We Modern Parents
I
MEMBERS of the generation called ‘younger’ during the first years following the war — the openly smoking, cocktail-drinking, healthily uncorseted young women and the determinedly frank and emancipated young men, whose early novels about themselves gave American literature a fresh start — have vanished from print and the public eye. It is a generation of parents now. Marriage with parenthood is not supposed to offer much scope for original treatment to even the most emancipated minds. Those who have settled down in marriage are subsequently tied down by parenthood, and no one wants to hear about settling and being tied when there are ever younger generations to watch being more and more modern. So a new type of parent has evolved away from the limelight.
One thing never sufficiently recognized about our generation was its tremendous seriousness. Perhaps we believed all the Commencement orators who told us we were the hope of the world. Perhaps it was because our adolescence coincided with the war. Perhaps it was just too much publicity. In any case we were serious about everything we did. We thought things out carefully and talked them out extensively. Roadsters parked beside country roads were full of couples Buchmanizing. We all knew what each other thought about everything. It was very exhausting.
Having married according to our much discussed lights, our seriousness and our passion for arranging our lives did not desert us. Most of us had made decisions about our children before any suitable mate had presented himself. None of us was prepared to let children come as Victorian surprises. Marriage gave us a companion with whom we could discuss this matter with practical results. We planned to have our first as soon as we got a Ph.D., or had a winter in Paris, or were given a raise, or could afford another bathroom. Our second would arrive within two years after our first. After that we divided roughly into those who really believed that the higher classes had a duty toward the race and those who thought two children were all they could bring up really well. In all cases the children were to be brought up really well.
In spite of laws to the contrary, we proceeded to have our children more or less as we had planned. With the actual arrival of the baby our seriousness doubled. We had a baby specialist inspect the infant almost as soon as it had begun to breathe, and we engaged him to preserve its health indefinitely. This, however, did not prevent us from investing in the latest books on the care of babies. Our generation was full of respect for the printed word. We bought all the standard books in the very newest editions. Earlier editions might say bananas at eight months. The latest said three. We were careful to get the latest.
We began to read books on child psychology. In common with everyone else in that decade, we were amateur psychologists, able to analyze each other with what we felt was quite deadly accuracy; but we had never considered what pitfalls await the very young. In terror we wondered whether to let the baby suck his thumb or to break him of it and risk its bringing on something worse. We welcomed the Behaviorists and took comfort in the thought that upon our training depended our child’s character and not upon Great-Uncle Oscar. Given enough books and perseverance, we felt we could eradicate Uncle Oscar.
We turned the baby to sleep on alternate sides, to make his head a good shape. We dressed him on a table, for his back. We let him cry on occasion, for his lungs. We were never a minute late with his schedule. We faded and the baby throve. He was enormous, responsive, red-cheeked. His disposition was flawless. He exceeded what our books agreed was normal development. We discussed him at luncheon parties, and our still unmarried or childless friends grew faint at the sound of orange juice or spinach. Our seriousness, however, was bearing good fruit.
II
We became increasingly earnest as our babies grew older. We ‘reconditioned ’ them to noises by feeding them in the bathroom and dropping tin pans into the bathtub during dessert. We joined Mothers’ Clubs and rose to discuss our smallest problems with a professional advisor who, being childless, had had time to study countless children. Coming from a generation that had talked a great deal about careers for women, and had meant it, we were not to be outdone by marriage and domesticity. We made motherhood our profession and talked shop with each other with an intensity that no business men could ever sustain. We were so earnest that we lost what was left of our sense of humor. We became a generation of scientifically heavy-handed parents.
For a start, we practically abolished the standard jokes about children. Only Punch now has pictures of children saying their prayers and making ingenuous remarks about life — and everyone knows that England resists change. No mother of our generation would dare to tell what her youngest said about God, Santa Claus, or fairies. In any case, the situations could not arise. Our children are carefully left alone to develop their own religious ideas, if any, when they are older. After all, there is no proof, as we see it, and our children must not have their minds cluttered up with what is not proved. (What it really amounts to is that we are as embarrassed by religion as our parents used to be by sex.) Fairies went out long ago, but Santa Claus was still rampant when we took charge. We relegate him to department stores and keep our children uncontaminated until they are old enough to see through red cheesecloth and white cotton whiskers. We encourage them to make their own Christmas tree ornaments and we avoid all mention of the original function of Christmas.
As for storks — no one thinks it amusing to hear what little Geoffrey said about the stork. One looks aghast at Geoffrey’s mother to think that he has been allowed to hear of such a bird. Little Anne and Patricia, Michael and Peter, were informed about what used to be called ‘the facts of life’ before they could feed themselves properly. They were persistently informed until it should have become a part of their consciousness, and if they forget from time to time and make some incorrect allusions, they will be taken up immediately and reinformed.
