Parents should be alert to child 'experts'
Betsy Hart
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com
Many times I've sought advice about raising my four children. I've just
not typically sought it from parenting books and magazines. For insight
from discipline to sleep issues, from sibling rivalry to school
performance, I go to the "experts" - demonstrably wise mothers and
fathers who have successfully and joyfully raised, or are far along in
the process of raising, caring, confident, happy kids. Kids other people
want to be around.
This used to be called "going to grandma" for child-rearing wisdom. But
in the last 100 years, it seems something has largely replaced it: the
distinctively American tendency to "go to the experts" when it comes to
raising our little ones. It's those experts who are the subject of an
illuminating and lively new book by Ann Hulbert, "Raising America:
Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children."
Hulbert writes not as a partisan in what might be dubbed the
"child-rearing wars," but simply as a chronicler of the phenomenon of
the child-rearing expert.
She suggests that the turn toward the "professionalization" of
child-rearing arose out of the notion that, with the dawning of the 20th
century, science could help us make everything better - even children.
The history of the experts, Hulbert writes in a way both provocative and
yet dispassionate, is largely one of conflicting, polarized advice often
based on the scantiest of research. It's been dispensed by men, for the
most part, who made careers, for the most part, out of telling women how
to be better mothers. It's a great story.
There's the famous, strict behaviorist John Watson, who told mothers of
the 1920s and 1930s only to kiss their children on the foreheads - if
they must kiss at all - and anyway it was better to shake hands. Of his
two sons, one committed suicide and the other had a breakdown and
battled suicidal impulses for years. There's the "permissive" Dr.
Benjamin Spock (actually not nearly as permissive as he's been labeled,
Hulbert notes ) deeply involved in antiwar radicalism in the 1960s.
Later there was Dr. James Dobson, who made a ministry out of daring
parents to discipline their kids, and Dr. T. Berry Brazelton who seems
to think that children are born into this world better people than their
parents ever were. There are many others.
Such experts started arriving on the scene as mothers started going to
nifty sounding conferences, like The Conference on Modern Parenthood in
New York City in 1925, and an area of study labeled "child development"
was discovered.
Hulbert says that through it all, what has remained constant is the
polarization between "hard" or parent-centered, and "soft" or
child-centered, parenting advice.
But, Hulbert writes, such advice may overlap more than we think. Sort of
the "going full circle round to the other side" view.
But where she's perhaps more likely to see some synthesis, I see a
typically futile attempt to hold two opposing views - whatever they may
be labeled - at the same time.
So, for instance, today's elite parenting culture - the books, magazines
and Web sites - will often, but certainly not always, talk about the
need for parents to have some authority in their children's lives. Yet
in the same breath, they will maintain that you should regularly give
your child as many choices as possible in every conceivable area of his
life. They might argue that a child needs limits and discipline, but
will then make the case that one should never spank a child because a
little one can't understand what's happening, but an 18-month old can
effectively be put in a "time out." They talk about helping a child to
develop a sense of empathy and right and wrong, but are adamant that one
never criticize the child, "only his behavior."
Huh?
Yes, the experts conflict, often with themselves. And Americans, 100
years after the "century of the child" and the "expert era" was
inaugurated, seem to have more child-rearing angst than ever. Nor have I
heard anyone suggest we're now raising "better" kids, however that's
defined.
So, is that child-rearing angst a cause of, or caused by, the experts?
Hulbert says it may be a bit of both.
But she ultimately steps back, and leaves final conclusions up to her
readers. In the end, it seems to me, if those readers at the very least
walk away from "Raising America" feeling less intimidated by the experts
and more confident in their own common sense as parents and in going to
grandma for child raising advice, Hulbert will have done them a favor.
|
