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G) COpyright by
BEVERLY T. PURRINGTON
1980

EFFECTS OF CHILDREN ON THEIR PARENTS:
PARENTS' PERCEPTIONS

By

Beverly T. Purrington

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fuifillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of Sociology

1980

ABSTRACT

EFFECTS OF CHILDREN ON THEIR PARENTS:
PARENTS' PERCEPTIONS

By

Beverly T. Purrington

Social scientists have traditionally assumed that socialization is
a process that flows from parent to child and so have sought to under-
stand the contributions of parental practices and personalities to the
development of children. This point of view is reflected in research
in socialization, in the family, and in education. There is, however,
increasing awareness that socialization may be a reciprocal influence
process in which strong influences may flow in the opposite direction
as well. The study of these reciprocal processes may enlarge our under-
standing of both the family and the socialization process.

This study focuses on parents' perceptions of the effect of their
children on the parents' own growth and develOpment. In-depth inter-
views with parents of preschoolers were conducted to generate grounded
substantive theory concerning the kinds of influence processes that
parents perceive themselves to have experienced. Results indicate that
middle class parents gg_perceive significant influences from their
children.

The analysis begins with the observation that parenthood provides
(indeed requires) participation in situations that adults without child-
ren can generally avoid. The non-elective nature of parents' partici-
pation in such situations results in a change process quite different

from that usually considered typical of change in adult life. The

Beverly T. Purrington

general situations that children provide for parents fall into three
broad categories. First, as a parent one is exposed to being around a
naive member of society who is both like one once was and becoming like
one is now. In this sense, being a parent involves having access to
the world of childhood, access to memories, and a chance to see close-up
mirrors of the self. Second, being responsible for the care and pro-
tection of a child both enlarges the range of permissible and required
emotions, and also requires parents to take concrete stands on a wide
variety of issues. Third, parents are held responsible for the growth
of children and for producing an "acceptable child" (Ruddick, l980).

As teachers, parents decide what's worth teaching; they provide a
setting and a cast of characters; they try to set a good example; and
they are faced with explaining things to, and answering the questions
of, a naive member of the society. This process changes the teacher

as well as the taught.

My research suggests that models which posit large differences in
the socialization of adults as compared to children are not applicable
to the special case of the socialization of parents by their children.
In particular, several common assumptions seem unwarranted, at least in
this type of adult socialization. The interviews with parents contra-
dicted the following assumptions: that adult socialization tends to
focus on behavior and knowledge rather than on values and motivation;
that it is specific rather than general; that it rarely involves core
identity issues; and that it takes place in situations of low power

differential and low affectivity which adults can leave with relative

Beverly T. Purrington

freedom. In many ways, the socialization of parents by their children
has much more in common with processes considered typical of childhood

than adulthood.

Dedicated to my parents

Ruth Elizabeth Turner
and
David Hall Turner

and my children
Teal Purrington

and
Colin Purrington

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My deepest thanks go to my doctoral guidance committee. Marilyn
Aronoff provided spirited encouragement and critical suggestions when I
was uncertain or discouraged. Jim McKee's human concern and attention
to social problems were an inspiration for me from my earliest days in
graduate school. Bill Ewens gave me the room and the criticism I needed
to learn to be a teacher. Finally, Barrie Thorne, as my chairperson
and friend, encouraged me to tackle a project that had no easy answers.
She was a tireless editor, and provided unflagging support and encour-
agement over the four-year period of this research.

I had the benefit of help from many people outside the field of
sociology. My selection of a topic was crystallized during discussions
with Clark Moustakas (of the Merrill Palmer Institute) who encouraged
me to think about the questions that really mattered to me and Richard
Burleigh (former head of the Mechanical Engineering Division of the
Lawrence-Berkeley Laboratory) who talked with me about how his own life
had been irrevocably altered by being the father of articulate teen-
agers. Ruth Danon and Joel Aronoff read early drafts and provided help-
ful suggestions. Georgia Brown offered a critique from the perspective
of a clinical psychologist. Imogene Bowers taught me to take myself
seriously and lightly at the same time. Her encouragement and advice
throughout the early parts of the project were invaluable. Richard

White, my closest friend and toughest critic, shares much of the credit

iii

for the final completion of this project. Scholarships from the P.E.O.
and the Mildred B. Erikson Fund provided financial support for one
semester.

My children, Teal and Colin, read early drafts, left poems of en-
couragement by my typewriter at night, and ate hastily prepared meals
(though not without complaining, and reminding me of the proper role of
mothers). They gave me a sense of what the process I was describing
looked like to young teenagers. In addition, they helped me play when
I was too absorbed in my work, reminded me about what's important, and
provided the initial insights and experiences that led me to write a
dissertation on this topic in the first place.

Many thanks go to the 70 parents I interviewd. Their candor, in-
sight, enthusiasm, and generous cooperation reaffirmed my commitment to
the use of qualitative data such as this in generating theory. They
told me things I would never have predicted, let me hold their babies,
and gave me wine and ice cream. They shared with me very personal in-
sights about being a parent and talked frankly about the misgivings
many of them had about social science as means of getting at the truth.
In many ways, those parents will be the best judges of the success of
this venture.

Marilyn Louval, executive secretary of the Michigan State Univer-
sity Sociology Department, has provided encouragement and invaluable
assistance over the last ten years. Elaine Hensley, secretary of the
Deparment of Sociology/Anthropology at Denison University, typed por-
tions of an early draft and made it possible for me to work without

interruptions Tuesday mornings--no minor accomplishment in a small

iv

liberal arts college. To Lois Pierson, I am especially grateful for
making the last phases of the process go smoothly. Her patience and
accuracy, coupled with her interest in the content of the manuscript
made the last few days of work more enjoyable for me than they would

have been otherwise.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page
PART I
INTRODUCTION, METHODOLOGY, AND FRAMEWORK OF THE STUDY . . . l
CHAPTER ONE—-INTRODUCTION .................... 2
CHAPTER TWO--LITERATURE REVIEW ................. 7
The Concept of Socialization ................. 7
The Uni-Directional Emphasis in Socialization Research

and Theory ........................ l2
Origins of the Skewed Bias .................. l3

Reasons for the Shift Toward a More Balanced Emphasis . . . . l5
More Recent Studies Which do Look at the Influences

of Children on Adults ................... 22
Summary and Implications ................... 29
CHAPTER THREE-~METHODOLOGY ................... 31
Study Sites ......................... 36
Procedures for Contacting Parents .............. 37
Sample Characteristics .................... 40
The Nature of the Interview ................. 5l
The Process of Data Analysis ................. 52
PART II
BEING AROUND CHILDREN ........... 56
CHAPTER FOUR-~THEY WOULD LIKE TO BUT THEY'RE TOO BIG: ACCESS

TO THE WORLD OF CHILDHOOD ............. 57
Introduction ......................... 57
Unwilling Exiles ....................... 6O
Routes of Access ....................... 6l

Access to Things Adults Usually Don't and Normatively
Shouldn't Do ....................... 62

A Chance to Experience Reality From a Different Point
of View .......................... 65
Remembering One's Own Childhood ............... 68
Creativity and Access to the World of Childhood ....... 73

An Opportunity to Revisit Earlier Developmental Stages . . . . 74
CHAPTER FIVE--CLOSE-UP MIRRORS: SEEING ONESELF IN ONE'S CHILD . . 8l

vi

PART III
BEING RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CARE AND PROTECTION OF CHILDREN . . 93

CHAPTER SIX--CHILDREN AS PRECIPITATORS OF EMOTIONAL RESPONSE . . 95

Love ............................. l02
Anger, Rage and Resentment .................. 108
Fears and Vulnerabilities .................. ll7

CHAPTER SEVEN--CHILDREN AS PRECIPITATORS OF DECISION MAKING . . . 131

Introduction ......................... l3l
Kinds of Decisions ...................... 133
Conservatism ......................... l36
More Universal Concerns ................... l37
PART IV
BEING RESPONSIBLE FOR SHAPING THE GROWTH AND
ENSURING THE ACCEPTABILITY OF CHILDREN ....... 138
CHAPTER EIGHT--TEACHING ..................... l40
Deciding What's Worth Teaching ................ l40
Providing a Setting ..................... l45
Providing a Cast of Characters . ............... l48
Setting an Example ...................... lSO
Examples from the Interviews ................. l53
Answering Their Questions .................. l6l
PART V

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS ........... l67
CHAPTER NINE--SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS .............. l68
Introduction ......................... l68

Differences in Socialization During Childhood and
Socialization in Later Life ................ l69
The Content of Socialization ................. l7l
Relationship to the Socializing Agent ............ l76

