Good Childhood

If you want to explore the subject of media and children further, I’d suggest The Faces of Televisual Media: Teaching, Violence, Selling to Children by Edward L. Palmer (Editor), Brian M. Young (Editor). Two of the experts in this field are both named Edward L. Palmer and all of their books are commendable.

(An aside: my experience of deeply religious Christians in the UK is that they are as likely to be on the political left as on the political right; and my experience of them in the US (which is intimate, but not extensive) is that their commitment to right-wing economics is not at all deep, and caused in part by a sense that the left is deeply anti-religious. Russell Arben Fox feels like an outlier in American political debate, for good reason — my guess is that he wouldn’t feel that way in most of Europe).

This opens up such a large can of worms, but hey, that’s what blogs are for…
Harry, I think you are absolutely right, in the U.S. Christian Conservatives feel a strong anti-religous sentiment from the left. This polarization has made it so that rational tax and social policy discussions get marginalized.

Just to add to Harry’s comparison b/w UK and US, many of the leading churches in Australia routinely promote left-wing causes. The impression of churches as forces of the left has receded a bit with George Pell’s rise through the Catholic hierachy, but for years it was common to hear right-wing complaints about how religious figures should stay out of politics because any such entry led to an attack on the right.

Well, you’re absolutely right about the contradictions, even incoherencies, that marks a lot of middle-class parenting in the US, especially among the highly educated. Many parents believe strongly in what they’re doing as parents, but run screaming from any attempt to connect the practical day-to-day landscape of their parenting strategies with any larger philosophy of childhood or society, and avoid any public enunciation of a belief that their strategies are best (while often privately believing that to an intense degree). I agree that we’re generally ill-served by the way that these contradictions make public discussions of childhood difficult or impossible.

On the other hand, I disagree profoundly about your views of commercial culture, though you’re perfectly right that at least one sector of the secular left ought to actually admire or agree with evangelical strategies of child-raising given that they also wish to shield or protect children from exposure to mass culture. (Before I get dogged by the usual truth-squad that tells me that my sense of the “left” is hopelessly generalized, let me stress: ONE TENDENCY of the secular left. Not the whole magilla.)

That alignment goes deeper than childhood: there is a rejectionist strategy towards the public sphere, mass media and popular culture that broadly links the cultural right and the cultural left in the US, even if they completely disagree on the values that ought to exist in distinction to public culture.

My attitude towards parenting and popular or commercial culture is (I hope) consistent with a larger set of beliefs:

First, that much of popular culture is in fact desirable or likeable or positive in ways that the cultural left often fails to appreciate, in part because of a Frankfurt-School style anti-capitalist hangover.

Two, because I believe in the intrinsic rationality, intelligence or human adaptability of children in opposition to many forms of paternalistic assumptions about their prelapsarian innocence or ‘blank slate’ status–and I also challenge the conventional wisdom of strong developmentalists who think that whatever a person is, they’ve primarily become that in the first three or four years of life;

Three, because I think the worst possible way to develop habits of critical thought and skepticism about commercial culture, consumerism and mass media is to be strongly protected from them until adulthood, for the same reason that the usual case of first-year college student alcohol poisoning occurs in the kid who has been raised by teetolers;

Fourth, because I don’t find the alternative vision of culture advanced by the cultural left any more appealing than mass culture, with its sackcloth-and-ashes pieties and frequent sleight-of-hand substitution of respectable bourgeois pleasures for universal norms of human satisfaction. (Example: Judith Schor, when speaking at Swarthmore, was asked what people would do with all the leisure time they would gain in her vision of minimal mass consumption and shorter working hours. Answer: everyone enjoys gardening! And also we’d learn to be better human beings to boot. No thanks.)

Actually, that’s a good point, Russell. You’re right: the cultural left and cultural right, broadly speaking, may actually share not just a position on mass culture but even a vision of the alternative regime of values they would like to see practiced in opposition or contradistinction to it.

I also agree it’s possible to make a boogeyman, but I don’t agree with your assessment of “Veggie Tales” or even the proposition that gaining control over the culture is an objective that is compatible with the liberating, open-ended creativity of commercial culture. I think those two visions really are in tension, and “Veggie Tales” or many other consciously prosocial works of children’s culture are a perfect demonstration of why. Rather than proliferating meanings, ideas, possibilities, and truly opening the imagination, most prosocial entertainment for children gives lip service to a plurality of ideas, creativities and ways of thought while heavily circumscribing their boundaries. It’s not quite as bad now as it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when virtually the only prosocial value which could be articulated in children’s media was “always cooperate”, but it’s not far from that, either.

What I find especially bad about “Veggie Tales” and many other prosocial works is that they have a very tight conception of the relationship between representation and practice–a general philosophical conceit shared by the cultural left and cultural right, that to represent a practice or value is to summon it into being, for good or ill. Just empirically, that seems a very dubious description of the lived relationship between representation and practice–but even ethically, I question it. In fact, it seems to me that this belief is centrally opposed to the conception of imagination I find liberating for myself and for children–it proposes that we are what we see, and that the social ills of our day can be banished by a counter-culture which shows us alternatives. Real imagination, it seems to me, is about envisioning a much more mysterious set of pathways between the world and the culture, between ideas and action, between images and life. I have much more faith in the ability of children to imagine a great many things with what they see in popular culture and consumer society than either the cultural left or right do.

There’s also a problem with prosocial entertainments in that they often actively deny children’s culture the ability to correspond to children’s experience. There’s been an argument knocking around for a while that the cultural rage and alienation found in US counterculture from about 1956 to 1963 had to do with the utter lack of resemblance between something like “Ozzie and Harriet” and the domestic lives of many young people.

Well, the circle has been closed and we’re back to that, perhaps this time from a different political vector. The kinds of children’s media (including books) that some on the cultural, communitarian left love best strike me as having the same surreal lack of resemblance to the lives of children. For example, they offer little violence or dramatic conflict (something that even children raised in completely benevolent, loving environments know a lot about, merely because the toddler will is so consistently thwarted by parental authority–and because the social world of toddlers relating to each other is often fascinatingly amoral in the way violence interjects into it).

