A certain calm seems to have descended recently on one of the most agitated frontiers of the social and psychological sciences—that of child-raising. The voices advocating extreme positions are stilled, and a note of moderate “common sense” prevails—or at any rate, only minor skirmishes are now reported on the battlefields. J. Glenn Gray here reviews a recent joint work combining contributions from the leading authorities in the field, and sketches the contour of the new solid land that seems to be emerging from the troubled waters.
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Responsible philosophies of history have declared that preoccupation with the training of the young may well be the most accurate index of a nation’s level of civilization. By that token, the existence of a vast and growing library in America on the care, indoctrination, and education of the young, in which every year of pre-adult life has been examined with loving and exacting attention, may be taken as eloquent testimony to the rising state of our culture, however complex and difficult a task it would seem to make parenthood today, as compared to an earlier day.
A significant addition to this library for present-day enlightened parents—perhaps we should say professional parents—is a recent volume prepared by the staff of the Child Study Association of America and edited by Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg, Our Children Today (Viking Press, 366 pp. $3.95), which presents a symposium of twenty-six authorities in the child-raising field.
It is probably wise to state at the outset that this book report makes no claim to be that of an authority appraising the work of twenty-six other authorities. Instead, this writer is a teacher dealing with what college people are pleased to call young adults away from home, and in his own domicile he helps with two little girls whose behavior frequently surpasses his comprehension. Hence his equipment for this task is, at best, what psychologists call a “motivated interest” in the subject and a close perusal of the expert opinions in Our Children Today, and, at worst, a penchant for piecing out his ignorance with strong opinions, doubtless no better grounded than most other people’s opinions.
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Those who are confident that they live in a golden age as regards the care and understanding of children will be pleased with the essays of Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Pearl Buck, whose contributions open and close this volume. Mrs. Fisher contrasts the methods of child care she remembers as a young mother with those recommended today and finds our advance is little short of miraculous. Pearl Buck, great optimist that she is, entitles her essay “At Home in the World,” and boldly affirms that “the realities of life are not sad or dreary. Life is good to the very last drop, and evil and sorrow and grief are part of the whole.” She feels that the problems of race, of equality between the sexes, and of war are the great challenges today, but holds that they can be conquered, provided our homes do not become places of refuge from these problems instead of the arena where the battle can be joined. “Let the life of the world stream through our homes and through us all, men and women who have children and teach children.”
But these are the affirmations of an older generation and so possibly it is the part of wisdom to be cautious about accepting them at face value. Are not these women privileged to view the prospect from too far above the battle, seeing their children’s children through the rosy haze not uncommon to grandparents? Be that as it may, the younger experts seem considerably less sanguine. Sidonie Gruenberg and Leona Baumgarten lead off for them with some sobering statistics and general analysis about family life and the situation of children in the United States. Thus, we learn that some four million of our youngsters live in broken homes, and two million more in institutions, with relatives, or with foster parents. There has been a 50 per cent increase from 1938 to 1948 in the number of children born out of wedlock. People marry younger today than ever before and mothers with less schooling bear the majority of the children. “One-half of the children under eighteen live in about one-sixth of the families, and these are the families with three or more children. In 1948, 47 out of 100 children were in families with incomes of less than three thousand dollars per year.” After this, one begins to see the danger of drawing conclusions from the upper middle class alone.
We are told that our children have never been so healthy as today. But to offset this, accidents have become the leading cause of death among persons who have not reached twenty years of age. While we have better schooling than ever before, over three million children of school age are still out of school. In nearly every community, school buildings are bursting at the seams and this situation is certain to get worse before it gets better. Our experts estimate that by 1960 a quarter of a million more teachers than we now have should be employed, but nothing like that number is in sight, and with teacher salaries what they are, there is next to no chance of getting them.
Nor is this all. All of us know that postwar United States is a land where people are on the move. In a representative year, 1948, the homes of over eight million children changed. Even when we learn this, few of us have enough imagination to realize what it means in terms of painful adjustments for parents and children. Small wonder that we find several of our younger authorities tempted to compare unfavorably the rootlessness of modern living with the “old village life” (but how many knew it?) in which our parents and grandparents felt sure they belonged. They contrast the restlessness and the loneliness of young mothers in cramped apartments with the old days of rambling houses, without the gadgets but with the maiden aunt, the grandmother, and the maid of all work (and again, how many were so fortunate?). They see the small family of today as a dubious gain over the large, unplanned families of old, where there was plenty of margin for error, often beneficent in the long run.
