games became unintentionally educational in nature, as children copied adult activities, learning their "position" in society, a position then as now connected to one's sex, race and "background." Boys went fishing or hunting; girls played "house" and not incidentally learned to cook. The children of slaves learned to wait on other (white) children, as well as assist their parents in various menial tasks. Children of the rich were given dancing lessons, learned how to eat, dress, walk, talk in the proper way and, not least, how to give orders and receive the lavish attention and regard of others. There were sleigh riding and ice skating in the Northern colonies, and in the South cockfighting, which was not considered unfit for the eyes of children. In fact, children all over the colonies were taken to watch the public execution of criminals --another "educational" diversion.

As for education proper, the variations were wide. Of course, there was no widespread, relatively uniform public school system. In the rural areas and on the frontier, children were apprenticed early or simply worked alongside their parents at farming or housekeeping. Most city children in the North went to schools--but for varying lengths of time. Tutors were often an alternative in the South where distances between plantations made public schools impractical. Private schools were founded to serve the interests of those who wanted their children taught intensively and maybe with a particular religious point of view. In New England, parents had several options: keep the child at home, apprentice him, tutor him or her--or send him off to school. The schools were not, by and large, free. Nor were they compulsory in the sense that every child in a certain area had to attend them. Some fortunate boys were educated in grammar schools with college in mind: they studied the Bible, Erasmus, Aesop, Ovid, Cicero, Vergil, Homer, Hesiod; Latin and Greek. Above all, there was what might be called a strongly moral education. Such an education for the colonists was by definition religious--God's will made known to the child.

The very notion of childhood was rather different from our notion of it. Children were dressed in smaller versions of adult clothes and, from the toddler stage on, were taught to obey their parents, pray long and hard to God--and fear his retribution. The father ruled the family, handing down orders to wife and children alike. The minister's words were given enormous respect. Church lasted many hours, not one, and was very much at the center of the family's life. Children were not coaxed, begged, bargained with; they were told and expected to respond immediately. Hell was believed to exist and to be full of properly suffering sinners. Even the most gentle and kind of parents feared hell for themselves and for their children, unless they learned to abide by the Ten Commandments and Christ's teaching.

Not that there was no gentleness and compassion shown children. Even Cotton Mather, that stern Calvinist moralist, loved his children and tried to be attentive and considerate toward them; certainly he showed them affection and even a humorous side of his personality. But especially in New England, children were held to strict account. A parent's love was measured by his or her sternness, though historical accounts show mothers less demanding and more acquiescent than fathers--and Southerners far more easygoing than Northerners. In fact, among the Southern gentry, children were virtually handed over to an assorted collection of nurses, tutors and servants who catered to their needs, taught them good manners and civility, how to ride, hunt, shoot, how to read the contemporary equivalent (the classics) of the right books. Usually the children were brought in to be with their parents for only an hour or two at night.

In 1975 it is obviously quite another matter for a child born in America, though by no means is there now a uniform childhood for all. Although our infant mortality rate is higher than that of many Western democracies, it is still overwhelmingly likely (984.5 chances out of 1,000) that a child born in this country will survive infancy. Longevity has more than doubled in two centuries, and so has the duration of childhood. In 1775 a boy or girl of seven or eight, especially if his or her parents were not very well off (and few were), might already be learning a trade or working in the field, or cooking and cleaning and taking care of even younger children. The usual age of students who entered college was 15 or even less. Young people married quite early and began to have children immediately. Now childhood extends, arguably, into the end of the second decade of life. The concept of "adolescence" is ours--and was unknown to colonial parents. Our children are increasingly likely to have been carefully chosen--in the sense that contraceptive devices and pills, along with legalized abortion, have separated sex from the inevitability of childbearing. Families are smaller. Children are by no means hurried into adult responsibilities. In fact, they are granted not only special foods, special doctors, but also a separate and distinct psychology and morality to which the grownup world is urged (moralistically) to accommodate itself--or else. The nearest we come to Satan and his hell is for a child to be cursed by the demon of neurosis or worse. Parents address themselves to that threat by resorting to a psychiatrist rather than prayer and ministerial guidance.

