I was watching a little kid at the playground yesterday. His dad was smoking and reading quite a ways away, and he was climbing a sort of enclosed tube of plastic sleeve covered chains. He was only about 3 or so.
He slipped and fell some 4′, landing flat on his back on the wood chip playground floor. I thought he would cry, but he got right back up, mumbling to himself something that no doubt would been something like “THAT wasn’t what I was trying to do” if I could have understood him, and went right back up, very slowly since he was barely able to walk.
Now, my first impulse was to run over there and see if he was OK. But I wasn’t his parent, and he got right back up in any event. HAD I run over there, I wonder if he would have started crying. I have noticed that when they get hurt, little kids often only start crying in earnest when they see the reactions of the parents around them. It is the social context that tells them what to do.
Moving forward in time, two kids got into a fight today at my kids school. One of them, still in primary school, has already learned that he has “Anger Management Issues”, which we will label the disease of AMI. His parents, apparently, are getting divorced–so he has more excuses than some kids–but he has apparently always had this problem. He sees the school social worker regularly for talks. If he isn’t already, he will no doubt be on meds of some sort soon.
I think it is worth comparing what seems to have been the mindset 100 years ago, with now. With the moralistic culture, and the psychotherapeutic culture.
100 years ago, you had a soul. You had a destiny as a Christian. When you encountered trouble, you were expected to deal with it. You had, in most cases, a stronger supportive culture, both in terms of regularly receiving moral advice, and in terms of supportive people, particularly in the church and local family; but combined with those were clear expectations that as both a man and a woman that you live with courage, loyalty, and persistence.
Manifestly, organic brain disturbances do happen. Back then, people no doubt sometimes broke and lost their sanity, or capacity to cope. Apparently locking the proverbial crazy uncle in the basement did happen. No doubt things like child molestation, wife beating, and simple cruelty were more common as well, simply because they had nothing like the social system we have now, in which many more options exist for escape than existed then.
The default, though, was a hard life, and the expectation you grow a thick enough skin to deal with it.
Today, the default is mothering. When something bad happens to you, half a dozen people will ask you if you are alright. We have made a thing out of difficulty by psychologizing it. Facing and overcoming pain has become not a necessary and inevitable part of life, but an aberration, a mistake somehow in what is trying to be an all-encompassing system of safety, and nurturing.
I don’t think it is possible to become a complete human being without difficulty. Many people see this, and that is the motivation of things like Adventure Racing, sky-diving, rock climbing, motocross, and even snowboarding. Pain is what makes you grow. A child that is nursed perfectly by those around it all its life will never become an adult. You need pain.
Thus, while not romantizing the past, I would say that my grandparents were better positioned to live happily than we are, despite the manifestly much larger physical and financial struggles which they regularly faced. Empirically, rates of clinical depression have risen steadily AS WE BECOME SAFER AND MORE PROSPEROUS. This would be the opposite of what we would expect, if Nanny States generated happier people.
Clearly, I don’t want to go back to the past. What I want to do is think about how we make more demands on our kids, such that they react in creative and personally fulfilling ways.
This little kids next trick, by the way, was to climb a much more difficult, open structure. I stood close to him, in case he fell, but he didn’t. He made it to the top.