Prosocial entertainments always strive to close the loop on “negative” emotions and show pathways to turn them positive, but usually unrealistically or immaculately so, or by assuming that anger or rage or envy or jealousy or disappointment have their foundations in completely arbitrary, irrational reactions to events. (I was struck just yesterday at a little segment on “Sesame Street” that did just this: a kid gets his toy fire engine crushed by some bully who sneers indifferently, and then talks about how he just swallowed his anger and felt good again, because everybody gets angry–as if the child’s anger was unfounded or typical or an ordinary part of being human, rather than being rationally righteous in response to a wrong being done).

In fact, to follow on that, the notion of individual acts (as opposed to collective states) being meaningfully right or wrong actually tends to drop out of the prosocial entertainments that the cultural left looks to, because this would suppose the need to make judgements on individuals and act accordingly. But every child even in the most indifferently parenting household, is struggling to operationalize what is good and bad, right and wrong, and to do it in both collective and individualized ways. The natural corollary is to turn around and consider those judgements in the wider world. (My daughter loves to tell me when I’ve done something wrong, like swear, because it extends a principle I’ve communicated back to me.)

Prosocial entertainments banish the actuality of family life, its disappointments and conflicts and mysteries. Death and fear disappear. And so on–so much of the substance and mystery of lived childhood is sanitized out of existence, put off until children are “old enough”, or managed into some soothing, sopoforic form that bears little resemblance to what children actually see and know.

Damn, you’ve thought a lot more about Veggie Tales than I ever have.

I agree with much of what you say; your invocation of children “envisioning a much more mysterious set of pathways between the world and the culture, between ideas and action, between images and life” is brilliant. And you’re right that both left-wing and right-wing cultural alternatives can both force a closure of the development of such pathways. Relying solely on either Veggie Tales or Sesame Street (and their ilk) to provide one’s kids with “safe” pathways out of the welter of media and corporate messages which surround us is foolish. I’ll defend Veggie Tales (and Sesame Street–and incidentally, let me disagree with you, and say that I think SS was a whole lot better back in the 70s, when the program was less structured, Oscar was a lot more anti-social, and Mr. Snuffleupagus was a not-entirely-reliable pseudo-imaginary friend) this far: in their place, they can serve to help parents strike a balance between directing what their children are exposed to, and what they oughtn’t have any direction regarding. I can’t, and shouldn’t try, to control my daughters’ imaginations, but I can, and should, be selective regarding which images and stories spark their imaginations. They cannot, and should not, replace those stories and entertainments which embrace, as you put it, “the actuality of family life, its disappointments and conflicts and mysteries.” But given that, in my experience, very little age-appropriate programing does in fact respect those realities, you’re going to have to pick your poison (or reject the tv entirely, as many of the home schooling parents I know, including some in my immediate family, have done). I shouldn’t represent to them some approved form of “free play” regarding how things ought to be, but I am responsible to establishing the enviornment within which they do play. Kids should draw their own maps, but as Harry said in his original post, it’s us who are supposed to take authority and exercise judgment over the ends towards which their maps direct them.

Timothy (or Tim?), I’d like to respond to some of what you’ve said, and add a further thought. I agree, of course, that complete shielding from commercial culture is not a good way of preparing kids to deal with it. But few of us completely shield them, as I said; they encounter it at other kid’s homes, in their schools, and simply walking around (if we let them walk around). And as Russell says, the counter-culture is in various ways parasitic on the mainstream (as always). Also, though, the crass commercialism of popular culture could be mitigated in various ways by public policy. E.g., we could make granting broadcasting licenses conditional on providing 2 hours of commercial-free children’s TV per day, and place a burden on broadcasting companies to show that those hours are costing them at least 75% of their average per-hour expenditure. I simply don’t see that anyone has a legitimate interest in advertising to kids, or that kids have an interest in being exposed to advertising.
Now, that said, of course I agree that there’s a lot of good in popular culture, even for kids. But there’s a lot of bad. So parents have an obligation to manage their kids’ access to it. That burden might diminish as the kids age (because, as I agree with you, it’s important for them to be exposed to it so they can enjoy what’s good, discriminate between the good and the bad etc). But the burden is serious, and heavier than it was when more conservative social norms constrained the content of public culture. And of course, there’s the slightly different issue (different from what I posted on) that with so much stuff around sorting out the high quality form the low quality is a major task for a 7 year old. And no-one is going to help her except her parent.
I don’t particularly like the idea of producing a left-wing counter-culture for kids, and find most of the efforts in the 70s in the US to do so at best quaint. So I agree with a lot of what you say in your second post — but I don’t see how commercial culture scores better on these grounds really. Most of it bears little relationship to the child’s lived experience and provides little scope for the imagination. Harry Potter (which, I confess, I haven’t read, but for a very good reason) stands out as doing the latter. Its first print run was 1,000 copies. The truth is that there are golden ages of children’s cultural production — for the US certainly the 30’s would count, for the UK the 60s/70s, for Germany whenever the Grimms lived. We’re not living in one, and I think that fact isn’t entirely unrelated to the regulation of children’s cultural production by unfettered capitalist values.
Do you disagree, though, with Russell’s other point — about the desirability of quantity time with kids, and the dominance of an unhealthy kind of future-adult-oriented set of norms governing day-to-day interactions with children? Rather than what’s-good-for-them-as-kids people focus on what’s-good-for-the-adults-they’ll-become, where that good is understood as something like ‘maximizing expected lifetime income’. So there’s this weird kind of neglect (what would you do if a guy came to the door and said he’d entertain your kids for free, but would spend 10 minutes an hour trying to persuade them to persuade you to spend money on things that wouldn’t be good for them or you?), combined with a heavy-handed attention to their percevived future interests. I’m partly reacting to my observation that lots of deeply religious parents (not just the evangelicals) de-emphasize the value of acquisitiveness both in themselves and their children, and value childhood as a period that is valuable in its own right. And I’m bemused by the secular left’s hostility (though I am completely in the secular left myself).

