Children have never had it so good

The American columnist Kathleen Parker has caused a furore with her book Save the Males, in which she argues that feminism has neutered men and deprived them of their noble, protective role in society. I haven’t read the book, and that’s not something I want to get into right now. What interests me far more are some of the views she expressed in an article she wrote to publicise her work still further.

“For most of recorded history,” she wrote in a recent piece for The Sunday Times, “human society has regarded the family, consisting of a child’s biological mother and father, to be the best arrangement for the child’s wellbeing, and the loss of a parent to be the single greatest threat to that wellbeing.” Wrong, wrong and wrong again. Even a first-year student of anthropology is able to explain to Ms Parker that family forms have been many and varied over the millennia and across all cultures. The nuclear family of mummy, daddy and baby is a relatively contemporary one and it is restricted to the industrialised world, the main contributing factor being the separation of the parents from their own parents by distances of hundreds, even thousands, of miles. We don’t even have that tight and isolated mummy/daddy/baby arrangement in Malta in the 21st century, because children here continue to be raised in and by a network of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and in-laws, all of whom live a maximum 20-minute drive from each other.

Ms Parker is wrong, too, in assuming that human society, in whatever shape, form, time or geographical location, ever gave much consideration to a child’s wellbeing, beyond keeping that child alive to help in the fields or perpetuate the dynasty. Even that latter consideration wasn’t necessarily thought important: children were born and children died. A son was a big thing; more than one daughter was a burden because you didn’t need more than that to clean the house and prepare the pot.

Children starved in the gutter, were hanged, whipped or deported for stealing a loaf of bread after days without food, were abandoned in the streets, sent up chimneys, worked to death in the new factories of the Industrial Revolution, sent down mines, burnt and tortured with their heretic parents, murdered and maimed in enemy raids along with the grown-ups, abused in their millions over time, dumped in establishments that Charles Dickens summed up as Dotheboys’ Hall in Nicholas Nickleby, and generally ignored, underfed, dismissed, and neglected right up until the post-war generation and the dawn of the Dr Spock age. Benjamin Spock was himself a monstrous parent, a product of his own time, who drove his wife to drink and turned his sons into self-conscious, unhappy, gibbering wrecks. There is a telling bit of film in an old documentary, in which he is shown striding with an egocentric swagger down a country lane, his wife dragging at his side, and one very small son trailing far, far behind and struggling to keep up, with a desolate expression and no apparent sense of connection with his parents. Neither of them turns round to look at him or to check whether he is still bringing up the rear instead of falling into the river.

The consideration of a child’s wellbeing is entirely a modern invention. It belongs to our own time. The concept of childhood is itself a relatively recent construct, developing slowly over the last 300 years and reaching its zenith, so to speak, in the second half of the 20th century. The 21st century has gone beyond that still, to the near-deification of children in the most advanced societies of the west, where declining numbers of them has seen a concomitant increase in their value and status. They have gone from being the least important members of society – non-members, actually, and non-persons – to the most important.

In medieval times, there was no such thing as ‘childhood’. Children were merely incipient adults, or smaller versions of them. They were dressed in miniature versions of adult clothes. They were expected to comport themselves like adults and to work like them, too. This is something we continue to see today in the developing economies of south-east Asia, where children work in sweat-shops and European adults express horror at this manifestation of something that was happening in Europe right up until the First World War. The concept of childhood appeared first among the European upper-classes in the 16th century, when we first see evidence of youngsters being considered separately from adults. Until then, children were not children but little adults. This should not be difficult for us to understand as it is precisely how children were considered in Malta until the Second World War and, in the most deprived sectors of Maltese society, even beyond that. Childhood is a luxury that only the comfortably off can afford. That’s why the idea developed first among the richest strata of European society and really began to take off with the development of a wealthy middle-class in 19th-century England. And that’s why, as society becomes ever more affluent, childhood is morphing into a cult movement. European society is now obsessed, to the point where it is almost pathological, with children and childhood.

The idea of childhood really took off in Victorian England, an extraordinary time and place in which saccharine sentimentalism about the innocence of children co-existed with armies of child-slaves in factories and legions of abandoned children in workhouses, poor-houses and orphanages. The process of industrialisation during the 19th century brought with it the separation of the workplace from the home for the very first time in history. As women were forced out of the workplace because that workplace was no longer in their home, their removal was rationalised ideologically by the equally new idea of ‘maternal instincts’, which decreed them more suited to the role of mother than of worker. Because this had to be rationalised even further as a non-earning occupation, in times when money was tight and poverty was rife, and after centuries in which women had habitually worked and contributed to the household income, the status and importance of children were magnified. This rationalised another European historical novelty: a life for women that was entirely child-centred.

Ms Parker starts from the mistaken premise that children have always had it good and that the present situation represents a severe deterioration of their comfort, status and general wellbeing. Yet the fact of the matter is that children have had a rotten deal since time immemorial, and that, in the 21st century, the children of the industrialised west have never had it so good. They are in clover. Their parents may not be together, they may not have one of Ms Parker’s protective males around, but then they aren’t pulling a coal-cart down a mine at the age of five, or walking the streets at eight and dying of syphilis at 10. Where women and children are concerned, this is the best time ever to be alive. I’ll leave the males to Ms Parker.

This article was published in The Malta Independent on Sunday yesterday.