We make a point of telling the truth to our children and of answering all their questions correctly. If modem children do not whine and repeat ‘Why?’ in the traditional annoying manner of children, it may be because they never have time to repeat the word and become fretful. They may also wish to avoid its consequences. Modern parents are full of information.
III
If you wish to give our children toys, you must give them something educational. Few of the formerly acceptable gifts for children will do now. Even if the recipient is at what you consider the rattle stage, the safest procedure is to go to some serious modern toyshop where a salesgirl full of psychological terms can choose something for you. The old idea of a child’s having a favorite toy, an animal or a doll, of his taking it to bed with him and cleaving to it until it becomes a shapeless lump, though still dear to him, is now believed in only by rotogravure sections and magazine covers. If little Christopher loves a Teddy-bear and wants to take it everywhere with him, he will be strange and an outsider when he is taken to see little Stephen and David, who are laboriously learning to put graduated pegs in holes or to throw a ball correctly. (They are taught to throw correctly as soon as they can throw at all. They’ll be so much better adjusted at Yale or Harvard or Princeton if they are really good at some game.) Little Christopher must be eased away from his Teddy-bear and taught to put just as many pegs in holes and just as many graduated rings on sticks as Stephen and David. We want him to be happy when he grows up.
Not even the old, commonly accepted books for children are welcome now. As one of our advance guard said in an introduction to her idea of the sort of book a child should have, the art of making picture books for children is still in its infancy. This may come as a shock to our elders, but we know it is only too true. We acclaim the publication of a book full of beautiful photographs of children’s shoes, a comb and brush, a bowl and spoon, and so on. When Joan smilingly recognizes the different articles at a very early age, we enthusiastically fill out the questionnaire provided, giving Joan’s reactions and our own, and send it to the serious, scientific, and interested publishers. We order the next book in this series, photographs of children doing just what Joan will soon be doing — putting on shoes, brushing teeth, and so on. We know there will be no pictures of a child saying his prayers, so no embarrassing explanations will be necessary. It is a comfort to have a book in which one can show every picture to a child.
The difficulty about the old books for children was that practically none of them told the truth and that only. For instance, what good can it do Peter to look at a picture of a cat wearing a hat? Or of an elephant dancing with a tiger? When the children later recognize the animals at the zoo it does n’t prove anything. Real pictures of the animals in the jungle are what we want, although most of the best photographs seem to show them standing and staring by water holes. It is better for Timmy to think that lions drink all the time than to think they occasionally go out for walks with umbrellas to get monkeys to give them haircuts.
Good toys are becoming increasingly easy to find, thanks to the manufacturers’ adopting the idea of a Purpose behind each toy. Last to be infected by modern business ideals, the toy industry is now second to none in intelligent theories accompanying simple products. There is, for instance, a toy which gives a child endless opportunity to hammer. A board pierced with holes is set on legs so that it will stand with either side up. In the holes are wooden pegs fitted tightly enough to require a real hammering to be pushed through. The child pounds the pegs down through the holes with a wooden hammer until the tops are level with the board. Then he reverses the stand and hammers them all back again — if he is a thorough child.
Any old-fashioned parent can see at once the practical advantages of such a toy, but practical advantages are not mentioned by the manufacturers. An accompanying explanation which launched the toy into popularity with us moderns said that the toy was to afford a means of expressing the instincts to hew and hammer inherited from our earliest ancestors who had to hew and hammer to survive. A father who fancies himself as a carpenter and may have had to chop down a tree or make a playhouse without recourse to his ancestors or Sears, Roebuck is not the civilized parent educational toy makers assume. He need n’t look with personal pride and sympathy at little Tommy hammering away to no end. Tommy hammering is a chapter in race history.
It is not the manufacturers’ fault if they seem rather to overdo the serious side of children’s playthings. We modern parents push them on. There was a time when only public playgrounds were equipped with elaborate apparatus for sliding, climbing, and swinging. Now every suburban back yard shames the city fathers’ appropriations. So intensely serious are we parents that even those of us who have moved to the semi-country for our children’s good feel that we owe them a jungle gym or something like it. It is not unusual to see this climbing framework, invaluable for city nursery schools and zoos, set down in the midst of climbable trees. If some enterprising manufacturer got out an artificial tree with explanations attached as to the climbing proclivities of Early Man he could sell incredible numbers to us city-minded rustics. We want to give our children every opportunity to develop, and we can’t help feeling that the scientifically constructed thing is superior to its counterpart in nature.
IV
For those who believe in the modern education of infants, or consider it better for a child to be away from home as soon as possible, there are the nursery schools. Much has been said about them as the dumping ground for parents who want to be rid of their children at the earliest possible moment. Naturally, nursery schools are a godsend to such parents — and to their children. They also solve the problem for women who want to work and still be mothers. But we earnest parents send our children because it is best for them.