Finally, you may think of gardening as an approved bourgeois activity. Where I come from it’s class-neutral. But I take Juliet Schor on the contrary to be impugning standard bourgeois norms. I don’t know what people would do if they worked and consumed less, and wouldn’t prescribe; but I certainly agree with her that people would lead more flourishing lives if they did work and consume less. Was the questioner seriously suggesting that we’re better off working long hours to buy more things?

What’s the further thought? Just this — that what a parent should do with a kid will depend on that kid. My 7 year old is sufficiently connected to her peers that I’m not worried about her being isolated by her eccentric home life, and sufficiently independent of her parents that I know she will push against us when she needs to (and there will be some give). If she were different the regime would be different (partly because I accept your point about teetotal parents — in fact, we even started drinking a little after they were born solely so that they wouldn’t grow up in a teetotal household) A colleague of mine says that his kids were both so shy and obedient of authority that he promised them money if they were naughty enough to get sent to the principal. The point is just that while we discuss principles and social policy in a general way, particular policies in particular families will be sensitive to the diverse needs of different children. I assumed this in my post, but its worth being explicit about it.

I don’t disagree about quality time, except to say that the very term itself is part of the problem. It imposes the productivism that an anti-commercial secular left claims to want to evade, the notion of trying to fill a child’s life with activities which accomplish something concrete.

Prosocial children’s entertainment is one of the most resplendent examples of that: everything has to serve some educational or ethical purpose, where the content and the output are perfectly and transparently aligned.

That’s why in some ways I’m much happier when my daughter sits on my lap and we play together one of MY computer games, one that’s just about a story of adventure and conflict and purely ludic, purely about pleasure and leisure. Then we don’t have to wrest pleasure violently away from some do-gooding productivist ethos that demands that the time children spend be to some good developmentalist end or even be spent on somehow becoming a fuller, better person. And I find the questions she asks about the iconography of “bad guys” in my computer games, or about the meanings of fantastic violence, to be much more interesting than the questions that consciously prosocial entertainments contain or suggest.

In this sense, I would say that a rejectionist project of raising children entails so much anxiety, so much desire to save children from something that I’m not even clear they need to be saved by–I don’t especially regard advertising as a horrible intrusion into my child’s life–that it will inevitably inflict on a child that productivist ethos, that need to make childhood and parenting and family life serve some purpose. To me, quality time means hanging out with my family, kidding around, playing games, making silly noises, telling stories, reading books, watching television together (with all our usual backchatter about it), playing computer games, going for walks, and so on. To interrupt my own engagements in the culture–which I do not see as antithetical to my ethical being, but consonant with it–in order to produce in my daughter some more exalted state of future being strikes me as a violation of quality parenting rather than the fulfillment of it.

As for Schor’s observation, I might note that to turn our future leisure time to gardening (which I also like to do) rather presupposes gardens to do it in. Green and pleasant England really is different in that way than the US, I think: to offer here that gardening would be the utopic form of leisure in a liberated society seems fundamentally suburban. More to the point, I shudder in general when we are told that we must stop living the way we live now in order to achieve some future state of being whose pleasures and fulfillments are unimaginable but also systematically better than what we have and are. The questioner (who was me) was wondering, “So we work less and consume less–and Schor specifically imagines that we would consume less television, fewer computer-mediated entertainments, less music, and so on: what would we do with all that time? What would be fun?” The reason I wonder it is that I’m actually having a lot of fun right now with television and music and books and the Internet and computer games and gardening and cooking and–you get the picture. What is this better life, this culture yet to be for which we should make drastic changes in our lives?

My colleague Barry Schwartz has recently argued that the overabundance of choice makes us all unhappy; as I understand him, he argues for constraint on choice to produce greater satisfaction. It is the actualities needed to produce the condition of constraint, whether for children or adults, that I wonder about. That simply feels to me like the impoverishment of the world, the diminishment of fecundity, the containment of the delights of the world. And I wonder a bit if people are asking that others be restrained so that they may achieve the special conditions of their own spiritual enlightenment. If I can come to an ethical self–and bring my daughter there as much as I can, as wisely as I can–what’s to stop others? If mass culture doesn’t contradict my possibilities, why does it contradict the possibilities of others, and if it does, isn’t that their problem?

Which of course brings us back to a structured withdrawal from the world, a sheltering of children and families from its outrages and offenses. And I’m fine with that, right up until we get into the discussion of which way of raising children is best–at which point I have to say that I think sheltering is comparatively unwise, if understandable, cogent, and worthy of my respect. Wouldn’t stop me from enjoying the company of a shelterer and admiring their beautiful kids, but since the point is to get past middle-class politesse about the soundest ways to run the parenting railroad, I will still say that I’m happy with the track my train is travelling on.

Timothy, you write (again, very eloquently): “It is the actualities needed to produce the condition of constraint, whether for children or adults, that I wonder about. That simply feels to me like the impoverishment of the world, the diminishment of fecundity, the containment of the delights of the world.”

Since Brayden has put this in straightforward “protectionist/non-protectionist” terms, let’s translate your observation into praxis. On the level of raising a child in the home, I assume such actualities would mean parental restrictions on television watching or reading material or a child’s purchasing power; that is, it would require the parent to exercise positive authority through outright restraint, persuasion, example-setting, explicit signaling, and so forth. I can see how you might criticize the specific ends that those actions are directed towards achieving, but are you actually worried about the actions (the “actualities”) themselves? If so, how then are we to move towards exactly that kind of judgment which Harry (rightly) accuses most of the secular left as being unable to exercise? For judgment must have a positive component, mustn’t it?

