The Future of Children

Ages turn, idols weather. Denounced yesterday for sexism, in the dock the day before for conspiring to help draft evaders (case dismissed), Dr. Benjamin Spock, author of RAISING CHILDREN IN A DIFFICULT TIME (Norton, $7.95), is today in some quarters a figure of controversy. (“Color him yellow,” says William Buckley’s National Review.) Harder still to credit, you hear condescension to the man even among his core constituency, the American middle classes currently in middle life. When we were youngsters starting out in the forties, we “used” him, trusted him, depended on him—but was Baby and Child Care (1946) a genuinely good book? Nine closely printed pages on thumb-sucking, and such heavy weather about letting the little ones out of their pen. Weren’t the lessons a bit obvious? Wasn’t the Doctor himself— au fond—a shade on the simple side?

As it happens, Dr. Spock’s new book is, in fact, a work of simplification. It inquires into the impact of the cultural environment on parents and children now, a subject excluded from Baby and Child Care; the item simplified is the modern world, and the effect of the simplification is hugely to enlarge the significance of individual human competence and goodness in ordinary daily life. The author of the twentieth century’s best-selling American book (22 million copies of Baby and Child Care have been sold) isn’t a stranger to the contemporary vocabulary of cultural disaster—alienation, fragmentation, death of community, loss of human dignity, and the like. He believes that things have gotten into a pretty mess about which something ought to be done:

In simpler societies neighbors of all ages know one another, live close to one another, work together on common tasks, play together, help one another. In our industrial civilization many people work far from home, on assembly lines or in office jobs that give little or no satisfaction; and they compete with one another. They live in more or less isolated homes. They restrict their social life to those they consider their social equals. And when they need assistance they have to buy it from professional people. This is a spiritually impoverished life, compared to what our species was designed for.

Anti-human developments in the arts trouble him: “Painting used to show mostly people who were good to look at. Now it has turned increasingly to abstractions; but when it shows human beings, they are ugly or distorted.” So too does the problem of faith: “People’s decreased respect for themselves is due partly, I think, to what you might call a sense of having lost their souls.”

Yet, like Kafka’s Joseph K., while the Doctor is troubled, he is not very troubled: the accents of hysteria aren’t heard in his book. “Outside the home.” he writes, “a sound approach to many of our social ills—including the misuse of drugs— would be somehow to restore a sense of real community to our socalled communities.” The word “somehow” lacks the usual overtones of desperation or impotence. Ways will be found if people set their minds to the job, the Doctor implies; violence, hatred, discrimination, brutality in films, promiscuity, LSD, other “problems” can be met. The root of the confidence is a conception of hearth and dinner table as independent theaters of operation, places where personal clarities and values can be made to count. Maybe in the broad world desert spaces can scare souls nowadays, but nobody’s helpless at home.

Why so? What exactly are my potencies in my castle? The Doctor’s answers are detailed. Suppose my three-year-old hassles me for a pistol: I can counter strongly. I can tell him that I don’t “want to give him a gun or even pretend shooting because there is too much meanness and killing in the world,” and thereafter I can think through a scenario for dealing with the pressures and compromises that are probably bound to follow. Suppose my children are puzzled or disturbed by the behavior of a religious fanatic glimpsed downtown, or by some piece of sexual perversion encountered in the schoolyard: I can ease them swiftly past. I can begin by saying, “He doesn’t think the way you and I think,” and go on to “explain in simple terms his line of reasoning and why I [think] it [is] mistaken,” and thus introduce them,

quietly, sanely, into the world of human difference. Suppose that my children cheat me, and watch in secret a killer television show I’ve forbidden them: even then I am not graveled. No matter how often they watch, the memory of my having disapproved will linger with them, and it will “protect them, to a degree, from the coarsening effect of the scenes.”

