There has been a fascinating and, I think, poorly understood evolution
of parenting and childhood since the earliest colonial days of the American
experience.
Paula S. Fass writes about it in The
End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to
the Managed Child (Princeton University Press, 2006). A New York Times reviewer points out that the narrative gets a bit lost in the most recent
history of “helicopter parents” who are overwhelmingly focused on controlling
and protecting their children so they grow up to great lives with success and
affluence and notable careers and….cue the all-important play date….make sure Joshua
can get into Yale….
It’s intriguing to me to understand that colonial parents rather
consciously moved away from the Old World view of children as economic resources, and adopted a more
relaxed willingness to give their kids some degree of independence and flexibility
in their paths to adult life. Of course, kids were put to work at a young age,
but parents gave them opportunity and approval to feel engaged in the work and
be open to wider horizons and innovation. Europeans thought that American
children were “rude, unmannerly and bold.”
There were many circumstantial differences at work. In the colonies and
early United States, there was an abundance of cheap land and a shortage of
labor, and thus, pervasive opportunities for personal success. The European
tradition of primogeniture was largely absent: on our side of the Atlantic, a
father’s land and estate did not pass automatically to the firstborn son, so
the more egalitarian inheritance practices boosted the life prospects of most children.
Of course, there’s another side to the childhood narrative: slave
children in America were often treated as economic units by their owners. That’s
a disgusting reality in our history.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
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