On the adult (political, economic, social) level, such “actualities” might be…what? Borders, presumably. Laws and restrictions of various sorts. The social contract, even if imagined as purely a self-interested, individually directed arrangement, in nonetheless filled with positive actualities. More specific to the discussion, since popular culture is overwhelmingly known in its commodified forms (I assume you didn’t personally write the code for the computer games you enjoy, just as I didn’t personally build my bike), the actualities involved in the establishment of constraints on consumption would be tarrifs, trade barriers, age-appropriate purchasing restrictions, hunting limits, licenses, copyright laws, unions, collective production agreements, and so forth. Again, the ends any of these might be directed towards can certainly be criticized. But are you actually bothered about the fact of such constraints themselves? If so, aren’t you actually embracing the neoliberal orthodoxy of contemporary corporate power: uninterrupted growth is good growth?

Your language is beautiful, but I can’t help but think you’re saying more than you actually believe. Heaven knows I don’t have an easy solution to all the problems which imposing constraints in the name specific (economic, social, or moral) ends entail. But if such limits feel to you “like the impoverishment of the world,” we have very different intuitions; a world that isn’t bounded in some way doesn’t seem to me like a world I (or my child) can get their hands on at all.

(Incidentally, just so no one gets the idea that wanting to establish a cultural context for one’s children is the same as wanting to goose-step them through it, Harry’s comments prompted me to retrieve part of an old essay of mine on my own blog, on the important connection between “believing” in creating appropriate alternatives, and thereby becoming able to be a “slacker” in regards the dominant (again, as Brayden put it, income-maximizing) one. See here: http://philosophenweg.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_philosophenweg_archive.html#107643714364101980)

Yeah, ok, Russell’s got my number. I’ll cop to saying more than I actually mean. I’m not letting my 3-year old squat and drop feces anywhere she likes, and I’m not letting her watch “Last Tango in Paris”. (Though in fact she is, like many children, effectively self-censoring, in that programs or culture which is way over her head bores or alarms her anyway, and she’s quick to turn it off herself.) And so on. All good parenting involves the imposition of parental power with the desire to produce disciplines and constraints on children, and sometimes that power is even imposed (thankfully) arbitrarily or sternly, as prohibition and dictate. I’m as dictatorial as the next Dad, and I find the notion that I could reason with my daughter about everything she needs to do and know silly.

But that isn’t where we started, and it’s not really what this discussion is about. This discussion, as I see it, is about a much more culturally specific vision of “the good childhood”, and Harry’s assertion that his self-described paternalism in pursuit of that quite specific cultural vision is a Good Thing–and more, a thing whose goodness he would like to see inform public policy and public suasion about good parenting, rather than an entirely private lifestyle choice.

And I agree that what we regard as “good childhood” should inform public policy, and that we shouldn’t just fall back on “whatever floats your boat”. So I’m specifically saying that my sense of what makes for a good childhood is in some way different than Harry’s. If we’re just talking about whether we should always have sidewalks, we’re in agreement. If we’re talking about what kinds of models of media and culture make the most sense for kids, and which sensibilities should be supported or endorsed by policy, I think we’re radically in disagreement. And in the history of the last forty years, Harry’s views are much more likely to have been extensively catered to by policymakers and politicians than mine, with what I would say have been some rather bad consequences, ranging from the politically correct bowdlerization of children’s culture to actual regimes of cultural restraint exercised by local and national states. Children’s media is not and has never been a cultural free-fall zone: more’s the pity. Though right now there’s a wider diversity and richness in children’s television and films than there has been for three decades, and all of that supplied by the market, not by publically-financed television. I’m actually quite happy with that state of affairs–and it seems to me that Harry is not.

Well, I’m definitely on the Left, and have no problems with Christians per se, and am conservative in terms of child-rearing. Where does that put me? I have no theories, here — just the stuff I can take from my won experience as parent and child, and from hanging out with my friends and watching their parents in action.

What I’ve learned, in no particular order:

• TV will not kill kids if you read to them as much or more than you let them watch TV. My mom and many older relatives read to me until I was around 4, when I started reading to my little sister. She’s also a reader. So are her kids. So’s mine.
• non-kid TV is best watched with parents
• There’s plenty of harmless TV out there, and frankly, it’s the ads I worry about. Me, I want a clear watershed back in the US, and the return of Schoolhouse Rock and a ban on ads that sell junk food and TV show product tie-ins before the watershed. Give me government intervention.
• Quantity and quality time are not mutually exclusive. And having to help out with the minor things in life is much more like most of our ancestors were raised. We shopped with my mom, went to the laundromat (where we got to have chips and soda and played cards while waiting — all treats), did chimp work in the kitchen, and pitched in during manic phases of major housecleaning at bizarre hours of the day. The latter also included board-game playing marathons, sitting up into the wee hours singing show tunes and watching classic films. I admit, not normal, but it instilled the very healthy idea that families do things together and rely on each other. I also learned how to do laundry, how to cook, how to compare prices, etc. So did most of my friends.
• There’s private behavior and public behavior. My parents were pretty lenient about noise and mess levels and building forts under the dining table at home, as long as we were exceptionally polite when we went out.
• kids need bedtimes that ensure decent amounts of sleep. If there were regular shows that were on past the kid’s bedtime (for example, non-icky mysteries that started after 9 p.m.), we’d record them and watch them the next night at 7. I still do this myself, since The West Wing is on too late for me.
• Tim’s colleague is right: too many choices make for unhappy people. OJ or Milk? not “What do you want to drink?”
• hierarchy in the home is not necessarily bad.
• living somewhere safe enough to play unsupervised is good. I’m pretty sure that being allowed to take the bus and BART into the city or to hang out in Berkeley all day with my best friend when I was 14 or so is one of the reasons I feel comfortable in new places.
• No parties without parents within shouting distance
• Cars are not a birthright, and grades are more important than jobs
• Encourage your children to save — you never know when you might have to borrow from them! But seriously — we put part of all income into savings accounts, and I seem to remember regularly going through toys to give to charity — not the books though. Breaking book spines, drawing, writing, and coloring in books all hanging offenses. It took me years to let myself make notes in the margins!

