Vanishing Childhood: Our Confused Culture Is Crowding out the Most Important Years of Life

Part I

A friend’s teaching had gone badly on a day when his second child was only a few months old. After finishing some necessary work, he fell into bed, exhausted, at midnight. Then the baby started crying. Stan is not an evil or sick man. But he imagined storming into the baby’s room, ripping him from his crib, and slamming him against the wall.

What Stan actually did was get out of bed, go to the baby, and gently lift it from the crib. He carried the baby to the living room and sat down in a rocker. The baby was teething and was hurting, Stan knew, but he was still smoldering. He restrained himself and steadily rocked the child. After several moments, the baby was still awake and still hurting. Only now he was looking up at Stan. And he was not crying.

“My anger just melted away,” says Stan. He explains this carefully, because he knows I am not a father. “None of his pain had gone, but he trusted me. He looked up with those big eyes, settled heavier into my arms, and burrowed into my chest. I couldn’t stay mad.” I see what Stan means—I don’t think I could stay mad either—but his reaction is by no means a universal one.

Last September, in Dallas, a four-week-old girl was dragged from her crib and killed by the family dog. It was a 100-pound Rottweiler named Byron. The hitch came when authorities asked the mother’s permission to destroy the dog. She refused, volunteering this logic: “I can always have another baby, but I can’t replace Byron.”

More recently, a Knoxville couple was arrested after swapping their baby for a 25-inch color television set. A few years earlier, a New Jersey couple was unsuccessful at trading away 14-month-old Jimmy. But then, they were going for a Corvette.

Men and women who trade babies for TVs or cars or prefer dogs to their own flesh and blood are, of course, exceptional. But why do most parents act like Stan—patient, loving, and restrained in anger? Why don’t more trade away their bawling, demanding infants? Why do people spend so much effort, time, and money—sacrifice so much—to birth, feed, educate, and discipline children? In short, if we must have children at all, why treat them with such privilege?

These questions seem absurd. They probe at something seemingly as indubitable as the Grand Canyon. Of course people have babies, and naturally people love and protect them. Sane people do not walk over the edge of the canyon, and normal people do not neglect or abuse their children.

Childhood—a span of 12 to 17 years in which a child is protected and prepared for life—may appear to be a biological fact. Parental protection of children may appear to be as natural as breathing, and it may be assumed that parents through history have been as restrained in their treatment of infants as Stan was.

But whatever is assumed, none of these is the case. There are many signs that children are increasingly less appreciated in our society and that childhood as we know it is threatened with change to the point of extinction. The boundary protecting children is no concrete, biological wall, as unchallengeable as the law of gravity. It is a thin, cultural veil, gradually raised in the past for good reason. It tears easily. And anyone who listens can hear it ripping.

Evidences Of Childhood’S Erosion

The traditional concept of childhood, like concepts of motherhood and the family, is confused. Children of surprisingly young ages, in fact, are treated and expected to act like adults.

In this light, the children’s rights movement has appeared at an eminently appropriate time. A host of changes push children to be more like adults. Why, then, should they not have adult rights? Advocates such as Ivan Illich and John Holt argue against compulsory schooling. Richard Farson, in 1974’s Birthrights, championed the child’s right to his or her own choice of education and home. Children, Farson said, should have the right to vote because “adults do not have their interests at heart and do not vote in their behalf.” (Even the Andrew Carnegie Council on Children agrees that children need political advocates and that the family can no longer be “assumed to be self-sufficient and able to care for its own.”)

But what are the evidences that childhood is changing, leading some to believe children need new rights?

The clearest is in the popular media. Brooke Shields was photographed in the nude at age 10, and today 10-year-olds are regarded by Madison Avenue as among the best models for makeup. Jordache has presented us with grade-schoolers in designer jeans who not only dress, but act (in a suggestive dance), like their very sexy teacher.

