Kay Hymowitz. I’m a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at city journal.
The bourgeoisie family was extremely child centered and the purpose of the family was not just to love the child, of course there was that, but also to teach the child the kinds of habits and values that would allow to thrive in their free economy, so the children had to learn self-discipline. They have to learn to be motivated. They have to learn to be creative and inquisitive. They have to learn to be competent. These are fairly advanced skills that require many, many years of socialization. This is why we always had this idea of a long childhood and a long protected childhood where the child would gradually learn to take on more and more responsibility, become more and more autonomous, so that they could then go on to live independent, creative, fulfilling and loving lives.
But the market introduces all sorts of noise that makes this process extremely difficult. One is that the child is tempted with so many different objects and desires: food, toys, sexual information, things that they are maybe not quite ready to process or having trouble controlling themselves in the face of. You have so much more energy that parents are forced to bring to bear on socializing childhood under those circumstances. So the free market makes that process very difficult.
It also tempts adults too. It isn’t just the kids. The free market tells us that there are all sorts of desires that we can satisfy that maybe we didn’t even know we had and makes possible lives of affluence that this is a wonderful thing but it also means that we are capable of a kind of autonomy that people in previous ages were not.
Well, I’ve been writing for many years now about children’s development and been very aware of how difficult it is to raise children in modern America. I gather this is also true in other parts of the western world these days. One of the things that I came up within my early research was the problem of the media which is an extension of the free market. The way that the free market gets introduced to the young child particularly through television and a lot of people are very much aware of how difficult television, in particular, now the internet, this was not so much the case when I first started writing, complicates the job of socializing a child. When I was presented with this question of does the free market corrode moral character, I thought to myself, “Well, what I do know is that it makes socializing children, it makes moralizing children an extremely difficult job.
Well, interestingly enough, despite the fact that the market has made socializing children so much more difficult, despite the fact that it introduces your five-year old to Paris Hilton and Grand Theft Auto, it also has the effect of increasing parental supervision, shall we say. It’s funny thing because there was a time, I think in the 1980s, when I was first starting to concern myself of the question of what it was like to raise children in contemporary society. We were hearing a lot more about latchkey child, the child who was really left home alone. Remember that series of movies was based on a real sense in the culture that children were indeed home alone. In fact, something different happened by the early to late 90s where parents kind of redoubled their efforts to supervise their kids despite the fact that they were spending many more hours at work when you combine mothers and fathers work hours. Nevertheless, they found ways; I’m talking largely of middle class parents who had the material wealth to do this. They introduced all sorts of after school activities, surrogate tutors, surrogate supervisors like tutors and baby sitters and so forth and then of course we got cell phones which have provided a kind of umbilical cord between parents and children and at this point, I find that I’m in touch with my youngest child who is an internet and cell phone baby, all the time far more than my parents were in touch with me, or that I was in touch with my older kids when they were growing up. So I think that in ways that I never could have predicted, I don’t think anybody could have. The bourgeoisie families sort of reinforce its efforts to really pay attention to the socialization of the next generation. This has been a much harder thing for people with fewer resources to handle.
Well, I like to think that we can correct the corruption of the free market. I think that in many ways we’re doing a pretty good job. I’ve been writing for some years now. I think the middle class Americans have a lot a criticisms of hyper-parenting and parents who are not taking their children’s moral life that seriously, that sort of thing. But when we look at how those kids are doing, I think we can be pretty proud. I also have some complaints about the education system and particularly the colleges and I’m not happy with the way they’re coping to development is going shall we say but clearly, we’re not doing as good a job for people with fewer resources and whether or not we can undo that remains to be seen. I think that people who are blessed with middle class lifestyles, with intact families need to understand just how lucky they are and to try to think about ways to pass on the good news. Because there is a real reluctance that I see in my generation but even more in the next generation to cast any judgment and therefore to make any recommendations about family structure and this reluctance to discuss this problem, it seems to me, is going to only worsen our problems within equality and poverty.
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