Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  In doing so she draws upon her concrete, day-to-day experiences. She also uses those experiences in order to suggest something larger about her particular life. Especially noteworthy is the care she and others like her take with themselves as they draw. So often poor children treat themselves cursorily; they quickly sketch a rather unflattering self-portrait. Sometimes they are unwilling to complete what they have begun — as if they are unsure of life itself. A migrant child once told me in a matter-of-fact way that he had no expectation of living beyond twenty. He was simply a child who knew the score. The children of doctors and lawyers and business executives have learned the score too. The girl mentioned above spends a half hour drawing herself, moves her eyes toward a mirror every once in a while to check on how she actually does look, and is eventually quite proud of what she has drawn. She also spends long periods of time looking at old photographs — of herself, her parents, her grandparents. Such observations and bits of anecdotal family history have become consolidated in the girl’s mind. She regards herself — though she has learned to be affectingly modest — as a rather attractive person. No wonder she once posed herself, in a picture, beside a giant sunflower. She was in no way overshadowed by the flower; if anything, it adorned her own luminous presence.

  When that girl became ill with chicken pox the anguish of her mental state was noticeable and instructive. She wanted to scratch the many lesions on her face and arms but was told, of course, by her parents that she must not. She heeded their advice. In the beginning she did scratch one pustule midway on her upper right arm. Her mother became quite upset. Before the mother could say a word, the child spoke up, acknowledged her awareness of the future implications of her deed. She had lost control, and she would suffer. Her description of that talk and of her later, more successful, bout with the disease, has struck me as a classic of sorts: “I don’t want to look ugly. If I had scratched my face, like I did my right arm, I’d look a mess for life. I knew that. But I had such a bad case! The doctor said it was one of the worst he’d seen in the last few years. He told me he had seen even worse than mine, and I was sort of disappointed. I figured that I’d like to go through the biggest challenge, and come out on top!

  “After a day or two, I began to wonder if I’d be able to survive! I got very weepy. I began to wonder whether I’d done anything wrong — to deserve this punishment. I couldn’t look myself in the mirror. I didn’t want to wash at all. I felt so dirty and horrible looking. I asked my brother and my parents not to look at me! My brother tried to kid me out of my mood. He came in with his Polaroid camera and said he’d take a picture of me, and I could keep it, and when I was over the disease, I could just laugh! Instead I started crying, right in front of him. He apologized.

  “The worst part of the chicken pox was the waiting and the trying to keep control. My mother sat with me, and my Dad did too, when he got home. On the worst day, he offered to stay with me and not go to his office. I said no, I’d be all right. But he decided to stay anyway. He just sat there and read to me. We watched some television — the news and a cooking class. We talked a little. Dad kept telling me I was great, and not to worry; he was sure I was going to have a wonderful life, because I’ve got everything going for me. I told him ‘not the chicken pox,’ when he said that. But he just laughed and told me that the chicken pox would soon be a bad memory, and I’d forget about it completely in a couple of months. I’m not sure I ever will, though. I have this scar on my arm, and I’ll always have it. My mother says no one will notice; but I do! She got angry the other day. She said I was worrying too much. But I’ve seen her worry a lot too. If a dress doesn’t fit her, she sends it right back. She’s always either on a diet or coming off one, or getting ready to go on one again. We have scales in every bathroom, and one in her bedroom. I told her I don’t need to weigh myself and my brother doesn’t; but she wants us to get in the habit, so we’ll know later when to start being careful about food. She tells the maid to give us cookies only when she’s not around; she doesn’t want to be tempted. And her hair — well, that’s ‘a whole subject,’ as my Daddy says. When he was with me that day, I asked him why Mom worries so much about her hair, and dyes it. Who cares if there’s some gray in her hair! But Dad said that gray hair for Mom is like the chicken pox for me. I could see what he meant, but it’s not exactly the same.”

  She did not for long insist upon the difference; she went along with her father’s comparison. She did so not reluctantly, but with the detachment that goes with complete recovery — a feeling of remove from what was once painful. Her mother has always been regarded as a rather lovely woman; the girl was prepared to emphasize that fact in her mind, and associate her own present and future appearance with her mother’s deserved reputation. The girl was also prepared to acknowledge quite candidly what a relatively severe case of a basically benign disease could do to her thoughts about herself: “I began to worry whether I really was as pretty as everyone had been saying. It was a mood; I’m over it now. I do have a few bad memories. Dad says they’ll go. I hope so. I look at myself in the mirror and I’ll suddenly be afraid that the chicken pox is coming back. I get scared. It’s silly. I know I’m never going to get the chicken pox again!

  “I wish I hadn’t scratched that one place. It’s such a small scar. But it gives me nightmares! I woke up the other night and my parents were in my room. I guess I’d been crying or shouting. In the morning my mother said I’d half-awakened, and I’d told them that a cat had been chasing me, and scratched me, and I was afraid there’d be a scar. I wonder a lot about the man I’ll marry. Will he have brown hair or blond hair or black hair? My mother asked me if it makes any difference; I told her I like brown hair and green eyes, and I hope he’ll be tall and thin. I wouldn’t even want to go out once with a man who was overweight!”