In contemporary literature, Joseph Epstein remarks, anything goes—indeed, it already went. Several publishers believe the same must be true in children’s literature. One offers a line of “young adult” books, to help 10- to 13-year-olds face the “problems of adulthood.” Judy Blume, a popular author of these “realistic” books, despises the “idea that you should always protect children. They live in the same world we do. They see things and hear things.” In these books, they certainly do. Prostitution, divorce, rape, and homosexual dalliance between 9-year-olds are now common in such fiction.

To keep up with the times, Walt Disney Productions must judiciously edit swear words into its films. A G rating is box-office death. Other film companies quit Mickey Mousing long ago. Films such as Little Darlings—which features two adolescent girls racing to lose their virginity at summer camp—are targeted at the early teen audience. More recently, in Blame It on Rio, a 15-year-old seduces her middle-aged father’s best friend.

Outside Hollywood, some consider adolesence too late for the loss of virginity. The Sex Information and Education Council of America (SIECUS) enthuses that “sex is so good and important a part of life that if children don’t happen to discover sexual enjoyment for themselves, if we really like them we will make sure they do.” And what sort of things might we who “really like” children make sure they do? The possibilities include not only masturbation, but “sex play with others of either sex or animals.”

SIECUS has also published an article comparing attitudes toward incest to those toward masturbation a century ago. What Time magazine has called the “incest lobby” promotes “salutary incest,” incest for the benefit of the child. For Richard Farson, sexual freedom is a corollary of children’s rights, and people should not be made to feel unreasonably guilty about incest with a child who “chooses” it. Incest is the latest in a long line of “last taboos” to be broached on network television. As for the movies, a film historian has counted 6 films about incest made during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. There were 79 in the 1960s.

All these examples are not intended to imply that incest is widely, accepted, let alone practiced. It remains reprehensible to all but a tiny percentage of society. But from advertisements to films to television, childhood sexual expression is more and more a part of the contemporary consciousness. Childhood sexuality has adults and children bewildered. Freud showed us that human beings are sexual from day one. He did not intend for parents of nine-year-olds to worry because their sons and daughters are not dating. A teacher told Marie Winn (author of Children Without Childhood) that “homosexuality is a big thing among fifth-graders—there’s constant talk about it.” Sometimes the situations created by this confusion are pathetically comical. A principal at my former school was last year enrolling fourth-graders, placing the usual demographic information such as name and age on his forms. He stopped asking about “sex” when one boy replied, “I haven’t had any yet.”

What the boy—and most other children his age—is likely to have had is a shot at some serious Little League sports. Sandlot baseball or an informally organized game of backyard football are passé. The Little Leagues are assiduously modeled after the big leagues.

Youngsters must be earnest about these games. Their parents are, as at a 1981 Ontario soccer tournament, involving 4,000 children from 10 nations. In a game between 10-year-olds, a brawl broke out after fathers argued on the sidelines, players accused one another of foul play, and one man made a vulgar gesture. The brawl was highlighted by two mothers kicking one another. Neil Postman, in his The Disappearance of Childhood, raises pertinent questions: “What are parents doing there in the first place? Why are 4,000 children involved in a tournament?… The answer to all these questions is that children’s play has become an adult preoccupation, it has become professionalized, it is no longer a world separate from adults.” Fourteen- to 16-year-old professional tennis players and world-class gymnasts are increasingly common.

Indeed, some contend childhood has shifted from its former center of play to one closer to an adult style: purposeful, success oriented, competitive. (It is no surprise, then, that some schools offer career guidance for 11- and 12-year-olds.) Third- and fourth-grade teachers told Marie Winn their students act more like tired businessmen than children: burned out at 9.

Like the businessman or any other adult, children are spending larger amounts of time alone and unsupervised. The extent of the “latchkey kid” phenomenon—children 6 to 11 and older left alone after school until their parents return from work—is unknown. But school officials do find more absenteeism and homework problems among latchkey children. One child psychologist states that these children contribute “far out of proportion” to the ranks of young people who are dropouts, drug users, and juvenile delinquents.

