Let the Children Come: Reimagining Childhood from a Christian Perspective
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Let the Children Come: Reimagining Childhood from a Christian Perspective
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Overview
In Let the Children Come, Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore explores the question, What does faithful parenting look like today?
As she addresses this query, she updates outmoded and distorted assumptions about and conceptions of children in popular US culture. She also shows important insights and contributions religious traditions and communities, Christianity in particular, make as we examine how to regard and treat children well.
Miller-McLemore draws on historical and contemporary understandings of Christianity, psychology, and feminism to push back against negative trends, such as the narcissistic use of children for adult benefit, the market use of children to sell products, and the failure to give children meaningful roles in the domestic work of the family and the life of wider society.
Miller-McLemore views children as full participants in families and religious communities and as human beings deserving of greater respect and understanding than people typically grant them. In particular, the book rethinks five ways adults have viewed (and misperceived) children--as victims, sinful, gifts, work (the labor of love), and agents.
Reimagining children, she proposes, will lead to a renewed conception of the care of children as a religious practice.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781506454580 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Augsburg Fortress, Publishers |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore is E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Religion, Psychology, and Culture at Vanderbilt University. A Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology and an author and editor of over sixteen books, she is widely recognized for her work on families, women, and children and her national and international leadership in pastoral and practical theologies.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Depraved, Innocent, or Knowing: History Reinvents Childhood
The longing for "operating instructions" (to recall Anne Lamott's phrase from the discussion in my introduction) for child rearing did not emerge out of thin air. Today's intense anxiety about how to bring up children is the direct outcome of a series of "domestic revolutions," as historians Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg call the far-reaching transformations in American family life of the last three centuries. These changes have raised what might be called the Child Question: What will become of children in a greatly changed world in which they no longer seem to fit easily or well? This chapter traces the twists and turns that led to modernity's fundamentally unsatisfying answer: the redefinition of children as economically useless, emotionally priceless, socially invisible, and in the end morally and spiritually innocent.
Economic Shifts: Children as Asset or Burden?
A few years ago, on an elementary school field trip to a 4-H agricultural center, I listened as a woman explained the processes of dairy production on a farm in bygone years to two classrooms of third-grade children. She displayed an antique butter churn and several other implements used to get butter from cow to table. Who, she asked, did they think churned the butter? Blank stares led her to hint, "Do you have chores?" "No" was the resounding chorus of about fifty eight-to-nine-year-olds. In the distribution of farm labor — not all that long ago — children close to their age churned the butter. That children no longer see themselves as directly responsible for family welfare may seem like a small matter. But in actuality it exemplifies a sea change of great proportions.
In a well-known and widely debated theory about childhood, historian Philippe Ariès sees the "idea of childhood" as a "discovery" of the seventeenth century. Until that time, childhood was not considered a distinct developmental stage. Children were perceived largely as tiny adults, or at least as adults in the making. Scholars of all sorts have contested this claim, demonstrating a real appreciation for childhood prior to the modern period. Perhaps a poor English translation of Ariès's French term sentiment as simply idea has contributed to the confusion. By sentiment, he did not necessarily mean that childhood itself did not exist; rather, childhood did not carry the emotional freight that it has acquired since that time.
The debate over historical accuracy aside, however, Ariès was right on at least two accounts. Each historical period fashions its own unique attitude toward children. Equally important, a profound change occurred with the advent of modernity, which raised new questions about a child's place in society that have plagued parents up to the present day. What is it, then, about the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and today's continued technological and social innovations that has displaced children and raised distinct difficulties for families?
Although in premodern and early modern times children remained subordinates in a highly structured, patriarchal family, they had essential roles. As soon as they were old enough, they took their place in family industries, weeding and hoeing gardens, herding domestic animals, carding and spinning wool, making clothing, and caring for younger brothers and sisters. The seventeenth-century American family in general existed as a more cohesive whole, bringing together under one roof the labors of economic production, domestic life, social interaction, and political participation. As family historian John Demos puts it, "All could feel — could see — the contributions Of the others; and all could feel the underlying framework of reciprocity." Children may have had to subordinate their interests to family and community needs and submit to the arbitrary authority of harsh fathers or weary mothers, but they knew where they stood in relationship to the family's well-being.
With industrialization, children, like women, gradually lost their place as contributing members of household economies. This shift occurred more slowly for girls and for working-class and slave children, whose labor in textile mills and coal mines or as field and domestic workers initially made it possible for white middle-class mothers and children to retreat to a private realm. Eventually, however, with emancipation, mandatory education, and child labor laws in the last century, the end result was much the same for almost all US children. No longer participants in home industries, or farmed out as servants and apprentices and eventually banned from factories, children did not increase a family's chances of survival but instead drained limited resources. Their position in the family changed dramatically from asset to burden.
