Childhood's End?

Abstract

Childhood's End? Janice M. Alberghene (bio) The Rise and Fall of Childhood, by C. John Sommerville. Volume 140, Sage Library of Social Research. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, Inc., 1982. Children of War, by Roger Rosenblatt. New York: Anchor Press, 1983. Children without Childhood, by Marie Winn. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981, 1983. The Disappearance of Childhood, by Neil Postman. New York: Delacorte, 1982. Family Politics: Love and Power on an Intimate Frontier, by Letty Cottin Pogrebin. New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1983. Promising to reveal the secrets of childhood, the books above reveal instead the secret concerns of adults. In these volumes, childhood per se often seems less important than childhood as a vehicle for discussing other issues—war and peace, social change, patriarchal power structures. It is fortunate, then, that The Rue and Fall of Childhood, the first of the five books, offers a perspective from which the reader can view the remaining four. Sommerville explicitly defines his subject as "an abstraction, 'childhood,' which is made up of the expectations, hopes, and fears societies have expressed with regard to their youngest members." A cultural history of childhood, Sommerville's work is "a study of adult attitudes as much as of the actual lives of children" (7). With few exceptions, the other authors present their arguments as relating to real children. Yet each page bears the firm imprint of various "adult attitudes" toward children. Time and again the writers turn to literature and myth—not life—to shape their texts. The reader is forced to conclude that for these adults, and perhaps for many others as well, "childhood" is an idea, a [End Page 188] cultural construct dependent upon time, place, and the concerns of grownups, rather than upon universal and verifiable fact. These ideas and the concerns that shape them are nonetheless important. They determine behavior and policies regarding children. Recall the issues the books discuss: war and peace, social change, patriarchal power structures. Although at first these issues look diverse, the ways in which the authors treat them reveal the common denominator of concern for the future. This future will be both shaped by and shaper of today's children. Once again Sommerville strikes a keynote. His very title, The Rise and Fall of Childhood, identifies the worry the five writers share that "children are in danger of becoming a thing of the past" (7). He sets that worry in context by surveying childhood from Mesopotamian, early Greek, and Hebrew culture up until the present day, but his main focus of attention is on the past 450 years and on the major Western countries: England, Germany, France, and the United States. The Rise and Fall of Childhood can be seen as complementary to Philippe Aries's earlier Centuries of Childhood, which primarily examined the family and child in France and the shift from a medieval to a modern sensibility. The two books belong on the same reference shelf for anyone seeking particulars of the cultural context in which a given work of children's literature was produced or received. The Rise and Fall of Childhood is valuable for another reason. It shows us that worried as we may be about the ways in which we treat young people, we do care about children; earlier eras would have wondered what all the fuss was about. This is not to say that Sommerville ignores contemporary uncertainties so acute that they make us wonder if childhood exists anymore. He links these uncertainties to adults' fears of a future characterized by long-term economic depression, a situation that would be exacerbated by a rise in population (9). Heirs are assets when the future looks rosy, liabilities when it appears grim. Economic decline, however, is not the only specter on the horizon. Nuclear destruction is a distinct possibility, although Sommerville does not raise the issue. The "fall" of childhood may be a function of contemporary adults' inability to imagine any future at all. The future was very much on Roger Rosenblatt's mind as he interviewed children from five of the world's war zones: Northern [End Page 189] Ireland, Israel, Lebanon, Cambodia, and Viet Nam. Children of War records the...