Children are left alone because both father and mother work. In many instances, though, they are left alone because the one parent they live with—a divorced father or mother—works. Disrupted families are so common that anyone reading this is certain to have witnessed (or experienced) the painful effects.

Jason is one child I know as more than a statistic. Playing outside while his divorced mother sunbathed, the five- or six-year-old often wandered across the way to our apartment to talk on the patio. A friend was helping as I barbecued steaks one evening. When Jason showed up, he was visibly upset. Looking at my friend, a woman, he asked, “But you haven’t got a new wife, have you?” He was not reassured until Sandy, my “old” and only wife, came from the kitchen and stood at the door.

Beliefs that children were better off in a divorced situation than with unhappy parents may have been wishful thinking. Longitudinal studies—those designed to track effects over a period of years—are indicating that most children do not find life in a split family an improvement over the predivorce family. In fact, many marriages that had been unhappy for the adults had been comfortable, even gratifying, for the children. Certainly children of a divorce are forced to confront “adult” realities. Their parents’ imperfections become not only obvious, but, when a crushed mother or father turns to bewildered children for support, burdensome.

Acting Like Adults

Divorce, confused sexual attitudes, the loss of play, the “adultification” of children’s literature and entertainment—all these have affected children. True to form, they have reacted not as children, but adults. And adult life, as Ernest Hemingway had it in an early novel, is not always pretty. Between 1950 and 1979, serious crimes (such as murder, rape, and robbery) committed by children increased by 11,000 percent. Half of America’s arrested burglars are under 18. In 15 years the arrest of youngsters for use of, or trafficking in, drugs rose 4,600 percent. Venereal disease among adolescents now accounts for one-fourth of all cases reported. The divorce rates stay sky high, and everyone agrees on the results: children of a divorce are more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs, commit suicide or crimes, be depressed, and fail in school.

But America, 1984, is a very good place and time to be a child. The increases in childhood crime and despair are astonishing, but such statistics need to be handled carefully. They reflect increases beginning, in some cases, from practically nothing in the 1950s. Even today, the majority of children do not experience the divorce of parents; fewer still are seriously involved with drugs or alcohol; and only a tiny fraction actually commit violent crimes. I believe childhood as it has been known in the twentieth century, and to a real degree continues to be known, is a cultural asset. It is a joy and a comfort to children. It also probably represents the most deeply Christian and humane approach to children any society has known. How much will we and our children lose if this kind of childhood dies? We can know simply by looking back.

History

Exhausted after a long day, my friend Stan had his sleep delayed by a bawling infant. Stan was understandably angry, and he admits he imagined throwing the baby against the wall. But he did imagine it. What he acted out was the opposite.

Now, what if Stan, rather than gently rocking and soothing the baby, had slammed him into the wall? He would then have been guilty of child abuse: the law would have prosecuted him, neighbors would have shunned him, friends would have been shocked and horrified. All this would have happened today (and does, in fact, when child abuse so tragically occurs). It would not have happened in most of the world’s yesterdays, when “child abuse” did not exist as a category of crime. It occurred, all right. But much of what we would unequivocally label child abuse was socially acceptable. Perhaps nothing can illustrate this so strikingly as one simple historical snippet: Animal protection societies, like the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, were the first to shelter abused children—and even these societies were not established until the eighteenth century.

Generally, historians indicate, children were more harshly treated. They were regarded not so much as children as miniature adults—or less. Such was the perception as late as the sixteenth century when Luis De Granada put the rhetorical question, “What is a child save a lower animal in the form of a man?” And from the same century comes this popular rhyme:

Of all the months the first behold,

January two-faced and cold.

Because its eyes two ways are cast,

To face the future and the past.

Thus the child six summers old

Is not worth much when all is told.

