In my last post I talked about an historical change in parenting over the long sweep of human history. I described the trustful parenting of hunter-gathers, the directive-domineering parenting of medieval and early industrial times, and the directive-protective parenting that predominates in our culture today. What I neglected to say there is that the directive-protective parenting style is largely a very recent development. Now, in this post and the next, I describe an historical change in parenting that has occurred within the past few decades.
The first sixty years or so of the twentieth century was a period of expansion of children’s freedom, at least in North America and Western Europe. Both adults and children gained more free time, as labor unions helped workers achieve shorter workweeks and child labor declined; and parenting styles became more liberal and liberating, less aimed at obedience training, than they had been before. The 1950s and early 1960s were, in some ways, a golden era for children. People around my age, myself included, often, and for good reasons, wax nostalgic about the freedom we enjoyed as children, in contrast with the highly controlled lives of children today.
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Childhood
One such person is Hillary Rodham Clinton. Here, in her own words, is a description of her childhood and her regret about the lives of children today: [1]
“I was born in Chicago, but when I was about four, I moved to where I grew up, which was Park Ridge, Illinois. It was your typical 1950s suburb. Big elm trees lined the streets, meeting across the top like a cathedral. Doors were left open, with kids running in and out of every house in the neighborhood.
“We had a well-organized kids’ society and we had all kinds of games, playing hard every day after school, every weekend, and from dawn until our parents made us come in at dark in the summertime. One game was called chase and run, which was a kind of complex team-based hide-and-seek and tag combination. We would make up teams and disperse throughout the entire neighborhood for maybe a two- or three-block area, designating safe places that you could get to if somebody was chasing you. There were also ways of breaking the hold of a tag so that you could get back in the game. As with all of our games, the rules were elaborate and they were hammered out in long consultations on street corners. It was how we spent countless hours. …