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A--INTERVIEW SCHEDULE ................. l79
APPENDIX B--GENERAL CODING CATEGORIES .............. l8l
APPENDIX C--LETTER SENT TO PARENTS . . . ' ............ l82
APPENDIX D--LETTER POSTED AT CHILD CARE CENTERS ......... l83
BIBLIOGRAPHY .............. l84

vii

LIST OF TABLES

111212 Fig.9.
1 ReSponse Rate ...................... 39
2 Education of Those Interviewed ............. 42
3 Employment of Subjects and Spouses: A Loose

Categorization of Types of Occupations ........ 43
4 Employment Status of Subjects .............. 44
5 Employment Patterns for Families by Group ........ 45
6 Sex of Those Interviewed ................ 46
7 Age of Those Interviewd ................. 48
8 Marital Status of Those Interviewed ........... 48
9 Religion of Those Interviewed .............. 49
ID Number of Children Per Family .............. 50

viii

PART I

INTRODUCTION, METHODOLOGY AND
THE FRAMEWORK OF THE STUDY

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Socialization has traditionally referred to a process that flows
downward: from the older to the younger, from the more powerful to the
less powerful--in sum, a process by which the initiated introduce the
uninitiated to the rules of the game. Further, many theories of social-
ization suggest a purposeful process and presuppose a relatively pre—
determined end product. This point of view is reflected in research on
socialization processes in general, in the family, and in education.

In research on the family, social scientists have assumed that sociali-
zation is a process that flows from parent to child and so have sought
to understand the effects of parental personalities and practices on the
development of children. Likewise, in educational research, the focus
has been on the effects of teachers on their students. Research in the
last twenty years shows an increasing awareness that socialization may
be a reciprocal process in which strong influences may also flow in the
opposite direction. Contemporary analysis focuses on reciprocal inter-
action patterns and recognizes that the adult as well as the child, the
teacher as well as the student, and the therapist as well as the client
are simultaneously socializing and being socialized.

In the field of family research the question of reciprocal pro-
cesses has been addressed primarily in studies of mother/infant inter-

action. A number of studies have sought to demonstrate the multiple

ways in which infants shape the caretaking behavior they receive. In
addition, researchers have studied the contributions of children to mari-
tal satisfaction and to the mental health of their parents. Psycho-
analytic theory has long cited both the positive and the difficult
psychic consequences of parenthood. While such studies do enlarge our
understanding of reciprocal influence processes, each has limitations.
The focus is usually upon neonates; on clinical populations rather than
on random samples; and on narrow sorts of behavioral changes.

The present study explores adult perceptions of the ways they as
parents have been influenced by their own children. I interviewed 70
parents (most of them selected from day care and nursery school families)
in order to generate grounded substantive theory about parental percep-
tions of the influence of children on adults. This study, by focusing

on parents' perceptions, uncovered effects little treated in previous

 

studies which have tended to rely on categories of influence selected a
priori by the researcher. This approach provides the basis for develop-
ing a more gounded theory of the everyday experience of parenting in
contrast to exaggerated ideological or sentimentalized portrayals of
"parenthood-as-bliss" versus "parenthood-as-hell." Non-clinical p0pu-
lations of parents were interviewed, which strengthens the generaliz-
ability of the results.

The interviews focused on the ways parents felt their own growth
and development had been influenced by their children. The results in-
dicate that middle class parents do perceive significant influences from
their children--influences that fall into two broad, complementary cate-
gories: first, parents felt that having children necessitated commit-

) ment and decision making and made them feel more "adult," and second,

children allowed parents to be more childlike through legitimizing more
open experience and precipitating more heightened emotional response.
For analytic purposes, I have framed the interview data in such a way
as to illuminate and highlight those aspects of the socialization of
parents by their children that are most unlike other kinds of adult
socialization. Thus the chapters that follow show how the socialization
of parents by their children differs from both socialization during
childhood and from other kinds of adult socialization.

The analysis begins with the observation that parenthood provides

(indeed requires) participation in situations that adults without child-

 

ren can generally avoid. It is the situations in which parents find
themselves because of their children, rather than background variables
or their personality characteristics, that forms the core of my analy-
sis. The non-elective nature of parents' participation in such situ-
ations results in a change process quite different from that usually
considered typical of change in adult life. The general situations
that children provide for parents fall into two broad categories.
First, as a parent one is exposed to being around a naive member of
society who is both like one once was and becoming like one is now.
Second, as a parent one is both responsible for the care of a depend-
ent member of society and expected to act as a teacher for that member--
fostering her or his growth and acceptability (Ruddick, 1980). This
framework provides the basis for the organization of the substantive
chapters.

Part I provides the framework of the study and'outlines the

methodological approach.

Part II explores the effects on parents of simply being around a
naive member of society on a day-to-day basis. It focuses on the ways
in which being around a child legitimizes access to the world of child-
hood, both by allowing parents to do things adults usually don't (and
normatively shouldn't) do, and by allowing parents to remember their own
past as they watch their children grow. Such access allows parents to
revisit earlier developmental stages and to resolve in new ways the
crises first encountered in their own childhoods. In addition, by pro-
viding access to the trans-schematic perceptions characteristic of
children, such experiences may contribute to creativity in adults. This
chapter also looks at the effects on parents of seeing themselves re-
flected in their children. Children remind parents of the child they
once were in addition to providing reflections of themselves now. Both
processes allow parents to see themselves in a new light.

Part III examines ways in which being responsible for the care and
protection of a child (what Sara Ruddick [1980] refers to as the inter-
est in preserving the child) also changes parents. First it explores
parental perceptions of the contributions of children to changes in
both the kinds and intensity of emotional experience. Children place
adults in situations where the range of permissible and required emo-
tions is enlarged, their intensity increased, and one's ability to
understand them decreased. Thus parents are exposed to a range of
powerful emotions in a way quite different from the exposure of adults
without children. Children, by their actions as well as by their very
existence, place adults in situations where they must make decisions
or take action. Such decisions may be practical ones (e.g. place of

residence, diet) or moral and philosophical ones (e.g. What is the

meaning of life? How does one explain death to a three-year-old?).

Part IV concerns the effects on parents of serving as teachers
for their children. Parents are held responsible for shaping the growth
of children and for producing an acceptable child (Ruddick, 1980). As
teachers, parents decide what's worth teaching; they provide a setting
and a cast of characters; they usually seek to set a good example; and
they are faced with explaining things to, and answering the questions
of a naive member of the society. This process changes the teacher as
well as the taught.

Part V summarizes the findings and explores their implications.

CHAPTER TWO

LITERATURE REVIEW

The Concept of Socialization

Certain problems arise in using the concept of socialization as a
research framework. Clausen (1968) alerts us to several of these prob-
lems: Is all learning socialization? Must the process be purposive to
be considered socialization? Are unwitting influences also socializa-
tion? No clear agreement exists on the answers to such questions, as
any survey of the socialization literature will affirm. My intention
here is to offer some examples of current and historical usages of the
notion of socializationand to speculate on its usefulness for under-
standing the effects of children on their parents.1

Although the subject of socialization captured the interest of the
earliest philosophers, social scientists began to use the term ooh/inthe
1920's. Before that time social scientists used a different vocabulary
to discuss similar ideas. C. H. Cooley, a close observer of his own
children, was centrally concerned with the social nature of humans.
"Self and society," he writes (1925; 1959: 5) "are twin-born, we know
one as immediately as we know the other, and the notion of a separate
and independent ego is an illusion." Cooley's interest in how the self

was shaped did not prevent him from recognizing the reciprocal nature

 

1For detailed reviews of the literature see Goslin (1969), Clausen
(1968), Aberle (1961), and Singer (1961).

7

of all interaction. In writing about institutions he observed:

The individual is always cause as well as effect of the insti-
tution: he receives the impress of the state whose traditions
have enveloped him from childhood, but at the same time im-
presses his own character, formed by other forces as well as
this, upon the state, which thus in him and others undergoes
change. (1925; 1959: 314)

The concerns of W. 1. Thomas were Specifically related to the pro-
cess of socialization. G. H. Mead, as the formulator of symbolic inter-
actionism, drew attention to the importance of language and meanings in
the development of the self. Clausen (1969) also notes that both early
studies of delinquency and research on "culture and personality" pre-
sumed a socialization framework but used a different vocabulary. During
the latter part of the 1920's, social scientists began to use the term
more frequently and to agree somewhat on its meaning.