Two centuries later, the English essayist Charles Lamb had the common parental experience of losing sleep because of a sick child. But Lamb’s sympathy was not aroused even after the child had died, and he icily wrote to a friend, “The little bastard is gone.” Many of Lamb’s contemporaries did not doubt the worth of children, yet still regarded them with suspicion. There remained a tendency to compare them to animals. So Jonathan Edwards warned against their beguiling, apparent innocence, for “they are young vipers, and are infinitely more hateful than vipers.” Like a potentially dangerous dog, the child had above all to be tamed. According to A Godly Form of Household Government, a seventeenth-century precursor of Spock’s Baby and Child Care, the child may be small, but he is “altogether inclined to evil. If this sparkle be suffered to increase, it will rage over and burn down the whole house.”

An extensive history of childhood would exceed our present scope and purpose. The uniqueness of childhood as we now know it can be demonstrated by briefly considering only three facets of childhoods past: infanticide and neglect, discipline, and work.

Infanticide And Neglect

Infanticide was an option, though utterly undesirable, for Stan with his crying baby boy. In the ancient world, though, infanticide was a more practical—and less consequential—option. Child sacrifice was practiced by the Moabites, Phoenicians, and Ammonites. Sometimes, the Bible indicates, the Israelites gave in to the pressure of surrounding cultures and “sacrificed their sons and daughters in the fire” (2 Kings 17:17). Child sacrifice stemmed from the idea that the gods liked human flesh, especially that of children, who have just come from the other world. It was not as common as other kinds of infanticide.

Historian Lloyd deMause summarizes: Infanticide of both legitimate and illegitmate children was “a regular practice of antiquity, … the killing of legitimate children was only slowly reduced during the Middle Ages, and … illegitimate children continued to be killed right up into the nineteenth century.” Children were thrown into rivers, dung heaps, cess trenches; they were “potted” in jars to starve, and exposed as prey to birds and beasts. The first known civil law to prohibit infanticide, in fact, was not declared until A.D. 374.

Boys, if healthy, were more likely to live. Girls were valued less, as evidenced quite matter-of-factly in a letter from Hilarion to his wife, Alis (1 B.C.): “If, as may well happen, you give birth to a child, if it is a boy let it live; if it is a girl, expose it.” Infanticide was justified by philosophers, such as the Greek Aristippus in the fourth century B.C. Of course a man should be allowed to do what he wants with his children, Aristippus wrote, for “do we not cast away from us our spittle, lice and such like, as things unprofitable, which nevertheless are engendered and bred even out of our own selves.” The Roman Seneca, writing four centuries after Aristippus, promoted infants above the equivalent of lice and spit. To him, they were at least comparable to animals: “Mad dogs we knock on the head; the fierce and savage ox we slay; sickly sheep we put to the knife; unnatural progeny we destroy; we drown even children who at birth are weakly and abnormal.”

Children were sometimes abandoned at a late enough age that they could scavenge and eke out an existence. Some of these were mutilated both for amusement and to make them more effective as beggars. “Look on the blind wandering about the streets leaning on their sticks,” wrote Seneca, “and those with crushed feet, and still again look on those with broken limbs. This one is without arms, that one has had his shoulders pulled down out of shape in order this his grotesqueries may excite laughter.…” The “origin of all those ills—a laboratory of human wrecks,” is a cave filled with limbs “torn from living children.” And this was a favor to the children, “inasmuch as their parents had cast them out.” Astonishingly, such mutilation continued into early modern times. In 1761, an English beggarwoman was imprisoned for putting out the eyes of her young charges, which she did to increase their “usefulness” as beggars. Her sentence: two years. Teeth were also removed from poor children’s mouths as replacements for the mouths of the rich.

There were precious few shelters for castaway children. Only by 1421 was the first large-scale orphanage established, in Florence. By the 1600s some were opened in Paris. Even later than that they were resisted in England, where a callous bit of doggerel expressed the widespread opinion that an orphanage would promote sexual irresponsibility, encouraging “the progress of vulgar amours, / The breeding of Rogues and the increasing of Whores.”

