Child Rearing

I

Introduction

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.

II

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.

III

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.