I do not question here the real value of protecting children from adult work. Horrendous reports of children's exploitation internationally reinforce the positive advances behind child labor laws and other changes. I am troubled, however, by a disturbing underside of a revolution in children's economic role. One of my son's working definitions of adulthood and childhood is based on his idea that "you work, I don't." Referring to some dislikable household chore, he explained, "You're the adult. You're supposed to do that; I'm not." Researchers fall into the same trap. Time-use studies of housework almost always focus on what adults do. Children drop out of the picture entirely.
Parents have struggled with how to fit children back in. Resistance to the idea of children as workers has led to the wrongheaded assumption that sharing domestic labor goes inherently against the grain of genuine childhood. Although a family allowance offers a solution to children's exclusion from the cash economy, even here common child-rearing advice argues against letting it function as a direct payment for house chores. That comes too close to giving a child an earned wage. When most US parents assign chores, therefore, they do so for strikingly different reasons than in preindustrial times or in developing countries. Household tasks are considered "good" for children because they cultivate valuable character traits of altruism and reliability or teach skills that will be needed when children "grow up." They are something supposedly done out of love or duty, and not because families need children's material or financial contributions. Sometimes, when parents weigh the poorer job, the extra time, and the nagging needed to get "help," they simply resort to doing the job themselves.
Ultimately, commodification of children has become increasingly harder to resist. Estimates of the expense of raising a child make regular headline news. In 1980, not that long before my oldest son was born in 1986, it was reported that children would cost parents between $100,000 and $140,000. One June day more recently, when I presented this overview at an academic meeting, a colleague, in response to my remarks, pulled out an editorial cartoon from the daily news showing two parents holding a newspaper with the headline "Cost of Children $233,530." Turning to look at their slouching teenager with headphones and baseball cap on backwards, they remark, "Seems our investment's taken a downturn." This public pricing of children as a major family liability, something foreign less than a century ago, epitomizes the revolution that has occurred in daily life.
Psychological Compensation: Children as Priceless
This sweeping historical change, however, does not necessarily mean that children are any less cherished. To the contrary. What would become of children now? From the nineteenth century until today, children became even more precious in a new way. Ironically, the more productively useless children became and the less valuable in the "real" world, the more emotionally priceless they became within the home.
With the benefits of children less obvious, their desirability and even presence in the family seemed to require fresh explanation. Almost as if overcompensating for expelling children from the adult world, debate has raged in the years since industrialization about the amount of attention adults should lavish on them. Early on, new social science experts on the intricacies of child rearing, aided by Christian theologians commenting on the true nature of sacrificial love, happily offered variations on an answer. Children are to be inordinately and unconditionally loved in the private sphere of home and family — that is, loved without limit on parental excess or expectation of return on the child's part.
Every bit as captivating and virulent as the "cult of womanhood" in the nineteenth century, which extolled the piety, purity, and passivity of white wives and mothers, was the "cult of childhood" and the obsession with child rearing among the white middle class. The very idea that improper maternal love could permanently harm a child's development, dictating how they would turn out as adults, was virtually unheard of in the Middle Ages. But by early modernity, children, especially white children, were idealized as precious, delicate, and in need of vigilant and constant care.
Over time, this perceived dependency became more acute in its length and nature. Puritan childhood in the 1600s was relatively brief, ending around the age of seven, followed by an extended period of transitional dependency during which young people assumed a variety of responsibilities. Contemporary childhood has doubled or even tripled, from seven to fourteen to twenty-one years. At the same time, the age of puberty has dropped, creating an odd period of physical maturity in the midst of emotional and social dependence. The number of children per family also declined, leaving parents focused upon fewer and fewer children.
Contemporary sociologists have mistaken the appropriation of the family's social, economic, and educational functions by schools, hospitals, banks, government agencies, and charitable organizations with the idea that the family is doing less. Nothing could be further from the truth. To the job of meeting a child's material needs was added the illusive, ever-expanding task of managing emotional and social development, including the very creation of meaning and fulfillment that society now falters in providing. Many parents today experience a sharp escalation of role expectations beyond anything imagined by their own parents, managing countless family interactions with multiple publics and with less and less control over those institutions that shape children.
The image of childhood as a sanctioned time and space, however, has had a distinct middle-class European American flavor that coincides with covert disinterest in the often-dire situation of other less-favored children. Less-privileged classes and nationalities, especially children in underdeveloped countries, have not lived by this modern construction of childhood and at times indirectly suffer the consequences of those who try to uphold it. It might even be argued that the protected, safe, and unproductive play of US middle-class children has been largely subsidized by the labor of the working classes and less-privileged children both in the United States and around the world.
Social Invisibility: Children Seen but Not Heard
That some children were prized and child rearing made sacred did not mean that children as a whole assumed center stage. Throughout these domestic revolutions of the last several generations, children moved farther and farther from the center of adult activity and more and more into a separate, privatized realm of home, school, and church. Children lost steady contact not just with parents but with the wider world of nonfamily adults. If there is anything to be envied about children who live close to poverty, it is precisely their often-greater proximity to adults caught in the same situation.