Part of this disregard for young children was due to horrendous infant mortality rates. Throughout the Middle Ages only one in two or three children survived to maturity. Allowed to live, most children had to survive spoiled food, polluted water, damp houses, famine, and waves of typhoid, dysentery, bubonic plague, or tuberculosis. Hopelessly inadequate cures were tried, such as placing a live frog in the child’s mouth to overcome whooping cough. Into the eighteenth century, a mother did not even count a child until it had contracted—and survived—smallpox.

Such frequent and relentless death necessitated, for sanity’s sake, parental detachment from young children. But the necessity lamentably evolved into a sort of institutionalized neglect that only added to the infants’ risk. Mothers “put out” children to wet nurses: women who had recently borne their own children and either weaned or abandoned them. The wet nurse was often dirty, underfed, and overburdened with the demands of her own family. Wet nurses were known to replace a dead child with another, never informing the natural parents of the switch.

Discipline

The severity of discipline is another evidence of the harshness of childhood in earlier days. Just as ordinary practices (such as infanticide) of previous centuries would be regarded as criminal neglect today, normal discipline prior to the eighteenth century would now be seen as child abuse. The ready acceptance of stern discipline was exemplified in the ancient world by the root words for “education” in three cultures. The Egyptian word for education meant “to chastise or punish,” and Egyptian teachers had a motto: “A youngster’s ear is his back, and he only listens to the man who beats him.” Likewise, the Hebrew word for education meant “to chasten or discipline,” and the law did not hold a rabbi responsible if a student died of flogging. Finally, the Roman phrase manum subducěre ferulae, “to withdraw the rod,” meant to leave school.

Historian deMause believes that beatings, up to the eighteenth century, were “generally severe” and “involved bruising and bloodying of the body.” Indeed, a thirteenth-century law held that “if one beats a child until it bleeds, then it will remember, but if one beats it to death, the law applies.”

Another form of discipline was to frighten the child with terrifying stories of devils, witches, and monsters that would slit the throats of misbehaving children, or steal them, suck their blood, tear them to pieces, eat them raw. Such tales, noted Dio Chrysostom, were “invented for a child’s benefit to make it less rash and ungovernable.”

After the Reformation, God himself was the bogeyman. Tracts were written in baby talk, describing in detail the tortures God had planned for children in hell: “The little child is in this red-hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out.… It stamps its little feet on the floor.”

There were undoubtedly psychological traumas suffered because of such stories. Sometimes there were physical consequences. An American mother of 1882 told of a friend’s two-year-old daughter being left with a nurse. The servant, wanting to enjoy herself for the evening, told the child a ferocious man was hidden in the girl’s bedroom and would attack her if she got out of bed. To insure the child’s silence while she partied with other servants, the nurse made a large figure with glaring eyes and an enormous mouth, and placed it at the foot of the girl’s bed after she was asleep. The nurse returned from the party some hours later: “Opening the door quietly, she beheld the little girl sitting up in her bed, staring in an agony of terror at the fearful monster before her, and both hands convulsively grasping her fair hair. She was stone dead!”

Work

Children of the past were no strangers to neglect and brutal discipline, nor to work. In the medieval period, children worked as early as ages 2 or 3, shooing crows away as their parents sowed seed, or herding cattle. At 7, they were considered adult and apprenticed to craftsmen. At 10, many were employed to bake bread, brew beer, catch fish. This early work, historians such as Philippe Ariès emphasize, was humane. Children worked with their parents or, if an apprentice, were protected by guild rules. They were also taught a trade of use to them as adults.

Such was not the case with the advent of industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In both England and America, children as young as 4 were employed in cotton mills. The Almy, Brown, and Slater Cotton Manufactory in Rhode Island was typical. Children over age 7 worked from dawn to dark, six days a week, with two-and-one-half days off every year. (Some industrialists incredibly claimed that 23-hour workdays would not be too long for children.) Those between ages 6 and 16 earned just over half a woman’s wage and one-fourth a man’s wage. Child workers in some mills were fed so poorly that they raided pigsties.

