It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us. - book reviews

Reason, April, 1996 by Gwen J. Broude

Hillary Clinton has written a book about children. Her agenda will surprise no one. She wants to promote the idea that government has a legitimate, conspicuous, and indeed necessary role to play in the lives of American children and their parents. In making her case for government intervention, however, Clinton adopts a clever strategy, ostensibly grounding her policy proposals in what experts on child rearing have to tell us about children's needs. This creates the impression that the policies she supports - including medical- and family-leave mandates, licensing of home-based day care, state-sponsored pregnancy and infant care programs, and training for parents with poor literacy skills to help raise children "born to read" - are based on empirical evidence and, even better, science. In keeping with this game plan, Clinton provides a running narrative of child development. Thus, while It Takes a Village is a political book, it is also a book that claims to be about developmental psychology. I want to focus here on the developmental story that Clinton tells and ask how faithfully the premises about children's development on which the book depends reflect what developmentalists actually have to tell us.

On Clinton's reading of developmental psychology, the first three or so years of life are "not just important; they are more crucial to shaping children than any other time." Further, young children are influenced for good or bad by virtually anything that happens in their presence. "From the way that we touch them and our tone of voice when we bathe or change them," she writes, "they sense whether we enjoy their company, whether we are paying attention or just going through the motions, whether we are listening."

Stress in parents "may create feelings of helplessness that lead to later developmental problems." Children need "gentle, intimate, consistent contact" from caretakers, and structured, ritualized, but also "unhurried" time. The early years are crucial to later development in part because it is then that the brain is most receptive to input, or "food," from the environment. "Brain research teaches us that feeling safe and protected is essential to healthy neurological development," Clinton claims. After that, "brain cells and synapses begin to wither away, so that the child learns more slowly."

"Children who are subjected to constant comparisons," writes Clinton, "may lose heart in their pursuit of a developmental task or abandon it altogether." Youngsters learn what they see and hear. Children also come equipped with certain predispositions. They ask all kinds of questions about God; for instance, what does God look like, why does God let people do bad things, and does God care whether we squash a bug. From this we can conclude that "the potential for spirituality seems to be there from the beginning." A baby will cry in the presence of another crying infant. From this we can infer that newborns have "empathy" for the suffering of others from the start. Mostly, however, who a child becomes is a product of what "the village" offers. The child that emerges from Clinton's reading of the developmental literature is vulnerable, even fragile, especially sensitive to early impressions. And impressions matter because this is a child who is mainly a product of its environment.

Is this the profile of childhood that emerges from developmental experts? It Takes a Village accurately points to the kinds of child-rearing environments recommended by developmentalists as most likely to produce a thriving child and a competent, self-sufficient, confident, productive adult. It is better to have two parents, one of each sex. It is better to set limits but also high expectations, to emphasize rationality, and to take the child's opinions into account. Consistency is better than inconsistency. And so on. But although the profile of better and worse child-rearing strategies portrayed in It Takes a Village remains loyal enough to what developmentalists tell us, the profile of the child does not.

When I was in college in the 1960s, I learned the Margaret Mead version of human development. On this view, human nature is infinitely malleable, and culture determines how any child will turn out. This sounds a lot like Clinton's account of children, and so it is unsurprising that Mead and her contemporaries make scattered appearances throughout the book. By the time I began to teach developmental psychology in the 1970s, however, a new model of development was emerging, and this is the model that characterizes developmental psychology today. On this view, children are resilient, able to withstand even large variations in their treatment while still remaining on track. Developmental outcomes are understood to be significantly influenced by the inborn traits of children themselves. The idea that a person's developmental fate is sealed by three or four years of age has given way to the notion of ongoing plasticity. Brains continue to adapt to environmental input throughout life, and so, therefore, do the psychological processes that brains underwrite.