It isn’t, of course, the individual speeches and strategies proposed in Dr. Spock’s pages that open a view of unsuspected resources and influence for the reader. Rather it’s the cumulative portrait of the parent as competent coper—alert, quick to perceive “quirks” (inner stresses, knots in formation), and superbly articulate in the cause of decency and truth. To survey this portrait is to shed self-pity, “feelings of inadequacy,” the wretched assumption that one doesn’t know, couldn’t advise, can’t tell—can’t tell anybody what to do how to think what to be, goddammit I-don’t-know . . . Read and you are made whole.

Social historians will doubtless remind people that the award of competence offered in Raising Children in a Difficult Time isn’t altogether different from the one provided long ago in Baby and Child Care. Young parents of the seventies are, to be sure, fearfully bedeviled—by marriage-mockers, “anti-natalists,” below-zero population growth freaks, others. But we ourselves, way back then, suffered a disadvantage or two. The middle-class mid-forties mother, for instance: surprisingly often, census figures attest, she was an only child, or reared in a two-sibling house with a live-in maid — which is to say, she had less direct baby-tending experience than, at her age, her mother before her or her daughters to come. Just at her delivery time, moreover, hospitals shortened the length of maternity stays—with less training she bore earlier responsibility. There were the disorientations of military domesticity-nesting in filthy coach seats, or in half a wobbly trailer, or in a back bedroom in a home married “from” but not departed from. Everybody’s system was upset in those days not only by ill-digested Freud (mustn’t do to ours what they did to us) but by an absolutely ferocious will to achieve separate domestic space—a thoroughly nuclear familyno matter what the cost in weariness and loneliness. (Communards of the seventies who seek familial extensiveness pursue that from which “victims” of the housing shortage of the forties, forced sharers with the folks, were in flight.) And—pity the forties mother this memory—there was the character of the young father and husband: broke, anxious, skeptical about discipline for discipline’s sake (a service-connected disability that eased the way for Spockish “permissivism”) and above all impatient (ground to make up . . . have to work late . . . can’t you decide?).

Should we forties people have been desperate? Should we have worried about our ignorance, our shaky nerves? Dr. Spock thought not. In Baby and Child Care he laid out probable crises, causes, and remedies in a tone that said: Fear not, these tasks have been done before. And over the last three decades his voice hasn’t changed a whit. —Come, friends, that object in the corner, if you didn’t know, is the Bathinette. Shut out “the crisis of our culture.” Bathe your babe.

If he had only this to offer—this incitement to faith in one’s own competence—Dr. Spock would still be a welcome companion. But, as already suggested, there’s a further reward for his readers, or for those among them who are rearing children—namely a small rosette of moral probity. The opening chapter of Raising Children in a Difficult Time claims that “The Family Isn’t Finished Yet,” and gives reasons. One is that “a majority of us” find largest satisfaction in being needed by our offspring when they are young. Another is that child-rearing by committed parents is necessary to the emotional health of future generations. (Children reared by neutral elders lacking emotional commitment to them turn out to be relatively stunted in their affective lives.) A third reason the family will survive—not spelled out flatly but everywhere implicit—is that the human dream of having things both ways, of managing to be simultaneously altruistic and self-indulgent, comes more often to fruition in family settings than elsewhere.

A hard point, but one does understand. Out the window as I write, at the foot of the hill, there’s a heavy-bellied chestnut mare moving about a snow field. I hear my neighbors, a young couple, hammering away, insulating a small falling-down barn. The mare is to foal in two weeks. The event has been much chatted-up in our house, and my daughter worries that it will happen during school. I root with her, naturally, wishing to bestow this scene, wishing also to see it registered. Neighbors, hay, stall, Coleman lamp, wet snow falling, vet, mother and child, dopey little beast on its embarrassing stick legs, my ten-year-old amazed . . . The habitual lives in an enchanted domain at such a moment if, pointing or not pointing, exclaiming or mum, you’ve a child’s eyes to see with, her feelings to track. Dr. Spock has always been splendid about this:

When you pat a dog for your eighteen month old, you can see her shrinking back with caution, reaching out to touch with fascination, smiling in response to the dog’s friendliness, and feeling proud of her own courage—all at the same time.