I’ve rambled too long, and apologize. I guess my point is that to me parenting is having a set of basically sound rules that can be adapted to the different personalities of your kids without making you seem wishy-washy. I’m pretty sure all the CT readers/contributors all have the intention of being excellent parents, and most of us have or will screw up royally many times.

I do think parents need to spend less time providing the “things they never had” and just teach them by day-to-day example — and I think that one of the best examples is being flexible and willing to admit you’re not perfect. Oh — and to teach then that they have an obligation to vote, pay taxes, and care about their fellow humans. And as early as possible, teach them how to pick up the dog poop and clean the litter boxes — that’s kids’ work!

Thanks Ayjay for the encouragement. I’m a light blogger, and am a little in awe of my colleagues. I am a little slow in responding to things because I’m having to think hard (as well as because I spend too much quantity time with the kids). And, having thought out a response along Russell’s lines I log on and he’s already said it all… Thanks Russell.
But three things. I was aware when constructing the post that it might seem to imply a kind of monism about good childhoods: there’s just one kind, and it’s the kind I’m giving to my kid. But obviously I don’t think that — there are many kinds of good childhood. And, taking a leaf from Berlin, I’m aware that measures that make some available might make others unavailable. Hence my caution about recommending particular policies. But one thing all of the discussants seem to have in common is jobs that allow us to spend a good deal of time with our children. Not everyone has that, and many people have no choice about whether they have it. Unregulated labor markets drive out good parenting, and that’s one of many reasons they should be regulated. As well as the recommendations about sidewalks and ad-free TV. Also, I realize that my lament about one policy area has shaped the discussion rather.

Second, there is a complexity that we’re all aware of but not talking about. On the one hand I think that our values should shape our lives and our parenting. On the other, none of us has the right to try to inculcate them in our children. I am an atheist socialist — whether my child turns out to be one will probably be influenced by that, but I have an obligation to ensure that it does no more than influence her; to ensure that she has plenty of exposure to values that are different from and conflict with mine. I have no problem with that (it’s a major theme of some of my writing in fact). But I do have a problem with her being exposed to values that aren’t really anybody’s — that are promoted as a side-effect of someone else’s desire to make lots of money. And I also have a problem with the fact that public schools repel deeply religious parents, so that my kid is less likely to mix with their children, so that she can get real insight into the lives of her deeply religious friends and their families, which will give her a much better basis for judgment than anything I, or some teacher of social studies, can give her. (I realize that the blame is shared between the public school authorities and the deeply religious parents, but I feel that the former, and not the latter, are in some sense accountable to me).

Third: latching onto Brayden’s point about Television. I simply disagree (with Timothy) that markets have done well at producing good television for kids, and I think they have done worse as they have been freed up from the prudish constraints of my own childhood. I jokingly linked to a DVD of The Singing Ringing Tree (East German, produced in the 50’s) which fulfills all the criteria Timothy uses, and brilliantly. Buy it. Books, that’s a different matter entirely. Its very hard to say anything persuasive in support of either thesis without degenerating into lengthy analyses of the relative merits of Alf, Barney, and the Magic Roundabout (though, judging by your comments, you, Timothy, might have a book in you about this). But markets seem to work differently well for different things. I don’t think it’s accidental that they work better where there is no advertising involved, and that TV is better where there either there is no advertising or where the broadcaster has to compete with a commercial-free competitor (as British ITV used to). Not that I want me, or any government body, to prescribe the precise content. Timothy’s comment that *Children’s media is not and has never been a cultural free-fall zone: more’s the pity* at first appalled me. But then it occurred to me that maybe I am calling for more of a ‘free-fall zone’ for television; let’s have it shaped by a much wider array of interests and voices than those of people whose only interest is in selling things to our kids (and through them, to us).

Well, er, *cough*, I already got the book in me about this issue out my system. But some of this extends the span of the analysis in that project forward a bit into the current environment. When I stack up contemporary American kids’ TV against the American kids’ TV of the late 1960s and 1970s, my heyday, while I have immense fondness for my own televisual past, there’s no question in my mind that the contemporary scene is vastly–like a thousandfold–better. There’s more styles of animation and live action, a broader range of templates and narratives, a wider range of aesthetics and themes and so on. Not just more but artistically and imaginatively better. As Malcolm Gladwell observed, you can see just how tired “Sesame Street” is when you watch it alongside “Blue’s Clues”, and that’s only scratching the surface of the change.

And really, those were changes produced by a cultural marketplace, and became possible only after the parental advocacy groups of the 1970s and their prosocial allies lost their deathgrip on kidvid content. See, if I’m skeptical about the idea of tying broadcast licenses to provisioning non-commercial children’s television, it’s because we already went down that road, and the result was a creative wasteland, the worst marriage of commercial cynicism (leading to creative evasions of broadcast restrictions like defining GI Joe as ‘educational’) and mind-numbingly awful and correct ‘educational’ and prosocial programming that no kid in his or her right mind would want to watch.

Somewhere along the line in the 1990s the previous generation of cultural commissars lost their grip, and the FCC’s regulatory approach on kidvid slipped away, and the result honestly was a serious improvement–even in the programming that has prosocial aspirations. There’s a huge difference between what you see on Noggin today and the PBS lineup circa 1988 or so. You still see something of that difference when you compare the Noggin/Nick Jr. shows and the kind of nauseatingly prosocial, highly moralizing programming that shows up on many PBS lineups like “Jay Jay the Jet Plane”.

One of the reasons I specifically credit the cultural marketplace for this is that after many years of TV producers and moviemakers understanding programming for children as a kind of market ghetto, as a kind of structured condescension–a condescension in which parental advocacy groups were their enthusiastic allies–there was a sudden discovery that if you made films and shows that were truly for families, that parents watched with children not as an act of bored parental duty but willingly and enthusiastically, and that even people without kids might want to see, you made big bucks. Disney found that out with “The Little Mermaid”; the television marketplace took a bit longer. But the results were good for everyone, a rising cultural tide that lifted all boats. In contrast, when prosocial interests had their greatest degree of influence over kidvid, they tended to produce material that absolutely conforms to all the negative characterizations I’ve offered in this thread.

