Focus 580; Hucks Raft: A History of American Childhood

In this hour of the show we'll be talking about childhood in America and how notions of childhood perhaps also the experience of childhood has changed over time in this country. Our guest for the program is Steven Mintz. He's professor of history at the University of Houston and is the author of a recently published book that looks at the history of childhood in America. The title is Hucks raft. It's published by the Belknap press of Harvard University Press he's talking with us this morning by telephone and as we talk questions and comments from people listening are certainly welcome the only thing we have is good people who are calling in is just the people try to be brief and we ask that so that we can keep the program moving and come get as many callers as possible. But of course the questions and the comments of listeners are welcome. They add a lot to the program. Are numb. Here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5 so at any point here questions are welcome you want to be involved the conversation and you can certainly do them. Professor meant solo.

Oh thank you for having me. Well thanks for talking with us so we appreciate it very much. In case anybody misses the reference of the title it clearly is a reference to Huckleberry Finn. That for a lot of people has has been an almost mythic kind of way of thinking about well a lot of things childhood American history. It's one of the archetypal journey stories. In what way does that does thinking about Huckleberry Finn perhaps help us think about what childhood in America has really been like. Well a century ago Mark Twain captured an American ideal of childhood and that childhood has an odyssey of self-discovery. A period of risk in experimentation a moratorium from the stresses of adulthood. And that's our

ideal. But the reality of family life the reality of childhood in America has always been very very different from the ideal. And you know I think just in looking at the book one could spend a lot of time talking about the major themes and then you also have a section here in the prologue where he where you present a series of myths that you say have clouded our thinking about the history American child and I think we could spend the rest of the hour just talking about these things. And it raises in my mind here the first and that is we have this idea that somehow in the past there was a time when childhood was idyllic and. And that there weren't any problems and that somehow we think that today the problems of today's families and children are worse than they ever have been before. And that's not you know not to say that today's families and children don't have problems but I think that you'd like to suggest to people that this

idea that there was once a carefree childhood that as you write about it we cling to a fantasy that once upon a time childhood and youth were years of carefree adventure despite the fact that for most young people in the past growing up was anything but easy. Well let me give you a few examples of that. Mark Twain himself was born two months prematurely so his parents didn't bother to give him a name for five months after his birth because they were convinced he was going to die. He survived three of his siblings died while he was growing up. His father died by the time he was 11. He witnessed personally three murders before he was 12. And. By the time he was 18 he'd worked in Washington DC New York City St. Louis Keokuk Iowa and Hannibal the surgery. Completely different than our sort of notion of childhood as a kind of protected state earlier in time Cotton Mather entered Harvard at the

age of 11. George Washington's army consisted of many kids who were 14 15 16 years old. Even during the civil war between five and 10 percent of all the soldiers Union and Confederate were under the age of 18. And as recently as nineteen hundred one in six children died by the age of one. And as recently as 1940 one child in every town lived in a no parent family. What I want to suggest is that there are a lot of tradeoffs in life that is in many ways childhood is better than it's ever been. But there's also been costs. For example if you were kids in infancy than ever in history. But it's not. An accident that we have higher rates of chronic

illnesses in children or disabilities in children than ever before. Because that's the kind of tradeoff that occurs with modernisation with social progress. So we have a greater incidence of depression in young children we have a greater incidence of autism a greater incidence of attention deficit disorder and these are some of the costs of the changes that have occurred. Something else that is identified as one of the major kind of themes that runs through the book is that and this I think he gets this issue that yes today we worry about the well-being of children. But it seems that throughout American history we have always where read there there may always have been some people who would have argued no matter what time it was it was always the worst of times. You write that there's a pattern of recurrent moral panics over children's well-being and that that runs all the way through American history Americans from the very start