The first time a three year old sees a steam shovel working, you realize that it takes her a long time to absorb all the impressions: the noise, the jolting of its motions, the enormousness of the bite of earth and the huge hunks of rock that it takes, the sudden vomiting of the shovelful into the waiting truck that shakes as it is loaded, the fact that an ordinary-looking man can control such vast power. ... A child will talk about her first sight of a working steam shovel for hours afterward, with eyes sparkling: and a parent can share in the wonderment.

What delicacy! What fine alertness to inward fact!

But the point in question mustn’t be lost. It’s all in the Doctor’s insistence that fun on this order isn’t self-indulgence alone: no shameless voyeurs we. My chatting up the event, passing the binoculars at lunch so others can check the runout pasture, promoting trips down the mud road are, he says, part of the moral history of the race. Anticipation begets anticipation begets love, the latter beginning as “constructive idealism,” a longing in the child to imitate the interest and fondness

she feels being bent toward her, an impulse to learn to share in the way the elders share. (“Out of this will eventually grow their devotion to their own children and their altruism toward humanity.”) What is being said is that when you go out on a lark with your kid you are contributing to the future of civilization. Appetite and probity, riot and rectitude conjoin and you are (however briefly) good. An excellent deal, in faith. Indeed, from a book how could anyone ask more?

Raising Children in a Difficult Time appears to have been assembled from the author’s Redbook columns, and it is awkwardly long on recantations. Dr. Spock apologizes to the women’s liberation movement for having written in earlier years that girls should be brought up to think of child-rearing as exciting work. (“Of course I should have said—as I honestly believe—‘Girls and boys should be brought up to think of child-rearing. . . .’ ”) He apologizes to parents generally for having preached too intimidatingly about the “problems that sometimes result from excessive repression.” And it may as well be acknowledged that the Doctor doesn’t qualify, in this outing, as a profound critic of contemporary culture.

In a hundred passages, however, he writes with beautifully intuitive ease about the moral dynamics of family life; his instinct for the separate living personhood of each party, elder or younger, hasn’t lost any of its edge; and in the world of feeling, now as when he began, he never mistakes a part for a whole. Still marketed to the mass audience as “just” common sense, Benjamin Spock is in truth a rarity: a thoroughly disciplined professional who joins to his natural kindness an organic sense of life.

Clear Instructions

Compare that sense of life with the perspective developed by the competition—Dr. Wesley C. and Janice Becker’s SUCCESSFUL PARENTHOOD: Raising Your Kids Using Grandad’s Values (Follett, $5.95). Despite the title, the Beckers can’t be described as traditionalists. The phrase “Grandma’s Rule” recurs frequently in their book, but the authors’ primary concern is to translate the wisdom of the old generation into scientific Skinnerisms— principles like these:

To make a reinforcing stimulus out of a neutral stimulus, repeatedly follow the neutral stimulus with a known reinforcer.

Any more-preferred activity can be used to reinforce a less-preferred activity by following the less-preferred activity with the more-preferred activity.

The Beckers work chiefly with case studies—Pam who won’t do her math, Rorey who belts his baby sis, Keith, a whiner, et cetera. The text presents techniques whereby parents can work scientifically to change behavior. The stress is on rewards, as just indicated. Following an opening discussion of the theoretical foundations of the principle of reinforcement, there are chapters on Problem Behavior, “Principles for Using Punishment.” “Basic Teaching Procedures” (special emphasis on the use of “prompts” and “behavior chains”), “How to Have a Smart Baby,” and behavioral change in grown-ups.