Yet, despite increasing agreement on the definition of socializa-
tion, conflicting usages remain today. DiRenzo (1977: 263) writes:

Whatever its original denotation, it seems quite clear from

a survey of the current literature that this term has not

had the fortune of conceptual refinement. Indeed, such an

expectation has become all the more acute since the problem

of conceptual ambiguity has been exacerbated in that "social-

ization" has assumed an ever-expanding, generic meaning, and

its fundamental reference seems to be any aspect of human

learning or human development. The use of the term "social-

ization" as a catch-all construct can be seen quite dramati-

cally in the rather comprehensive reviews of the field that

have appeared in recently published handbooks . . . . one

need not elaborate on the obstacles that this confusing kind

of analytical situation presents for the development of

sociological theory on socialization.

Social scientists have often noted the problems posed by the broad
inclusiveness of the term "socialization." They have less often proposed
useful solutions. DiRenzo (1977: 267) suggests that “[w]hi1e, on the
one hand, the distinct subprocesses of socialization (humanization) need

to be kept separate, we need at the same time to adopt a more synthetic

perspective. What is required, therefore, are resolute efforts toward
the theoretical integration of these concepts and distinctive processes,
and such attempts demand a much more complex perspective than has been
characteristic of sociological analysis for the most part.2

Yet, despite DiRenzo's suggestions there is little agreement among
social scientists (or even among sociologists) regarding usage of the
term "socialization.“ Many definitions exist and individual researchers
pick and choose the ones that suit their own purposes. By some defini-
tions, the influence of children on their parents would not qualify as
socialization. By others it clearly does.

If by "socialization" we mean the inculcation of a new generation
into the culture, the concept may be inapprOpriate for use in understand-
ing the effects of children on parents. To a large degree, the concept
of socialization was developed in the context of a stable culture which
was to be learned by newcomers. Yet, the effects of children on their
parents often result in cultural discontinuities rather than in stabil-
ity. Harper (1975), for example, observes that both human and non-
human offspring contribute to change in their parents: to the acquisi-

tion of new habits, to the exploitation of new niches and (in the case

 

2DiRenzo (1977: 265) finds the use of "the term 'humanization'
rather than 'socialization' as a more appropriately generic label for
the several process of social learning and development. Not only is this
new term conceptually convenient in heuristic respects, but also it is
more appropriate for revealing the commonality of the several specific
processes that are the respective concerns of the individual disciplines.
The fundamental problem, nevertheless, is not resolved. It still re-
mains to specify the complex nature of this process of humanization or
socialization and to delimit its analytical and empirical components
for any adequate understanding of both the simplicity and the complexity
of the phenomenon under investigation . . . . The generic process of
humanization is comprised of at least four distinct, sometimes separate,
subprocesses . . . maturation, culturation, socialization, and person-
ality development."

ID

of humans) to the adoption of new attitudes. If "socialization is the
means by which social and cultural continuity are attained" (Clausen,
1968: 5), then a large part of the influence of children on their par-
ents cannot be considered socialization at all.

Yet even definitions which emphasize cultural continuity over gen-
erations might be stretched to include child effects on parents. For
example, my own study points to ways that children do have conservative
effects on their parents. In the process of setting a good example for
their children, parents tend to become more conventional in their own
behavior.

Other definitions of socialization, especially those used by soci-
ologists, tend to emphasize role preparation as central to the process.
Clausen (1968: 7) whose view is typical, defines socialization as being
concerned with,

Those kinds of social learning that lead the individual to

acquire the personal and group loyalties, the knowledge,

skills, feelings, and desires that are regarded as appropri-

ate to a person of his age, sex, and particular social status,

especially_as those have relevance for adult rolegperformance.
(emphasis mine)

 

‘ To a certain degree, children g9_train their parents for adult role
performance. Rheingold emphasizes the socializing nature of the human
infant, which "fashions caretakers into parents." The infant, she
writes,

Socializes them . . . teaches them to assume the role of

parents . . . evokes in them the disposition to behave as

society expects parents to behave . . . helps them acquire

the skill and knowledge that enable them to become effective
members of a family and of the community, thus fulfilling

their roles as protectors and educators of the young.

(1969: 783)

Yet not all of the effects of children on their parents fall into

the realm of preparation for adult role performance. For example, when

11

children provide access to the world of childhood or activate powerful
emotions in their parents, they are not precipitating or teaching role
performance per se, although these experiences may have bearing on the
performance of roles. Are we to conclude that such influences are net
socialization?

The answer to this question is complicated by the existence of
still broader definitions of socialization which encompass virtually
all influence processes. For example, DiRenzo (1977: 263) observes that
socialization's "fundamental reference seems to be any aspect of human
learning or human development." Using this definition, one would have
to conclude that all child effects are socialization.

The questions raised at the outset of this chapter remain: Is all
influence socialization? Is all learning socialization? Must the pro-
cess be purposive in order to be considered socialization? The bulk of
the literature on the effects of children on their parents takes no
stand on whether such processes are usefully understood within the
framework of socialization. Others who have written about child influ-
ences on adults (Rheingold, 1969, is an example) clearly opt for a
socialization framework. More general works on socialization (e.g.
Stollak, 1978) increasingly contain a proviso noting the importance of
the effects of children on their parents and call for research in this
area. Such works do little to suggest how this fits into a more general
framework of socialization and, in fact, rarely elaborate at all on the
issue.

My own view is that a socialization framework is applicable pri-
marily to understanding ways in which children induct their parents

into the role of caregivers. In addition, the notion of socialization

12

may be useful in highlighting the particular ways in which the sociali-
zation of children by their parents differs from other kinds of adult
socialization (see Chapter Nine for an elaboration). Beyond this,
socialization frameworks (especially to the extent that they emphasize
preparation for role performance and deliberate intent) seem ill-suited
to understanding most of the sorts of influences parents perceive as
coming from their children. The following review of the literature,
therefore, does not deal primarily with socialization theory since such
a conceptualization applies only to a small part of the influence pro-

cess I have studied.

The Uni-Directional Emphasis in Socialization Research and Theory

 

Socialization is often characterized as a one-way process, going
always in the same direction: from the tap-down, from the more powerful
to the less powerful, from the older to the younger. While some
theories do stress an interactive approach to the process, or do look
at varieties of adult socialization, there has been little explicit
attention to socialization that flows in the opposite direction: from
down-up, from the less powerful to the more powerful, from the student
to the teacher or from the child to the parent. This skewed emphasis
persists not only in the general area of socialization but also in
research and theorizing on the family and the schools. Parents and
teachers are held responsible for the physical, intellectual, emotional,
and social development of the child--the assumption being that children
are almost infinitely plastic. No such assumption is generally made

about adults3 and the influence of children on their parents and

 

3DiRenzo (1977: 271), in his review of socialization and personal-
ity research notes that: "There has been, up to very recent times,

13

teachers is mentioned, if at all, only in passing.

Origins of the Skewed Emphasis

 

Curiously, even the authors who question the uni-directionality of
research have written little on reasons for its origin or perpetuation.
Some find its origins in certain theories of child development, but
fail to ask more probing questions about why such theories recurringly
make the assumption that socialization flows one way. For example,
Berberich (1971: 92), a behaviorist, ascribes this bias to the influence
of:

Two prominent contemporary theories of child development

. . Learning Theory and Freudian Theory . . . which em-

phasize the role of adults as primary socializing agents for

the child and view infancy and early childhood as critical

periods in which the basic structures of the child's emo-

tional, social and intellectural behavior are acquired.

The others (Cf. Bell, 1968; and Korner, 1965) offer some variation
of an analysis which emphasizes differences of power. In at least three
ways, the less powerful and the younger are gasjer_to study than the
older and more powerful. First, powerful persons are more likely to
have a monopoly on the skills and resources necessary for studying and
publishing. Infants, children, and the poor--all have fewer such re-
sources and skills. Secondly, and perhaps more fundamentally, it has
been considered "unseemly" for the powerless to interview the powerful,

to theorize about them, or to write about them. Dexter (1970: 135), in

discussing the difficulty of getting true information from elites, cites

 

comparatively little work on 'adult socialization.‘ Indeed, not only in
the field of sociology, but in psychology, psychiatry, and other related
fields, there has been a widespread neglect of human development and/or

sociOpsychological change in the period of life after the age of roughly
25. Social scientists frequently assume that human development goes on

to about age 6, or even 18, and that then there is a long plateau until

about 60 or 65, when aging begins."

l4

Manning's problems in interviewing physicians who took a position of
"evasiveness and implausibility, free to ignore the demands of the
questioner who is stepping out of his deference role" (Manning, 1967:
307). The ability to control leakage of information about the self is
often associated with positions of power. Behind this is a recognition
that knowledge (especially about another person's life) is power (e.g.
see Nancy Henley, 1977: 197). Finally, those who are younger or less
powerful are generally unable to resist being studied. They are often
part of captive p0pulations in nurseries, schools, factories, or jails,
where observation and control are relatively simple. In summary, it

is easier to study infants and children (and the powerless in general)--
they are accessible and compliant. Furthermore, it is easier to control
for significant variables when dealing with children, something that is
more difficult with adults who have long personal histories.

