Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  Soon, however, that ambition faded. The girl became increasingly interested in her fathers business. Wasn’t there a way she could work for him? She asked him that repeatedly, and he scratched his head, and shook his head, and said no, there was only room for his son and three nephews, and maybe not all of them. Besides, in a few years she would have other ideas in mind — marriage and motherhood. Joan was not so sure; she resented being told exactly how her life ought to unfold. She resented, too, being given one dress after another, along with bracelets, a watch and then another, fancier watch, some necklaces and hair braids and an endless number of shoes. She took to wearing her jeans all the time — or as much of the time as she could. She was now delighted with her school uniform — its somber simplicity pleased her immensely. She felt torn between her desire to dress up (in the future) and talk before the television cameras, and her desire to be utterly casual (right then and there) and lounge around the house, watching television.

  She also felt torn between various “lessons” she had heard from her parents: “I can’t win. My mother tells me I should study hard. Then I do. Then she says I shouldn’t study too hard, because boys do that, and I should try to be ‘lighter.’ I ask her how, and she says I shouldn’t ask her, because I already know the answer, and I’m only being stubborn. My father says I’m not supposed to be interested in his business. Then he catches me sitting in the house watching television, and it’s nice outside, and he gets very angry, and asks me why I don’t go outside. Then I tell him there is nothing for me to do outside, and he gets very angry. He pulls me! When we get outside he points to the pool, and to my bike, and to the grass. He says I can swim; I can go on a bike ride; I can cut the grass. I said it was for my brother to cut the grass! He exploded. He told me I would get no allowance for a month. I was glad. All I do is put the bills in my wallet, and it gets fatter and fatter! When my father is in a different mood, he won’t even let us spend our own allowance. He buys us what we want, and tells us the allowance is for the extras. But a lot of times, I can’t think up anything extra that I want, and so I get richer all the time!

  “Maybe a few years from now I’ll have so much money I can go and invest it somehow and start making a lot of money, like my father did. I could buy some land; he says that land is the best thing to buy, because it always goes up, up. Once he gets going on the subject of land, and the money you can make from owning it, he doesn’t care what he was telling you before. He will sit down with us and explain why he bought the land in this place, and this place, and this place. I wish he owned the land where the television station is. Then maybe he could get me a job on one of the television programs, when I’m bigger. But he says there’s a lot of land that only the Anglos own. They sell it to each other. They wouldn’t let a Mexican own the land, even if he had a lot of money, and was ready to pay anything they wanted.”

  She will switch from one ethnic or racial self-description to another, depending on the subject of discussion. She knew that Anglos often referred to her people in a derogatory way as “Mexicans.” She herself can unselfconsciously assume Anglo attitudes and words toward her own kind as if she were one of “them.” She can also be more evenhanded, can talk in a rather neutral tone about “the Mexican-American streets” in San Antonio, as contrasted to the Anglo ones. She can also become fiercely proud of her own (“Chicano”) people. At twelve or thirteen she frightens her parents with her declarations of solidarity — and enmity: “I don’t like to hear my father talk about the Anglo bankers. He admires them. He says he is sure that they like him. Well, why shouldn’t they be nice to him and like him? They make a lot of money off him! First he makes money; then he borrows more money from the Anglos; then he makes more money, and so do they! No wonder they smile at him and pat him on the back, when he comes to them and tells them that he is going to build some stores or some office buildings or some houses. I wish some of our own people had as much money as the Anglos do; then we could go to a Chicano bank and borrow money from Chicanos, and then Chicanos would be helping each other. The Anglos don’t like us; they do business with my father, but he is just another ‘Mexican’ to them. He told me that himself a long time ago, and I remember. But when I remind him, he gets angry with me and tells me I should stop talking like a man who is running for mayor of San Antonio!

  “I wish I could be mayor! I wish a Chicano got elected mayor; then our people would be better off. The nuns told us that would be good too; and they are Anglos. One nun told us that it’s already been too long that the Anglos have run Texas. Once Texas belonged to us, the Chicanos. Now, we are under the Anglos; they are over us. I asked my father the other day, when we were all joking and he was in a very good mood, if he would give me enough money to run for mayor of San Antonio. He laughed. He said he would; yes, he would. He asked me how much money I thought I’d need. I said, maybe five hundred dollars. He said I’d need hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars! Even he couldn’t give me that much! He has a lot of money, but my mother has always told us that when a Mexican-American has a lot of money, it is one thing — you’re still in the barrio, even if you’re rich. When an Anglo has a lot of money, that’s another story. We can lose our money overnight. The Anglos can put the squeeze on us. It’s their country.”

  Toward the end of the eighth grade, when Joan was a few months short of fourteen, she “settled down,” as her parents described it. She didn’t by any means become, in the mother’s words, a “dream girl.” She played her hi-fi set louder and louder; her choice of music (acid rock) confused and enraged her parents. Her dress continued to be casual, or provocatively disheveled. She was no better at taking care of her room. She turned sour and petulant inexplicably and remained so for hours, even days. But she indicated to her parents a desire to stay in San Antonio, to go to college, to take there “a business course,” and to become, at least for a while, a “business secretary.” Her father was delighted. Maybe Joan could, after all, join his business. He had a part-time secretary already; he had for some time felt the need of someone to keep track of his various obligations and commitments, as well as the bills he sent out and received, the payments he had to make and expected to arrive. Why not entrust such important and mostly quite confidential matters to someone in the family?