Parents of a kid who is, speaking bluntly, a pain in the ass will find several useful notions about effective bribery in the book. And certain sections of the text are more particularized and not strikingly less humane than Dr. Spock—notably some helpful pages on teaching language and about how and why to talk to a very young baby. But the absent quality is missed—the feeling for the back and forth of little and big, for the textures of response (waywardness, comedy, boredom), for the contrary beingness of each character in the equation. The Beckers write as follows:

Choose a body part that your baby can see . . . touch that part, and say, “This is your tummy.” Do it again: “This is your tummy.” Then say, “Where is your tummy?” and guide his hand to touch his tummy. While he is touching his tummy, say, “You can find your tummy.” . . . When your baby can touch two body parts on command with few errors, you can add a third body part. Again, the body part should be visible and at a distance from the other two, etc.

Clear instructions. The person who heeds them knows where he is and what he’s up to. He’s a creature of will, an intentional man, no diddler.

no giggler. But around him will anything flower except what should flower? As for the other person—the human one over there, small but real—does he have insides? Is he on his way to becoming a collection of levers? A moral of Successful Parenthood is that Method could make monsters of us all.

New Identity

Whether it will or not depends on the firmness of resistance to abstraction, and on our capacity to come to terms with our contrarieties. The interest of Erik Erikson’s DIMENSIONS OF A NEW IDENTITY (Norton, $5.95)—the second annual Jefferson Lectures sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities—lies in the subtlety and intellectual breadth of its address to both matters. The first lecture is a psychohistorical analysis, by turns suggestive and enigmatic, of Thomas Jefferson, “one of the founding personalities in the emergence of a new identity” in America. The second asks, what is it in us “that seems to need a sense of newness in every epoch of history, in every new stage of our lives, and, in fact, every morning as we start the day?” En route to the answer the reader traverses a thicket of ponderable cultural overviews. And by the end he’s had glimpses of a model “new American” for the future—a figure hearteningly substantial, alive to the interdependencies of conscious and unconscious motives, richly aware of the processes of acculturation, and (best by far) ill disposed to punitiveness.

The moments of triumph in Dr. Erikson’s previous books occur usually when he is in process of defining tensile stresses in a structure of feeling, catching a mind of distinction in the act either of drawing “positive” energies from “negative” sources, or of transforming mean superstitions, as though by magic, into foundation posts of an admirable public identity. The story is much the same in this latest work. The Jeffersonian self set under examination is that of the “founding father”; the writer circles round it warily, respectful of the grandeur but observant of the stress points.

One amongst them is the impulse to confine or repress. To be a found-ing father, to succeed in nurturing nondestructive attitudes in the new generation, an elder must surely have come to terms with the punitive parts of his being—but how did he manage this? History in the large and autobiographical materials provide clues, and the analyst studies them with shrewdness and tact. A letter shows Jefferson at his most extravagantly severe; he’s chiding his daughter for idleness; he insists shrilly that idleness is un-American, that it causes disease, that it will drive the girl mad. The father is at an edge of negative identity, fortifying himself “against those negative potentials which each man must confine and repress . . . within himself.” But other, self-restraining currents move within him, flowing from his awareness—exceptional at the time— that punitive behavior by parents is ruinous to parent and child alike. In passages of moral analysis, Jefferson condemns parental severity; he goes beyond this, reflecting on a slavebeating administered by a slaveholder before the eyes of the slaveholder’s own child, to focus on the way in which the child “catches the lineaments of wrath . . . and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.”

As Professor Erikson links various bits of evidence, entering the mysteries of nurture, and extending the analysis from the realm of personal character to that of public sway, he is caught up in uncommon intensity. What saves any of us from our worst selves? Pride? Self-love? The will to do good? Only, he concludes, an “informed love of humanity,” a condition of understanding for which a prime point of origin—and not alone in Jefferson—is knowledge of the humanity of the child. Pressing the claim, Erikson rises momentarily to the level of the best pages of his Luther or Gandhi’s Truth—the level, that is, of extraordinary performance in the field of moral education. Scale down the passion, though, and the eloquence, and the elevated authority of that performance, and the familiarity of the theme is disclosed. It is the theme that, from the beginning of his career to the present. Dr. Spock also has labored to make available—to the least of us as to the grandest. Wish both these caring men well.