  This is no petty, superficial, half-witted, or empty-headed girl. She has gone to very good private schools — each of which has high academic standards and expectations. She can be serious, thoughtful, and idealistic — that is, worried about others less fortunate and hopeful that they somehow get to live better lives. As a child she can hardly be expected to come up with solutions for the world’s various problems, but some of those problems do at times weigh upon her. Yet she can, all of a sudden, move from writing a composition about “world hunger” to discussing with her mother the virtues of various cosmetics or the appropriateness of certain dresses for one or another social occasion. She can also, rather disarmingly, stop thinking about “the troubles in America” her teacher has asked the class to write about, because her parakeet needs food or water, her two gerbils require new bedding, her alarm clock has to be set, her desk is cluttered and ought be straightened out, or her phone has rung. She has a room with its own demands and requirements, with a bureau mirror and one on the back of the door, a full-length mirror. Sometimes she gets tired of thinking of arithmetic problems and social problems, and spelling problems, of coming up with ideas meant to straighten out society.

  It is important that a privileged child’s normal sense of “entitlement” be distinguished not only from pathological narcissism, but from the more common phenomenon known as being “spoiled.” It is a matter of degree; “spoiled” children are self-centered all right, petulant and demanding — but not saddled with the grandiose illusions (or delusions) clinicians have in mind when using the phrase “narcissistic entitlement.” The rich, the “well-to-do” are all too commonly charged with producing spoiled children. Yet one sees spoiled children everywhere, among the very poor as well as the inordinately rich. A child can be spoiled by a mother’s attitude. What the child is “given” can be called excessive instinctual leeway or, in everyday words, however politicized in recent years, “permissive indulgence.” I remember a migrant mother who knew precisely and uncannily what she was doing “wrong” — knew, indeed, to call it all “wrong.” She told me one day that she had given birth to a particular child with more pain than usual and had been in lower spi
rits than ever before in her life during the first months of that child’s life. When the baby began to notice the mother and the world, start crawling and separating himself from her, she felt a fierce desire within herself, expressed with unforgettable intensity, “to let that boy have anything he wants, anything he can lay his hands on.” She was careful, for all her lack of education and her troubled spirits, to qualify herself. She moved quickly, immediately, from “anything he wants” to “anything he can lay his hands on.” She knew that in the first or second year of life the child would have all he could do to reach and hold on to what he wanted.

  But soon enough a child begins to see things that others have; on a rented, only half-working television set the migrant child saw a lot, and looked around the room and realized a lot. His was no blessed life! He continued, however, to want to take what little he could get. And of course children (or adults) can want things that are psychological in lieu of what is “material.” They can become demanding, possessive, insistent, if allowed to be. They can compete with others for attention, push hard against others who try to assert themselves. They can make every effort to obtain center stage at all times. The migrant mother developed, deep within her hurt and sad self, a pride about her child and his stubborn, indulged, expropriative, loud-mouthed, and at times impossibly egotistical behavior.

  He was the child who would shout and scream and swagger, shake his fists, really, at the wretched world he had been born to. No matter that such behavior, whether allowed or even encouraged, is hardly a guarantee of a future rise to success. On the contrary, a child of migrant parents who acts like that one is headed, quite likely, for future trouble. The mother knew that too. She knew that migrants are virtually peons; that they submit to endless demands and manipulations. Perhaps one of her children would be so “spoiled” that he would be utterly incapable of becoming a migrant or lasting as one for very long. She answered along those lines when her husband asked her why she doesn’t spank the “spoiled one” as she does the other children.

  He in turn mentioned the grim likelihood that the boy would not indeed last as a migrant. He would instead end up in jail — or soon dead. All right, better a last stand, the mother replied. But she knew that really there was no point to such a hope; it would never even come to that, because the boy would either learn to mind his manners, and submit to the only life he would most likely ever know, or go down not in defiant resistance but through the slow attrition of cheap wine and harmless side-of-the-road braggadocio — the “maladjusted” migrant who works inefficiently, goes to the bars before and after work, dies in a car accident or drowns drunk in one of the hundreds of irrigation canals that crisscross the agricultural counties of Florida, where this particular family spent its winters.

  The parallel with spoiled children of upper-income families is not so farfetched. In one of the first such families I came to know there was a girl who was described by both parents as “spoiled.” At the time, I fear, I was ready to pronounce every child in New Orleans’ Garden District spoiled.

  Nevertheless, I soon began to realize that it wouldn’t do to call one set of children spoiled, by virtue of their social and economic background — as against another set of children who were obviously less privileged. Though one meets among the poor any number of spoiled children, one also meets among the rich restrained, disciplined children; sometimes, even, boys and girls who have learned to be self-critical, even ascetic — anything but “spoiled” in the conventional sense of the word. True, one can find a touch and more of arrogance in those apparently Spartan boys and girls, who seem quite anxious to deny themselves all sorts of apparently accessible privileges. But one also finds in these children a consistent willingness to place serious and not always pleasant burdens on themselves. They often struck me, as I came to their homes fresh from visits with much poorer age-mates, as remarkably less spoiled: not so much whining or crying; fewer demands for candy or other sweets; even sometimes a relative indifference to toys, a disregard of television — so often demanded by the children I was seeing across the city, on the other side of the tracks.

