MESSAGE
| DATE | 2020-07-01 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Childhood Culture
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https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201610/the-culture-childhood-we-ve-almost-destroyed-it
psychologytoday.com
The Culture of Childhood: Weve Almost Destroyed It
22-28 minutes
Children learn the most valuable lessons with other children, away from
adults.
Posted Oct 31, 2016
publicdomainpictures.net Courtesy of Dawn Hudson
Source: publicdomainpictures.net Courtesy of Dawn Hudson
I dont want to trivialize the roles of adults in childrens lives, but,
truth be told, we adults greatly exaggerate our roles in our theories
and beliefs about how children develop. We have this adult-centric view
that we raise, socialize, and educate children.
Certainly we are important in childrens lives. Children need us. We
feed, clothe, shelter, and comfort them. We provide examples (not
always so good) of what its like to be an adult. But we dont raise,
socialize, or educate them. They do all that for themselves, and in
that process they are far more likely to look to other children than to
us adults as models. If child psychologists were actually CHILD
psychologists (children), theories of child development would be much
less about parents and much more about peers.
Children are biologically designed to grow up in a culture of childhood.
Have you ever noticed how your childs tastes in clothes, music, manner
of speech, hobbies, and almost everything else have much more to do with
what other children she or he knows are doing or like than what you are
doing or like? Of course you have. Children are biologically designed
to pay attention to the other children in their lives, to try to fit in
with them, to be able to do what they do, to know what they know.
Through most of human history, thats how children became educated, and
thats still largely how children become educated today, despite our
misguided attempts to stop it and turn the educating job over to adults.
Wherever anthropologists have observed traditional cultures and paid
attention to children as well as adults, theyve observed two cultures,
the adults' culture and the childrens culture. The two cultures, of
course, are not completely independent of one another. They interact
and influence one another; and children, as they grow up, gradually
leave the culture of childhood and enter into the culture of adulthood.
Childrens cultures can be understood, at least to some degree, as
practice cultures, where children try out various ways of being and
practice, modify, and build upon the skills and values of the adult
culture.
I first began to think seriously about cultures of childhood when I
began looking into band hunter-gatherer societies. In my reading, and
in my survey of anthropologists who had lived in such societies, I
learned that the children in those societiesfrom roughly the age of four
on through their mid teen yearsspent most of their waking time playing
and exploring with groups of other children, away from adults (Gray,
2012, also here). They played in age-mixed groups, in which younger
children emulated and learned from older ones. I found that
anthropologists who had studied children in other types of traditional
cultures also wrote about childrens involvement in peer groups as the
primary means of their socialization and education (e.g. Lancy et al,
2010; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989). Judith Harris (1998), in a discussion of
such research, noted that the popular phrase It takes a village to raise
a child is true if interpreted differently from the usual Western
interpretation. In her words (p 161): The reason it takes a village is
not because it requires a quorum of adults to nudge erring youngsters
back onto the paths of righteousness. It takes a village because in a
village there are always enough kids to form a play group.
I also realized, as I thought about all this, that my own childhood, in
Minnesota and Wisconsin in the 1950s, was in many ways like that of
children in traditional societies. We had school (which was not the
big deal it is today) and chores, and some of us had part time jobs,
but, still, most of our time was spent with other children away from
adults. My family moved frequently, and in each village or city
neighborhood to which we moved I found a somewhat different childhood
culture, with different games, different traditions, somewhat different
values, different ways of making friends. Whenever we moved, my first
big task was to figure out the culture of my new set of peers, so I
could become part of it. I was by nature shy, which I think was an
advantage because I didnt just blunder in and make a fool of myself. I
observed, studied, practiced the skills that I saw to be important to
my new peers, and then began cautiously to enter in and make friends.
In the mid 20th century, a number of researchers described and
documented many of the childhood cultures that could be found in
neighborhoods throughout Europe and the United States (e.g. Opie &
Opie, 1969).
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Children learn the most important lessons in life from other children,
not from adults.
Why, in the course of natural selection, did human children evolve such
a strong inclination to spend as much time as possible with other
children and avoid adults? With a little reflection, its not hard to
see the reasons. There are many valuable lessons that children can
learn in interactions with other children, away from adults, that they
cannot learn, or are much less likely to learn, in interactions with
adults. Here are some of them.
Authentic communication.
