by Alfie Kohn
So, too, do the best theory and research challenge the claim that all children would benefit from more self-discipline. Chapter 7 examines this concept closely, reviewing the dynamics of self-control and exploring the ideology that leads so many people to demand that children work harder, resist temptation, and put off doing what they enjoy. Even if kids were as self-centered and spoiled as we’re told they are, we might respond not by invoking the Protestant work ethic or with stricter discipline but by helping them to work for social change. Chapter 8 discusses ways we can promote a disposition to question things as we find them and refuse to go along with what doesn’t make sense.
In the pages that follow, I want to invite readers who don’t regard themselves as social conservatives to reexamine the traditionalist roots of attitudes about children they may have come to accept. And I want to invite all readers, regardless of their political and cultural views, to take a fresh look at common assumptions about kids and parenting. We’ve been encouraged to worry: Are we being firm enough with our children? Are we too involved in their lives? Do kids today feel too good about themselves? Those questions, I’ll argue, are largely misconceived. They distract us from—or even make us suspicious about—the shifts that we ought to be considering. The sensible alternative to overparenting is not less parenting but better parenting. The alternative to permissiveness is not to be more controlling but more responsive. And the alternative to narcissism is not conformity but reflective rebelliousness.
In short, if we want to raise psychologically healthy and spirited children, we’ll need to start by questioning the media-stoked fears of spoiling them.
CHAPTER 1
Permissive Parents, Coddled Kids, and Other Reliable Bogeymen
THIS TIME IT’S DIFFERENT . . . AGAIN
It’s the sort of rhetorical cliché favored by high school orators and academics who are trying to spice up their plodding monographs: Offer an anonymous quotation that’s directly pertinent to the topic and then reveal with a flourish that the source is actually decades, or even centuries, old. Ha! Gotcha!
This device, however, has the potential to be more than a source of mild entertainment. To read strikingly familiar observations or sentiments offered by people long dead is to be deprived of the myth of uniqueness, and that can be usefully unsettling. Whenever we’re apt to sound off about how certain aspects of modern life are unprecedented in their capacity to give offense, the knowledge that our grandparents or distant ancestors said much the same thing, give or take a superficial detail, ought to make us stop talking in mid-sentence and sit down—hard.
Take education. Commentators and veteran teachers often announce—in a tone of either resignation or disgust—that the performance of our students and the standards to which they’re held have become increasingly lax. Kids do the bare minimum and manage to get away with it. Heck, they’re actually pleased with themselves—and celebrated by others—for their mediocrity!
“In recent years,” one article observed, “parents have cried in dismay that their children could not read out loud, could not spell, could not write clearly,” while “employers have said that mechanics could not read simple directions. Many a college has blamed high schools for passing on students . . . who could not read adequately to study college subjects; high schools have had to give remedial reading instruction to [students] who did not learn to read properly in elementary schools.” On and on goes this devastating indictment of our education system. Or, well, perhaps not “our” education system, since few of us had much to say about school policy when this article appeared—in 1954.1
Comparable jeremiads were published, of course, in the 1970s and ’80s (an influential example being the Reagan administration’s deeply dishonest “Nation at Risk” report2), but couldn’t one argue that those, like today’s denunciations of falling standards, reflect the same legacy of multiculturalism, leftist education professors, and the post-Woodstock cultural realignment that brought down traditional values inside and outside of schools? Yes indeed, one could certainly make that argument. But defending it proves rather difficult given that people were attacking America’s supposedly dysfunctional education system before Vietnam, before Civil Rights, before feminism—and were striking the very same tone of aggressive nostalgia.
So if pundits were throwing up their hands even during the Eisenhower era about schools on the decline and students who could barely read and write, the obvious question is this: When exactly was that golden period distinguished by high standards? The answer, of course, is that it never existed. “The story of declining school quality across the twentieth century is, for the most part, a fable,” says social scientist Richard Rothstein, whose book The Way We Were? cites a series of similar attacks on American education, moving backward one decade at a time.3 Each generation invokes the good old days, during which, we discover, people had been doing exactly the same thing.
Thus, middle-aged grumblers during the 1950s undoubtedly grew misty-eyed as they recalled their days in school—you know, back when excellence mattered and excuses weren’t accepted. How inconvenient, then, to discover that, when they were children, adults had been outraged that the judges of a college essay contest were forced to select “the essay having the fewest errors” (in 1911) and high school students missed two out of every three questions on a test of “the simplest and most obvious facts of American history” (in 1917).4
Did someone say “grade inflation”? Everyone knows that A’s are handed out like fun-size candy bars on Halloween nowadays—a disgraceful dilution of rigorous standards that “got started in the late 60s and early 70s,” as Harvard University’s Harvey Mansfield tells the widely accepted story.5 (Blame all the bleeding-heart radical professors hired and tenured during that period.) Hence a report from Harvard’s own “Committee on Raising the Standard”: “Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily—Grade A for work of not very high merit, and Grade B for work not far above mediocrity. . . . One of the chief obstacles to raising the standards of the degree is the readiness with which insincere students gain passable grades by sham work.” Except that report was written in—you saw this coming, didn’t you?—1894. Back then, letter grades were still a novelty at the university, less than one decade old, but Mansfield’s ideological forebears were already complaining about how little the top grades had come to mean.6
“Nostalgia is only amnesia turned around,” said the poet Adrienne Rich. Of course all this historical evidence doesn’t mean that today’s scolds, braying about our recent decline, will finally sit down and shut up. It just means they should.
