Ready or Not: Why Treating Children as Small Adults Endangers their Future—and Ours
by Kay S. Hymowitz
Free Press. 292 pp. $25.00
For whatever reason, the murders in Littleton, Colorado, last April by the teenage killers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris loosed a tide of public commentary unmatched in the recent history of such crimes. Just about everyone, it appeared, had something to say about what had happened at Columbine High—from a debate in the New York Times about whether high schools as we know them may be obsolete, to Time magazine’s chart comparing the medication profiles of Klebold and Harris with those of assailants in similar killings, to the Weekly Standard’s poignant article about young Cassie Bernall, who died professing her Christian faith (and whose life story, coincidentally, is just out in book form). And though the quality of what was said varied widely, the level of seriousness was unusually high. The murders in Littleton, almost everyone seemed to agree, meant that something, somehow, had gone terribly wrong out there in the America where children were growing up.
It is a pity that all those commentators could not have availed themselves of Kay Hymowitz’s excellent new book. For in dealing with the way children and adolescents are treated in society today, Ready or Not drives boldly into territory only skirted last spring. This is a book rich in implication not only for the sociology of certain teenage suburban savages but for any understanding of the ideas that will influence the course of almost every American child’s life.
Ready or Not tells the profoundly disturbing story of how ostensibly disparate theories of children and child development—theories emanating from the academic realms of psychology, education, and legal philosophy, then translated with signature vulgarity into the popular culture—have come to operate as a web of excuses for what amounts to a pervasive pattern of indifference and neglect. Hymowitz, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, opens by observing the changes in our “contemporary social environment” that have rendered children an “endangered species.” This territory, as she acknowledges, has been charted by others, particularly the sociologist David Elkind in his classic book, The Hurried Child (1981). But where Elkind drew attention to the unique stresses imposed on children by certain postmodern phenomena, including the “decline of traditional domestic arrangements,” the “demands of a meritocratic society,” the “growing presence of a hypersexualized media,” and so forth, Hymowitz goes further. The diminution of American childhood, she argues, has been caused not only by such impersonal social forces but also by the conscious, at times intensely personal, “ideas and actions of those who help shape our understanding of children.”
Fundamental to these ideas and actions, she finds, is the notion of “children as capable, rational, and autonomous beings.” This notion, which she dubs “anticulturalism,” has as its Siamese twin the idea that adults themselves, deprived or relieved of the task of acculturating the young, can now safely be demoted to the status of “personal trainers or mere companions.” Both sides of this anticultural idea, as Ready or Not demonstrates, have had tragic consequences for the children nurtured—or more accurately, refused nurture—under its influence.
Consider, writes Hymowitz, the field of education. For almost a century now, under the influence of John Dewey and his followers, American classrooms have been the training ground for progressive experimentation in all its related varieties: “discovery learning,” “constructivism,” “lifelong learning,” “child-centered curriculum,” “whole-language philosophy,” “natural math,” and the rest. All these experiments, Hymowitz observes, “begin by assuming the existence of a rational, organized, and self-directed youngster,” while simultaneously denying what she calls the “less obliging side” of children, meaning their “restlessness, impulsiveness, preference for the easy way out.”
Generations of children have suffered from this disjuncture between what educational theory holds them to be and what they actually are. There is, to begin with, the by-now familiar fact that American students lag behind their foreign peers on almost every reliable measure of performance. But even more telling is that our children do not appear to be enjoying their self-direction very much. For all the appeals to their “innate interests” and “natural love of learning,” few if any students are able, in the absence of real adult guidance, to live up to the educators’ imaginings. To the contrary: “student apathy and restlessness,” Hymowitz reports, “are the most common complaints among teachers today.”
Related to this are the costs of ignoring the darker side of children’s—which is to say, human—nature. Where once a struggling student was expected to call forth a teacher’s pedagogical ingenuity, the onus today is placed elsewhere, often on psychotropic drugs. Similarly, the stunning rise in classroom violence—which has increased directly alongside the proliferation of student-centered activities and the relegating of adults to the sidelines—can be seen as one more illustration of what happens when children and teenagers are understood to stand in need of no particular protection.
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Anticultural ideas saturate the realm of contemporary psychology as well. Beginning with Piaget, Hymowitz notes, experts uncovered surprising information about just how much toddlers and infants were really capable of. Confronted with such findings, they then deemphasized what was also true and had long been recognized: the vulnerability, unique by mammalian standards, of the human infant. Wishful thinking, here as elsewhere, played its own part. By the mid-70’s, according to Ready or Not, “scientists were ready to overthrow entirely the traditional picture of the helpless infant.”
