The demise of child-rearing

Public Interest, Fall, 2000 by Lyric Wallwork Winik

These fundamental Lockean precepts are still with us. Some 50 percent of those surveyed for a recent New York Times report on American attitudes say that education played "a big role" in making them who they are, more so than their race, or religion, or their parent's personal wealth. Faith in the transforming power of education can also be seen in current debates over school vouchers and funding for Head Start. Locke's general concepts have also trickled down in more far-flung forms today. Arguments that gender differences are not innate, but are merely artificial social constructs thrust upon young boys and young girls to which they must then conform, owe something of their genesis to Locke's' depiction of the infant as a tabula rasa. Parents who ban "war toys" for their sons or who give dump trucks to their daughters are, consciously or not, working to shape that same sensory, even reflective, component of education that Locke first identified.

Tough love

But the Lockean model of childhood is not the only one to undergird the collective consciousness. Two very contradictory views, one espoused by John Wesley and his followers, the other by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, also do much to shape our present-day conceptions of childhood and child-rearing. The founder of the Methodist movement, Wesley had a conception of childhood that was rooted in the long-standing Christian doctrine of original sin: namely, that children were born flawed, inheriting the sins perpetrated by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Writing in the first half of the eighteenth century, Wesley's remedy was strict scheduling and the liberal use of corporal punishment. (His mother Susanna helped set him on this path by advocating set sleeping hours, family prayers, no food between meals, and use of "the rod" starting with children one year old, sometimes even earlier.) Wesley himself frowned on unsupervised time and the eighteenth century version of play days. His motto could be summed up by these words: "Break his will now, and his soul shall live."

Wesley's conceptions of innate child behavior have been credited with partially shaping everything from the mid-twentieth-century fiction classic Lord of the Flies to rigid British schooling systems designed, it was believed, to remedy the deplorable nature of the untutored boy. It is easy enough today also to see the Wesley model underlying debates about whether or not spanking is appropriate or is a form of child abuse. And his strict message is repeated by contemporary "tough love" parenting gurus like John Rosemond, whom the New York Times once dubbed the pro-punishment Spock, and who advocates judicious spanking; serious household chores; unpleasant, memorable punishment for all disobedience, no matter how small the infraction; and a three- to five-day plan for toilet training by age two. Popular among some Baby Boom parents and Christian evangelicals, Rosemond also believes that the current emphasis on developing self-esteem is corrupt, producing not children who say "I can" but a culture of narcissism whose children say "I am special." And in a more circumscribed vein, even many childhood sleep experts and sleep consultants today don't sound too far removed from Susanna Wesley when they advocate set bedtimes and sleep periods for young children.