“Today’s cozy family finds it hard to welcome the odd child, or the child who is different, who does not conform. Mothers and fathers hover protectively over the child, but at the same time they may push him to do his utmost according to their notions of what a child should do, without considering his own particular capacities, limitations, and needs.” Unlike a previous generation we do more for our children, but we also demand everything possible from them in return.
Add to all this the relative disappearance of the stable moral and religious values on which our forefathers depended so confidently, and again the threat of another war and the confusion of this period of contending states, and we see how natural is the nostalgia for the past to which even these trained “scientists” fall prey.
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Three quite new themes—when seen in the perspective of fifty years—are evident in this symposium: the credo of total parental responsiblity, the modern concept of discipline, and the idea of maturity.
Perhaps foremost of these three is the immense role given to parents today. We parents are conceived to be responsible for nearly everything that happens to our children, from the time they are born till they achieve, or fail to achieve, that difficult goal called maturity. Some of the experts seem to vie with each other in stating this new faith. “More and more is expected of parents today,” Lawrence Frank writes. “Emotionally stable, loving parents are the first requisite for the healthy personality,” another puts it. “Of all the important, fateful, and determining influences of childhood the relationship of a child with his parents comes first,” writes a third. “This is his very lifeline, through which he establishes his relationships, for better or for worse, with the rest of the world. . . . Few parents are wise enough to meet [the] rapid and necessary maneuvers of their children.”
Whether our authorities deal with the infant, the nursery school tot, the school child, the pre-adolescent, the adolescent and the young adult—at every stage parents hold the center of attention. We are informed that breast feeding for the infant is considered more desirable now, not because the milk is better for him but because it “brings the baby closer to his mother” and is the first stage in his “socialization.” Helen Ross expresses it thus: “It is a long way from a baby’s first turning his head toward his friendly mother to the winning of a Nobel Peace Prize, but the direction of interest in other people which ends in altruistic achievement begins with the child’s first anticipation of kindness from the world.”
Anna Freud relates experiences with wartime nurseries and crèches in Britain to demonstrate the thesis that however well and scientifically children are treated in such places (and their physical needs were infinitely better provided for there than at home) prolonged separation from parents resulted in retarded development of their mental and emotional lives. The children, it is said, could not progress from self-love and self-centeredness to the love of others, because they lacked the necessary desire to please their mothers and fathers. Such children’s communities may produce children who learn modes of attack, defense, and escape, the habits of yielding to superior strength or avoiding unpleasantness by devices of sharing. “But there is a great difference between such superficial, strictly utilitarian attitudes, which are produced by the need of the moment, and the laborious, deep-reaching processes of character formation, which produce qualities such as courage, generosity, self-sacrifice, pity, shame. The latter are rooted exclusively in the love for the parents and in the child’s identification with them.”
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And so it goes throughout. When we deal with disturbed young businessmen, psychiatrist Carl Binger repeats the Freudian conviction that “the kernel of neurosis lies in the conflict between the child and his parent and the failure of the child to solve this conflict satisfactorily.” When we read about sex education, Katherine Hyam warns us that the child’s earliest satisfactions are closely tied up with later sexual pleasure and “a child’s relationship with his parents during this period will deeply affect the pattern of his mature love life.” If we are dealing with spiritual values and the failure of religious instruction today, we have Arthur Swift Jr. to remind us that the solution must be found within the family, for “religion as the child experiences it is a social phenomenon, a product primarily of the family group.”
What are we to say of this emphasis, we non-expert parents, except to register the fact that it is all very frightening? I think it can be fairly said to be extreme. The doctrine of total parental responsibility stems from the idea, so deeply embedded in our culture, that the human being is infinitely plastic and manipulable, that our freedom of will is such that we can make of ourselves or each other what we want to make. Many anthropologists have bolstered this favorite American faith with sweeping assertions of the unimportance of natural endowment in comparison with cultural inheritance.
It is encouraging to report that there are among our authorities one or two swimming against the current. Anna W. M. Wolf in a spirited essay titled “Shall we Blame the Parents?” labels the doctrine of total parental responsibility a half-truth. How can parents really measure up to current notions of what they ought to be? she asks. They are required not only to understand their children, according to the latest findings, not only to love their children, but also to enjoy them, something every honest parent will confess is not eternally possible for mere human beings, given the best will in the world, working time and a half overtime. She points out the obvious fact that no parents could wholly control the environment their children move around in, even if they had no other duties than to bring them up. Parents are, after all, people (or are they?); she even suggests that they ought to recognize their limitations—for the good of their offspring, if for no other reason. (We can think of at least one other reason.) To her mind, such parents are likely to have more respect and tolerance for the child when he begins to show the difficulties of growing up.