believe that kids are going to hell in a handbasket. The reason that the Pilgrims came to the New World they were in Howland at the time the reason they came to the New World is they thought that their kids were degenerating morally and ethically and they thought that if they could take them to a barren wilderness that their kids might grow up perfect. And of course in the secular form that's the attitude of many parents today we want to give our children a perfect childhood. We want to free them from the corruptions around them. But it proved to be impossible to insulate kids from the society that we adults inhabit. Well maybe that gets again one more basic idea. One can argue as you have that in many ways children today are better off than they have been in the past although there are certainly negatives and there are

costs and for those people who would rush right away and say well that's not true of all children I'm sure you'd say well of course that's right and in fact all one of the things that you have to keep in mind when you thinking about childhood today or were you thinking about childhood in the past is that in any given time the experience of childhood can be VERY can vary greatly from the experience of one child to another depending on a lot of things including their gender their class their race where they live all sorts of things and that that's certainly true today. But apparently that's always been true. Diversity has always been the hallmark of American childhood but now it's more pronounced than ever. Globalization is not just a catch word of our time it's occurring among kids as well. Today one third of all kids are nonwhite. We have a rapidly

changing and ever more diversified group of young people. And one thing that I think as a society we need to pay attention to is that when. This is for upper middle class white women. When kids don't look like their kids they still need to care about kids. And there's been a increasing tendency I fear to believe that it's possible to opt out that we can sort of privatized our own children's upbringing and and insulate them from the society around us. Now one reason why I think people are so easy about children today is that this is the 50th anniversary of many things that make baby boomers. It's the 50th anniversary of Plato and Scrabble and Captain Kangaroo and Disneyland and the Mickey Mouse Club and Tony of the tiger and Lego

and Mad Magazine and McDonald's and the fried chicken TV dinner. And it's above all the 50th anniversary of the Davy Crockett coonskin cap. And it's easy I think for many baby boomers to think that was so. I feel lucky and things are hirable today. Girls we're like oh I use color they're here bright yellow. It's easy to think that things are going to hell but it's important to understand that childhood has always been changing in America for better and for worse. Well our guest this morning in this part of focus is Steven Menzies an historian he's the John and Rebecca Morris professor of history at University of Houston and is an author of a book that explores this territory it's titled Hucks raft the reference there is to Huckleberry Finn. It's subtitle A History of American childhood and it's published by Belknap press of Harvard University Press. And questions comments are welcome 3 3

3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. You talk in the book about the fact that. The history of childhood in America has three overlapping phases and the one thing that for a lot of people is the touchstone is is what you call modern childhood which begins in the mid 18th century but perhaps doesn't really come into its fullness until the 50s. Let's say that for a second because I want to contrast that with what came before which was pre-modern childhood and that was early America. And they're the way that people thought about children. And I'm sure that this was this would have been true probably in England as well and maybe elsewhere in western Europe was really different from the way that we think about children today. I find it incredibly eye opening to go into the more distant payoff and see that a lot of the assumptions that we take for

granted are not shared by people who are just like us. They lived 300 years ago. Let me give you a few examples of that. We believe that it is cute when kids crawl and when they prattle in front of us and our Puritan ancestors three hundred years ago took the exact opposite view. They believed that crawling was animal like. So they never allowed kids to crawl. They put them in walkers from a very young age because they wanted them to be upright because to be upright was to be morally upright not just to stand tall. They point to a wooden spine down a wooden rod down children's spine to ensure that they stood erect because again they believe that this was a sign of being morally correct. They thought it was animal like that young children could not talk so they did everything

in their power to make them talk as quickly as possible. We believe that childhood should be prolonged. They believe that childhood should be as short as possible and so kids as young as five six or seven were often put to work as servants in other people's homes. It's a great irony we were a tremendous amount about adolescent rebellion three hundred years ago adolescent rebellion with a lot different because many adolescents were not in their parents home. They were in somebody else's home because our Puritan ancestors believed that no parent could properly discipline his or her own children. Only someone else could do it. The big difference between modern childhood and perhaps one of the big differences between modern childhood in pre-modern childhood was in in the way that people were viewing children in a sense the in pre-modern childhood children were viewed as I think the phrase you used as