I dont know if this is or isnt true in traditional cultures, but in
modern Western cultures adults are terribly condescending toward
children. Their communications with children, especially the
well-intended ones, are frequently dishonest. Consider for example, the
adult who asks a four-year old, What color is that? while pointing to a
red toy fire engine. This is not an honest question. Unless the adult
is blind, or color blind, the adult knows perfectly well what color it
is. A child would never ask such a stupid question. Almost all the
questions that teachers ask, through all the grades of school, are
dishonest; the teacher knows the answer (or thinks she does because she
read it in the teachers edition of the textbook), so her question is
not really a question; its a test.
Or consider the adult who says, Oh, thats beautiful, what a wonderful
artist you are, while looking at the childs latest scribbling.
Children never give such false praise to one another. Even as children
grow older, adults tend to engage them in ways that suggest that either
the adults or the children are idiots, and often their comments have
more to do with trying to teach the children something, or control them
in some way, than with genuine attempts to share ideas or really
understand the childs ideas.
Little children communicate with one another largely in the context of
play, and the communications have real meaning. They negotiate about
what and how to play. They discuss the rules. They negotiate in ways
very similar to the ways adults negotiate with one another. This is
far better practice for future adult-adult communication than the kinds
of conversations that children typically have with adults.
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As children get older, and especially once they are in their teen
years, their communications with one another have ever more to do with
the emotions and struggles they experience. They can be honest with
their friends, because their friends are not going to overreact and try
to assume control, the way that their parents or other adults might.
They want to talk about the issues important in their life, but they
dont want someone to use those issues as another excuse to subordinate
them. They can, with good reason, trust their friends in ways that
they cannot trust their parents or teachers.
Independence and courage.
The ultimate goal of childhood is to move away from dependence on
parents and establish oneself as ones own person. Already by the age
of twothe terrible twos, when childrens favorite word is nochildren are
clearly on this path. Typically by the age of four or a little later,
children want to get away from parents and other adults and spend time
with children, where they can try out ways of being that they couldnt
try in the presence of adults.
Childrens cultures often set themselves up as if in opposition to adult
culture, often quite deliberately and adaptively. Even young children
begin to use scatological, naughty words, deliberately flouting adults
dictates. They delight in mocking adults and in finding ways to
violate rules. For example, when schools make rules about carrying even
toy weapons into school, children bring tiny toy guns and plastic
knives to school in their pockets and surreptitiously exhibit them to
one another, proudly showing how they violated a senseless
adult-imposed rule (Corsaso & Eder, 1990).
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The anthropologist Collin Turbull (1982) noted that children in the
hunter-gatherer group he studied would build their own play huts, well
away from the main encampment, and would spend some of their time there
mocking the adults by exaggerating their blunders and poorly
constructed arguments. To learn adaptively from adults, children must
not just absorb the good that they see but must also judge and digest
the bad, and they cant freely do that when adults are present.
Part of gaining independence is gaining couragecourage to face the
challenges and deal with the emergencies that are part of every life.
In their play groups, away from adults, children everywhere play in
ways that adults might see as dangerous and might prevent. They play
with sharp knives and fire, climb trees and dare one another to go
higher. Little children, in fantasy play, imagine themselves dealing
with trolls, witches, dragons, wolves, and other kinds of predators and
murderers. In all such play, children are learning how to manage fear,
a crucial skill for anyone who intends to stay alive and well in the
face of the real life dangers that confront everyone at some points in
their lives (more on this, here).
In play amongst themselves, children create their own activities and
solve their own problems rather than rely on a powerful authority
figure to do these for them. This is one of the great values of
playing away from adults. In such play they have to, as it were, be
the adults, precisely because there are no adults present. Play is the
practice space for adulthood. Adults spoil this large purpose of play
when they intervene and try to be helpful.
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Creating and understanding the purpose and modifiability of rules.
A fundamental difference between adults games and childrens is that
adults generally abide by fixed, pre-established rules, whereas
children generally see rules as modifiable. When adults play baseball,
or Scrabble, or almost anything, they follow or try to follow the
official rules of the game. In contrast, when children play they
usually make up the rules as they go along (Youniss, 1994). This is
true even when they play games like baseball or Scrabble, if there is
no adult present to enforce the official rules. (For my story of how I
learned this lesson, about Scrabble, from two 9-year-old girls, see
here.) This is one of the ways in which childrens play is usually much
more creative than adults play.
The famous developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1932) noted long ago
that children develop a more sophisticated and useful understanding of
rules when they play with other children than when they play with
adults. With adults, they get the impression that rules are fixed,
that they come down from some high authority and cannot be changed.