But it is Alan Gregg, vice-president of the Rockefeller Foundation, who opens the biggest attack on the credo. He traces it to the neglect of heredity in our current thinking with the consequent overemphasis on environment. Dr. Gregg is very sure that hereditary traits play a vast role in the growth and maturing of our youngsters. The science of heredity is, of course, still in its infancy, and he is aware that hereditary capacities will not become actualities if we do not provide a good environment for a child, but there is no good scientific reason for underplaying the importance of the raw material. Like Anna Wolf, he is troubled by the number of parents who feel fantastic degrees of guilt when their children do not turn out well. “The child is thus doomed to be brought up in the gloomy atmosphere of parental disappointment or defeat, from which he can escape, if at all, by pitying himself as the irresponsible product of his parents’ monumental ineptitude. His failures and successes are explained for him in advance and forever as being not his but his parents’, and the general attitude of guilt, defeatism, and over-all failure spreads out like a pall of smoke over the whole idea of raising a family, and thus pollutes an atmosphere which could have been sunny and honest and humble in the face of the whole truth.”
Perhaps still more fateful than this, is the tendency to overload our children with stimuli, to ply them with sensations and demands, thus giving them no time to organize and integrate experience, which is a sine qua non for the formation of character. The people who believe environment to be everything, Gregg writes, “do not seem to know that it takes time for a child to respond fully and completely to a powerful impression. They misrepresent or they misinterpret that beautiful stillness of children when vivid impressions are being organized into happy memories or creative responses. They misinterpret this stillness, thinking that nothing has registered, and so another stimulus must be forced onto the child’s mind, which they think is unoccupied or unimpressed because he is quiet,”
Are many of us not guilty, in our anxious insistence on completely “creating” our children, of depriving them of the time and solitude necessary for discovering whatever they have brought with them?
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On that hotly disputed issue of a couple of decades ago over discipline, when “permissiveness” warred with the traditional notion of parental authority, our authors, with surprising unanimity, have taken a middle course, Aristotle’s golden mean was never more in evidence. None of them wants to go back to the old dispensation of “spare the rod and spoil the child.” On the other hand, several have only harsh words for the more recent doctrine of unlimited freedom, which they trace to an unwarranted concern for, and fear of, frustrations and inhibitions which certain schools of psychology popularized.
We are in effect discovering a new conception of the meaning of discipline. In etymology, of course, the word has no implication of either punishment or reward and our tendency to think in terms of the polar extremes of indulgence and authoritarian control is unfortunate. Almost everyone knows upon reflection that the purpose of all discipline is self -control. Many of the opinions expressed in Our Children Today convince me that we are at last achieving some sanity on how to manage this. No longer are we asked to believe, for example, that character is fully formed during the first months or years of childhood. It is not molded by any one experience and there can be unlearning as well as relearning. Nor is there any one method of discipline which works for all children—no panaceas, no scientific formulas. After all the skirmishing, we come upon this conclusion: consistency in the control and direction of children is the only constant. If consistency of treatment be combined with a reasonable capacity for giving and receiving love on the part of the parents, almost any system seems to work as well as any other.
One great gain is the growing recognition that children need limits and definite rules. However strongly our children protest against them, we are assured that in the long run they are likely to be lost without them. “In an atmosphere that encourages free expression of feeling,” Anna Wolf writes, “parents must at times act decisively and impose controls when a child’s behavior goes beyond the limits of what others find comfortable or tolerable. They need to remain unintimidated by the child’s protests, realizing that his feeling of security will be greater when he finds his parents on the side of his own conscience. But parents also need the honesty to recognize when a child’s hostility may be partly or even wholly the result of their own mismanagement.”
Even our adolescents, the experts agree with singular unanimity, need their parents to exercise control over them. When a youth is in internal conflict between the impulse to emancipate himself and at the same time to be secure and protected, parents are enjoined to insist upon controls and rules. They cannot hope to be right, in the adolescent’s eyes, at least for long, but that is because he himself is a web of contradictions. To be sure, the wise parent will keep a sensitive balance between “too great strictness on the one hand and a leniency on the other that leaves a child exposed to all his instinctual drives.”
Perhaps all this can be summed up by the remark that “children need their parents not as dictators or playmates but as friendly leaders who can help them on their way.” In this observation we have the true Hegelian synthesis of authoritarian control on the one hand and permissiveness on the other.