  He and Joan talked about such a prospect with increasing intimacy and relish. The nuns soon heard from her of the plan, and supported it. The father gradually laid bare to his daughter much of his financial situation. On the weekends, especially, he would take her aside for an hour or so, explain what he owned, how he had acquired it, and what he hoped to do in the future with it: hold on, make improvements, sell at the first opportunity, sell eventually. He also showed her how to use an adding machine he kept in his study at home; and he explained to her what he does with the profits he makes — stock investments, insurance, savings accounts. “There is not a lot of money,” he kept telling her. “The Anglos can wipe me out in a moment,” he kept telling her. “The Anglos hold my fate in their hands,” he kept telling her — because he believed in “expanding” rather than “standing still,” and so he would rather (and constantly did) borrow money to enlarge one or another part of his business.

  Every once in a while the girl would suggest to her father that he stop in his tracks, even change direction: give some of his money away to the poor, to the Church, to an orphanage next door to some property he owns. He was not resentful. He even promised at times to remember them when making his will, or rather, revising it. But he did warn his daughter that later on, when she was “all grown up,” and so “no longer a trusting child,” she would have “different ideas” about what he ought do with his money — while alive or in anticipation of death. If he were “really rich,” he told the girl, he would indeed leave large sums to charity. For that matter, if he knew that she would, years in the future, marry a Mexican-American man who himself was quite well-off, then he would perhaps contemplate giving her share, at the very least, of his estate to ch
arity. But he rather believed she would not want him to do that. And when he asked her what she thought, she said yes, he was right, she would “probably” want to receive and hold on to her inheritance. She did hope to have children someday, and her father had quite successfully convinced her that a lot of money is required if they are to live well.

  Entitlement

  The poor both are and are not all alike. On the one hand they struggle against the same odds — hunger and malnutrition in the worst instances, or a marginal life that poses constant threats. Yet Eskimos do not regard their poverty in the same way that Appalachian yeomen do, or Chicanos in Texas or southern California. In the four sections that have preceded this one I have tried to show how the common social and economic vulnerability of the poor does not make for a uniform pattern of child rearing. Historical precedents, cultural experiences, religious convictions exert their influence on parents and children, make boys and girls differ in all sorts of respects, depending on where they live and who their parents are. The same holds for the well-to-do or the rich. It won’t do to talk of the affluent ones in America (never mind the world!). It won’t do to say that in our upper-middle-class suburbs, or among our wealthy, one observes clear-cut, consistent psychological or cultural characteristics. Even in relatively homogeneous suburbs, there are substantial differences in home life, in values taught, hobbies encouraged, beliefs advocated or virtually instilled.

  But there are indeed distinct groups among the well-off — equivalent in their way to the various kinds of poor people. It is the obligation of someone who wants to know how children make sense of their lives — agricultural migrancy, Indian reservation life in the South-west, the upper-income life of large homes amid ample acreage in rich towns or in wealthy urban enclaves — to document as faithfully as possible the way the common heritage of money and power affects the assumptions of individual boys and girls. Each child, however, is also influenced by certain social, racial, cultural, or religious traditions, or thoroughly idiosyncratic ones — a given family’s tastes, sentiments, ideals, say. The issue is “class”; but the issue is not only “class.”

  Many of the influences, even some of the more idiosyncratic ones, that distinguish some children from others are themselves subject to side influences — a “rebound effect,” one rather prosperous Illinois Mormon called it. He was anxious for me to know (just as he could not forget) that there was only so much his faith could resist. He took pains, constantly, to tell his children that he was not like his father; that he was not like his brother either, who lives in Salt Lake City and works for a bank. To live near Chicago and be a doctor, to be a Mormon living in a highly secular upper-middle-class world, was to be an exile. He felt stronger in his faith, but also weaker; he felt I ke his neighbors in many ways, but unlike them in critically important preferences and articles of faith.

  What binds together a Mormon banker in Utah with his brother, or other coreligionists in Illinois or Massachusetts? What distinguishes such people, one from the other? Old New Orleans upper-class families are not in certain respects like families who live in, say, Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, or Haverford, Pennsylvania, or up the hills outside San Antonio. There are resemblances, based on class, occupation, religion, common experiences, expectations, ideas conveyed to children. And yet, again, there are distinctions, shades of feeling and thinking, emphases of one sort or another — even within those families and well-to-do neighborhoods.