But when children play with other children, because of the more equal
nature of the relationship, they feel free to challenge one anothers
ideas about the rules, which often leads to negotiation and change in
rules. They learn in this this way that rules are not fixed by heaven,
but are human contrivances to make life more fun and fair. This is an
important lesson; it is a cornerstone of democracy.
Practicing and building on the skills and values of the adult culture.
Even while differentiating themselves from adult culture, children
import features of that culture into theirs. Children incorporate into
their play many of the skills and values that they observe among
adults. This is why children in hunter-gather cultures play at hunting
and gathering; why children in farming cultures play at farming; and
why children in our culture play at computers. It is also why
hunter-gatherer children do not play competitive games (the adults in
their culture eschew competition), while children in our culture do
play competitive games (though not to the degree that they do when
adults are involved).
Children dont just mimic, in play, what they observe among adults.
Rather, they interpret what they observe, try out variations of it, and
in that way strive to make sense of it. Childrens play is always
creative, and in their play they experiment with new, creative
variations of themes derived from adults. This is how each new
generation builds upon, rather than simply replicates, the culture of
their parents generation.
Children are naturally drawn to the newest innovations in the larger
culture around them. Adults are often suspicious of such changes, but
children embrace them. This is illustrated today by children's
eagerness to learn how to use the latest computer technology; they are
often far ahead of their parents on this. Childrens culture focuses,
quite naturally and adaptively, on the skills important to the world
they are growing into, not the world as it was when their parents were
growing up. Adults in every generation seem to bemoan the fact that
their children dont play the way they played when they were kids.
Thats one more of the reasons why children have to get away from adults
to play most adaptively.
Getting along with others as equals.
The main difference between adults and children that affects their
interaction has to do with power. Adults, because of their greater
size, strength, status, experience in the world, and control of
resources have power over children. So, childrens interactions with
adults are generally unbalanced ones, across a power gap. If children
are going to grow up to be effective adults, they must learn to get
along with others as equals. For the most part, they can only practice
that with other children, not with adults.
Perhaps the most important function of the culture of childhood is to
teach children how to get along with peers. Children practice that
constantly in social play. To play with another person, you must pay
attention to the other persons needs, not just your own, or the other
person will quit. You must overcome narcissism. You must learn to
share. You must learn to negotiate in ways that respect the other
persons ideas, not just yours. You must learn how to assert your needs
and desires while at the same time understanding and trying to meet the
needs and desires of your playmate. This may be the most important of
all skills that human beings must learn for a successful life. Without
this ability it is not possible to have a happy marriage, true friends,
or cooperative work partners.
The need to learn how to deal with others on an equal power footing is
the primary reason why children need to grow up in a culture of
childhood. It underlies all of the rest of what children learn best
with peers. The reason why childrens communications with other
children are more authentic than those with adults, why they can
practice independence and courage with other children better than with
adults, why they can learn about the modifiability of rules with other
children better than with adults, and why they can more freely practice
adult skills with other children than they can with adults is that
their relationships with other children are relationships of equality
rather than relationships of dominance and subordination.
The adult battle against cultures of childhood has been going on for
centuries.
Hunter-gatherer adults seemed to understand that children needed to
grow up largely in a culture of childhood, with little adult
interference, but that understanding seemed to decline with the rise of
agriculture, land ownership, and hierarchical organizations of power
among adults (Gray, 2012). Adults began to see it as their duty to
suppress childrens natural willfulness, so as to promote obedience,
which often involved attempts to remove them from the influences of
other children and subordinate them to adult authority. The first
systems of compulsory schooling, which are the forerunners of our
schools today, arose quite explicitly for that purpose.
If there is a father of modern schools, it is the Pietist clergyman
August Hermann Francke, who developed a system of compulsory schooling
in Prussia, in the late 17th century, which was subsequently copied and
elaborated upon throughout Europe and America. Francke wrote, in his
instructions to schoolmasters: Above all it is necessary to break the
natural willfulness of the child. While the schoolmaster who seeks to
make the child more learned is to be commended for cultivating the
childs intellect, he has not done enough. He has forgotten his most
important task, namely that of making the will obedient. Francke
believed that the most effective way to break childrens wills was
through constant monitoring and supervision. He wrote: Youth do not
know how to regulate their lives, and are naturally inclined toward
idle and sinful behavior when left to their own devices. For this
reason, it is a rule in this institution [the Prussian Pietist schools]
that a pupil never be allowed out of the presence of a supervisor. The
supervisors presence will stifle the pupils inclination to sinful
behavior, and slowly weaken his willfulness. [Quoted by Melton, 1988.]