Following the emphasis of the psychologists, child-care experts, too, have stressed how much babies or toddlers “know.” Benjamin Spock, T. Berry Brazelton, and Penelope Leach “evoke a lucid, independent, and self-regulating baby”—and one who does not grow any less autonomous as he graduates to childhood. In the several day-care abuse trials of the 1980’s, Hymowitz notes, “social workers, parents, lawyers, and judges were duped by a particular form of the anticultural fallacy” into assuming that even very young children “already have a firm grip on an independent reality.”
Similarly with the law, where the pressure to endow children with the same rights as adults, detailed in one of this book’s most absorbing chapters, grows apace. One source of that pressure is assuredly its political appeal to certain constituencies, among them the partisans of legalized abortion for teenagers. Hymowitz quotes from an amicus brief filed in a parent-notification case: “There is no factual justification for treating fourteen-year-old women [sic] differently, in this regard, from eighteen-year-old women.” From this concept of “fourteen-year-old women,” as Hymowitz suggests, it is but a short slide down an ever-steepening legal slope.
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There is much more in this book about anticulturalism in all its coarse varieties, from the “family-rot” genre that envelops television shows like South Park and The Simpsons, to the Home Alone movies, and to the much lamented commercial exploitation of even the youngest children. “Yesterday’s parent-controlled childhood,” Hymowitz aptly summarizes, “protected children not only from sex, from work, and from adult decisions; it also protected them from the dominance of peers and from the market with all its pressure.”
But Ready or Not also closes on a note of measured optimism. Messages from the “anticultural wilderness”—Hymowitz has in mind such books as Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, Mayra Hornbacher’s Wasted, and Wendy Shalit’s A Return to Modesty—have shown the darker side of anticultural child-rearing to the thinking public. And then, too, the fact remains that, as she puts it, “human nature can only be stretched so far.”
This is a plausible line of argument, and one that is reminiscent of Francis Fukuyama’s analysis of the continuing “renorming of society” in his latest book, The Great Disruption. But, as the author of Ready or Not knows better than most, planting our faith in human nature can also be a risky and sometimes self-deluding business. Limits to human nature are one thing; how far we can stretch before reaching those limits is another.
Forty years ago, most Americans would surely have never believed that in the not-so-distant future, the majority of mothers with babies and preschool children would end up parting company with those children for many or most of their waking hours, and that many of these same mothers would also insist that the separation itself was positively good for their child. Forty years ago, it seems safe to guess, people would not only have had trouble believing that such things could come to pass, they would have been astounded to learn that this massive separation of mothers and their young would coincide with the most prosperous era in American (or, for that matter, world) history.
Yes, some mothers are forced to leave newborns in order to work. But many, many others are not so compelled. Their freely chosen maternal absenteeism is something new. It is conscious, counterintuitive, learned—and the adroitness with which it has been learned should make us pause before assuming that “human nature,” at least in this area, will reassert itself en masse any time soon.
In fact, this very experiment in mother-child separation—perhaps, as hindsight may prove, the most important domestic experiment of our time—is what binds together all the disparate strands of Hymowitz’s important and sorry tale. For although serious people from many different walks of life have contributed to the myth of the autonomous, independent, rational child, the principal agent of that myth, in which so many millions of parents have apparently needed to believe, has been the American feminist movement. In general, Hymowitz is oddly lenient toward this movement, noting merely that “for obvious reasons, feminists were especially prone” to the shrinking of American childhood. But the truth is not so nuanced.
It was feminism, more than any other single force, that contrived the abstractions that even now cloud what anyone can grasp with his unaided senses: that babies and young children are fragile, irrational creatures who need their parents, and most especially their mothers, because their happiness demands it (and not merely because neglecting them may affect their future brains or career prospects). It was feminism that, one bit of polemic at a time, diminished the rewards of American motherhood and hardened the hearts of American mothers; the undoing of what it has thereby wrought will be the work of generations.
Still, though Ready or Not may pull this final punch, it succeeds in delivering blow after blow to the ideas that have warped the American perception of what children, as such, really are about. This is a book not only for parents but for every psychologist who has pondered the skyrocketing rates of disorder in prepubescent children, every teacher and principal and school-board member who has lost sleep over the vulgarity and violence in even the best public schools, every doctor concerned with teenage medical plagues from eating disorders to STD’s. But perhaps Ready or Not should be reserved especially for all those angry and defensive souls, most of them female, who let fly with letters to the editor whenever anyone dares to wonder how it ever came to pass that so many American children—figuratively and often literally—have ended up home alone. They should read it and weep.
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