Parent-offspring conflict explains why child-rearing is always a battle of wills. What it does not explain is why that battle should be fought with rods and birches in one era and lectures and time-outs in another. In retrospect, it’s hard to avoid sorrow for the millennia of children who have needlessly suffered at the hands of their caregivers. Unlike the tragedy of war, where each side has to be as fierce as its adversary, the violence of child-rearing is entirely one-sided. The children who were whipped and burned in the past were no naughtier than the children of today, and they ended up no better behaved as adults. On the contrary, we have seen that the rate of impulsive violence of yesterday’s adults was far higher than today’s. What led the parents of our era to the discovery that they could socialize their children with a fraction of the brute force that was used by their ancestors?
The first nudge was ideological, and like so many other humanitarian reforms it originated in the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. Children’s tactics in parent-offspring conflict have led parents in every era to call them little devils. During the ascendancy of Christianity, that intuition was ratified by a religious belief in innate depravity and original sin. A German preacher in the 1520s, for instance, sermonized that children harbored wishes for “adultery, fornication, impure desires, lewdness, idol worship, belief in magic, hostility, quarreling, passion, anger, strife, dissension, factiousness, hatred, murder, drunkenness, gluttony,” and he was just getting started.
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The expression “beat the devil out of him” was more than a figure of speech! Also, a fatalism about the unfolding of life made child development a matter of fate or divine will rather than the responsibility of parents and teachers.
One paradigm shift came from John Locke’s
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
, which was published in 1693 and quickly went viral.
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Locke suggested that a child was “only as white Paper, or Wax, to be moulded and fashioned as one pleases”—a doctrine also called the tabula rasa (scraped tablet) or blank slate. Locke wrote that the education of children could make “a great difference in mankind,” and he encouraged teachers to be sympathetic toward their pupils and to try to take their viewpoints. Tutors should carefully observe the “change in temper” in their students and should help them enjoy their studies. And teachers should not expect young children to show the same “carriage, seriousness, or application” as older ones. On the contrary, “they must be permitted . . . the foolish and childish actions suitable to their years.”
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The idea that the way children are treated determines the kinds of adults they grow into is conventional wisdom today, but it was news at the time. Several of Locke’s contemporaries and successors turned to metaphor to remind people about the formative years of life. John Milton wrote, “The childhood shows the man as morning shows the day.” Alexander Pope elevated the correlation to causation: “Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.” And William Wordsworth inverted the metaphor of childhood itself: “The child is father of the man.” The new understanding required people to rethink the moral and practical implications of the treatment of children. Beating a child was no longer an exorcism of malign forces possessing a child, or even a technique of behavior modification designed to reduce the frequency of bratty behavior in the present. It shaped the kind of person that the child would grow into, so its consequences, foreseen and unforeseen, would alter the makeup of civilization in the future.
Another gestalt shift came from Rousseau, who replaced the Christian notion of original sin with the romantic notion of original innocence. In his 1762 treatise
Émile
,
or On Education
, Rousseau wrote, “Everything is good as it leaves the hand of the Author of things, and everything degenerates in the hands of man.” Foreshadowing the theories of the 20th-century psychologist Jean Piaget, Rousseau divided childhood into a succession of stages centered on Instinct, Sensations, and Ideas. He argued that young children have not yet reached the Age of Ideas, and so should not be expected to reason in the ways of adults. Rather than drilling youngsters in the rules of good and evil, adults should allow children to interact with nature and learn from their experiences. If in the course of exploring the world they damaged things, it was not from an intention to do harm but from their own innocence. “Respect childhood,” he implored, and “leave nature to act for a long time before you get involved with acting in its place.”
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The 19th-century Romantic movement inspired by Rousseau saw childhood as a period of wisdom, purity, and creativity, a stage that children should be left to enjoy rather than be disciplined out of. The sensibility is familiar today but was radical at the time.
During the Enlightenment, elite opinion began to incorporate the childfriendly doctrines of the blank slate and original innocence. But historians of childhood place the turning point in the actual treatment of children considerably later, in the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century.
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The economist Viviana Zelizer has suggested that the era from the 1870s to the 1930s saw a “sacralization” of childhood among middle- and upper-class parents in the West. That was when children attained the status we now grant them: “economically worthless, emotionally priceless.”
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The era was inaugurated in England when a “baby-farming” scandal led to the formation of the Infant Protection Society in 1870 and to the Infant Life Protection Acts of 1872 and 1897. Around the same time, pasteurization and sterilized bottles meant that fewer infants were outsourced to infanticidal wet nurses. Though the Industrial Revolution originally moved children from backbreaking labor on farms to backbreaking labor in mills and factories, legal reforms increasingly restricted child labor. At the same time, the affluence that flowed from the maturing Industrial Revolution drove rates of infant mortality downward, reduced the need for child labor, and provided a tax stream that could support social services. More children went to school, which soon became compulsory and free. To deal with the packs of urchins, ragamuffins, and artful dodgers who roamed city streets, child welfare agencies founded kindergartens, orphanages, reform schools, fresh-air camps, and boys’ and girls’ clubs.
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Stories for children were written to give them pleasure rather than to terrorize them or moralize to them. The Child Study movement aimed for a scientific approach to human development and began to replace the superstition and bunkum of old wives with the superstition and bunkum of child-rearing experts.
We have seen that during periods of humanitarian reform, a recognition of the rights of one group can lead to a recognition of others by analogy, as when the despotism of kings was analogized to the despotism of husbands, and when two centuries later the civil rights movement inspired the women’s rights movement. The protection of abused children also benefited from an analogy—in this case, believe it or not, with animals.