So this is not hypothetical, or about the culture-yet-to-come: it’s my reading of the culture that we’ve just overcome.

OK, Timothy, you’ve got at least one extra sale, and if its half as good as your discussion here I can’t wait to read it. Sorry not to have known already (if I’d known, I’d probably already have read it).

I accept there’s a incentive problem senescent. Some regulations work well, others don’t. The inordinate market power that the UK government has handed to the BBC is an unremitting good, in this and many other areas. Maybe in an era of cable and satelite its impossible to regulate effectively; that’s a possibility.

What I want from Timothy, though, is a comparative book. Is it another case of American exceptionalism? I don’t know other markets except that British and the American, and concede the general lamentableness of US kids TV (with some brilliant exceptions). My general thesis holds, I maintain, for the UK at least.

BUT more importantly, my claim about the intrusion of popular culture into children’s lives is not restricted to issues about TV, and also there may be a big difference between toddlers (much better catered to than before, perhaps: at least, I’m with you on Blues Clues versus Sesame Street) and older kids who, though older, are still kids. Thoughts?

Interesting discussion. I have never taken a philosophy or ethics course (I dropped out of college ny sophomore year when I got pregnant, as a matter of fact), so some of the terms you are using are over my head, but I’ve been jotting down some bullet points that I want to respond to.

brayden said that the “left” has found it politically incorrect to embrace family values. I agree that the term “family values” has been disparaged by liberals in the U.S., but my impresson is more that the term “family values” was hijacked by politicians who were promoting a socially conservative agenda. I think all parents embrace family values, but the values my family embraces may be different from the values George Bush’s family embraces, for example.

joel b wrote that the left exhibits a great deal of anti-religious sentiment, an idea that is echoed by sebastian holsclaw. I don’t disagree that many on the left are anti-religious. I do think that much of that is related to the fact that religious organizations have morphed into political and/or corporate organizations that are engaged in fighting the ideals that liberals support. And there has been an increase in fundamentalist Christianity in this country that has contributed to the divide. It’s not one-sided – religion is moving away from liberals as much as liberals are moving away from religion. I think Christianity provides a good base for a value system, but I admit I shy away from the supernatural aspects of religion. My younger daughter, who is 6, loves Jesus Christ. I would be disappointed if that translated into denying people rights because of their sexual orientation, or if she worked to dissolve the separation of church and state, because I think those are inherently unChristian ideals.

The abortion topic is an interesting one for me to think about as a mother. It’s hard, having felt life kicking around in there, to imagine making my womb the site of someone’s (a potential someone, anyway) death. But I don’t think banning abortion is an effective way of eliminating the need for abortion. I think the way the right deals with this issues is simply to ignore the reality of what happens in life. I have moved around a lot on this position, from being vehemently pro-life as a Catholic teenager, to being vehemently pro-choice as a young adult, to the present day, where I am pro-life and but pro-choice – I guess I put the life that is currently here on this earth ahead of the potential life. Obviously, the key moment to make a decision about abortion is before you have sex, but since I got pregnant while on birth control pills and while my husband (then boyfriend) was using a condom, I know that life sometimes throws you a curve. (Incidentally, after getting pregnant unexpectedly while using 2 different methods of birth control, I then experienced years of infertility when I wanted to get pregnant a second time. Ah, the rich irony of life.) I think sex is one of the greatest things life has to offer, and I don’t believe that people should have to be married to have sex (although I do think that if one is married, one should only be having sex with one’s spouse).

russel arden fox discussed parenting productivity – this is something that I don’t think is really divided along political lines. I work a full time job and a part time job, the last thing I want my family time to be is productive. We spend a lot of time playing games and going grocery shopping and cleaning the house and cooking meals. My two girls also have scheduled activities, but those are activities that they chose and enjoy. To me, a successful life is one where you are happy and feel like you made a choice to be where you are. Maybe that means you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, maybe that means you’re a stay-at-home mother. I think there is some institutional feminism that thinks that one of these choices is better than the other, but I consider myself a feminist and I know that having a choice is the key.

Some random friction for the wheel.

1. The early incarnations of the Christian channel mostly showed westerns, with lots of point-blank-range killings per hour, and there has always been a peculiarly freewheeling acceptance of violence in the Christian-scrubbed zone so long as it was in the context of oldtimey gender roles and/or in costume. Evangelical campaigns against violence seem to have been campaigns about–what–only “modern,” “urban” violence? Hard for me to figure out, but sex was clearly the worrisome taboo and maybe the only one that really mattered.

2. The problem is movie ads. Outside of the zones designed for kids only, there is literally no safe, friendly show you can watch anywhere on cable at any time without an ultraviolent movie ad literally depicting a murderous, throat-cutting, helicopter-blade-chopping, defenestrating act of sneering sadistic torture within the first 2.5 seconds of the commercial break–well before you can hit the mute button or switch the channel. Even Tim uses an extreme sexual instance (Last Tango in Paris) as the point where he would draw the limit, but it’s the flash images of denarrativized sadistic killing that I don’t want my three year old watching every ten minutes. It can’t be filtered by a parental lock, or even by you sitting right there in the room with the remote. Short of ponying up the money for Tivo, which I don’t have, there’s no control that can be exercised here. And when we all pony up the money for Tivo, they’ll find a way to make the ads intrude into the program time, the way screen-corner popups are being experimented with now. I can imagine a little ad for the evening’s Tom Clancy movie popping up in the corner while we’re watching Frazier at suppertime, with a mercenary drawing a knife across a woman’s throat. “Tonight at nine.” I’ll waive complaints about indoctrination into consumerism and gender roles, and I’ll let my kid watch Brando’s butter scene, if I can get rid of the frigging sadistic movie ads. Tim’s glorious free market ain’t going to solve this; it’ll just look for further “penetration,” and it will bankroll, directly and indirectly, lots of predictable polemic that fussy objections to movie trailers are pussified political correctness and/or Pat Robertsonism and/or the lingering socialist anhedonia of the Frankfurt School.