adults in training. They were really like the small adults. And it wasn't until we get into this period of modern childhood that people started to think of children as being in a somehow special category that they were innocent they were vulnerable that they needed to be pretty. Dead that in fact children were not little adults. Two very important heroes. About two hundred years ago that radically changed Americans had attitude towards children. The first as you put it is the notion of children has plastic mailable creatures who are highly vulnerable to the world around them fragile creatures. The other major idea was that childhood needed to be prolonged. Children needed to remain independent inside their families home in til their mid or

even their late teens. And these two ideas what we might call romantic childhood or modern childhood continue to influence us enormously today. The ideal in the 19th century was a protected childhood. That is you're going to protect children from all of the corrupting influences of the adult world so that they can preserve their natural innocence. But of course it's important to remember that that was confined to a very small minority of kids because the nineteenth century the same period that witnessed the rise of this romantic ideal of childhood also saw a great intensification of child labor. So while some kids enjoyed the tremendous benefit of a prolonged childhood up their kids had to work long hours. This recently it was 19:00. There were still millions of

American children who worked on farms for in factories or on street corners. And so it's very striking to me that two very different patterns of childhood emerged simultaneously useful childhood of the working child and the leisured childhood of the schooled child. This is this idea this change in the idea of what childhood was all about from the idea of the fact that the child was a little adult the idea that the child was somehow special deserving of protection was malleable. Was it was the special category of individual. Where does that. Come from the set that come out of the beginnings of psychology does it come out of philosophy does it where does that idea come from. Remember the famous line that poets are the UN acknowledged legislators of the world.

It's a great irony but it was generally writers whole with novelists and even philosophers like Johns rock Rousseau who helped persuade thousands tens of thousands of adults that childhood needed to be thought of in a radically different way that instead of viewing children as incipient adults as in Coate adults instead of viewing children as workers. Childhood needed to be cherished and preserved. Now the reason that this ideal proved to be so attractive is of course because adults lives were changing. We're talking about a period that marks the early stages of the industrial revolution. Men were beginning to work in increasing numbers outside the home. Labor was being transformed society was becoming more commercialized.

And so for many adults the idea of creating child hood as a preserve of innocence as a sort of perfect world became something that they longed to create. We have a caller who would welcome others 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 as the Champaign-Urbana number toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Again just let me quickly introduce the guest which. Working with historian Steven Mintz He teaches at University of Houston is author of the book Hawks raft a history of American childhood of color over in Indiana here to start us off line number four. Hello. In some ways I wished I had held back and especially after the thing about the Puritans with the stick in the back and treating children as as just young adults. But I'll go ahead and ask the questions I was going to one in relationship to Rousseau. Were there any Puritan thinkers who brought

this you know stick in the back and that sort of whole collection of ideas was there anybody in particular who pushed that or did they find it somewhere in the Bible that you know this is what you're supposed to do with your child. I was going to start off with an you know presumably I did I grew up in the golden age of the late 40s and early 50s and of course from my firsthand perspective. And it wasn't exactly golden and I you know I guess the presumption is as you mentioned earlier every group does that sort of thing least their ideas are and I was wondering in relationship to other cultures if you could their perspective on raising children do they have the sort of all of this complex ideas about raising children or is it very just been traditional for long periods of time and that's just the way it is. Thanks a lot. Very very nice show. Thank you. Well let me take your questions out of order and I'll try to cover each of them.

First I want to talk about stale shots for many baby boomers. It's easy to look back on the past and tend to think that it was a better world. And it's easy to see why some people feel they outweigh the ideas for many middle class kids if they have a full time mother or nurturing to their needs. Society seems to be more child friendly than and so on and so it is really important for us to remember that nostalgia is not a documentary Portrait of the pale so let me give a few examples from fifty years ago this year. We worry about many things in our society today and Americans in the 1950s were just as much one of the big hit movies of the 1950s was a Blackboard Jungle story of juvenile delinquency.