More than the people of any other country in the world, Americans in 1975 publicly talk about and worry about their children. We have the overwhelming majority of the world's child psychologists and child psychiatrists. Our universities and, increasingly, our high schools devote themselves to a proliferation of courses in child development. Journalists offer daily newspaper advice on child rearing. Books (and there are dozens of them) like those written by Dr. Spock attract an enormous, eager and sometimes all too gullible readership. The prevailing concern of parents is not what the child ought to believe and live up to (in the way of standards, rock-bottom beliefs, a religious faith) but what is "best" for the child. Every effort is made to "understand" children, even infants under one: what is going on in their minds and how we might get "closer" to them, become more "empathetic" toward them, succeed in "helping" them along--through various "periods," "crises," and so on.

Of course, there are exceptions; among hundreds of thousands of black, Chicano and Indian families, among many of Appalachia's people and in our urban ghettos, which seem to grow and grow, one finds children who are hungry, malnourished, plagued by a variety of untreated illnesses and certainly not catered to--not at home, not at school, not in the neighborhood. There are even children in this country in this century who are born in circumstances no better than those obtained in 1775. If medical knowledge was, at best, primitive at the time of the American Revolution, the first-rate medical care now available for pregnant women and children is of no consequence at all for many migrant farm families or black tenant farmers or poor white people up the hollows of West Virginia and Kentucky or Indians on various reservations. I have worked with children who were delivered under the saddest and most dangerous conditions --delivered not even by midwives but by a nearby friend or neighbor of their mother, and in cabins that lacked running water, electricity, even a semblance of decent sanitation. Those same children never see a doctor, often go only fitfully to school, experience a confused, harassed and in some cases uprooted childhood, and have a life expectancy much lower than that of other children. Their parents are not "child-centered"; their parents are frightened, vulnerable, grim and themselves hungry, jobless, constantly apprehensive. It is one thing to live in a world that altogether lacks good sanitation, electricity or good medical care, as did colonial Americans, but in compensation to feel the self-respect that goes with being an accepted and welcome member of a particular community. It is quite another thing to watch one's children suffer and live extremely marginal lives while other children have quite different, vastly better prospects.

If the poor are lucky to get by from day to day, middle-class parents have their eyes on something else--the future, which becomes concretely symbolized in the child: through him, through her, one can get hold of the future, secure it, possess it, mold it, ensure it. With the decline of religion and an increasing affluence, the happiness, security and welfare of children become for many a major obsession which, in turn, has a broad and strong impact on the way children look, play, get educated and, not least, are treated at home. In our middle-class suburbs, infants and children often have more toys and gadgets, more clothes than they or their parents know what to do with. Often those children have more food, too, than their bodies can effectively use--with obesity the result. After 15 years of work with the children of America's poor and working-class families, I have, in recent years, been getting to know boys and girls of affluent parents, and it has been some adjustment for me--especially when I have heard mothers and fathers of even nursery-school children talk about what they want from a school, what they hope to see happen in a school. The answer, in a word, is everything--loving attention, learning that competes successfully with that offered anywhere else, character building, athletic excellence and, of course, psychological health (whatever that is).

In fact, for many parents, there is an ironic duality to their family life: on the one hand, a desire that children have the "best," and on the other hand a willingness to turn to others in order to make sure that such an objective is realized. Those others are doctors, teachers, camp counselors, "experts" of various kinds; they are the men and women who, it is hoped, will year by year work on a child, make him or her stronger, sounder, more ambitious, more effective, more competent--better able to get ahead and, very important, able to "cut the mustard," meaning deal with the difficulties and obstacles that present themselves to people in a highly advanced and still quite competitive society. In the background lurks fear: Will my child lose, will he or she slip back, will the result be failure, real or imaginary? No admission to schools like A or B, no acceptance at colleges like X or Y and, long before that, a lack of success at the hurdles of tennis and baseball, camp activities or a first dance? For many children, the problem is not how to survive, as it was 200 years ago, or even how to enjoy an already comfortable life, but how to make sense of an avalanche of possessions, opportunities, possibilities--all of which, in turn, generate demands such as no other children have ever had to face.