In Manhattan in 1874, the neighbors of ten-year-old Mary Ellen McCormack, an orphan being raised by an adoptive mother and her second husband, noticed suspicious cuts and bruises on the girl’s body.
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They reported her to the Department of Public Charities and Correction, which administered the city’s jails, poorhouses, orphanages, and insane asylums. Since there were no laws that specifically protected children, the caseworker contacted the American Society for the Protection of Animals. The society’s founder saw an analogy between the plight of the girl and the plight of the horses he rescued from violent stable owners. He engaged a lawyer who presented a creative interpretation of habeas corpus to the New York State Supreme Court and petitioned to have her removed from her home. The girl calmly testified:
Mamma has been in the habit of whipping and beating me almost every day. She used to whip me with a twisted whip—a rawhide. I have now on my head two black-and-blue marks which were made by Mamma with the whip, and a cut on the left side of my forehead which was made by a pair of scissors in Mamma’s hand.... I never dared speak to anybody, because if I did I would get whipped.
The
New York Times
reprinted the testimony in an article entitled “Inhumane Treatment of a Little Waif,” and the girl was removed from the home and eventually adopted by her caseworker. Her lawyer set up the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the first protective agency for children anywhere in the world. Together with other agencies founded in its wake, it set up shelters for battered children and lobbied for laws that punished their abusive parents. Similarly, in England the first legal case to protect a child against an abusive parent was taken up by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and out of it grew the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
Though the rollover of the 19th century saw an acceleration in the valuation of children in the West, it was neither an abrupt transition nor a one-shot advance. Expressions of love of children, of grief at their loss, and of dismay at their mistreatment can be found in every period of European history and in every culture.
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Even many of the parents who treated their children cruelly were often laboring under superstitions that led them to think they were acting in the child’s best interests. And as with many declines in violence, it’s hard to disentangle all the changes that were happening at once—enlightened ideas, increasing prosperity, reformed laws, changing norms.
But whatever the causes were, they did not stop in the 1930s. Benjamin Spock’s perennial bestseller
Baby and Child Care
was considered radical in 1946 because it discouraged mothers from spanking their children, stinting on affection, and regimenting their routines. Though the indulgence of postwar parents was a novelty at the time (widely and spuriously blamed for the excesses of the baby boomers), it was by no means a high-water mark. When the boomers became parents, they were even more solicitous of their children. Locke, Rousseau, and the 19th-century reformers had set in motion an escalator of gentleness in the treatment of children, and in recent decades its rate of ascent has accelerated.
Since 1950, people have become increasingly loath to allow children to become the victims of any kind of violence. The violence people can most easily control, of course, is the violence they inflict themselves, namely by spanking, smacking, slapping, paddling, birching, tanning, hiding, thrashing, and other forms of corporal punishment. Elite opinion on corporal punishment changed dramatically during the 20th century. Other than in fundamentalist Christian groups, it’s rare today to hear people say that sparing the rod will spoil the child. Scenes of fathers with belts, mothers with hairbrushes, and teary children tying pillows to their bruised behinds are no longer common in family entertainment.
At least since Dr. Spock, child-care gurus have increasingly advised against spanking.
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Today every pediatric and psychological association opposes the practice, though not always in language as clear as the title of a recent article by Murray Straus: “Children Should Never, Ever, Be Spanked No Matter What the Circumstances.”
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The expert opinion recommends against spanking for three reasons. One is that spanking has harmful side effects down the line, including aggression, delinquency, a deficit in empathy, and depression. The cause-and-effect theory, in which spanking teaches children that violence is a way to solve problems, is debatable. Equally likely explanations for the correlation between spanking and violence are that innately violent parents have innately violent children, and that cultures and neighborhoods that tolerate spanking also tolerate other kinds of violence.
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The second reason not to spank a child is that spanking is not particularly effective in reducing misbehavior compared to explaining the infraction to the child and using nonviolent measures like scolding and time-outs. Pain and humiliation distract children from pondering what they did wrong, and if the only reason they have to behave is to avoid these penalties, then as soon as Mom’s and Dad’s backs are turned they can be as naughty as they like. But perhaps the most compelling reason to avoid spanking is symbolic. Here is Straus’s third reason why children should never, ever be spanked: “Spanking contradicts the ideal of nonviolence in the family and society.”
Have parents been listening to the experts, or perhaps coming to similar conclusions on their own? Public opinion polls sometimes ask people whether they agree with statements like “It is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking” or “There are certain circumstances when it is all right to smack a child.” The level of agreement depends on the wording of the question, but in every poll in which the same question has been asked in different years, the trend is downward. Figure 7–17 shows the trends since 1954 from three American datasets, together with surveys from Sweden and New Zealand. Before the early 1980s, around 90 percent of respondents in the English-speaking countries approved of spanking. In less than a generation, the percentage had fallen in some polls to just more than half. The levels of approval depend on the country and region: Swedes approve of spanking far less than do Americans or Kiwis, and Americans themselves are diverse, as we would expect from the southern culture of honor.
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In a 2005 survey, spanking approval rates ranged from around 55 percent in northern blue states (those that tend to vote for Democrats), like Massachusetts and Vermont, to more than 85 percent in southern red states (those that tend to vote for Republicans), like Alabama and Arkansas.
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Across the fifty states, the rate of approval of spanking tracks the homicide rate (the two measures show a correlation of 0.52 on a scale from -1 to 1), which could mean that spanked children grow up to be killers, but more likely that subcultures that encourage the spanking of children also encourage the violent defense of honor among adults.
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But every region showed a decline, so that by 2006 the southern states disapproved of spanking in the same proportion that the north-central and mid-Atlantic states did in 1986.
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