Chimney sweepers, again as young as age 4, were forced into flues not more than seven inches square. Their soft bones were deformed from the pressure of standing in awkward positions for long hours, and from hauling 25-pound bags of soot. Ultimately, when children were too large to sweep chimneys, they were turned out on the streets—having learned no trade useful to them as adults.

It was, unsurprisingly, mostly poor and orphan children who were exploited by industry. This was the case with coal mines, where half-naked boys and girls of 5 and 6 were forced on their hands and knees, harnessed to hauling carts, into dark, coal dust-choked tunnels, unable to straighten their backs for hours. We can only too accurately imagine that for these children, reality was more hellish than most contemporary children’s nightmares.

Why Look Back?

We look back at these grim realities to know that children have not always been treated as they are now.

There were certainly loving parents in the past. Most biologists (like Konrad Lorenz) would probably argue that adults have some natural affection for children. But from Eden to Auschwitz, there has been an enormous human capacity for evil. More often than not, evil has been wreaked on the powerless. And it is clear that at least during the first several years of their lives, children are physically, intellectually, and emotionally unequal to adults. They are at the mercy of adults—for food, drink, shelter, education, and love. Adults may violate the child’s trust for sake of greed, convenience, or simple sadism.

Cast in the image of God, mankind also has a great capacity for good. But that capacity for good seems to lie in the purposeful, determined choice to be good. When men and women have kept the trust of children, they have done so not merely because of “natural” affection, but because of religious or cultural custom and governmental policy.

Shifting Ideas On The Child

From its beginning, Christianity was a steady and sure force for the improvement of childhood. Jesus of Nazareth’s treatment of children, as recorded in the synoptic Gospels, was unique to his time. “In contrast with their position in contemporary Western culture, children occupied a low estate …,” writes biblical scholar Joachim Jeremias. In rabbinic classifications they were categorized with the deaf, dumb, and weak minded.

Still and all, Jesus singled out children as exemplars of God’s kingdom. The scholars are agreed: the mark of childhood relevant to the kingdom is dependency. The child has no choice; he must depend on his parents, on God. And he depends spontaneously, without reservation, and with energy and joy. The Lord also appears to have treated children with affection. His attitude was definitely a protective one. “And if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin,” he said, “it would be better for him to be thrown into the sea …” (Mark 9:42). One commentator, speaking of Christ, may be guilty only of minor exaggeration: “If today men show a solicitude for little children that would have amazed the ancients, that solicitude takes its concern from one Man.”

The Hebrews and early Christians opposed the surrounding culture and forbade infanticide, abortion, and child mutilation. “Never do away with an unborn child, or destroy it after its birth,” wrote Barnabas (about A.D. 130). Christians were so few, however, that by the fourth century they were still battling infanticide. They were by then unambiguously asserting that infanticide was wrong because children have souls. “God breathes into their souls for life, not for death,” declared Lactantius.

The tremendously influential Augustine struck the most telling blow on behalf of children. He saw a sure place for infants in the universe, a perfectly ordered system created by God, “where not even one leaf of a tree is superfluous.” To Augustine, “it is not possible to create a superfluous man.” The child, like all men and women, was under God’s protection.

The church fathers, summarizes historian Richard Lyman, Jr., engendered “progress in compassion for children by asserting that children had souls, were important to God, could be taught, should not be killed.…” The ideal of childhood was developing, in mind if not in practice. Yet, Lyman adds, folk customs run deep, and many children were still woefully mistreated.

The appreciation of children surged again beginning in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with the development of the cult of the infant Jesus. This, says Barbara Kaye Greenleaf, “became the single most important factor in improving the status of children. From a special sympathy for the Holy Child, Western man eventually developed a general sympathy for every child.” Refracted through the image of the Christ child, children had to be innocent. Now biblical themes on chidren were emphasized. To be childlike was to be like Christ, whose followers are called the children of God.

By the sixteenth century, it was possible to have such a remarkable parent as Sir Thomas More. More, known to us because of the play and film about his clash with Henry VIII, was ahead of his time—truly a man for all seasons. He recognized that, in God’s sight, “a crowned king is no greater than a child or a clown.” In an age when few women were educated, More’s daughters were. And in a time when it was believed that “cherishing marreth sons, but it utterly destroyeth daughters,” More only reluctantly spanked his children—and then did it with a peacock feather.