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Pervasive in American educational discussion in recent years is concern about the meaning of maturity. We are understandably sensitive on this score, since Europeans and Asians persist in calling us either children or adolescents. As a nation thrust into a position of dominance in world affairs, we can no longer afford such estimations, deserved or undeserved. Hence the widespread uneasiness about this quality alleged to be lacking in our private and public life.
How define maturity and, once defined, how help our children attain it? Our experts are manifestly much further along toward an adequate vision of what it means to be mature than they are toward charting any course. Indeed, as one puts it, no one yet knows why one man remains so tied to his mother’s apron strings that he becomes a hopeless homosexual and neurotic, while another sublimates these urges to become a professor of aesthetics or an artist. Or why one man remains a sadistic brute while another’s similar impulses by some alchemy get refined sufficiently to make him a skillful surgeon.
One thing is certain, however. We are rapidly overcoming the assumption of a few years back that maturity can be understood in terms of simple “adjustment” to environment. Whatever the demands of the present social scene toward conformity or toward “other-directedness” in thought and action, our authorities are sure that maturity is not to be found that way. In fact, it is becoming clear to many that we cannot arrive at an adequate idea of maturity through the social sciences construed in any narrow sense, because maturity involves judgments of value. It follows that there is no simple definition which will achieve common acceptance. On the contrary, maturity is relative to the individual and his society and conceived to be consequent upon the experience and reflection any individual has undergone. In the developing youngster, one measures “age-adequate maturity,” using a flexible standard appropriate to his time and place.
The present trend is to think of maturity as an inner growth, not a process of external adjustment. Maturity involves “socialization” of the individual, to be sure, but to be merely gregarious is not to be socialized. Only as one has developed a distinctive individuality is maturity possible. Carl Binger conceives of the mature person as one who has enough self-knowledge “to learn from the past, not only to suffer from it.” Those who are mature “grow to accept and respect their own uniqueness and that of others; they develop the capacity to tolerate frustration and disappointments; and they find pleasure and satisfaction in living and working and in their association with other people.”
Applied to the young, this means a gradual and organic development from the status of emotional dependence to that of independence. “A time arrives in the growth of the individual when, ideally speaking, his emotional development is in step with his physical; then he is able to give as well as to receive love and to express his love by joyful union with the opposite sex. As he becomes physically capable of reproducing his kind, he should gradually become emotionally capable of caring for them—or at least of taking his place with the givers, the providers, and the protectors, as opposed to the graspers, the demanders, and the receivers.”
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But when we shift from this general agreement on the meaning of maturity to general directions on how to help our children attain it, the symposiasts are all but overwhelmed by the difficulties, and tend to fall back on the favorite credo of total parental responsibility. Again and again we are told that mature parents alone can really produce mature young adults. How to transform our young graspers, demanders, and receivers into givers, providers, and protectors is still tied up with the mysteries of sublimation, Oedipus complexes, and regressive tendencies—and turns out to be just about impossible.
Lawrence Kubie, perhaps the most orthodox Freudian of the group, carries this line furthest. “It seems as though,” he writes, “we never completely rid ourselves of the effects of those many years in which we are small and weak in a world of overpowering adults. It leaves us deeply if unconsciously afraid to grow up, because to grow up brings us into dangerous rivalry with the adult giants around us. . . . Throughout our adult lives we have some difficulty in accepting our maturity and remain caught in childhood. As a result, from childhood there echoes in us a deeply buried fury against the adults around us, as though each of us feels doomed to remain a child to the end.”
Need we accept this thesis? Surely it is not a universal experience of children to feel weak, vulnerable, and dependent in an adult world. Is it not at least equally true that children live in their own world, and adults are tolerated, rejected, or admired not as overpowering giants but, in the unthinking way of childhood, as simply being there, a part of the world as it is?
This writer prefers to think that the difficulty of achieving maturity is bound up more closely with our failure to leave our children alone, the point so sharply raised by Alan Gregg: “In my opinion the fact that so many creative men and women tell us that in their childhood they had much illness or loneliness or lots of time to swing on the gate is more significant than we realize. Illness and freedom from overstimulation give a child time to absorb his impressions, to integrate and organize them, and finally to create from his whole being a response.”
Such a conclusion takes us, at least temporarily, beyond the bounds of science. It says simply that maturity is a mystery and we know so little about it that all we can be is sympathetic observers, waiting for this human summum bonum to appear from the depths each child brings with him. Such, at any rate, is the conclusion that seems to me most in harmony with what we know.
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