The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  Increasingly in doubt as to how to bring up their children, parents turn to other contemporaries for advice; they also look to the mass media; and like the mother quoted at the outset of this chapter they turn, in effect, to the children themselves. They may, nevertheless, fasten on some inflexible scheme of child rearing and follow that. Yet they cannot help but show their children, by their own anxiety, how little they depend on themselves and how much on others. Whatever they may seem to be teaching the child in terms of content, they are passing on to him their own contagious, highly diffuse anxiety. They reinforce this teaching by giving the child approval—and approving themselves because of the child—when he makes good.

  To be sure, inner-directed parents also often were able to “love” only those children who made good in the outer world. But at least the canons of success were reasonably clear. The other-directed child, however, faces not only the requirement that he make good but also the problem of defining what making good means. He finds that both the definition and the evaluation of himself depend on the company he keeps: first, on his schoolmates and teachers; later, on peers and superiors. But perhaps the company one keeps is itself at fault? One can then shop for other preferred companies in the mass circulation media.

  Approval itself, irrespective of content, becomes almost the only unequivocal good in this situation: one makes good when one is approved of. Thus all power, not merely some power, is in the hands of the actual or imaginary approving group, and the child learns from his parents’ reactions to him that nothing in his character, no possession he owns, no inheritance of name or talent, no work he has done is valued for itself but only for its effect on others. Making good becomes almost equivalent to making friends, or at any rate the right kind of friends. “To him that hath approval, shall be given more approval.”

  From bringing up children to “Bringing up Father” The typical other-directed child grows up in a small family, in close urban quarters, or in a suburb. Even more than in the earlier epoch the father leaves home to go to work, and he goes too far to return for lunch. Home, moreover, is no longer an area of solid privacy. As the size and living space of the family diminish and as the pattern of living with older relatives declines, the child must directly face the emotional tensions of his parents. There is a heightening of awareness of the self in relation to others under these conditions, especially since the parents, too, are increasingly self-conscious.

  Under the new social and economic conditions, the position of children rises. They are not subjected to a period of deprivation and hardship which leads to compensatory dreams of a life of ease and pleasure. Girls are not, as they were in some earlier societies, drudges at home until, at puberty, they were suddenly given the only “capital” they were ever likely to find—that of their bodies —to live on as income, or exhaust as principal. Even boys from comfortable homes were expected until recently to hit the sunrise trail with paper routes or other economically profitable and “character-building” chores.

  The parents lack not only the self-assurance that successful inner-direction brings but also the strategy of withdrawal available to many unsuccessful inner-directed types. The loss of old certainties in the spheres of work and social relations is accompanied by doubt as to how to bring up children. Moreover, the parents no longer feel themselves superior to the children. While children no longer have immediate economic value, they are less numerous, scarcer in relation to the number of adults: the effort is made, and it is objectively possible, to want all children who are conceived and to raise very nearly all children who are born. More is staked on every single child than in the earlier epoch when many children were not raised to maturity. In addition, apart from the fact that the children may be better Americans than the parents, in ethnic or social terms—as Jiggs’s daughter is more up to date than he—there are undoubtedly other solid reasons (which I shall not go into) for the general emphasis on youth which runs through all forms of popular culture.3

  Historical changes in the lives of adolescents can be seen most clearly, perhaps, if one looks back to those Bildungsromane of the nineteenth century that described the misunderstood youth who struggled against the harsh or hypocritical tyranny of his parents, particularly if one compares one of the best of such novels, Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, with one of the best of our contemporary examples, for instance Lionel Trilling’s short story, “The Other Margaret.”4 In Trilling’s story we have a picture of a precocious young girl in the intellectual, urban, upper middle class. Margaret, who goes to a progressive school, believes that Negroes are exploited, and she resents the inferior position in the home of “the other Margaret,” a Negro domestic. It is the daughter Margaret who is self-righteous, not the parents.

  In the face of her criticism, buttressed as it is by the authority of the school, the parents, themselves progressive, are on the defensive. They are tense and very much concerned with what their daughter thinks—and thinks of them. Eventually, all three adults manage to destroy Margaret’s illusion of the virtues of the other Margaret—the parents by reasoning; the other Margaret by bad behavior. But in the end the parents are anxious about their victory, lest it harm their sensitive child. They possess little of the certainty and security of Theobald’s parents in The Way of All Flesh.