On another level, some researchers (Korner, 1965; Bell, 1968) sug- ‘
gest that the emphasis on how parents and teachers influence children
was part of a more general emphasis on the improvability of the indivi-
dual and constituted an attack on Old World emphases on hereditary
factors as determinants of ability, behavior and privilege. Korner
(1965: 48) proposes that this tendency in the U.S. to focus on the role
of the parent as crucial in the development of the child:

has deep roots in our cultural heritage . . . . The exten-

sive migration to this country was motivated by the wish

to leave behind all the Old World's inequalities of class

and birth . . . . The idea that there might be basic gene-

tic and biological differences among people has to be re-

jected as too close to Old World values, too close to

being undemocratic and unequalitarian.

Similarly, Bell (1968: 81) argues:

15

It is not too surprising to find that most research on
parent-child interaction has been directed to the question
of effects of parents on children. The historian Palmer
(1964) maintains that our political and social philosophy
emerged in a period when there were many revolutionary or
protorevolutionary movements ranging from the Carolinas to
Sweden, movements directed not just against monarchical
abolutism but against all constituted bodies such as parli-
aments, councils, assemblies, and majistracies. These in-
stitutions tended to be hereditary, either in theory or
through firmly established practice . . . Although scienti-
fic research on parents and children is a fairly recent
phenomenon, it still shows the primary influence of this
broad social philosophy by emphasizing parents and educa-
tional developments as determinants of human development.

Thus parental and educational influences were seen to have important
equalizing functions and this efficacy was consequently held as evidence
of the supremacy of nurture over nature. Ironically, this trend in
research, in its attempts to underscore the malleability of the child,
ignored to a large extent the possibility that adult§_too are more mal-

leable than we may have imagined.4

Reasons for the Shift Toward a More Balanced Emphasis

 

Whatever the historical reasons for the tendency to overlook the
influence of the young on the old or the powerless on the more powerful,

this emphasis has persisted with few exceptions.5 Even by the early

 

4At the same time, immigration did result in situations where
foreign-born parents were clearly inaaposition to learn from their
American-born children. Margaret Mead discusses this in Culture and
Commitment (1970).

 

 

5Books such as Sears, Maccoby, and Levin (1957) Patterns of Child
Rearing, did point to the existence of constitutional differences in
children which affect adult behavior. Bell (1968: 82), in discussing
that book, concludes that "the model of a uni-directional effect from
the parent to child is overdrawn, a fiction of convenience rather than
belief.“ In addition, studies of psychic disturbances related to
pregnancy and childbirth constituted the great majority of early writ-
ings on the effects of children on parents (see the section on mental
health .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

16

1970's, the existing literature on the effects of children on their
parents was slim. For example, Berberich (1971: 92) was "unable to
find a single study in which a child's behavior had been systematically
manipulated so that its effects on an adult could be specified." Those
studies he could find share certain drawbacks:

First many of them are of a correlational design. There-

fore, the direction of influence (adult on child or child

on adult) cannot be specified. Second, the measures used

are often far removed from the behavior which is inferred

. . . . Third, many investigations have dealt with broad,

global variables. This has made it difficult to specify

just what aspect of a particular independent variable con-

tributed to the changes in the dependent variable (1971:

92 .

In my own search of the literature, I found that over 90 percent of the
literature on infant and child effects on parents (in humans) was pub-
lished after 1965.

Why ii shift occurred at that particular point in history is an
interesting question which again (as in the reasons for the original
bias) only a few of the writers have explored. Since this is only in-
directly discussed in the literature on offspring effects or sociali-
zation (with the exception of Harper, 1975; Bell, 1968; and Korner,
1965), this section will of necessity be speculative and draw on writ-
ings outside the immediate field. Nine of the most likely explanations

for this shift will be briefly outlined below.

1. Discordant Data. One of the more obvious reasons for the re-

 

latively sudden, more widespread awareness of children's effects on
parents (although it fails to explain its occurrence at this particular
point in history) is that a good deal of the socialization research
data is discordant with a simple parent-effect model (Bell, 1968). For

one thing, there is evidence that parents, including foster parents,

17

react differently to different children, as Bell (1968: 83) notes in
the following discussion:

Characteristics of the infants appeared to have evoked very
different behavior in this foster mother and in other mem-
bers of her family . . . in a parent-effect model, it is
easy to explain differences between the behavior of two par-
ents with the same child, but awkward to accommodate a dif-
ference in the behavior of one parent toward two children.
The latter difficulty is due to the fact that the parent-
effect model assumes a fixed and invariantly applied
repertoire. The usual method of explaining differences

in behavior of a parent with different children is to
postulate effects associated with ordinal position or sex
of siblings. The reports on infants in foster homes could
not be explained this way.

Bell also cites work by others supporting

Levy's contention that specific maternal behavior could

be accounted for more by the infant's behavior than by the

mother's general "maternal attitude” . . . . (1968: 83).
Similarly, Rheingold (1966: 12-13) notes that deSpite their helpless-
ness, human infants manage to command an inordinate amount of attention
in any human group. Thus, the simple fact that the data is discordant
with a parent-effect model may account for the shift in theories regard-

ing direction of effects.

2. Studies of Animal Behavior. The shortcomings of the parent-

 

effect model became clear in studies of animal behavior long before
they were apparent in studies of human behavior.6

. . students of animal behavior have been much more aware
of offspring effects on parents than investigators of human
parent-child interaction; this more comprehensive view of
parent-offspring interaction may be a simple consequence of
availability; all phases of develOpment are accessible to
direct observation and manipulation. It is also possible
that our political and social philosophy has limited scien-
tific outlook at the human more than the animal level. The

 

6Cf. Rheingold (1963) for a review of the literature and Lewis
(1974) for additional bibliographies.

18

animal mother is not seen as an agent of socialization, nor

her offspring as a tabula rasa (Bell, 1968: 84).
Harper (1975: 784) too, points to the influence of animal studies on
this shift noting that the neglect of the effects of human offspring on
their parents is surprising for two reasons:

First, from an evolutionary perspective, the adaptations of

parent and child must be mutual (Mead, 1965) . . . . Second,

ample evidence has been provided by comparative psychology

for the reciprocity of parent-offspring stimulation in other

mammals (Schneirla and Rosenblatt, 1961; Scott, 1967). Yet

despite the fact that it has been over 20 years since Erikson

wrote 'a family brings up a baby only by being brought up by

him,‘ only a few attempts have been made to summarize the

ways in which the human child affects his parents.
Beach and Jaynes (1956) identified classes of stimuli which control
parent behavior in rats. "Visual, olfactory, tactile, thermal, and
movement cues from rat pups were shown to be capable of inducing mater-
nal retrieving, being effective individually and in combination" (Bell,
1968: 85). Studies by Noirot (1965) and Ressler (1962) confirm this
direction of influence in mice. Rheingold showed that infant rhesus
monkeys induce lactation in mothers. Other studies of monkeys, apes
and chimpanzees point to the importance of infant characteristics and
behavior in influencing the adult members of the group. The progression
of Harry Harlow's work is of special intereSt here, particularly his
revision of his earlier theories of the effects of isolation during
infancy. His earlier work pointed to a "critical period for sociali-
zation," something for which his later work fails to find support.7

If the results of studies of primate behavior can be generalized to an

 

7See Novak and Harlow "Social Recovery of Monkeys Isolated for the
First Year of Life: 1. Rehabilitation and Therapy." In Developmental
Psychology, 1975, Volume II, No. 4, pp. 453 ff.

 

 

l9

analysis of human behavior, then our focus on the crucial importance
of the adult's effects on the infant is out of proportion to its actual
influence, making further inquiry into the actual nature of that rela-
tionship a priority item.

3. Studies of Evolution. One subarea of studies of animal behavior

 

concerns the contribution of the young to the adaptive evolution of the
species. Both Harper (1970) and Bruner (1972) discuss the implications
for human populations, yet neither cites the work of the other, indi-
cating that such notions were apparently "in the air" in the late 1960's,
with a number of persons independently exploring the same ideas.

4. Studies in Psychology. Within the field of psychology various

 

trends of the last twenty years seemed to favor the emergence of a focus
on the child as a socializer. Rheingold (1969: 780) notes that "the
emphasis in psychology today falls more on the behaving organism and
less on the impressed organism, more on learning as the result of the
organism's own action on the environment and less on learning as the
action of the environment on him." Clinical psychoanalytic work too may
have opened doors to revising notions about the direction of effect in
two ways: by noting the implications of offspring effects for both the
offspring themselves and for their parents. The striking effect (mostly
negative) that parenthood could have on adults was noted by clinicians
and explored by theorists.8 In some cases the discovery of child effects
on the adult emerges as a byproduct of studying the child itself, thus
Korner (1965: 47) notes that the

search for factors in the child that may je0pardize a
mother's capacity to relate to him was largely stimulated

 

8See Anthony and Benedek (1970).