“Before the days of dumbing down and propping up, we held high standards for children at home as well as in school.” That declaration appears in a book published in 2003 called The Epidemic: The Rot of American Culture, Absentee and Permissive Parenting, and the Resultant Plague of Joyless, Selfish Children. (Once you’ve read the subtitle, you’ve read the book).7 Like many other writings from the grouchy/wistful school of cultural criticism, it contends that education is just the beginning of our current problems. Indeed, the last few years have brought a boatload of polemics that focus less on how children are taught than on how they’re raised. Given that the latter is our primary focus in this book, we might be forgiven for wondering what to make of claims that kids today are more spoiled than ever before and that parental authority has eroded over time. Is it possible that a response of “been there, seen that” is called for here, too?
Even without a trip to the archives, readers of a certain age will recall that condemnations of pervasive permissiveness are hardly new. For starters, the very same points being made today about pushover parents and their coddled offspring could be found in books published in the early 1990s (Spoiled Rotten: Today’s Children and How to Change Them) and in the early 1980s (Parent Power). The latter was written by the Christian conservative John Rosemond, but at least three other books over the last few decades have used that same title, with its call for an unapologetic assertion o
f control.
A little earlier, in 1976, U.S. News and World Report ran an article called “Permissiveness: A ‘Beautiful Idea’ That Didn’t Work.” And a couple named Joseph and Lois Bird wrote, in their 1972 manifesto Power to the Parents, that “teaching the child responsibility . . . is not a popular idea” these days. “Most parents and teachers expect too little” from kids, they explained, with the result that we now have to worry not only about “the terrible teens” but also about “the rebellious preteens and the obstreperous grammar schoolers.” The Birds hearkened back to a simpler time (though with no hint of when that was) during which “we knew what we believed in,” before those “pseudo-psychologists” started telling us that children need more freedom.8
Not too long ago, Time magazine’s cover featured an illustration of a smirking boy, his arms folded and a gold crown on his head, surrounded by an enormous collection of toys. “Do Kids Have Too Much POWER?” the cover demanded in boldface capitals. (Guess what the answer was.) The article reported that “80% of people think kids today are more spoiled than kids of 10 or 15 years ago.”9 But there’s every reason to believe that a poll taken ten or fifteen years earlier would have found a large majority making precisely the same claim. When the author of a book called Spoiling Childhood warns, “We have entered an era of permissiveness in which the scales are tipped toward gratification,”10 that can be true only if the word era denotes a period of at least forty years. Clearly, there’s not much difference between what we’re hearing today about how children are raised and what was being said before most parents of younger children were even born.
Here, though, just as with claims about education, the possibility exists that we’re merely suffering from a lengthy interval of crumbling values and lax parenting, one that can be traced back to all those tie-dyed baby boomers who were allowed to do as they pleased and are now raising their own children the same way. Does it all get back to the tectonic shift of the late 1960s and early ’70s? Did people raise their children responsibly before everything went to pot?
Like, say, in the early 1960s? Apparently not. Journalist Peter Wyden declared in Suburbia’s Coddled Kids that it’s become “tougher and tougher to say ‘No’ and make it stick.” The cover of his book, published in 1962, depicted a child lounging on a divan, eating grapes while Mom fans him and Dad holds an umbrella to protect him from the sun.11 (Perhaps the artist was the parent, or even the grandparent, of whoever created that Time cover illustrating how kids have never had so much power as they do now.)