3. Doesn’t someone need to say that a lot of this conversation is probably just projective nonsense? We have no idea why kids like what they like or what they carry away, and I’m not sure we want to listen. The objection to Barney or Dragontales or The Wiggles being saccarhine and insipid, while true, comes from the parents who can’t stand to watch them for the umpteenth time–just as the hipass attitudinizing of Nickelodeon cartoons are directed at teens and adults, even if they’re projected into the animated bodies of kids. (Please, please, can’t we watch Shrek? say the parents. No, the kid says, I want to watch Berenstein Bears. O God please, no, the parents say, something from Pixar? At least Wallace and Gromit?) “Insipid” means “insipid to adults,” which further means “insipid to adults who have been socialized into late 20c. affective structures of hip irony.” Remember the old Burl Ives Rudolph special? There was an oldster discussion over at Invisible Adjunct about how horrible it is, compared to our glowing childhood memories, and some new parents were bragging that their kids were bored by it. Well, mine wasn’t. He liked it. Should I be embarrassed? To what extent is that just another competition, for having the hippest kid? Pierced tongue, little leather jacket. Less different from the productivist scheduling of soccer lessons and toddler premed camp than you might like to think.

4. The supposedly “saccharine” cooperative affect of prosocial programming has to be judged in a context. If it’s an alternative to some perfect full-bodied taxonomy of affect and ethical situation and narrative resolution, then okay: yuck. But television is very mean-spirited, and is becoming more so. Reality shows are all about rehearsing kill-the-loser screw-the-safety-net social Darwinist attitudes, encouraging radical selfishness as a preparation for an coming economy of scarcity. Hakim Bey once said that all the movies on the shelf of the video store give you only the choice of being a victim or a cop. Judged against that, prosocial programming looks a little less objectionable–at least the instant sniff at its “goodiness” starts to become suspect, if you can’t point to places in your culture where those affects are being trained in some better way. Phil Fisher (Hard Facts) once argued, correctly, that diatribes about the icky sentimentality of Uncle Tom’s Cabin are hopelessly ahistorical because its intense melodramatic techniques were battling a loud proslavery propaganda campaign trying to prevent sympathetic identification with slaves from forming at all. The rhetorical excess only becomes available to us because the sentimental techniques succeeded in their historical task, by defeating the opposition–by making the extension of full humanity to slaves seem normal. It’s dangerous to think that advances in common citizen sympathy are permanent, that they can’t be rolled back. I get my dander up when academic lefties mechanically rehearse tired attacks on bourgeois sentimentality. The right is mounting a deliberate scorch-and-burn campaign to decivilize the public sphere for political and economic gain right now, and I think the snarky leftist attitude toward the “positive affects” is anachronistic and often thoughtless these days when such affects are not so much being used as a fake control tactic as being shown the door entirely.

5. An important contribution to the more general debate about culture & kids (audio file download, 2MB).

(from Hapless Dilletante)

Yow, a six-year old and “Spirited Away”. Now that’s bold–but damn cool too.

I agree, sort of, that we don’t know why kids like what they like, and it is precisely that which leads me to argue that I have a root level trust in the intelligence, imagination and adaptability of children. On a great many things, perhaps not just media, we worry too much, and hubristically believe too much in our ability to programmatically produce desirable life outcomes by adopting carefully designed strategies of parenting. To some extent, we ought to regard childhood the way Geoffrey Rush’s character in “Shakespeare in Love” looks on the success of the performance that comes at the end of the film: “it’s a mystery”.

I do think that there are ways to understand, a bit. Some of it involves a genuine attempt to remember our own childhoods experientially–a book that I find oddly, remarkably moving in that regard is Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, even though it is about a childhood radically unlike my own–I just admire the clarity with which Fuller recreates her childhood voice and frame of reference. Another book I found to be fascinating and powerful was Under Deadman’s Skin, which is about how children use violence and images of violence in their play in creative ways.

One of the few advantages of being a stepparent (and part of the noncustodial household, at that, though he does spend Wednesdays and every other weekend with us) is that there’s no point to me trying to “programmatically produce desireable life outcomes,” as Timothy so accurately puts it. Mom and Dad have way more say than I do, and because Kid lives with Mom most of the time, Mom has the most say. Dad is extremely involved, though. In any case, all I can do–with Dad’s assent–is try to provide Kid with tools that I think are useful and that he may not be getting elsewhere in his life. (And Mom has ceded to me the responsibility of teaching Kid to cook and teaching him athletic-type stuff, which is fine with me.) The fact that the two households have different beliefs in some arenas–and I’m pretty damn clear about what my beliefs are–provides him with information about variety in the world. And I think he trusts me to not lie to him, and not to push away questions that are inconvenient or difficult. About a year and a half ago we had a very intense conversation about the Trade Center attacks–clearly no one had talked about it to him before. After I talked a bit, we digressed a little, and then he said, “I want to talk more–you go first.” Amusing though that was, it told me that he’s capable of getting some of this stuff. The same with the god conversation. And trying to make my core concepts understandable to a six-year-old is an exercise in really knowing what concepts are important–my brother’s formulation about not lying, cheating, or stealing is very helpful in that regard. And, lately, I’ve been challenging him to evaluate his own behavior in light of the standards he knows we have in the household, which is interesting, too.

Maurinsky, there’s no entrance fee here, and as you can tell knowing lots of technical terms in no way qualifies anyone better for participation! I agree with so much of what so many people have said. And the various comments from Matt, Maurinsky, t.v., Russell, Laura and adm illustrate well the plurality of good childhoods. I’m really finding what people are saying interesting. There’s way too much to respond to, so I just want to add a couple of comments.