But teenage terror in the schools and 1955 was also the year of Rebel Without A Cause. There were Senate hearings about the problem of juvenile delinquency and there was a sense that juvenile delinquency was out of control. 1055 was also of course the Year of the testing of the Salk vaccine against polio. Parents lived through nightmares every summer has thousands of kids were paralyzed for life and crossed into Iran long. We forget that kind of fear when we're not stale check for a distant past. Also 1955 saw the publication of a novel called Lolita. A novel One suspects that couldn't really be published today about a pre adolescent quote unquote nymphet who according to the mayor Rader of the book seduces him. I mean this is a book clearly about child abuse by an adult but by an adult who doesn't recognize what he's doing to that child. In other words

many of the same concerns that we have now about domestic violence about disability and disease about the brain Quincey all of these can be seen in the past. One other example from 1955 a book appeared a bestseller called Why Johnny Can't Read it. It was a book that decry the decline of literacy skills among these young children of the 1950s and it led eventually to Congress in accepting new funding for schools to try to redress this problem of mounting juvenile illiteracy in other words when we think of the past in wholly positive terms when we look at the past through rose colored glasses we don't see the past as it was. We see it as we wish it was. Now let's go to your other question. One was about the Puritans and they are ideas kind of where they came from.

The Puritans very much wanted to reconstruct what they view as biblical. They wanted to prepare every child from an early age for death and for conversion. And the Puritans further were convinced that the whole future of their experiment of creating a godly society depended on their ability to convert their own children. Now the most important and influential thinker was Cotton Mather. He was a minister who went to Harvard when he was just 11 years old and would be one of the dominant Puritan intellectuals. And in raising his own children he would take them into his study and he would tell them that he was about to die or he would tell them that they were about to die and that they needed to recognize their sinfulness and repent.

Otherwise they would be doomed to eternal damnation. In other words he treated children with a great deal of seriousness he did not treat children as juveniles he did not treat children as innocent. The plastic creatures he treated children as morally responsible beings and he viewed that as being rooted in the Bible. The last question dealt with looking at American childhood from a cross cultural perspective. And there are many things that are unique about American childhood that make it extremely different from childhood elsewhere and I'm just going to give a couple of examples. One of the most striking takes place immediately after a child birth. We put children in a crib Usually we put them in their own room. In other words this is a society that places high emphasis on individualized children

from birth. No other society does that. We have medical reasons for doing that we have intellectual reasons for doing that but we need to recall that most societies do not individualized young children the way we do that is young children sleep usually with their mother and they are in physical contact with an adult all the time that they are young. Is there held a woman's back or in her front or in her arms and they are not let go very frequently. We live in a society that sends powerful messages even to the youngest children. That being an individual is the most important thing in life. Let me contrast that with the Puritans in puritan society there was a very high death rate with about three or four of every 10 children

dying before reaching adulthood. And these children often were named after a recently deceased sibling. So if one child died the next child would get the same name. They didn't give children middle names. They gave children names usually from a wealth of family names individual izing children was not a crucial concern for us. Naming is extremely important it's designed to be individualized. Children Well hope to get to the questions of the caller. And for people who are listening basically other questions comments are certainly welcome to you if you want to call in here and talk with our guest Stephen Mintz. He's professor of history at the University of Houston. He's also director of the American Cause. Program he is a leading authority on the history of the family. He's also written extensively on reform on slavery and also on film history and the book that

we're talking about here this morning is the history of American childhood Hucks raft is the title of the book and it's published by Belknap press of Harvard University Press. And it's in bookstores now came a little bit earlier this year. Questions are welcome. People want to participate in the conversation you can do that 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. One of the other kind of themes the basic themes that you deal with in the book has to do with children and perhaps the fact that no we when we look at children and we look at the culture in which they're immersed we most often see them as acted upon rather than as actors. And so often we see them as in a sense kind of victims of the culture certainly their people are concerned about the values that their children are exposed to. We're concerned about the fact that children are heavily marketed to and so many of the aspects of child childhood today. And child play has to do with stuff has to do

with things and you make the argument that in fact that children are not passive there. They haven't been passing in the past in the past maybe they're not passive now that they really are active agents in shaping their society. Perhaps more than we give them credit for. We often joke in our society about the Victorians who believe that children should be seen and not heard. And yet we too live in the five were children are seen and not heard. We don't much attend to children's voices and we don't much listen to their concerns and therefore we project a lot of our own worries upon Kiya and let me give you a bad example that we're just talking about of the commercialization of children. There is no question that the commercialisation of childhood is different than it was when I was growing up.