Newsweek, meanwhile, which warned us a few years ago about the need to “just say no” to today’s youngsters who “want it all,” managed to scoop itself in the early 1960s with a cover that depicted a little girl with a miniature mother and father standing on her outstretched hands. It asked the ominous question, “Are We Trapped in a Child-Centered World?” The answer was conveniently supplied by The Child Worshipers, a 1963 book by Martha Weinman Lear: “We are living, like it or not . . . in a child-centered society”; in fact, “child worship is in some ways a national epidemic.”12
Any chance that things were better in the mid-1950s (despite the failing schools)? Let’s check in with Marguerite and Willard Beecher, authors of Parents on the Run:
Time was when parents had their own authority about the rearing of children. In those days, children were supposed to be “seen and not heard.” The fear of parents and of God was instilled in them. There was no back talk and no nonsense. The homes of yesteryear were adult-centered. Today [in 1955] we have the child-centered home. In it there is little peace and quiet, and certainly not much respect for, or fear of authority. Today’s comic-tragic home reveals the child is firmly and autocratically in command. Parents are barely tolerated around the house. Indeed, it is parents who are to “be seen and not heard.”13
That denunciation was echoed by respondents to another poll, who lambasted contemporary (1950s) moms and dads for being “not strict enough,” as well as by Parents magazine in a January 1950 article—“When and How to Say No”—that condemned parents for being “unable to take the responsibility for being grown up and making decisions.”14
OK, so the problem didn’t start with the peace-and-love generation. Here’s a fallback hypothesis: Perhaps it began with Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose name in conservative circles has long been synonymous with permissiveness. If kids are insufficiently deferential, one author informs us, it’s because of “the influence of progressive child-rearing experts and educators. This movement started with Dr. Spock.”15
Alas, this explanation, too, suffers from a couple of rather serious flaws, beginning with the fact that Dr. Spock never really deserved his reputation. His famous Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, published in 1946, hardly reads as a manual for letting children do as they please. Spock’s reputation for permissiveness was due mostly to his suggestion that parents should not impose a rigid feeding schedule on an infant—or potty-training demands on an unready toddler. In his approach to discipline and related topics, he was actually quite moderate. The famous distillation of his advice to mothers was “Trust yourself”—not “Trust your kids.” “Don’t say [to young children] ‘Do you want to’—just do what’s necessary,” he advised. “It’s easy to fall into the habit of saying to a small child, ‘Do you want to . . . have your lunch?’ . . . It is better not to give him a choice.”16
Moreover, the book went through seven more editions during his lifetime, with its title shortened to Baby and Child Care, and he seemed to grow increasingly conservative as the years went by. Beginning with the second edition, in 1957, Spock took pains to emphasize his conservative credentials on the very first page: “Nowadays there seems to be more chance of a conscientious parent’s getting into trouble with permissiveness than with strictness.” Like so many others, Spock regarded that as a serious problem—and one that he, himself, clearly didn’t create. By the third edition, he was even more worried about the possibility that children might be spoiled, and he recommended that parents just let them cry if they resisted going to sleep lest they become dependent on parental comfort. When he wasn’t updating his book, Spock spent time rebutting the charge that he sanctioned permissiveness—beginning with a 1948 speech in which he denied being “foolish enough to say that a child does not need control . . . [as] some people imagine we have said,” and continuing in a magazine article almost a quarter-century later that was titled “Don’t Blame Me!”17
The other problem with the “it’s Spock’s fault” argument is that traditionalists were decrying what they saw as permissive parenting before this particular pediatrician ever set pen to paper. Shortly before his book was first published, an article in American Home—“I’ve Raised Three Selfish Little Savages”—blamed progressive child rearing for making the author’s children believe “they have priority over everything and everybody.”18 Even earlier, during the 1920s, there had been a “great hue and cry about the loss of parental authority in the modern home.”19 Readers of The Atlantic Monthly, meanwhile, were treated to a stern rebuke directed to the younger generation. Sure, the author conceded, kids have always been pleasure seekers, but what we’re currently witnessing “is different from anything we have ever seen in the young before.” Parents teach “nothing wholeheartedly,” and things now come so easily to children that they fail to develop any self-discipline. Forget about traditional values: Today, it’s just a “culte du moi.” That essay, by one Cornelia A. P. Comer, was published in 1911,20 when Benjamin Spock was eight years old.
When Comer’s piece was subsequently reprinted in an anthology, the editor added his own two cents. He confessed that “the older generation is bewildered. It cannot understand the freedom of youth. It agrees with foreign observers, that American children have the worst manners in the world; that they are thoroughly spoiled; and that, intent upon pleasure and oblivious to duty, they are driving straight to destruction.” He added, “Though the world has certainly changed before, it never has c
hanged at the whirling speed of the last half-dozen years”—that is, since 1915.21
This time, in other words, things really are different. That’s what people today post on their blogs to get you to take their italicized complaints seriously, and it’s what people were using fountain pens to communicate a hundred years ago for the same reason. Appeals to historical perspective apparently need to be put in historical perspective.
Set the Way-Back Machine even earlier and you’ll find an English visitor clucking in 1832 about “the total want of discipline and subjection which I observed universally among children of all ages” in America.22 In fact, it’s difficult to know when these themes weren’t being sounded. One writer in the 1640s decried children who carry their insolence “proudly, disdainfully, and scornfully toward parents.”23 And there are reports of people having said these sorts of things thousands of years ago. The following rant, for example, is widely attributed to the Greek poet Hesiod, who lived in the eighth century B.C.E.: “I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly [disrespectful] and impatient of restraint.” And this, allegedly from Socrates: “Children today love luxury too much. They have detestable manners, flout authority, and have no respect for their elders. What kind of awful creatures will they be when they grow up?”24
True, even ample historical precedent doesn’t rule out the possibility that parents are too permissive; theoretically, they might always (and everywhere) have been so. But the force of the argument one hears—in books and articles, at seminars and dinner parties—is that parenting is more that way now than it used to be. Back then, parents set limits and kids obeyed (which is uncritically assumed to be desirable). Back then, standards were high and students were motivated and self-disciplined. Thus, if it turns out that “back then” people were actually saying the very same thing, we’ve taken the first step to forcibly deflate this hot-air balloon.