  In this change of parental attitude the mass media of communication play a dual role. From the mass media—radio, movies, comics—as well as from their own peers, children can easily learn what the norm of parental behavior is, and hold it over their parents’ heads. Thus a kind of realism is restored to the child which was his property much more simply in the societies depending on tradition-direction: the other-directed child is often more knowing than his parents—like the proverbial Harvard man, there is little they can tell him.5

  As already noted, the parents also have their sources of direction in the mass media. For in their uneasiness as to how to bring up children they turn increasingly to books, magazines, government pamphlets, and radio programs. These tell the already anxious mother to accept her children. She learns that there are no problem children, only problem parents; and she learns to look into her own psyche whenever she is moved to deny the children anything, including an uninterrupted flow of affection. If the children are cross then the mother must be withholding something. And while these tutors also tell the mother to “relax” and to “enjoy her children,” even this becomes an additional injunction to be anxiously followed.

  It may be that children today do not gain the strength that adults—no longer inner-directed—have lost. To be sure, this was often a factitious strength, as Samuel Butler saw; but it was usually sufficient both to crush the child’s spontaneity and anesthetize his diffuse anxiety. “Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy”—and the prisoner might feel oppressed, even guilty, but not too anxious behind his bars. In contrast, what the other-directed child does “learn” from his parents is anxiety —the emotional tuning appropriate to his other-directed adjustment.

  The rule of “reason” Despite the diminution of their authority, the parents still try to control matters; but with the loss of self-assurance their techniques change. They can neither hold themselves up as exemplars—when both they and the child know better—nor resort, in good conscience, to severe corporal punishment and deprivations. At most there are token spankings, with open physical warfare confined to the lower classes.

  The parents’ recourse, especially in the upper middle class, is to “personnel” methods—to manipulation in the form of reasoning, or, more accurately, of rationalizing. The child responds in the same manner. One might summarize the historical sequence by saying that the tradition-directed child propitiates his parents; the inner-directed child fights or succumbs to them; the other-directed child manipulates them and is in turn manipulated.

  A movie of several years ago, The Curse of the Cat People, while it testified to American preoccupation with certain child-rearing themes which do not dire
ctly concern us here, also provides an interesting example of these manipulative relations between parent and child. A little girl lives in a suburban, middle-class home with its typical neatness, garden, and Negro servant. As in “The Other Margaret,” there is a terrific pressure of adult emotion focused around this one child from the parents and servant. The child is supposed to invite the other children in the neighborhood for her birthday party; but believing her father’s joke that the big tree in the yard is a mailbox, she puts the invitations there and they never go out. When her birthday arrives, the other children whom she had said she would invite tease her and refuse to play with her. Her father scolds her for taking him seriously, and she is also in difficulties for not getting along better with the other children. But the parents (plus servant) decide to go ahead with the party anyway, “as if.” There follows a “party” which tries to persuade the child that there has been no tragedy, that this party is just as good as the one which failed.

  The parents insist that the child somehow know, without a formal etiquette, when things are supposed to be “real” and when “pretend.” The tree as the mailbox is pretend; the party real. Feeling misunderstood and alone, the little girl discovers a real friend in a strange woman who lives almost as a recluse in a great house. The parents frown upon this “friend” and her gift of a ring to the child. The little girl then discovers an imaginary friend at the bottom of the yard, a beautiful older woman with whom she talks. The father cannot see, that is to say “see,” this latter friend and punishes the child for lying.

  Notice this fictional family’s lack of privacy for the child. The discovery of the gift of the ring seems to be typical of the fact that few of her excitements escape parental scrutiny. Moreover, the very fact that the father suggests to the daughter the secret about the make-believe “mailbox tree” is symbolic of the intrusion of his knowledge: the daughter is not allowed her own make believe but must share it with him, subject to his determination of when it applies. That the daughter and father finally come into open conflict over the little girl’s fantasy friend is only to be expected; the girl cannot put a lock on the door of her room or the door of her mind. (In a lower-class home there would be, spatially at least, even less privacy; but there might be more psychic privacy because the parents would often be less interested in the child.)

  Notice, in the second place, the “reasonable” but subtly manipulative tone of parent-child relations. This is evidenced by the parental planning of the party for the daughter and her peers and by the parental irritation when the plan miscarries. Still more significant is the way in which the family meets the crisis of blocked peer-group communication symbolized by the nonoperative mailbox—a failure that is itself occasioned by a blockage of understanding about the real and the unreal between daughter and parents.

  The fiasco is, obviously enough, a matter that requires immediate corrective action; parents in this pass, it seems, should do something. The parents of the child in this movie do nothing; they prefer to talk away the situation, to manipulate the child into the acceptance of a formal illusion of party making. The result is to produce a sort of exaggeration and burlesque of the way in which other-directed persons, in parent-child as in all other relations, constantly resort to manipulation and counter-manipulation.

