Through the Eyes Of Children

By LANCE MORROW

Saturday morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young the music issued at the lips . . . Cardiff Hill, beyond the village and above it, was green with vegetation, and it lay just far enough away to seem a Delectable Land, dreamy, reposeful and inviting.

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush . . .

-- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

CHILDHOOD: THE DELECTABLE LAND. Like Cardiff Hill, it lies just far enough away from the adult mind to be dreamy, to shimmer with a sentimental abstraction -- if one does not recall it too precisely. Childhood, where everyone begins, has the power of myth. Big people are gods, and the world is magic -- or terrifying.

Like myths of Eden, the stories of Huck and Tom endure in the American imagination. But they have a dark side too. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck's journey in the Delectable Land is also a drama of alcoholism, child abuse, young runaways, social breakdown, violence, hypocrisy, racism and a child's struggle to understand right and wrong in a society that has lost its bearings. Huckleberry Finn is still the best book about American childhood, as contemporary as a milk carton bearing the photograph of a missing child.

Only sentimentalists have ever considered childhood to be a kingdom of untroubled innocence. Today there is more trouble for children and less time for innocence than in recent generations. The problem is not so much that children have changed. The world has changed. Writes Dr. Robert Coles, a psychiatrist and author who has studied the lives of the young for more than 30 years: "Children have always been, and still are, a mirror to us -- ourselves writ small." Ourselves have changed.

It is both the best and the worst of times for children. Their world contains powers and perspectives inconceivable to a child 50 years ago: computers; longer life expectancies; the entire planet accessible through television, satellites, air travel. But so much knowledge and choice can be chaotic and dangerous. School curriculums have been adapted to teach about new topics: AIDS, ADOLESCENT SUICIDE, DRUG AND ALCOHOL ABUSE, INCEST. Trust is the child's natural inclination, but the world has become untrustworthy. The hazards of the adult world, its sometimes fatal temptations, descend upon children so early that the ideal of childhood is demolished.

Crack, for example, is far more addictive and deadly than marijuana, the drug of a different generation. Strange fragments of violence come flashing out of the television set and lodge in minds too young to understand them. In New York City a five-year-old and his friend argue about 1) whether there is a Santa Claus and 2) what Liberace died of. In New Orleans a boy in first grade shaves chalk and passes it around the classroom, pretending it is cocaine.

The messages are powerful and contradictory. Rock videos suggest orgiastic sex. Public health officials counsel "safe sex." Prudence -- and morality -- would recommend no sex to children, who have no clear idea of what sex is anyway. Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue conduct seminars on such subjects as lesbian nuns, exotic drugs, transsexual surgery, serial murders. Television pours into the imaginations of children a bizarre version of reality. But TV has a certain authority in loco parentis. It is there when the kids come home.

Every stable society transmits values from one generation to the next. That is the work of civilization. In the Freudian scheme, it means the construction of a strong ego and superego above the dark basement of the id. Today in American culture, the barbarous id is both powerful and profitable (in the drug underworld and the entertainment industry, for example). The transmission of values is more difficult. Today's parents are often raising children in a world far removed from their own memories of childhood.

Thirty years ago, in the era of Ozzie and Harriet, two out of three American families consisted of a breadwinner, known as Dad, and a mother, known as Mom, and the children they both were raising. Today fewer than one in five families fits that description.

Children have lost status in the world. Teachers have endured a long decline in public esteem. Day-care workers rarely earn a living wage. The role of mother is being rewritten, and that of father as well. A generation of children is being raised in the midst of a redefinition of parenting. Childhood has become a kind of experiment.

Cant phrases, such as "quality time," have found their way into the vocabulary. A motif of absence -- moral, emotional and physical -- plays through the lives of many children now. It may be an absence of authority and limits, or of emotional commitment. A mother writes in the New York Times: "What I see emerging is an entirely new category of professionals who spend little, if any, time with their children. There appears to be a new form of neglect: absence ... Recently my six-year-old daughter exclaimed, 'Look, Mom, Sarah has a new babysitter.' The 'babysitter' was Sarah's mother."

American parents have not suddenly grown malicious or indifferent. Many are at the mercy of economic changes. Today 50% of working mothers have husbands earning less than $20,000 a year. To support a family, buy a house and prepare for a child's future education, two incomes become essential. More than half of women with children younger than three years old work outside the home. But because society, and especially the workplace, has not caught up with these changes, the job of raising children has become more complicated.

Growing up has always been difficult. Today it is difficult in unprecedented ways. For the 52.4 million American children 14 and under, the terrain is strange and forbidding. Perplexed parents, finding their own childhoods seemingly irrelevant to the task, are left to improvise.

But examining the changed shape of childhood may allow parents and children alike to understand it better. Each childhood is distinctive, the first chapter of a new biography in the world, and its truth is in the individual details. What follows is stories gathered by Boston Correspondent Melissa Ludtke over a period of four months, stories of five children trying to grow up in America in the late 1980s.