20

by work with child-psychoses and infantile autism. From
this concern with extreme deviations has sprung an inter-
est in the individual differences among normal children.
Research findings clearly demonstrate that individual dif-
ferences in disposition and temperament do exist among
newborn babies, but there is a lag in incorporating this
fact in child-rearing practices.

5. Population Growth. Increasing interest in curbing the rate of

 

p0pulation growth may also have contributed to the shift toward looking
at how children influence parents, and has resulted in studies of the
perceived costs and rewards of children9 (Arnold, 1976).

6. Increasing_Emphasis on the Marital Relationship. The last 15
years have evidenced increasing interest in the study of the family in

10 One focus of that

general and the marital relationship in particular.
research was the effects of children on a marriage as seen in the mari-
tal satisfaction literature as well as in studies of the "transition to
parenthood."H

7. Antinatalist Literature. Related to 5 and 6, yet in some ways

 

independent, are the contributions of the antinatalist literature (e.g.
Peck, 1974), celebrating non-parenthood. Aimed at freeing people from
the burden of enforced parenthood, this literature looks at alternatives
and attempts to demolish stereotypes of non-parents as selfish, lonely
unfortunates. In the process, this approach calls attention to effects

(largely negative in this case) of children on parents. That such a

 

9

10Andre Burgiere suggests we might understand the increased atten-
tion to the history of the family by noting that history is best able
to deal with institutions that are breaking down (Carnuchan, n.d.: 4).

( 1;Cf. Rossi (1968), LeMasters (1957), Hobbs (1965, 1968), Jacoby
1969 .

See also Lamanna and Kurtz (1979).

21

movement should occur at this point in time is not surprising. The

last 15 years mark the first time in history when not having children
was a viable alternative. Effective (though not necessarily safe) birth
control has become more widely available, coupled with acceptance of
engaging careers for women and increased awareness of the need to limit
population. Parents now feel they have more choice about having or not
having children. The success of the book by Fabe and Wikler (1979)
arises partly from parents' need for information on the effects of
children on adults.

8. Increasing Emphasis on Children. At the same time, the increas-

 

ing focus on children, evident in psychology and popular thinking may
have simultaneously redirected attention to parents. Korner (1965)
points to the need to reconsider theories which hold parents totally re-
sponsible for the growth and development of their children. Such theories
result in overlooking the child "as a separate organism with his own
propensities and vulnerabilities" (Korner, 1965: 47). In addition,

such theories burden parents with a load of guilt that is hardly condu-
cive to good parenting (Korner, 1965: 47-48).12

9. Increasing Emphasis on Development Over the Entire Life Cycle.

 

Finally, the shift toward looking at the effects of infants and child-
ren on adults grows out of increasing attention to human growth and
development throughout the life cycle with attention to stages of adult

life. Beginning with Erikson and reaching popular audiences with the

 

'ZCf. Edmund Bergler Parents, Not Guilty of Their Children's
Neuroses (1964), and Skolnick (1978).

22

13 this focus has unmasked

publication of Passages by Sheehy in 1977,
naive pictures of adulthood as a period of unchanging stability. This
new emphasis may be due to increased longevity for men and women, expan-
sion of leisure time, and the rapidity of change to which 20th century
adults must adapt. Whatever its origins, this focus has led to an inter-

est in sources of change in adult life. One of these sources is the

influence of children.

More Recent Studies Which 00 Look at the Influence of Children on Adults
In the last twenty years, a number of studies have appeared which
focus on the long-neglected area of offspring effect on adults in human
and nonhuman species. Many of these are outside the main stream of so-
cialization literature. These pioneering studies provide rich grounds
for beginning to take a look at the dynamics of a relationship long pic-
tured as a one-way street,I4 and for undoing the consequent over-emphasis
on the educative functions of parents. Harper (1975) suggests that the
literature on children's influences on parents falls into three categories
1. The effects of infants and children on the caregiving

behavior of adults--including here both the motivations
for, and the skills of, caregiving.

 

13Cf. also Levinson The Seasons of a Man's Life, 1978.

 

14DiRenzo (1977: 272) alerts us to another way in which the emphafis
of socialization research is "unilateral":

These kinds of concerns could contribute much to such timely
questions as personality dynamics and change during adult life--
a question that has become increasingly controversial of late
as the heretofore rather widely accepted position of relatively
permanent personality formation in childhood seems challenged
more and more extensively. Yet, one major shortcoming of much
of this work is that the emphasis is grossly unilateral. That
is to say, the concern seems to be nearly exclusively with the
effects of social situations . . . on the individual and his
personality-~rather than simultaneously as well on the effects
that adult socialization and personality have on middle age
and/or work roles and work systems.

23

2. The effects of infants and children on their parents as
persons or as members of a marital dyad.

3. The effects of infants and children on the culture at large,
either directly or on their parents as members of that
culture.

While there exists literature in all three of the preceding areas, the
first has been studied far more than the other three, as shown by the
sheer volume of empirical studies, the sophistication of the theorizing,
and the extent to which researchers have built on each other's work.
Students of animal behavior and child develOpment, and research by cli-
nicians and medical doctors are largely responsible for the work in
this first area. Very little of it has been done by sociologists. The
bulk of the work in the second area has come from the marital relation-
ship perspective (see LeMasters, 1957; Dyer, 1963; Hobbs, 1965, 1968,
1976, 1977; Jacoby, 1969; Rossi, 1968; and Wylie, 1979), and from life-
cycle inquiry (see Brim, 1957 and 1968; Neugarten, 1976; Rosow, 1965;
Erikson, 1963; Gould, 1972; Levinson, 1978; and Sheehy, 1977). The
third area, the least studied, has been largely confined to theoretical
speculation and a few empirical studies concerning animal behavior (see
Lewis, 1974; Harper, 1970, 1971, 1975; Bell, 1968 and 1971; and Kawai,
1965), or human adolescence (see Eisenberg, 1970; and Falkman and Irish,
1974).

For ease of presentation, this literature on the contributions of
children to the adult growth and develOpment of their parents may be
divided into nine categories, each of which will be very briefly dis-

cussed.

Transition to Parenthood

 

Several dozen studies have appeared which examine the degree of

24

difficulty (or "crisis") experienced by parents making the "transition-
to-parenthood." Except in Jacoby's (1969) and Rossi's (1968) review
articles (which explore application of small group and role theory),
only scant attention has been paid to theoretical issues. Furthermore,
partly because of a lack of theoretical sophistication, the results of
these studies are inconclusive. Earlier studies report extreme crisis
scores (LeMasters, 1957 and Dyer, 1963) while later ones suggest that
the transition is made with relative ease (see especially Hobbs, 1965,
1968). Different methodologies and scoring procedures account for some,
but by no means all, of the differences in degree of adjustment diffi-
culty reported. Besides, no consensus (even across studies by the same
researcher, e.g. those by Hobbs) emerges about the factors associated
with varying degrees of difficulty in making the transition to parent-
hood, except that women report greater degrees of difficulty than do men.
Finally, none of these studies gets at long-term or more global (beyond
the initial crisis) influences of the child on the parents. Some repre-
sentative studies of the transition to parenthood include Beauchamp
(1968); Bogdanoff (1974); Cowan gt_al,, forthcoming; Cronenwett and
Newmark (1974); Dyer (1963); Fein (1976); Hobbs (1965, 1968); Hobbs and
Peck (1976); Hobbs and Wimbish (1977); Jacoby (1969, 1970); LeMasters
(1957); Meyerowitz and Feldman (1966); Russel (1974); Titus (1976);
Tooke (1974); Uhlenberg (1970); Wente and Crockenberg (1976); and Wylie
(1979).

Marital Satisfaction

 

Like the literature on the transition to parenthood, this area is
beset with conceptual as well as methodological problems (for summaries

of these problems see Hicks and Platt, 1970; Laws, 1971; Burr, 1970; and

25

Lively, 1969). The findings are inconclusive about the effects of the
presence or absence of children or their number and spacing on marital
satisfaction (or its equivalents: happiness or adjustment) or stability
(usually defined as the absence of divorce). An additional problem is
the failure of many studies to report wives' and husbands' scores sep-
arately. More generally, the work on marital satisfaction reveals a
number of sexist biases (outlines in Laws' 1971 review). Studies repre-
sentative of this field include Bossard and 8011 (1955); Burgess and
Cottrell (1939); Burr (1970); Chester (1972); Christensen (1968);

Figley (1973); Feldman (1974); Heath gt 11., (1974); Hurley and Palonen
(1967); Luckey (1966); Luckey and Bain (1970); Meyerowitz (1970); Nye
gt 31., (1970); Orden and Bradburn (1969); Pohlman (1968); Renne (1970);
Rollins and Feldman (1970); Thornton (1977).