40 years ago. That is children today are bombarded with commercials and with advertising all the time and not just on TV whether they're using the Internet or simply going into schools where their their schools are Broadcasting Channel One commercial station. Kids are rooted with commercial messages and this makes parents reasonable parents very very nervous. It makes me nervous. We really do fear that our kids cultures are being how one dies by various corporate interests. And yet what I'd like to suggest is that kids always draw from the culture around them and create their own meaning so let me give the exam an example from the baby boomer generation. The first child they had was the Davy Crockett coonskin

cap and every baby boomer remembers first seeing that and coveting. They are beyond anything. And when Walt Disney popularized Davy Crocket his goal was to prepare young people for the Cold War struggle against communism. And he turned to the American past in order to prepare young boys to have the toughness and the moral fiber to stand up in the Cold War. But what's interesting to me is that that's not how kids understood it. Kids reinterpret those things that are thrust upon them and give them their own meaning. So I don't think it's at all accidental that it was the baby boomers influenced by Davy Crocket who became the hippies of the 1960s because for many baby boomers what Davy Crocket.

Represent it with contact with nature. Was self-reliance was not in conformity in other words the message that Walt Disney meant to send men to say was radically reinterpreted by young people themselves. And I think that the same process is going on now. We're kids absorb the culture around them and then give it a fresh meaning. I never realized there was so much continuity in fringed buckskin that I think about it. Let's talk with some other folks here who are listening. Champagne this next one a big one. Hello there. Yes hi. Well you've led the questions all along here. First of all I'm a Baby Boomer as well and my memories of the idyllic childhood are a lot closer to a Christmas story than Davy Crocket. But I guess my it my question and it's sort of a comment would be that would people I teach college students here at the university. And when people talk to me about the death of childhood and how

children are going astray and all the usual things that have been mentioned since the time of the Romans I tell them that they are dealing with an incredibly complex world that we could not have imagined they are dealing with. Communication and relational options that were either outright illegal or not even considered at the time that I was that age and these are these are most childhood people obviously but reasonably close. So they're dealing with a you know extended serial families poly sexual families instant communication anywhere in the world instant information any anywhere in the world and they're doing a very good job of it. As you just said reinterpreted it and brought it so if there were do you think this all going. Well I would call the states that were entering the post modern childhood and it's a very odd mixture of elements. And I think that we as a society haven't come to grips with the

kind of transformations that you're describing all of the big changes that we view in society. Are affecting children's lives. Globalization for example is evident in the increasing diversity of young people. One in every five young people today in the United States is either an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. That's globalization with Aventura privatization is occurring in childhood not just in the adult world. That is many parents are trying to find alternative institutions outside of our public institutions to give their kids a leg up in society. You mention the information revolution which has radically transformed the whole nature of childhood. As kids have access to information that I certainly didn't have when I was their age and whose communication with other kids is chatter only electronically mediated. They spend a lot more screen time than baby

boomers did. But it's not always the TV set it's other kinds of institutions. Heres where I think we confront an issue that we as a society have not thought through very well. On the one hand we still cling to the idea that childhood should be prolonged. The children should be safeguarded from the corrupting influence of the adult world that they should grow up in gradual steps in institutions that are controlled by adults yet in their everyday lives. Children are much more aware of the adult world than ever before. My own personal view is that instead of trying to protect children in quite the obsessive way we have tried to we would do better to try to prepare children to function in the complex sometimes threatening world in which they're going to grow up. I believe that naivete is

