Children
Apparently, we’ve also just discovered that childhood development is important. The previous idea was, of course, that children were just small, unready adults, to be seen and not heard, and to be shuffled off to the nanny or the boarding school as soon as possible. You couldn’t really do much with children below a certain age. But are we really saying that? This sort of thinking has certainly prevailed in some social classes at some times, but even the reference to nannies and boarding schools proves that we’re making generalizations from a pretty specific population. Are we suggesting that there were no mothers who bounced their babies and cooed at them? No fathers who chased their sons around the park? No fairy tales? No toys? Surely some of the aristocrats above would have tried to choose nannies who knew how to raise children, and not just small unready adults. So where did we get the idea that we’re just discovering these things? Is it that we’ve just started to write about them in the form of research papers? If anyone has any other ideas, I’d love to hear them.
September 17th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
It’s just part of the whole “whatever our parents did was wrong” mentality. Basically I think there’s just a trend of reinventing everything. More than that though, we can’t give any other generation credit for being at all enlightened or loving. (”whatever our parents did was wrong and if it turned out alright it was sheer luck” ) For example, I had a class I had to attend during my pregnancy and it was mostly on how to eat etc during pregnancy but then they asked “how many of you were spanked as children?” Well this was a gathering of military families who are mostly on the conservative side so every hand went up. “Well spanking is wrong and you must never spank your child. Spanking will only teach your child to be sneaky to avoid spanking and that people that love them will hit them and thus they will be set up for abusive relationships later in life.” hmmmm funny, everybody in THIS room seems pretty succesful, upstanding and happy.
September 20th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
I think that I might want to consider someday asking you to be the godfather of one of my unborn children.
I’ll be cooing and bouncing them… not shaking, though. Shaking’s bad. I think it’s the difference between up and down and side to side & front to back that messes them up.