  Those children from prominent families appeared, even at the age of four or five, to put their energies in the service of “constructive” play or “useful” activities. They had begun to learn at two and three how important it was for them to do “right” as against “wrong”; to build rather than destroy; to concentrate their energies, devote them to particular tasks, which were to be finished rather than started and abandoned. They had, in some instances, even learned to take care of their own rooms — keep them neat, pick up after themselves, be conscious of what belongs where. Maids came to help, or lived with the family, but sometimes a particular boy or girl, as young as five or six, was a taskmaster to the maid rather than, certainly, a helpless or indulged child. And sometimes the maid herself became astonished by the example set by such children — and became their strong admirer.

  A New Orleans black woman said to me in 1961: “I don’t know how to figure out these rich, white kids. They’re something! I used to think, before I took a job with this family, that the only difference between a rich kid and a poor kid is that the rich kid knows he has a lot of money and he grows up and he becomes spoiled rotten. That’s what my mother told me; she took care of a white girl, and the girl was an only child, and her father owned a department store in McComb, Mississippi, and that girl thought she was God’s special creature. My mother used to come home and tell us about the ‘little princess’; but she turned out to be no good. She was so pampered she couldn’t do a thing for herself. All she knew how to do was order people around. It’s different with these two children here in New Orleans. I’ve never seen such a boy and such a girl. They think they’re the best ones who ever lived — like that girl in McComb — but they don’t behave like her. They’re never asking me to do much of anything. They even ask if they can help me! They tell me that they want to know how to do everything. The girl says she wants to learn how to run the washing machine and the dishwasher. She says she wants to learn all my secret recipes. She says she’d like to give the best parties in the Garden District when she grows up, and she’d like to be able to give them without anyone’s help. She says I could serve the food, but she would like to make it. The boy says he’s going to be a lawyer and a banker, so he wants to know how much everything costs. He doesn’t want to waste anything. He’ll see me throw something away, and he wants to know why. I wish my own kids were like him!

  “I wish my kids weren’t so lazy; they don’t care what’s going on; they just want to play and play, and they waste a lot of food, and they break the toys I get them real fast. I even told my children I wish they could learn from these two children here. But these children here are special, and don’t they know it! That’s what being rich is: you know you’re different from most people. These two kids are even more special, because they act as if they’re going to be tops in everything, and they’re pleased as can be with themselves, because there is nothing they can’t do, and there’s nothing they can’t get, and there’s nothing they can’t win, and they’re always showing off what they can do, and then before you can tell them how good they are, they’re telling the same thing to themselves. It’s confusing! They’re not spoiled one bit, but oh, they have a high opinion of themselves!

  “And I’ll have to admit, there are times when I have the same high opinion of them! I’ll look at them, and I’ll say that they could be dropped on an island in the middle of a big ocean, and they’d know what to do, and if they didn’t have anyone around to be pleased with them, they’d be all right because they’d be pleased with themselves! And it wouldn’t take them long to know where to go and what to do on that island, because they are just so sure of themselves and so full of themselves that they always have their chins up, and they’re happy, and they know where they’re going, and they know what’s ahead — that everything will come out fine in the end. When you have that kind of spirit in you, then you’ll
always get out of any jam you’re in, and you’ll always end up on top, because that’s where you started, and that’s where you believe you’re going to end up, and if it’s in your mind that it is like that, and it’s going to be like that, and if you’re willing to work hard, like these kids are, and if you’re careful about everything, like they are, then you just can’t lose, and don’t these kids know it, I’ll tell you!”

  Actually the children she speaks of aren’t as confident of themselves as she thinks, though she certainly has accurately conveyed their appearance. The kind of children she knows so well are extraordinarily privileged by virtue of background and money, are also intelligent and of attractive appearance; but those children have demons that occasionally urge them on, and their nature is not always easy to divine. Boys and girls may seem without anxiety or self-doubt at, say, eight or nine. Yet, there are moments of hesitation, if not apprehension. An eleven-year-old boy from a prominent and quite brilliant Massachusetts family (three generations of first-rate lawyers) told his teachers in an autobiographical composition about the vicissitudes of “entitlement”: “I don’t always do everything right. I’d like to be able to say I don’t make any mistakes, but I do, and when I do, I feel bad. My father and mother say that if you train yourself, you can be right almost 100% of the time. Even they make mistakes, though. I like to be first in sports. I like to beat my brothers at skiing. But I don’t always go down the slopes as fast as I could and I sometimes fall down. Last year I broke my leg. That was the first time I’d ever gone to a hospital and stayed there. It was my mother who reminded me that I’d been in the hospital for a week just after I was born! I’d forgotten! I was saying that I’d never been in the hospital overnight, and she corrected me.