dangerous in the world that we live in and that by trying things like abstinence only sex education we are not doing an effective job of preparing kids to deal with the complex world in which they must function. Let's go to. Next caller here someone in Winnebago line number four toll free line hello. Good morning she. Bravo. I'm very pleased to hear what you have to say but I wanted to ask about Roussel because I might have been sleeping in class. I probably was but I was under the impression that despite whatever he had to say I'm public he was an absolute monster at home that he was a terrible person and that

he is trying to sell him family. It's worse than you think. You know you really you know if you read his autobiography The most chilling passage in it is he says that he had four or five children they had his he didn't know how many children he had but that they had been put into foundling hospitals. And at that time in the mid 18th century the death rate in those hospitals approximated 100 percent. And it seems absolutely incredible to us that the man who wrote the child who it should be valued in and of itself not as a way station to maturity that the man who said these exciting profoundly moving ideas about childhood could be from our point of view. I'm an utter hypocrite. But life is complicated

and people's ideas can have meanings and implications that of course they never intended or that they don't live their lives according to like so many politicians today. Absolutely. Well thank you very much. It will go against another caller here this is someone in her band. Line 3 Yeah. I had two questions really the first one had to do with what you said about cutting Medicare and his sort of teaching morality to kids reminded me of something I read about in a with children how they are given little morality plays that are unexpectedly put into when when their extended family act out this problem and then they were as young as 3 years old when they were being subjected to. But suppose that later it worked really well

and which me brings up my first question is that. Understand that there is some recognition now adays that parents aren't that important to a child's personality. You know that the kid's going to be what it is. And I'm wondering what about the parents. And as far as the important to the to the character formation of the child I mean their character formation. But let me I'm going to answer your questions but I wouldn't start out with an anecdote. During the early days of colonization in this country many Americans were struck by an amazing phenomenon and that is that sometimes kids or of the colonists were were kidnapped

by Indians or taken captive. And those kids never wanted to return to white society. Those kids found a kind of happiness in Indian society that they contrasted markedly with the kind of experience that they have in Colonial society. And this was something that many adults Benjamin Franklin wrote at great length about this couldn't understand they couldn't understand why these kids wanted to remain with their Indian captive words when they could come back. And the reason of course was that childhood among Indian peoples was a very very different. It was much less disciplined. It was much freer. Kids were expected to labor from a very early age girls had a great deal more freedom than they did in Colonial society. And so you have this remarkable.

Set of stories of literally hundreds of children who apparently preferred to live among Indian captors than to return to their own parents. OK so I I mentioned that to underscore the fact that even in one society there can be very very different ways of rearing children and the children have their own minds and develop their own perspective. All this. Now to get to kind of the thrust of your question. Societies there has been a lot of work recently that argues that peers are very important in rearing children that kids themselves. Kids interpret the world around them. And this is often been interpreted to downplay the significance of parenting. I think what we need to

do is just to understand parenting in a kind of different way than we often do. Parents do not mold their children as if they were by x or a piece of clay. But parents have enormous influence nonetheless. Parents help determine who their children's peer group is going to be. Parents model all kinds of behavior for their children they model love they model discipline they model reading they model all sorts of values. In other words parents have enormous influence. But we need to see kids themselves as agents who help to bring up themselves. Kids have minds. Kids have eyes and they shape. The imports that they get from others so that there is always a limit to how much we can shape their temperament. I mean I think it's

very important that parents learn to accept their kids and treasure their kids for who they are not for whom they wish they would be because there's always going to be limits to our ability to shape them. And one of the greatest pains of parenting is also one of its greatest joys and that is to see your kids grow up to go on adventures on their own adventures that we can't cerium don't ask you about a specific problem your crops up with everybody and that is the talk speaking about sheltering children from the harsh realities. One thing that everybody has to contend with and eyeing up after I ask this is the idea of showing them the facts of life or telling them the facts of life. Is there anything to say about that. Because I personally think the current idea that when me and when they ask you want to tell them is the is the best one

