Our ancestors' childhoods

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When you said ancestors, I thought you meant ANCESTORS! Do you know where childhood developed as its own specific 'time' rather than just minature adults doing the same thing as their parents (chopping wood, hauling water, gathering food, existing?) It came when children needed to be educated to be literate. Before that, all bets were off on any sort of 'child hood'.

from a website that caught my attention:
"The absence of literacy, the absence of the idea of education, the absence of the idea of shame - these are the reasons why the idea of childhood did not exist in the medieval world,"

Only after the development of the printing press, and of literacy, did childhood begin to emerge, he says. Despite pressures on children to work in the mines and factories of an industrial age, the need for literacy and education gradually became apparent, first among the elite, then among the masses. Childhood became defined as the time it took to nurture and transform a child into a civilized adult who could read and comprehend complex information. The view American settlers was that only gradually could children attain civility and adulthood through "literacy, education, reason, self-control and shame."

It was during that time, Postman notes, that public education flourished, that children began celebrating birthdays and that a popular culture especially for kids developed around games and songs. Postman places the high-water mark for childhood at between 1850 and 1950.

But the seeds for childhood's demise were sown even before 1850 with the advent of the telegraph. For the first time, electronic messages could be transmitted faster than the human ability to travel.

The most profound meaning of the telegraph (and of its electronic successors) was that the information transmitted on it didn't need real content. The medium itself was the message.

It's an observation that only a few people understood at the time. Henry David Thoreau was among them. When told it was possible for people in Maine and Texas to exchange electric messages, Thoreau remarked, "But what do they have to say to one another?"

Postman sees Thoreau as a prophet. The point is that electronic messages in a free-market society tend to be uncontrollable and banal. News becomes a product. Advertising becomes ubiquitous. Self-restraint and deferred gratification collapse. Celebrity takes over.

Television especially vaporizes the hierarchy that adults once held over children, Postman argues. Pictures dominate. Unlike a child learning gradually to read and to grasp ideas, no one needs to learn how to watch TV. No one gets better at TV watching by doing more of it. Its images are simply there for everyone, adult and child, to absorb.

Electronic media find it impossible to withhold any secrets," Postman writes, letting the reader's mind drift backward to the Middle Ages. "Without secrets, there can be no such thing as childhood." The electronic media thus pose a challenge both to the authority of adults and to the curiosity of children, he argues. Children's curiosity is replaced by cynicism and arrogance. "We are left with children who are given answers to questions they never asked."

Violence, for example, is offered without the mediation of a mother's voice. It's governed by no theory of child development. Rather, it's there because it makes for interesting TV.

For middle-class kids, this meshing of adult and child worlds is surely one of the biggest differences between today's childhoods and those of earlier times, say the 1950s.

Our parents never saw us play ball. They never knew that sometimes we hung out in the rail yards, or stole apples from neighbors' trees. They didn't know the games we played because they were ours. On summer mornings, we disappeared into neighborhood - kid enchantment, emerging only briefly for lunch before plunging back into our conspiracies. We had no play dates. It was assumed we'd return before dinner – safely.

Now, middle-class parents feel the need to be all over their kids' lives. Rarely do you see middle-class kids playing unattended in city parks. Kids are tightly scheduled: ballet, swim team, computer camp. An author writes about a scuffle that broke out among parents at a massive kids' soccer tournament, and then, afterward, about how parents congratulated one another for a wonderful event.



the point is, "child hood" is fluid

I was born in 57 and we didn't have a TV until I was in 4th grade because my father had this idea it would rot our brains. We had spy clubs where we spent a great deal of time making up codes and electing officers, we put on plays in the yard and played the usual cops and robbers, kickball, fox and geese. The little girl next door always had the latest board game such as "Operation" and "Mousetrap" but we only had Monopoly, Scrabble and Parcheesi. We went down to the corner store and bought candy and then went to the playground to sneak cigarettes the little girl next door had stolen from her mother's purse. Yeah, I had a childhood. My brother made an interesting comment about how so many kids live in a bubble where they go from home to school to the mall to some other facility in a vehicle and never actually experience "outdoors".

It might have something to do with the fact that the 50s/60s generation grew up just after WWII and families didn't have too much money to spend on toys/games etc.

It's why I specifically mentioned the Baby Boomer generation, and none before that.

Well from what I have heard from Baby Boomers--not to mention a few things I've read about them here and there--since their parents grew up so incredibly poor, they wanted to spoil their kids rotten and give them childhoods they never had.

Most of what it said though does totally make sense, and I wish a lot of folks from my generation understood that best.

I've even read about play conditions and living conditions of about 100 years ago, and I'm more than aware of how different it all was then compared to today.

It's why I specifically mentioned the Baby Boomer generation, and none before that.

Part of what you're saying is correct. You are right that in general, generations that came to adulthood just before and during WWII had experienced the worst economic depression. Most had grown up pretty poor, and after WWII, there was an employment and construction boom. The first middle class developments began to be built then. There was also a boom in cheaper manufacturing methods suddenly making high tech appliances available to the masses. Boomer kids had it far better than their pre WWII parents did.

In comparison, the children of Boomers have had it even better than they did.

What is a little ironic though, is that you've used Toy Story as the "launching point" for your original post. Most of the toys in Toy Story (1) are actually the toys that boomers played with. That's no accident. That was done intentionally because the makers of the movie knew that boomers would find it nostalgic, and would very likely go with their kids, and their grand kids to see it. That's a TRIPLE generational whammy in ticket sales, and that is exactly what happened. It's the reason that film broke so many sales records.

Of course, they were also smart enough to play on generational differences to. That was Buzz Lightyear's role. He was there for Generation X and their kids (or something like that).

I do think Generation X and Y and Milleniers have not only had "it" progressively better, but probably do seem more connected to their childhoods than their predecessors. I also think being more connected is a bit of a double edged sword. If you stay too connected for too long, it can stunt your growth into adulthood.

There is something else too. Food for thought. Have you ever watched the History Channel or Discovery? Have you ever watched the shows outlining the various ways in which we could suddenly lose ALL of the technology we now possess? They all say it's not a matter of "if" but when it will happen. There's no telling what the cause will be. It could be a massive solar flare that knocks out all electrical infrastructures, possibly even wiping out all digitally stored information all over the globe.

How many of us, from Boomers onward, would know how to start a fire without matches? How many of us know how to train horses? How many of us would even survive past the first few months, much less years?

If something like that did happen during our lifetime, I predict the Third world would suddenly become the richest cultures on Earth.

The U.S. for the most part, would quickly become a country in chaos and collapse as a world power.