Cultivating Children: On How We Have Come to Misunderstand the Trials and Tribulations of Modern Parenting

• In Event: 25.086 - Sheraton Roundtable Session One - Grand Centre
  In Roundtable Session: 25.086-12 - The Challenge of Cultivation

Abstract

If you read what many sociologists, psychologists, and historians have been writing about parenting for the past twenty or so years, you’d conclude that “parenting” is a recent invention. Sure, people reared their offspring in the past but, so it is argued, the straightforward rearing of children gave way recently to a new era of obsessing over children under the dictates of a newly minted expert class. Alison Gopnik (2016, p. 21) has argued that “parenting” as a verb only emerged in the US in in 1958. Rima Apple (2006) has argued that a mother’s know-how was the basis for child-rearing in America until the 19th century, at which point medical professionals began dictating what parents should do. Peter Stearns (2003) dates the rise of “anxious parenting” to changes in families including the isolation of immediate families from extended families. Frank Furedi (2008) has argued experts have driven us into an era of “paranoid” parenting. And a dozen other books exist that propose stepping back from modern parenting, allowing children more freedom and independence and allowing parents to relax.
The narrative about modern parenting involves two central claims: (a) parenting advice is new and (b) parents were laissez faire about their children’s activities and emotions in the past but now “helicopter.” But is this story about modern parenting correct? In this paper, I shall argue that it is not. We can find evidence of both parenting advice and parents’ anxious concern about parenting in our oldest surviving literature. Confucius advised parents on how to cultivate filial piety. In the Iliad, Homer twice humanizes fierce warriors by having them reflect on the advice their fathers gave to them when they were young: to strive always to excel. Plato depicts fathers, Laches (in Laches) and Demodocus (in Theages) who, out of concern for their sons’ welfare, struggle to identify the best course of education and associations for their sons. Aristophanes depicts parenting run amok in Clouds. Readers of the bible are warned, in perhaps the most famous parenting dictum of the western tradition, that sparing the rod will spoil the child. By the 17th century, John Locke had penned his enormously influential, Some Thoughts Concerning Education. A half century later, Rousseau’s Emile offered not only a grand ideal of the educated man but also, one should not forget, specific directives on the temperature of children’s baths, swaddling, and breastfeeding.
These historical reflections on parents and parenting reveal that seeking advice about rearing one’s children, and anxiety about rearing one’s children, are not new phenomena. Perhaps instead we ought to recognize these features of parenting as part of the human condition. At the very least, parents have been thinking about and advising others about how best to raise their children since the dawn of the attempt to make sense of human life in literature.

Author

• Avi Mintz, Independent Scholar