but I want to hear what you have to say I think. Well I'm afraid I'm not a child rearing guru and I'm sure my own kids who had the second. What what one does here is that you need to tell kids appropriate to where they are and that you can't go into a biology lecture with the six year old. You have to try to provide information that they are ready for and that they will understand and they will be able to make sense of. I think it is pretty clear that withholding information is not a good idea. One of the sources of evidence that I used were diaries by kids contemporary sources written at the time. And one of the things that becomes very clear when you read these diaries is you read about young girls going through menstruation for the first time. This would be around the turn of the 20th century and being whole

unprepared for thought of having been told nothing by their mothers and when they turned to their mothers for advice they are pushed off. Clearly this was something that their mothers viewed as quote unquote dirty as something inappropriate to discuss. And it left I think real scars on the kids. And so one value of history as we can see how other generations dealt with problems ways that we don't deal with them and we can see the impact. When you read these diaries you come away with a real sense of what it means to withholding information from kids so that they can deal with the problems that they encounter as they grow up. We have maybe three four minutes left our guest on this program Steven midseason historian at University of Houston author of a book Hucks raft a history American childhood some most call real quick perhaps we can get him in 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 2 2 2 9 4 5 5. I think one of the things that

you suggest that people think about in and I'm sure is one of the challenges of the historian is how difficult it is to get into the mindset of people in the past. And I think you have a very nice turn of phrase at some point in the book you say the problem that we have in thinking about people of the past as we think of them like we think about Leonardo. In Titanic they wear different clothes but other than that they're just like us. Well you seem to be saying no they're not. They're not just like us they're very different than we are. They lived in a different world and their outlook was different. And it seems that that's something for us that's difficult to understand. Well let me give you what I think is the hardest example for us to deal with most parents in the past lost one to three or more children. Someone like Cotton Mather who had over 10 children only saw two

of them live to adulthood and it is on imaginable to us how parents could bear it they up and yet they lived in a society in which the church and all moral had advisors emphasized resignation in the face of the earth. Real Parents were torn apart by seeing their children die and yet their society told them that they could not grieve openly. That excessive displays of emotion were evil that they were a sign of sinful nuts. And it's a real challenge for us who could never feel who could never restrain our own emotions in the way people were expected to. To understand people who don't speak out or pour out their emotions and this seems to me one of our challenges. Let me let me put it

a slightly different way. There is a phenomena that I'm going to call generational chauvinism and that is the bully that we today are the smartest most moral people who ever lived. And before we embraced that kind of generational chauvinism that puts us at the top of the food chain. Let me say this in American society. In 2005 twenty five percent of all American kids and their childhood with a theory a significant problem. Let me explain. Twenty five percent of all American children either have failed to graduate high school or they're seriously involved in the criminal justice system or they have a child of their own or they have a serious physical or mental disability. One out of every four

children by the age of 20 has had their life fundamentally shaped in bad ways by their experience of childhood. So before we pass ourselves on the back and think that we're the greatest most child friendly society that ever existed. We need to look closely at how any society could allow 25 percent of its kids to end childhood with a severe problem. Do you think that we are. Sometimes it seems we're doing little more than giving lip service to this idea of the family and family values and wanting to protect children. Do you think that it's as bad as that or is that the picture is just decidedly mixed. Americans love children but they mainly love their own children. Historically America was at the forefront of efforts to

help all children. Ours was the first society to have universal free secular public education. Ours was one of the very first societies to ever be concerned about child abuse. Ours was one of the first societies in history to provide poor mothers with sufficient money to allow them to keep their kids at home instead of putting them in an orphanage. For much of our history the United States was a pace setter in reforms aimed at improving children's welfare. Today we are not a pacesetter today. Americans care deeply about their own children and will do everything in their power to give their own kids a leg up. We've largely abandoned the notion that we have a collective concern for children. Well there we must stop our guest Stephen minces professor of history at the University of Houston a leading authority on the history of the family the book which is

subtitled A History of American childhood his hocks raft and it's published by Belknap press of Harvard University Press Professor ments Thank you. Thank you.