  I use the word “entitlement” to describe what, perhaps, all quite well-off American families transmit to their children — an important psychological common denominator, I believe: an emotional expression, really, of those familiar, class-bound prerogatives, money and power. The word was given to me, amid much soul-searching, by the rather rich parents of a child I began to talk with almost two decades ago, in 1959. I have watched those parents become grandparents, seen what they described as “the responsibilities of entitlement” get handed down to a new generation. When the father, a lawyer and stockbroker from a prominent and quietly influential family, referred to the “entitlement” his children were growing up with, he had in mind a social rather than a psychological phenomenon: the various juries or committees that select the Mardi Gras participants in New Orleans’ annual parade and celebration. He knew that his daughter was “entitled” to be invited here, to attend a dance there, to feel part of a carefully limited and sometimes self-important social scene.

  He wanted, however, to go beyond that social fact; he wanted his children to feel obligated by how fortunate they were, and would no doubt always be, all things being equal — or unequal! He talked about what he had received from his parents and what he would give to his children, “automatically, without any thought,” and what they too would pass on. The father was careful to distinguish between the social entitlement and “something else,” a “something else” he couldn’t quite define but knew he had to try to evoke if he were to be psychologically candid: “Our children have a good life ahead of them; and I think they know it now. I think they did when they were three or four, too. It’s entitlement, that’s what I call it. My wife didn’t know what I was talking about when I first used the word. She thought it had something to do with our ancestry! Maybe it does! I don’t mean to be snide. I just think our children grow up taking a lot for granted, and it can be good that they do, and it can be bad. It’s like anything else; it all depends. I mean, you can have spoiled brats for children, or you can have kids who want to share what they have. I don’t mean give away all their money! I mean be responsible, and try to live up to their ideals, and not just sit around wondering which island in the Caribbean to visit this year, and where to go next summer to get away from the heat and humidity here in New Orleans.”

  At the time he said no more. It was 1960, and I was interested mainly in what his son and his daughter thought about black children — and about the violence then being inflicted on a few black children brave enough and stubborn enough to walk past mobs into two elementary schools. But as months became years, I came back to that word “entitlement,” especially because it was one I had heard years earlier, in Boston, when I was receiving my training in child psychiatry. “Narcissistic entitlement” was the phrase I had been taught to be familiar with, to use occasionally when speaking of a particular kind of “disturbed” child. The term could be used in place of more conventional, blunter ones that everyone else uses from time to time: a smug, self-satisfied child; or a child who thinks he (or she) owns the world, or will one day; or a self-centered child who expects a lot from just about everyone.

  I recall a boy of eight I was treating in Boston, before I went South; my supervisor, a child psychoanalyst who had worked with a similar child for three years, and anticipated, alas, another year or two, at least, of thrice weekly office visits, told me that I was being naïvely hopeful, and a touch simpleminded, when I remarked upon the curiosity of the boy, his evident willingness to ask me questions about all sorts of persons, places, things — and so his capacity for engagement with the world around him. Yes, she pointed out, there was indeed a measure of that, but it was best that we ask questions about the nature of his questions. As we did, they all came back to him — to quite specific experiences he had gone through and wanted to talk about. And he had told me that, actually; he never asked a question out of intellectual interest — rather, in his words, “because I like to know what might happen next to me.”

  It is hard to describe the special fearfulness and sadness such a child struggles with. He was not the “ordinary” child; he was quite troubled. And I suppose the parents of such children (even if those mothers and fathers have other, relatively solid children, psychologically speaking) must be disqualified as “normal” or “average.” They may be like anyone else on the street; may be rather knowing, psychiatrically — able to sense something “wrong” with a child’s “behavior” and go do something about it by seeking out a doctor. But the analyst-supervisor I was myself “seeing” once
a week was convinced that there was a “special narcissism,” she called it, that a certain kind of parent offers a child: “Narcissism is something we all struggle with; but some people have more of it than others, and some children come from homes that have so much that all the money and possessions, all the rugs and furniture and toys and vacations and savings accounts and insurance policies come crashing on the child’s head. There is a shift from narcissism to narcissistic entitlement.”

  I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant, or how the “shift” she had mentioned did indeed take place. I know, because she is someone I still discuss psychoanalytic theory with, that she was not sure herself what the exact dimensions were of that childhood journey. But she knew even then, before there were “fields” like “social psychiatry” or “community psychiatry,” that at some point a family’s psychology and psychopathology engage with its social and economic life; and that when a migrant child or a ghetto child has to contend with narcissism, it will take on a certain flavor (narcissistic despair, for instance); whereas for a child who lives in a big house and whose parents have a lot and want to give a lot to their offspring, “narcissistic entitlement” may well be a possibility. The child withdraws not only into himself or herself but, by extension, into a certain world of objects, habits, and rituals — the comfortable world of a room, a home, a way of life. The child has much, but wants and expects more — only to feel no great gratitude, but a desire for yet more: an inheritance the world is expected to provide. One’s parents will oblige, as intermediaries. And if underneath there lie apprehension and gloom and, not least, a strain of gnawing worthlessness, that is of no matter to many children whose “narcissistic entitlement” becomes what psychoanalytic theorists refer to as a “character trait,” rather than a “symptom” that prompts a visit to a doctor. That is, the child is regarded by everyone, psychiatrists included, as “normal,” as “all right,” or different, but not all that different. One doesn’t send every cocksure, greedy, self-centered child to a child psychiatrist.