Childlessness

 

This area includes writings on both the correlates of Childlessness
and those writings which are explicitly antinatalist. Again, results
are often contradictory. More recent studies fail to confirm earlier
findings that link Childlessness to marital instability or personality
problems in the parents. Jessie Bernard (1972), in fact, argues that
childless couples are happier, a theme echoed in the work of Peck (1971).
Other representative studies include Chester (1972); Gustavus and Henley
(1971); Heath 25.21-9 (1974); Hollingsworth (1929); Houseknetch (1977);
Keifert et_gl., (1968); Monahan (1955); Movius (1976); Peck and Sende-
rowitz (1974); Pohlman (1970); P0penoe (1936); Rosenblatt gt 31., (1973);
Silka and Kiesler (1977); Silverman and Silverman (1971); Veevers (1973,
1973a).

26

Loss of a Child

 

Some recent research (Roman, 1977; Brief, 1977; Keshet, 1978) sug-
gests that after divorce non-custodial parents suffer depression and an
acute sense of loss from being deprived of their children. Such studies
have generally focused on fathers, since they are the most likely to be
the non-custodial parent. There is also research on the effect of the
death of a child on parents. By looking at the effects of the lg§§_of
a child, one can gain insight into the effects of their presence. Some
relevant studies of the loss of children by death include Schiff (1977);
Pincus (1974); and Schoenberg gt_gl,, (1975).

Parenthood and Mental Health

 

The work in this area tends to be heavily psychoanalytic and to fall
into two broad categories--empirical or theoretical--with little overlap
between the two. The empirical work is almost exclusively based on case
study data15 and documents the psychic consequences for parents of preg-
nancy, delivery and childrearing (see e.g. Freeman, 1951; Hilgard, 1953;
Kaplan and Blackman, 1969; Lerner et 31., 1967; Melges, 1968; Rettersol,
1968; Tod and Edin, 1964; Towne and Afterman, 1955; Zilborg, 1931).
Virtually all of these studies look at negative, rather than positive,

consequences of the experience of parenting.16 In contrast to the de-

tailed empirical evidence for the negative psychic consequences, the

 

15One exception to the clinical research tendency is Pugh _t_al,'s

(1963) study of rates of mental disease related to childbearing.

16Recently there have been some studies on the positive consequemxs
of parenthood (see e.g. Coley and James, 1976; Cronenwett and Newmark,
1974; and Greenberg, 1974). Unfortunately all these are about men only.
There is also literature on prepared childbirth which suggests positive
consequences for parents.

27

literature about the positive psychic consequences of pregnancy, delivemn
and childrearing is almost totally theoretical and relatively devoid of
concrete data (Anthony and Benedek, 1970; Benedek, 1959; Deutsch, 1945;
Jessner gt 31., 1970). Such writings are general and lack some of the
richness and depth of the writings about negative consequences. Both the
theoretical and the empirical works grow largely out of the psychoanaly-
tic tradition and provide us with the most sensitive and encompassing

approaches to the question of child effects.

The Effects of Offspring on Parents in Nonhuman Species

 

This literature is important in establishing notions about the reci-
procal nature of the parent-offspring relationship (see Rosenblatt gt_al.
1961; and Schneirla et 31., 1963). The bulk of it documents the effects
of the young on the caretaking behavior of adults, e.g. in stimulating
retrieving and lactation (see Beach and Jaynes, 1956; Rosenblatt, 1967,
on rates; Noirot, 1965, and Ressler, 1962 on mice). Some researchers
have noted ways that offspring effects go beyond simply affecting the
caretaking behavior of adults (see Itani, 1958, on offspring “teaching"
adults to eat new foods; Kawai, 1965, on the transmission of sweet
potato washing from the younger to the older members of a troup of
Japanese macaques; and Harper, 1970, on the role of the young in the

adaptive radiation of the species).

The Effects of Human Infants on Parents

 

Much of this work parallels that in the preceding section, and looks
at ways in which infant cues (e.g. smiling) function as releasers for
maternal behavior. See Harper (1970, 1972, 1975); Harper and Bell
(1977); Bell (1968 and 1971); Lewis (1974); Korner (1965); and Rheingold

(1969) for summaries and analysis of these effects.

28

General Works on Directions of Effects

Both Bell (1968, 1971) and Harper (1970, 1971, and 1975) have
written extensively about the need to re-examine the direction of effect
in studies of socialization. Harper (1970: 107) concludes "that empha-
sis on the 'educative' function has led to an underestimation of the role
of offspring behavior in mammalian evolution and an exaggeration of the
significance of parental tuition in mammalian behavioral development.“
Bell (1968) has suggested that biological differences in neonates are
important determinants of the childrearing techniques used by adults,
especially those differences normally attributed to social class member-
ship. Rheingold (1969) proposes that human infants, far from being help-
less, are social from the start and socialize their caretakers far more
than caretakers socialize infants. Brim (1959: 68) notes that "[p]ro-
bably one of the most obvious controlling influences within the family
upon the parent has been most neglected . . . . This is the influence
of the child upon the parent . . . ." Skolnick (1978: 58) contends that
the models used by both behaviorists and Freudians "greatly exaggerate
the power of the parent and the passivity of the child." For additional
discussions of these issues see Erikson (1950), Korner (1965), Devor

(1970), Osofosky (1970), Wrong (1961), and Yarrow_et.al., (1971).

LifeACycle or Adult Growth and Development

Even in this rapidly growing field of research, there is scant
mention of children. What mention there is often lacks grounding in con-
crete data. Cox (1970) and Gurin et_al. (1960) do offer some empirical
data on parental perception of the contribution of children to the
quality of their lives, but,irlneither case is this a major focus of

the study. Some important works in this area include Neugarten (1976);

29

Levinson (1974 and 1978); Gould (1972); Sheehy (1977); and Erikson
(1959, 1963, and 1968). A related, though separate, field of inquiry
concerns what is usually called "the value of children." Some work in
this area does address the concerns of this dissertation (e.g., Arnold,
.gtial., 1976); Espenshade, 1977; Lamannana and Kurtz, 1979; and Hoffman,
1979).

Summary and Implications: The Need for Further Research

 

While the above literature is extensive, little of it addresses the
questions which are guiding the current project. There has been little
systematic attempt to document the range of influence of children on
adult growth and development in non-clinical populations nor to consider

parents' own perceptions. The literature on marital satisfaction and on

 

the transition to parenthood is narrow in scope and often atheoretical,
largely confining itself to correlating the presence or absence (or num-
ber and spacing) of children with some measure of happiness, stability,
or adjustment difficulty. While such literature addresses the questions
raised by this study (how children influence adults), it defines the
areas of influence too narrowly. Studies in the area of mental health
are overwhelmingly based on observation and analysis of pathological
cases. The theoretical work on the positive psychic correlates of child-
bearing suffers from lack of concrete data. The research on human and
nonhuman neonates, although rich in empirical data and methodologically
sophisticated, contributes little to the understanding of adult growth
and development since it focuses almost exclusively on the more narrow

question of the influence of offspring on the caretaking behavior of

 

mothers (and, less commonly, fathers). While the adult growth and devel-

opment (or life cycle) literature comes the closest to dealing with the

30

issues of this proposed study, those parts of it concerned with the

effects of children on parents are largely confined to theoretical spec-

ulation devoid of actual empirical data (see especially Erikson, 1963).
What is needed is research that looks specifically at adult devel-

opment and experience as influenced by children and as seen by parents

themselves.

viewed above, research is needed that will:

1.
2.

Use non-clinical populations;

Look at ways in which the influence of offspring goes
beyond affecting only the caregiving behavior of parents;

Avoid narrow definitions of influence and probe the sorts
of varied influences that parents themselves report as
important, by concentrating on their constructions of the
social reality of parenthood; and

Elucidate similarities and differences between socializa-
tion during and after childhood.