His parental love shows in a letter he wrote to all four children (three daughters and a son). “It is not strange that I love you with my whole heart,” he said, “for being a father is not a tie which can be ignored.” Because of that tie, More explains, he often takes his children in his arms, feeds them cake, apples, and pears. “This tie is the reason why I never could endure to hear you cry. You know, for example, how often I kissed you, how seldom I whipped you. My whip was invariably a peacock’s tail. Even this I wielded hesitantly and gently so that sorry welts might not disfigure your tender seats.” More has “always been an indulgent parent—as every father ought to be. But at this moment my love has increased so much that it seems to me I used not to love you at all.”

A steady Christian influence continued to benefit children. By the end of the seventeenth children, parents were recognizing the uniqueness of each child. No longer did they pass down the same name used by one or more deceased siblings. Protestants enthusiastically invented matchless names for every new child: Tribulation Wholesome or Zeal-of-the-Land Busy. Family portraits began to include children. Poignantly, not only living, but dead children are portrayed, distinguished from the living only by a cross in hand, a nearby death’s head, or a finger pointed heavenward.

But it would be a distortion to imply that Christianity alone is responsible for the humane treatment of children. A different, significant source that cannot be overlooked is the French philosopher Rousseau. With Emile, published in 1762, Rousseau unleashed across Europe a rampant adoration of children. Emile romanticized children’s naturalness, innocence, and joie de vivre.

Perhaps most important, Rousseau persuaded a continent that children were different than adults. Now children were not to be seen as they were depicted in medieval paintings—nothing but miniature adults. (One art historian claims a fifteenth-century painter was the first to portray the infant Jesus in accurate, childlike proportions.) Not long before Rousseau’s time, children and adults worked together. They played together (hide and seek and blindman’s bluff were originally not “children’s games,” but everyone’s, and children freely gambled, played cards and dice, and saw cockfights). They sat through funerals and slept in the same cramped quarters where parents, servants, or overseers made love. Students of age 12 drank grog with their tutors. It was a world where little was hidden from children, and where little set them apart from adults.

The Reformation teaching that all persons (whether “religious” by vocation or not) should press toward perfection in life added an element of civilizing shame unknown in the medieval world. With it, adults realized there were things to be hidden from children. Rousseau, though hardly a friend of the Reformation, solidified the growing sense that children should not only be treated differently than adults, but that they are basically and finally different. The “wisest writers,” Rousseau chastised in Emile, are “always looking for the man in the child, without considering what he is before he becomes a man.” In England alone the book triggered more than 200 tracts on benevolent child raising. Mothers who only a year before would have sent their children to nurses, now suckled them. Schoolmasters eased discipline and enlivened their lessons. A new spirit swept the world, and after the turn of the century Victor Hugo staked a claim: “Christopher Columbus only discovered America: I have discovered the child.”

The Challenge At Hand

Hugo was not alone in his assessment. Ariès and other historians are agreed that childhood as we know it took form only beginning in the seventeenth century. This childhood, waning perhaps since 1950, will not be naturally sustained but must be consciously maintained by individuals and society.

Like southwestern soil in the 1930s, childhood is suffering erosion. The soil erosion was halted by disrupting the soil less, not plowing as deep. It was halted by planting trees and other “windrows” to protect the soil from wind and rain. And it was halted by letting the soil “summerfallow,” or rest a year, before the next crop was planted and harvested. Children, too, can use all three: less disruption, some protection, and a time to prepare for maturity. Unfortunately, no one did anything about the soil until it blew away. I hope the same will not be said of childhood.

Tim Stafford is a free-lance writer living in Santa Rosa, California. He is a distinguished contributor to several magazines. His latest book is Do You Sometimes Feel Like a Nobody? (Zondervan, 1980).

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