I suspect that the protectionists are less protectionist than they sound in this conversation, just as the non-protectionists are probably more protectionist than they sound. It seems to me that excessively non-protectionist practices abound, and my conjecture was that in order to get similarly good experiences for my kids as my parents got for me I have to be much more protectionist than they were. Obvious things like letting the kids play in the street or dawdle home form school (in which I was a master); and less obvious things like letting us watch TV as and when we wanted.

Something that most of you have revealed is that you share your own particular enthusiasms with your own kids. I suppose everyone does this. When some aspect of popular culture is your particular enthusiasm its entirely possible that participating in it with your kid makes it very different from them than when they are thrown into it. I feel, personally, deeply alienated from the cultural world I around me, and have been able to inhabit a slightly different one (enabled, of course, to do so by modern technology). I’ve always loved listening to radio drama, documentaries, and comedy, and my elder daughter shares a lot of that with me (though within the genre she has certainly developed enthusiasms that are specifically hers — viz, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and the Great Gildersleeve). Its good in itself, and its good because its part of the relationship. Cooking too.

I think that for most (but certainly not all) kids the reality of the news is much less disturbing than the kinds of thing that t.v. talks about (as Laura’s anecdote suggests). Honesty and straightforwardness are important in exposing them to the reality of the world — war, death, poverty, etc. It is, again, hard to know how to expose them to the news — mainly, for me, because of the quality issues, not the protection issues. I’d happily have her watch the TV equivalent of the Economist. But not the drivel they actually show.

On the topic of childhood reminiscence I recommend Michael Foreman’s lovely two-parter *War Boy* and *After the War*, both published in the US, about his childhood in East Anglia during and after WWII. It’s short, a bit rambling, beautifully illustrated, and completely accessible to kids 6 and up I’d say. I read it to my daughter about a year ago, and there is one fantastic passage where he describes a typical day in which he and his friends played on the sand-dunes and in the underground passages which had been dug for soldiers resisting potential invasion. He says something like this: ‘We were allowed to play on our own all day long, without adult supervision, because there were no cars, and everybody knew who we were’. My daughter just sighed and said ‘I wish my life was like that’ and then added, very quickly, ‘well, without the rationing’. I think most kids long for the freedom that Thomas talks about. In fact, in some ways, the protectionists among us are only partly protectionist — we want to shield the kids from the worst aspects of popular culture, but we are pissed off that the physical (and social) environment has been made such that we cannot allow them the kind of freedoms and responsibilities that we ourselves were granted as children.

Finally, I agreed so much with t.v. about so much, which is so brilliantly articulated that I thought ‘who the hell is this?’, went to his/her site, and found Patrick McGoohan giving me the brilliant answer.. My younger adores the tiresome Berenstein Bears (who make me sick); but otherwise I am delighted by my two’s enjoyment of the quiet, non-sassy, non-clever, stuff. And I guess I should just be more honest and say that I think lots of kids (and lots of adults) would benefit from more so-called bourgeois values. Bourgeois values are, of course, not bourgeois values; they are the values that my working class great grandparents and grandparents held.

Amelia, that’s an important dynamic you’ve articulated, and you did so very well; thank you. For what it’s worth, my oldest is now seven, and all this year (as she has ended second grade) my wife and I have noted the building up of the sort of pressures which you identify so well. “Protectionism” changes–must change, should change!–in relation to one’s socio-economic position and how one’s children are (or aren’t) internalizing the ways that position situates them in the world. Look around and you can find hundreds, thousands of stories of people who, at a certain point looked at what the world is doing to their children (and what their children are doing in the world) and say: “The previous arrangement isn’t working, I’ve lost control!” And then they pick up and move or do something radical, and good for them: they’re putting the kids first.

Harry, thanks for the wise, moderate words on “protectionism” in general. Of course no one who takes these kind of issues seriously is a tyrant in the home (I hope), just as no one here would let their children run entirely wild in the name of “independence” (or so I trust). If there is any real disagreement (as opposed to diversity; there’s plenty of that), it probably comes down to how one wants to, or thinks one ought to, collectively apply your observation that “excessively non-protectionist practices abound, and…in order to get similarly good experiences for my kids as my parents got for me I have to be much more protectionist [of both] obvious things like letting the kids play in the street or dawdle home form school…and less obvious things like letting us watch TV as and when we wanted.” This can lead to some heated debates, but it does suggest that ultimately we’re all debating with shared goods in mind.

Also, ditto all the good things you said about t.v.’s wise words. T.V., you nailed perfectly the degree to which the efforts of those of us who stress about getting “the good stuff” to our kids are, as you put it, perhaps “less different from the productivist scheduling of soccer lessons and toddler premed camp than you might like to think.” Touche! My oldest is moving on in her reading habits to a lot of the fine stuff my wife has collected as part of her passion for youth literature (we recently read Burnett’s “The Little Princess” together, and she loved its, yes, crudely Victorian and sentimental but nonetheless powerfully moral story), while my middle daughter is still quite the fan, like Harry’s son, of the Berenstain Bears. Is it simplistic bourgeois stuff? Damn straight it is, and more power to it. The Victorian bourgeoisie were wrong about a great many things, but they got a lot more right, especially in regards to the family, than the left ever gave them credit for.

That’s interesting Carla. As I say, we watched a lot, but it was good. I watch less than I would like to now, partly because of busy-ness, and partly because of paucity of easily available good things to watch. Our library has a fantastic on-line search capacity and I’ve used it to supply my kids with videos of old TV shows (some of which are, they and I both think, fantastic — Top Cat is much better than I remember it, Pink Panther is as good, and (not TV) we’ve been indulging in old Popeye cartoons which they love (but makes me break into a cold sweat because of the hieghts involved). My 7 year old absolutely has loved watching Life on Earth and The Living Planet. The other thing is listening to kids stuff on the radio — go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/listings/
and explore.