Children: An Endangered Species

Abstract

Children:An Endangered Species Nancy Tillman Fetz (bio) Neil Postman . The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Delacorte, 1982. David Elkind . The Hurried Child; Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1981. Marie Winn . Children Without Childhood. New York: Pantheon, 1983. Since Phillippe Ariès in his influential Centuries of Childhood (1962) sought to demonstrate that the concept of childhood was a relatively recent invention of Western society, an abundance of works on the changing cultural meanings of childhood have appeared. "The history of childhood has now become a major industry among scholars," writes Neil Postman in The Disappearance of Childhood (1). He adds, however, that historians usually come not to praise but to bury, and that when we turn a cultural value into an object of nostalgia and contemplation it is a sure sign of that value's obsolescence. Postman, a professor of Media Ecology at New York University, advances the bold proposition that childhood as it has been known since the late seventeenth century is rapidly vanishing and probably won't be resurrected without major changes in our communication system. He asserts that the concept of childhood as a distinct period of life requiring special kinds of supervision and care arose with the printing press, which erected a knowledge barrier between those who could read (adults) and those who couldn't (children). With the rise of literacy came schools and schooling and a further defining of childhood as a separate stage of life with its own internal requirements. Literate adult society meanwhile collected an ever-richer content of secrets to be kept from the young; secrets about social and sexual relations, about money, violence, illness, and death. Postman contends that so long as adults could withhold such information they could also maintain a separateness from (and control over) children. But if ever the knowledge gap were to disappear, so would childhood. This gap has been all but closed by the mass media, Postman believes. Television —the "total disclosure medium" —is the primary culprit because it does not discriminate between viewers but offers up [End Page 91] "He really is getting smaller," said Treehorn's mother. "What will we do? What will people say?" "Why, they'll say he's getting smaller," said Treehorn's father. He thought for a moment. "I wonder if he's doing it on purpose. Just to be different." "Why would he want to be different?" asked Treehorn's mother. Treehorn started listening to the commercial. its fare to whoever is there to receive it. It is because children now have access to the previously hidden fruits of adult information that they have become more "adult-like," in Postman's words. Parallel to the "adultification" of children, adults have become "childified." That is, according to Postman, the very structure of television communication calls attention not to ideas but to images and sensations, conditioning us to respond emotionally (i.e., in a childlike way) and not rationally (i.e., as an adult would). Because television demands an immediate response to its ever-changing images and fragmented content, it renders us less capable of patient or thoughtful consideration of a subject, and we regress, so Postman would have us believe, to a childlike mentality. Everywhere Postman sees a merging of the activities and expressions of young and old. Children and adults now wear the same clothes, share the same tastes in entertainment, read the same books, play the same games, commit the same crimes. In extreme cases, parent and child reverse roles, as in several films —Paper Moon, Endless Love, A Little Romance, Irreconcilable Differences —in which the child plays the reassuring adult to a parent, or is put in the position of having to force the parent to grow up. In treating contemporary children's literature as another expression [End Page 92] of our altered concept of childhood, Postman's understanding is disappointingly superficial. He would have us set up the old battle lines between fantasy and realism: fairy tales as constructive, therapeutic tools preserving childhood vs. the so-called "new realism" —with Judy Blume in the forefront of the forces of bad influence. Postman's mechanical, either/or viewpoint culminates in the...