It is one matter when a child learns to fight his or her way out of poverty or insecurity and up, up, up. It is quite another matter when a child is taught to behave in a certain way, to go to certain schools or camps and get along at them in a certain way, because that is what a healthy, welladjusted, "successful" child or youth manages to do. One mother, the wife of a well-to-do lawyer, has spoken to me repeatedly of her concern for her children. She knows they will probably find reasonably worthwhile jobs or professions when they are older. But she wants more from them--high competence, excellence, repeated demonstrations of academic and social success, because, of all things, such achievements would "prove" that the children have been brought up wisely, and are, as a consequence, quite "happy." When one asks her what, indeed, happiness is, the circularity of her thinking comes across quickly: happiness for a child is the knowledge that various challenges have been met, hence a feeling of accomplishment and, very important, the respect of others.

In a curious way, there is a distinct continuity between colonial America's notion of what children ought to be like and our present-day "enlightened" and "emancipated" notion. The Puritans saw evil everywhere, not excluding the minds of children. A child who obeyed his parents and spoke tactfully and courteously was a child whose behavior attested to his parents' Christian virtues. The parents had recognized sin in their boys and girls and fought it (relatively) and subdued it (mostly). By the same token, today's parents also strive hard to be found among the elect. That includes those who have read their Spock (in revolutionary days it was the philosopher John Locke who had all kinds of advice about child rearing) and have sought out the best psychological methods or techniques for handling their young children, the best "learning environments" for educating them--and having done so, been found winners. The children of these elect "cope" well, "adapt" well, are able to assert themselves without "anxiety," get along with others without too much "frustration." In both instances one detects at least a thread or two of Utopian thinking. Whether it be prayer and Christian piety or psychological "insight" and the "sensitivity" that is offered in "groups" or by individual experts, the point is to apply what one has been trying to obtain (God's grace, a psychiatrist's knowledge) to children. Thereby one builds something that lasts longer than a particular lifetime: the "New Jerusalem" or the "better, happier world" that several generations of people have hoped to build here in America.

Many of our contemporary educational problems and controversies can be understood as part of a persisting American ideological commitment to success--to a firm belief in its possibility, to a desire for proof of its achievement, here and now. Even Cotton Mather, no pagan hedonist or crass materialist or psychologically "oriented" suburbanite, wanted his children to prosper--and saw in such a fate for them a realization of himself. Today many of us fight for our children as if it were heaven itself we have in mind as we roll up our sleeves or bare our teeth. If public schools lack certain qualities, then one must find them in private schools. If a particular community cannot provide what the child "needs," one must move elsewhere, or turn to various levels of political authority in urgent protest. If one book fails, or one educational philosophy, or one guru's written or spoken words, we do not become apathetic or skeptical or wryly amused; we do not turn to ourselves, and assume our own sovereignty, so to speak, as human beings who have a right, even an obligation, to hold on to certain ethical propositions, beliefs, standards--even at a sacrifice. Rather, we become restless, feel dissatisfied with someone or something "out there," and immediately undertake yet another search: so-and-so's new theory; a school that is radically different; or, in another direction, a school that won't give in to recent and suspect innovations. The men and women who settled this country in the 17th century and fought for its independence in the 18th century hoped that if they held themselves to account, worked hard and demanded much of their children, salvation would eventually come and, too, be anticipated by signs here on earth: the obedient, pious child as a prophet. We have yet to relinquish that role for our children; they may not forecast heaven or hell for us, but they are all we seem to feel we have--and our obsession with them may be our way of saying that we place little stock in the lasting value of everything else we have, often in such abundance.

Not that preoccupations do not undergo a change in character over time. Many parents today have become disenchanted with endless psychological explanation and proscriptions. The phenomenon of permissiveness was, to a degree, real, and not simply a cleverly used political epithet. Dr. Spock has acknowledged that perhaps he ought to have advised more firmness toward children at certain points in their lives. Anna Freud, the founding and guiding spirit of child psychoanalysis, has acknowledged a definite faddish element in the name of her own discipline. Right now the nature of America's future is in question; we are no longer indisputably the world's strongest power, with an apparently limitless supply of resources. As a result, the nation must begin acting more circumspectly, with more self-control and a greater willingness to live with ambiguities rather than attempt to come up with clean-cut solutions to every problem everywhere. By the same token, an increasing number of our parents are finding it possible to set limits on their children, to ask of them as well as give to them, and to regard them more realistically--as messengers of hope but not by any means guarantors of a near-perfect world to come.

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