As soon as he can stand, a child is eligible for the more advanced nursery schools. He will be taught to stay dry, to string beads, to develop along all the proper lines. Although some of us still consider that it does a child of a year and a half no harm to stay at home, we feel that by the time he is two and a half a mother is n’t doing all she should for him if he is n’t in an organized group of some sort. He learns to adapt himself to a roomful of very young children, and, among many other useful and decorative things, to wash his own glass after orange juice, to put on and take off his own overshoes, to walk like an elephant to elephant music, and to rest with his hands over his head. We get report cards with marks for coöperation and rhythm, and we have conferences with his teachers if he refuses to learn to swing.
To see the benefit he has derived from his organized group, one has only to take him to see some two-and-a-halfyear-old contemporary in the country whose parents affect to scorn group education of infants. The country child will be obviously glad to see him, but she will run about playing by herself, almost as if he were not there. He will have brought some simple educational toy with him, but she will have no practical use for it, and he will have as little use for her ‘houses’ in shrubbery and imaginary nests in trees. He will know how to be helpful, polite, how to coöperate, but he will have no opportunity to demonstrate. By the time the afternoon is over he will be thankful to be taken away. Before this spectacle of childhood in the rough he can only think, with his parents, as he labors to put on his own leggings and they maintain a proud and patient aloofness, that she is not a very perfect social unit.
V
The model modern child is reasonably affectionate, as is the modern parent. Books, however, give no table of the emotions, and we are left to wonder if, by the book’s lights, we are the gushing, cloying type, or grimly undemonstrative. Does our baby feel there is too much or too little love in his home? The mother who was one of the most determinedly unsentimental of her generation and married on the ‘Shake hands and part’ basis must now study the art of bestowing endearments. The mother who knows she would have been a model in 1900 worries for fear that by following her natural impulses she will give Tim an Œdipus complex. And the children may have inclinations of their own. It is all very confusing. Fortunately there are always the psychoanalysts.
As for that, we can all go to psychoanalysts now. Our generation does not go, as our predecessors seem to, — to judge by their dinner-party conversation, — to see why we don’t get on with our husbands and wives. We feel that we settled all that before we married. We go to see why we don’t get on with our children. We don’t even have to go to the expensive people. There are always ambitious amateurs who have been ‘done’ by the great, and who, having studied their methods, are eager to lay on hands in their turn. If Anne is unresponsive and resents her manly mother’s attempt to become feminine for her sake, if Patricia whines continually and her mother feels most unmaternally irritated by the noise, they can all go to Mrs. Duplex-Pulvex, who has recently been done by both Jung and Freud. You may think that Anne would rather not have her mother try so hard to be affectionately demonstrative; you may say that Patricia knows she was expected to be a boy from hearing her mother’s obstetrical reminiscences — we believe in talking naturally before our children — and feels chagrined by her initial failure to please. You may think that Patricia’s mother is pushing her too fast along the road to adult perfection. But these are merely surmises. The bottom truth is that these mothers and their two-anda-half-year-old children are ‘fundamentally incompatible.’ If we start again with that in mind, of course, everything will be made easy. It is wonderful to have science to turn to.
As for sex, we who were and are so frank about it are as concerned for our children’s adolescent years as was the generation which kept us from knowing all about it as long as possible. We take all the best magazines devoted to the problem of child rearing, and, with our eldest falteringly stringing beads in his play pen, we devour articles on the subject of sex at sixteen. We have so lost our perspective that we will read with sinking hearts articles and books on the subject by writers whose earlier novels we used to ridicule as overdone or even pornographic. The squealing stallions of our literary generation are out at pasture now. The Mothers’ Clubs will take them in and feed them through the winters.
It is natural for one to try to make up to one’s children for the lacks one remembers in one’s own childhood. We criticize our own parents’ efforts in ourselves and determine that our children shall not suffer where we feel ourselves inadequate to-day. They shall not be shy, unaccomplished, left, out, expecting too much of life, awkward, followers rather than leaders. They must be supermen and superwomen.
If one puts one’s self in these modern children’s places one sees them trying to bring up their children twenty years from now to be easy companions to themselves. Discipline, yes, but never conscious scientific experimenting, never a laboratory atmosphere. They will try to have fun together as a family, to enjoy each one for what she or he is, to let each other alone. They will prize a sense of humor above all things and fiercely resent the lack of it in their own parents. They will admire the individual who does not fit perfectly into the universal level.
Still, this may be only the cynical prophecy of an unbeliever. In the meantime no one can deny that we are most earnestly trying to do our duty by our children. They will be completely socially adjusted at any age; they will all be intelligent, popular, good at games, knowing only established facts. If you think they will be deplorably serious-minded, or prigs, or even nervous wrecks, you show yourself to be far behind the times — or possibly ahead of them.