Child
Rearing
Child Rearing, process of socializing young human beings to
live successfully in the culture of their parents. This is
probably one of the most hotly contested areas of social
and moral theory
Background
Human young have always been dependent on their parents for
longer than the young of other primates, and play has
always been a part of children's lives (for example, toys
have been discovered in the archaeological sites of the
earliest civilizations). Making children conform to adult
norms—child rearing—has probably never been an easy
process. Ancient Chinese writings, for instance, speak of
regret for children's foolishness; and disobedience and
sibling rivalry feature in the Bible as early as the story
of Cain and Abel.
Complex
Western theories about bringing up younger children
developed only as advances in public health meant that
enough of them would predictably survive to make theorizing
worthwhile. In the Middle Ages and beyond, the rearing of
very young children was largely permissive and, for
upper-class parents, carried out by wet-nurses (women
employed by others to suckle their children), a practice
that is associated with a high infant mortality rate.
During that time, the unruly behaviour of young children
was generally not seen as a problem (as argued in Philippe
Aries's book
Centuries of Childhood, which
draws on many paintings of the period as evidence). The
reason was that before the age of seven, “infants” (Latin,
meaning “non-speakers”) were not held to be morally
responsible.
In
the 16th century, Puritan theorists such as John Calvin
began to preach the need to drive out evil impulses. With
expressions such as “spare the rod and spoil the child” and
“the devil finds work for idle hands to do” they attempted
to foster habits of work and limit sexual exploration and
misbehaviour. At the same time, the Jesuits decreed “give
us a child until he is seven and he is ours for life”, and
stressed prayer and discipline. By the 19th century, mass
education of the young had become imperative to produce a
workforce for industrialization.
Approaches
to child-rearing in the 20th century
After
Calvin, sexual repression became a dominant motif in child
rearing: Victorian writers on the subject, for example,
were obsessed with preventing masturbation. In reaction to
this, Sigmund Freud identified oral, anal, and genital
stages of child development and analysed the dangers of
interfering in these stages, thus influencing a more
permissive approach. His daughter, Anna Freud, developed
child psychoanalysis, helping troubled children understand
themselves through play. The Austrian-born psychoanalyst
Melanie Klein was the first theorist to concentrate on the
inner life of very small children, even describing the
passions of small babies.
Reacting
against these psychoanalysts, in the 1930s, behaviourists
believed that training could impose desirable behaviour on
children. The American behaviourist Truby King urged
mothers never to go to their baby except for the
four-hourly feed, lest it ruin the baby's independence.
Meanwhile, the work of cognitive development workers such
as Jean Piaget and Leo Vygotsky suggested that maturation
might be more important than motivation in learning: that
is, a child might not be naughty but simply too young.
“Training” a child to do things for which it was too young
would then be futile.
The
British psychiatrist John Bowlby, who came to child-rearing
theory from ethology (the study of animal behaviour),
researched the effects of maternal deprivation and
concluded that both monkeys and children deprived of stable
attachment figures neither grew nor learned properly. In
extreme cases, they died. The work of the British
paediatrician Donald Winnicott carried Bowlby's
understanding of attachment further by looking at the use
of “transitional objects”, such as teddy bears, to ease the
passage from the child's inner imaginary world to outer
concrete experience.
Bowlby
and Winnicott's work was used to support governments eager
to encourage women to return to the home and leave the
workplace after World War II (although neither Bowlby nor
Winnicott had opposed well-run day care). In reaction to
this, feminists cited anthropological research from around
the world to show that sole care by the mother was a recent
Western invention.
Many
new areas of debate arose around this time: for example,
whether “child-centred” rearing makes women domestic
slaves; how much a growing child needs the sole attention
of another person; and how much and from what age children
need to be in a group. Nurseries, crèches, and playgroups
all try to meet the emotional and cognitive needs of
children, alongside parents.
Popular
child-rearing manuals have fuelled these debates. Perhaps
the most famous of all theorists in this field is the
American paediatrician Dr Benjamin Spock, whose writing in
the 1960s took a permissive approach. This was partly based
on the clinical practice of T. Berry Brazelton, an
influential paediatrician, who advocated postponing
toilet-training almost indefinitely and promoting the use
of pacifiers (“dummies”). Penelope Leach, British author of
several high-profile books on childcare in the 1970s,
modified this to include responsibility for all cognitive
and emotional development to be the mother's role.
A
furious argument developed over breast-feeding versus
bottle-feeding, especially with regard to developing
countries. Amid widespread unease about the best way to
bring up children in a rapidly changing world, the writer
Bruno Bettelheim offered more limited advice: be a “good
enough parent”.
Although
there are many different child-rearing models worldwide,
there is a general Western consensus; it suggests that
Puritan ideas of physical punishment are wrong, that
children should be reasoned with even before the “age of
reason”, that they respond best to consistent guidelines
and boundaries, that they need intellectual and linguistic
stimuli as well as emotional stability, but that although
mothers are crucially important to their children's
development, they may leave their children for periods of
time if they have provided reasonable substitutes. There
are many, however, who would challenge one or more of these
points. In addition, such secondary areas as the influence
of television, gender stereotyping, violence, and the
effects of reconstituted families are bitterly
contested.
Contributed
By:
Victoria Neumark, M.A.
Journalist: The
Times Educational Supplement. Author: The Magic Exercise
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