Given the strengths and shortcomings of the literature re-

CHAPTER THREE

METHODOLOGY

This research was designed to generate theory on parents'
perceptions of the influence of children on adults. My review of the
literature led me to believe that hypothesis testing was premature at
this point. Thus I decided against selecting hypotheses from some gen-
eral theory of socialization and attempting to verify their applicabil-
ity to child influences on parents. Additionally, given the difficulties
I observed in other research in this area, I was reluctant to develop an
extensive new theory (by logical deduction for example) prior to con-
ducting the interviews. Such an investigation would have resulted in
an attempt to make real life fit the categories of my theory, and might
have neglected potentially significant aspects of the process as seen

1

by parents. Consequently, I chose what Glaser and Strauss (1967)

 

1Glaser and Strauss (1967: 238) discuss these problems:
A sociologist often develops a theory that embodies,
without his realizing it, his own ideals and the values
of his occupation and social class, as well as popular
views and myths, along with his deliberate efforts at
making logical deductions from some formal theory to
which he became committed as a graduate student. .
These witting and unwitting strategies typically result
in theories so divorced from the everyday realities of
substantive areas that one does not quite know how to
apply them, where they fit the data of the substantive
area, or what the propositions mean in relation to the
diverse problems of the area.

They further note (1967: 2) that what is often taken as grounded theory
generation is actually grounded modifying of theory:

31

32

describe as "the constant comparative method" of deriving grounded
theory, using the data to develop a theory closely related to the phe-
nomena studied.

Although the use of an open-ended format may involve certain dif-
ficulties,2 I chose it for several reasons. First, interviews are the
best way to get at people's understanding of their own behavior, or
their definitions of the situation. I was interested in elucidating

parents' perceptions of the influence which their children had had on

 

them, not in determining whether or not the influences had actually

 

Merton never reached the notion of the discovery of
grounded theory in discussing the 'theoretic functions

of research.’ The closest he came was with 'serendipity':
that is, an unanticipated, anomalous, and strategic find—
ing givesrise to a new hypothesis. This concept does not
catch the idea of purposefully discovering theory through
social research. It puts the discovery of a single hypo-
thesis on a surprise basis. Merton was preoccupied with
how verifications through research feed back into and
modify theory, thus, he was concerned with grounded modi-
fying of theory, not grounded generation of theory.

Finally, Glaser and Strauss (1967: 238) suggest consulting Cicourel
1964

[f]or an analysis of how current sociological methods by
their very nature often result in data and theory that
do not fit the realities of the situation.

2See Nisbett (1977) for an excellent discussion of the pitfalls of
introspection as a method of obtaining data in sociology. especially his
observation that the "reasons" people offer for their behavior are less
reasons than "plausible theories." His reasoning suggests that when
parents say that they have been influenced in such and such a way by
their children, we really know only that they have come up with this as
a "plausible explanation" for behaviors and actions that may have very
different "real" explanations. So, for example, it may be that all
adults remember a lot about their childhoods--those with children simply
think that being around kids has "caused" those memories. I am contend-
ing in this research, however, that whatever the relationship between
the accounts and the reality, a consideration of these "plausible expla-
nations" has merit in its own right. Wenar (1963: 703) in discussing
the limitations of retrospective studies, points to another difficulty;
"[t]hese present accounts of the past cannot qualify as antecedent con-
ditions at all, but merely serve to create an illusion that the past
has been evaluated. This is what we refer to as the illusion of time."

33

occurred. Neither observations nor laboratory experiments could get at
this dimension. Secondly, a primarily open-ended interview format
seemed appropriate, given the exploratory nature of this inquiry.
Levinson's study (1978) is an excellent model of such research. Like
the influences of children on parents, the notion of developmental
stages in adult life is not a new idea. Yet, as Levinson notes (1978:
ix), "despite its wide acceptance in the abstract it had remained
'curiously neglected'.“ One strength of Levinson's study (and also
perhaps its major weakness) is its in-depth focus on a very small num-
ber of subjects, an approach that allows patterns to emerge that might
be cancelled out in a survey format. When I was a research assistant
with one of the "transition-to-parenthood" studies (Jacoby, 1970), I
became sensitized to these dangers. In that study the two hundred
parent interviews which I supervised contained enormous potential for
elucidating the question of the effects of children on their parents.
However, few significant findings emerged; the analytic approach which
used only parents' responses to predetermined categories tended to can-
cel out nearly everything of interest. (For example, three “strongly
agrees“ and three "strongly disagrees" combined to produce a seeming
"neutral” response, leading one to conclude that the transition to
parenthood involved few strong feelings either way.) A major danger in
conducting exploratory research is that of "premature closure . . . of
supposing we know all the questions and are just looking for the
answers" (Dexter, 1970: 134). Some of the failure of the "transition-
to-parenthood" research may lie exactly here. By supposing that they
knew the questions and simply needed to add up the number of "strongly

agrees" in a given population, these researchers often let slip through

34

their fingers the very kinds of influence that parents themselves see
as most significant.

A widespread assumption exists that survey research methods are
applicable to most interview groups. Quite the contrary is true. As
Dexter (1970) notes, one must use different guidelines in interviewing
experts (or, as he calls them, "e1ites"). Yet, "the information we have
is almost entirely about how to conduct interviews with random samples
of some fairly general nonexpert populations by people who are not
themselves experts" (Dexter, 1970: 89). In interviewing the parents,

I used Dexter's guidelines for interviewing elites--methods which make
the most of the possibility that the interviewee may know more than the
interviewer knows how to ask. Among these guidelines are the avoidance

of overly detailed explanations of the focus of the research,3

phrasing
the questions in the most general ways possible, and following up on
leads that weren't part of the original focus (Dexter, 1970: 34-41 and
62).

The issues involved in selecting a sample for the study raised
important theoretical and practical concerns. Given the paucity of
research on this emerging topic, little theoretical basis existed for
identifying significant variables (e.g. ethnicity, age and sex of
parents and children, number of children, family size, religion, labor

force participation, mental health of parents, or social class member-

ship). I conducted a pilot study which failed to uncover significant

 

3Thus, for example, I told parents that my interest was in the way
children influenced their parents' growth and development, leaving it
to them to define “growth and development.“ In this way I hoped to
avoid predisposing them to answer along certain lines and hoped that I
would get their perceptions rather than their best attempt at filling
in a sociologist's categories.

35

differences in the directions I expected: between mothers and fathers,
between parents of older vs. younger children, between parents who
wanted vs. those who did not want children, and between parents who
were employed vs. those who were not. On a more practical level, prob-
lems emerged which complicated my sample choices. Gaining access to
any given group of parents is a substantial problem which severely
limits sampling decisions.4

With the preceeding in mind, I made some decisions which reflected
both my practical and theoretical concerns. First I chose to focus on
the parents of pre-first grade children, more specifically parents who
had children in day cares and nursery schools, largely because of the
relative ease of access compared with parents of school age children.
Despite the even greater ease of locating parents of infants, I decided
not to include them because I suspected (from my work with Jacoby) that
the bulk of their responses would be in the category of influences re-
sulting from accommodating themselves to the routine of having a baby

around. I was more interested in the ways that parents changed as

 

4Parents of infants are the only group easily tracked down, since
birth records are public information. Other groups, though they may be
recorded on accurate, inclusive lists, are of limited use in research
for several reasons. First, public schools will not give researchers
access to their lists of students, making it impossible to get lists of
parents with children of a particular age. Homeroom lists (available
from the children themselves) are available, but I did not use these
for ethical reasons. The schools are willing to send home a notice to
_parents advising them of the project and giving them a number to call,
but they will not provide the researcher with the parents' names. Thus
one gets only those parents who respond to a written notice, with no
chance for a followup with non-respondents. Including only such volun-
teers in the study would have seriously biased the data. While other
groups (Boy Scouts, church groups) are willing to provide lists, there
are difficulties here as well. Despite the probability of a good re-
sponse rate, the groups themselves would be so particular as to result
in even more bias in the resultant data.

36

persons, not so much in how they rearranged their sleeping and eating
schedules.
The questions of age settled, I decided to control for social

5 interviewing only middle and upper-middle class parents. Prac-

class,
tically, this made sense. Travel time was substantially decreased by

my interviewing parents living near the univerSity, and I was able to
use my existing contacts with local child care centers to ensure better
cooperation and to save time in negotiations.

Beyond these two considerations of children's age and parents'
class membership, I wanted to be broad in defining the sample in keeping
with the theory-generating focus of the research. Thus, I hoped to
make use of variations in sex, marital status, length of marriage,

religion, family size, sex and number of children, ethnicity, and par-

ticipation in the labor force

Study Sites

 

Parents for the study were selected from child care centers located
inga Midwest university town with a p0pulation of about 54,000. The
centers, located within a two mile radius of each other, drew families
from the same predominantly middle to upper-middle class geographic
area. The nursery school had been in Operation for 17 years, day care

#1 fbr eight years and day care #2 for six years. All three were

 

5While the literature on child effects on parents gives little
suggestion of the importance of class (Bell, 1977, is an exception) the
very considerable class differences noted in studies of the family (see
e.g. Rubin, 1976; Stack, 1974; and Komorovsky, 1962) prompted my deci-
sion to limit the study by social class. I intend to extend this
research later to include perceptions of working class parents, and I
have begun to make contacts for those interviews.