We may today reject Franckes way of stating it, but the underlying
premise of much adult policy toward children is still in Franckes
tradition. In fact, social forces have conspired now to put Franckes
recommendation into practice far more effectively than occurred at
Franckes time or any other time in the past. Parents have become
convinced that it is dangerous and irresponsible to allow children to
play with other children, away from adults, so restrictions on such
play are more severe and effective than they have ever been before. By
increasing the amount of time spent in school, expanding homework,
harping constantly on the importance of scoring high on school tests,
banning children from public spaces unless accompanied by an adult, and
replacing free play with adult-led sports and lessons, we have created
a world in which children are almost always in the presence of a
supervisor, who is ready to intervene, protect, and prevent them from
practicing courage, independence, and all the rest that children
practice best with peers, away from adults. I have argued elsewhere
(Gray, 2011, and here) that this is why we see record levels of
anxiety, depression, suicide, and feelings of powerlessness among
adolescents and young adults today.
The Internet is the savior of childrens culture today
There is, however, one saving grace, one reason why we adults have not
completely crushed the culture of childhood. Thats the Internet. Weve
created a world in which children are more or less prevented from
congregating in physical space without an adult, but children have
found another way. They get together in cyberspace. They play games
and communicate over the Internet. They create their own rules and
culture and ways of being with others over the Internet. They mock
adults and flout adult rules over the Internet. They, especially
teenagers, share thoughts and feelings with friends through texting and
social media, and they stay several steps ahead of their parents and
other adults in finding new ways to maintain their privacy in all of
this (more on this here).
Of course, the hew and cry we keep hearing from so many educators and
parenting experts now is that we must ban or limit childrens screen
time. Yes, if we all did that, while still banning them from public
spaces without adult supervision, we would finally succeed in
destroying the culture of childhood. We would prevent children from
educating themselves in the ways that they always have, and we would
see the rise of a generation of adults who dont know how to be adults
because they never had a chance to practice it.
-----------
Basic Books with permission
Source: Basic Books with permission
And now, what do you think? This blog is, among other things, a forum
for discussion. Did you grow up in a culture of childhood? How did it
help create the parson you are? Are your children growing up in a
culture of childhood, and how is it different from yours? Do you agree
or disagree with the thesis here that children learn more important
lessons in interactions with other children than in interactions with
adults? As always, I prefer if you post your thoughts and questions
here rather than send them to me by private email. By putting them
here, you share with other readers, not just me. I try to read all
comments and try to respond to all serious questions if I think I have
something worth saying. Of course, if you have something to say that
applies only to you and me, then send me an email, but I dont guarantee
a response because I often receive more emails than I can answer.
See also Free to Learn, self-directed.org (to find out about the
Alliance for Self-Directed Education), and join me on Facebook.
References
Corsaro, W. A., & Eder, D. (1990). Childrens peer cultures. Annual
Reviews of Sociology, 16, 197-200.
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. (1989). Human ethology. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de
Gruyter.
Gray, P. (2011). The decline of play and the rise of psychopathology in
childhood and adolescence. American Journal of Play, 3, 443-463. 2011.
Gray, P. (2012). The value of a play-filled childhood in development of
the hunter-gatherer individual. In Narvaez, D., Panksepp, J., Schore,
A., & Gleason, T. (Eds.), Evolution, early experience and human
development: From research to practice and policy. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2012.
Harris, J. R. (1998). The nurture assumption: Why children turn out the
way they do. New York: Free Press.
Lancy, D. F., Bock, J., & Gaskins, S. (2010). The anthropology of
learning in childhood. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
Melton, J. V. H. (1988). Absolutism and the eighteenth-century origins
of compulsory schooling in Prussia and Austria. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Opie, I., & Opie, P. (1984). Childrens games in street and playground.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Piaget, J. (1932, 1965). The moral judgment of the child. New York:
Free Press.
Turnbull, C. M. (1982). The ritualization of potential conflict between
the sexes among the Mbuti. In E. G. Leacock & R. B. Lee (Eds.),
Politics and history in band societies, 133-155. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Youniss, J. (1994). Childrens friendships and peer culture:
Implications for theories of networks and support. In F. Nestmann & K.
Hurrelmann (Eds.), Social networks and social support in childhood and
adolescence, 75088. Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter. `:wq
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