  As contrasted with all this, the inner-directed parent is not particularly worried by his child’s resentment or hostility. Nor is he as apt to be as aware of it. He and the child are both protected by the gap that separates them. The other-directed parent, however, has to win not only his child’s good behavior but also his child’s good will. Therefore, he is tempted to use his superior dialectic skill to “reason” with the child. And when the child learns—this is part of his sensitive radar equipment—how to argue too, the parent is torn between giving in and falling uneasily back on the sterner methods of his inner-directed parents. The father in The Curse of the Cat People, after trying to reason away the little girl’s belief in her fantasy friend, finally spanks her. But such scenes are always succeeded by parental efforts at reconciliation, turning the spanking itself into a step in the manipulative chain.

  Finally, we must observe the change in the content of the issues at stake between parent and child. The more driving and tense inner-directed parents compel their children to work, to save, to clean house, sometimes to study, and sometimes to pray. Other less puritanical types of inner-directed parent want their boys to be manly, their girls to be feminine and chaste. Such demands make either economic or ideological sense in the population phase of transitional growth. The large home could absorb enormous amounts of labor; even today those who putter in small house and small garden can still find lots to do. The parents themselves often set the example, in which they are supported by the school, of work and study: these are believed to be the paths of upward mobility both in this world and in the next.

  In the other-directed home, on the other hand, the issues between parent and child concern the nonwork side of life. For in the phase of incipient population decline—most markedly, of course, in America but elsewhere too—there is no work for children to do inside the urban home, and little outside. They need not brush and clean (except themselves)—they are less efficient than a vacuum cleaner. Nor is there an array of younger brothers and sisters to be taken care of. The American mother, educated, healthy, and efficient, has high standards for care of the apartment or small home and would, where she is not working, often feel quite out of a job if the children took over the housework. Fortunately released from the quandary of the old woman who lived in a shoe, she faces—just, as we shall see, as her husband does—the problem of leisure; care for the house and children is frequently her self-justification and escape.

  So parents and children debate over eating and sleeping time as later they will debate over use of the family car. And they argue tensely, as in The Curse of the Cat People, about the contacts of the child with the “others” and about the emotional hue of the argument itself. But by the nature of these discussions the parents have a less easy victory. In the population phase of transitional growth they can point to self-evident tasks that need doing—self-evident at least according to accepted standards that have survived from the still earlier epoch. In the phase of incipient decline, however, the issues involving consumption or leisure are no longer self-evident; to decide them, if they are to be decided, one has to resort to models outside the particular home—in search of the ever changing norms of the group in which the parents happen to live. And indeed the radio and print bring the models into the home, like a trial record from which the child and parent legalists prepare briefs.6

  To sum up: parents in the groups depending on other-direction install in their children something like a psychological radar set—a device not tuned to control movement in any particular direction while guiding and steadying the person from within but rather tuned to detect the action, and especially the symbolic action, of others. Thereafter, the parents influence the children’s character only insofar as (a) their own signals mingle with others over the radar, (b) they can locate children in a certain social environment in order to alter to a very limited degree what signals they will receive, (c) they take the risks of a very partial and precarious censorship of incoming messages. Thus the parental role diminishes in importance as compared with the same role among the inner-directed.

  II. Changes in the Role of the Teacher

  Much could be said about the changing configuration of adult authorities, other than the parents, as society moves from dependence on inner-direction to dependence on other-direction. Largely for economic reasons the governess, mammy, or hired tutor, for instance, virtually disappears from middle- and upper middle-class homes. One significant consequence is that children are no longer raised by people who hold up to them the standard of a family or class. Such a standard is good training in inner-direction—in the acquisition of generalized goals; it is at the same time a partial buffer against the indiscriminate influ
ence of the peer-group. But there is another more subtle consequence. The child who has been raised by a governess and educated by a tutor gains a very keen sense for the disparities of power in the home and in the society. When he goes off to boarding school or college he is likely to remain unimpressed by his teachers—like the upper-class mother who told the school headmaster: “I don’t see why the masters can’t get along with Johnny; all the other servants do”. Such a child is not going to be interested in allowing his teachers to counsel him in his peer-group relations or emotional life.

  Furthermore, the presence of these adults in the home—somewhat like the extended family in earlier eras—helps reduce the emotional intensity of parent-child relations. Though the child knows who is boss in the home, he can still play these other “officials” off against parental authority. And, indeed, the inner-directed parents, frequently not overeager for warmth from the child, are quite willing to have the child’s experience of affection associated with persons of lower status. The inner-directed young man raised under these conditions learns to find emotional release with prostitutes and others of low status. He becomes capable of impersonal relations with people and sometimes incapable of any other kind. This is one of the prices he pays for his relative impermeability to the needs and wishes of his peers, and helps account for his ability, when in pursuit of some end he values, to steel himself against their indifference or hostility.