The growing invisibility of children had a lot to do with the heightened division between private and public worlds. Fathers, increasingly removed from home to factory, shop, or office, gradually traded roles, from primary parent in child rearing and custody disputes in the seventeenth century to the often-distant provider of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Children gradually spent a greater portion of time in age-segregated institutions, whether school or Sunday school. They experienced even less adult interaction in the last half century as women followed men into the workplace and daytime activity in neighborhoods diminished. In recent years, these changes have led to artificial means of bringing children and adults together, such as "take a daughter to work" or "take a grandparent to school" days, or in Christian contexts "children's sermons" and "youth Sundays."
With the rise of the middle-class companionate family in early twentieth-century United States, the family's purpose itself became increasingly defined around personal desires. Its primary focus shifted progressively from the parent-child relationship to the couple. Marriage and family were expected to bring love, emotional connection, and fulfillment rather than property, security, and sustenance. These redefined goals did not fit all that well with one of the results of such intimacy: children. Long before the feminism of the mid-twentieth century, therefore, parenting and children began to lose their ascribed status in the larger scheme of adult life.
Children were to "be seen but not heard." This English proverb first appeared in the nineteenth century, according to one dictionary of quotations, even though it was used as early as the 1400s with reference to maids rather than children. Its familiar ring today speaks volumes about the marginalization of "inferiors": women and servants initially, and then children. In the adult business of modernity, adults gazed upon children with adoration, but children had better keep quiet.
Even the artifacts used by and for children reveal this need for control and containment. In a fascinating study of changes in the material culture surrounding child rearing, historian Karin Calvert observes that "most children's furniture of the seventeenth century was designed to stand babies up and propel them forward" into adulthood and away from the precariousness of early childhood. In contrast, by the middle of the nineteenth century, cribs, high chairs, and perambulators replaced the objects designed to assimilate children rapidly into adult society. These new inventions served instead as barriers, carefully preserving a child's special sphere, designed to "hold infants down and contain them in one spot."
Today, children are often expected to fit in with adult lives and choices. Adults often over program children, push them ahead in school, require them to use daily planners to organize their schedules, and essentially force them to grow up quickly. The multiple drop-off lanes meant for use by cars and the lack of bike racks at the school to which we moved when our children were all in elementary school epitomize the disinclination to appreciate children's views. Only adult drivers can reach the school. One cannot approach it with a child's sole means of transportation — on foot or bike. That youths get into the most trouble in the hours between 3:00 and 5:00 p.m. also speaks tellingly of the incongruity between adult and child worlds. The daily 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. schedule and the rest of the school calendar have only a distant correspondence with the daily work hours and annual holidays of the adult work world.
Even demographically, children have come to occupy an ever-shrinking place in adult lives. In the nineteenth century, only about 20 percent of families did not include children younger than eighteen. By 1991, at least 42 percent of all families did not include children. The most common living arrangement in the United States in 1998 was unmarried people without children, doubling in just a few decades from 16 percent of all families in 1972 to 32 percent. In the twenty-first century, as more young people choose to postpone marriage or remain single and childless, and as those who bear children live longer after their children leave home, a majority of households will not include children.
This is not just a matter of numbers. It is also a matter of money and its distribution. Among households without children, the median income per person is 67 percent higher than among those with two children. Some economists have responded to this statistic by suggesting policies to redistribute income from households without children to those with them. That such a re-allotment is hardly imaginable in US society, unless forced by governmental tax allowances or credits, underscores the extent to which most US citizens do not believe they share responsibility for anyone else's children. This distinctively Western European view stands out when compared with some African governments that purposely tax the childless precisely because it is believed that all adults, especially those without children, have a financial and moral responsibility for members of the extended family.
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Table of Contents
| Foreword | xi | |
| Introduction: Faithful Parenting: The Search for Operating Instructions | xvii | |
| Author's Note: A Practical Theology of Children | xxvii | |
| Chapter 1 | Depraved, Innocent, or Knowing: History Reinvents Childhood | 1 |
| Chapter 2 | Popular Psychology: Children as Victims | 25 |
| Chapter 3 | Christian Faith: Children as Sinful | 57 |
| Chapter 4 | Christian Faith: Children as Gift | 83 |
| Chapter 5 | Feminism and Faith: Children as the Labor of Love | 105 |
| Chapter 6 | Feminism and Faith: Children as Agents | 137 |
| Epilogue: Care of Children as a Religious Discipline and Community Practice | 161 | |
| Thinking About Children and Faith: Questions for Reflection | 171 | |
| References | 185 | |
| Acknowledgments | 203 | |
| The Author | 207 | |
| Index | 209 |