37

housed in churches, although none required any religious affiliation of
the parents. The nursery school, however, was used by more families
associated with the church in which it was housed than was the case
with either of the day cares. Parents in all three facilities were
quite similar in terms of socioeconomic status, the only noticeable
difference being that day care #2 tended to have more "non-traditional"
(e.g. single-parent) families. A secondary sample of parents with teen~
age children was contacted through the leader of a youth group associ-
ated with the church housing the nursery school. Although this group
differed from all three others in that it was more closely affiliated
with the church, it was selected because of similarities (in geographic
location, in social class, and in child rearing philosophies) with the
nursery school group. The overall response rate was relatively high.
Only five families directly refused. I contacted 83 families from the
nursery school, day care centers, and high school group. Thirty-five
of these had moved or were ineligible because of the oldest child's
age. Another ten families did not respond indicating either refusal

or that they had not received the note (due to illness or having left
the child care center recently). Forty-three families agreed to parti-

cipate resulting in 59 interviews.

Procedures for Contacting Parents

 

Having decided to interview middle class parents with preschool
(not yet in first grade) children, and a secondary group of parents of
teenagers, I explained my project to the directors of three child care
centers and a teen youth group. In each Case the directors granted
permission to contact parents in their groups. Participation was soli-

cited by placing notes requesting only a yes or no answer (see appendix)

38

in the “cubbies” or mail boxes of the children at the day care or
nursery. A letter from my dissertation supervisor explaining the pro-
ject was posted near the entrance at each facility (see appendix).
Parents were asked to return the note to a box in the office. Those
parents not returning their notes were given a second, and, if necessary,
a third one. If these failed to bring a response, I telephoned the
parent at home. This latter was necessary in only three cases. At the
nursery, and to a lesser extent at the day care centers, I was able to
talk directly to some parents who came by while I was delivering the
notes. I contacted the high school parents directly by phone; none
refused to be interviewed (see Table l for response rates).

Originally, the sample for this project was to include equal num-
bers of parents from one nursery school and two day care centers.6 All
three are within a two mile radius and draw children from roughly the
same geographic area. My purpose in including both day care and nursery
parents was to-get a range of parental work patterns. I assumed that
the nursery school group would include families where one parent stayed
home and the day care group would consist primarily of single parent
families or families with both parents employed. During the interviews
I discovered that this was generally true, although the nursery group
did have four families where both parents worked at least part-time,

and some day care families had at least one parent at home nearly

 

6Day care and nursery schools in the town differ in several ways.
Day care centers accept children for longer periods of time, and are
generally seen as a place for children to be while parents work. Nur-
series tend to accept children from 2-3 hours only per day, and are
usually seen as being for "children's sake" rather than as a babysit-
ting arrangement.

39

Table 1. Response Rate

 

 

 

 

 

Day Care
Nursery High School
#1 #2
Total number of families 39 23 15 6
contacted
Number of families 19 13 5 6
interviewed
Number of persons inter- 24 20 8 7
viewed
Number of families moved l6 6 3 0
or ineligible
Number of persons who 0 l O 2
agreed to participate
but were not needed
Number of families that 1 z 7 N/A
did not respond to
the note
Number of families that 3 2 o 0
refused to participate

 

 

 

full-time. The original plan to include equal numbers of parents from
two day care centers had to be abandoned when cooperation at day care
#2 proved difficult to obtain.7 Rather than discard the interviews from
#2 (eight had been completed at that time), I retained them as a check

on my general observations and to sensitize me to idiosyncracies of the

 

7The main problem was that many of the families did not want to be
interviewed because they felt they were not “representative“ (some were
divorced, others co-habiting). In addition, one of the directors of
the center was reluctant to have me be at the day care center when the
parents picked up the children. Thus I did not have an opportunity to
talk with them individually when they picked up the notices as I did in
the other centers.

40

main sample.8 In addition, I interviewed seven parents of teenagers to

help me sort out influences that might be age-specific.9

Sample Characteristics

 

In all, I interviewed 59 parents: 52 with preschool children in a
nursery school or day care center, and 7 with teenagers. My two major

goals in selecting the sample were to obtain (1) homogeneity in class

 

membership and children's ages; and (2) as much diversity as possible
on other variables. The decision to draw the sample from child care
centers and an associated youth group turned out to be an effective
means of attaining both goals.

First, and most important, this was an efficient way of locating
families whose oldest child was not yet in first grade, and a comparable
group of parents of teenagers. Second, this method resulted in a sample
that was almost entirely middle class. Using education and employment
as indicators of class membership, only one person included in the sam-
ple was not clearly middle or upper-middle class. In terms of education,
85 percent of the parents interviewed had at least a bachelors degree,

with nearly half of the total sample holding higher degrees (M.A.,

 

8Day care #2, while still solidly middle class in income, education,
and occupation, tended to attract parents with more radical views on
childrearing, They stressed being non-sexist, and non-racist. I hoped
interviewing these parents would sensitize me to differences (within
class and age groups) related to political and social views, as well as
providing a corrective to any possible carryover to parents of a parti-
cular day care "line" on how parents should be influenced by their
children.

9The parents of the teenagers were selected because their children
had attended youth groups at the same church that housed the nursery
school. Some of the teenagers had attended the same nursery. I hoped
to find parents who shared a similar childrearing style but who had
children of a different age.

41

Ph.D., DVM) (see Table 2). Occupationally, the sample was also largely
upper-middle class, the five exceptions to this including three who
were highly educated (see Table 3).

On other variables (age of parents, marital status, work patterns,
sex, size of family, and religion) I found the hoped-for diversity.

A wide range of family work patterns was evident in the sample,
although virtually all of the men interviewed were employed full-time.
One man was employed part-time, three were students. Paid employment
of women varied sharply by group, with over twice as many of the day
care (as opposed to the nursery) mothers working full- or part-time out-
side the home. Twelve (63 percent) of the nursery school mothers were
at home full-time (none of these were students), compared to only one
of the day care mothers and one of the high school mothers.(See Tables
4 and 5).

Both men and women were represented in the sample. Overall more
women than men were interviewed (71 percent were women), especially in
the nursery and high school groups (see Table 6). I had assumed that
both parents would agree to be interviewed so I neglected to make
special effbrts to ensure this in the early interviews of the nursery
parents. By the time I began work at the day care centers, 1 was more
persistent in getting fathers as well as mothers to participate. In
addition to variations in my own persistence, other factors contributed
to the imbalance. Few fathers picked up children after the nursery
school, while many did so at the day care centers. Thus, more men at
the day care centers, as compared to the nursery school, were likely to
see the note requesting participation in the study. Also, parents in

day care #1 had participated in many more studies than the others and

42

 

 

 

Table 2. Education of Those Interviewed
Day Care
Nursery High School Totals
#1 #2 A

Less than High School ‘ (O) (1) (O) (O) 2%?
High School (0) (l) (O) (0) (21%)
Some College (4) (l) (2) (O) (7)
12%

B.S./B.A. (6) (1) (O) (2) (9)
15%

Some Beyond B.S./B.A. (5) (3) (4) (2) (14)
24%

M.A./M.S. (5) (6) (l) (2) (14)
24%

Ph-D- (2) (5) (l) (1) (9)
15%

Professional Degree: (2) (2) (O) (O) (4)
DVM, LLD, MD 7%

 

 

 

 

 

 

43

Table 3. Employment of Subjects and Spouses:
A Loose Categorization of Types of Occupation

CATEGORY 1. Professionals with Advanced Degrees
Doctor (MD), lawyer, university professor or
instructor, veterinarian, social analyst,
fiscal analyst, urban planner, museum curator,
librarian, engineer, graphic designer, clinical
psychologist, social researcher, social science
consultant, academic advisor at university.

CATEGORY 2. Teachers
Nursery, high school, or elementary school
teacher, school counselor, advisor to a student
newspaper staff, teaching assistant.

CATEGORY 3. Managerial and Business
Management (business and public), stockbroker,
buyer, newspaper photographer.

CATEGORY 4. Clerical and Retail Sales
Miscellaneous: clerk, lab assistant, sales,
sales clerk, secretary, clerk, Optician.

CATEGORY 5. Student

CATEGORY 6. At Home

Women
14

14

Men
23

44

 

 

 

Table 4. Employment Status of Subjects
Nursery Day Care #1 Day Care #2* High School
Women Men Women Men Women Men Women Men
At Home 63% 0% 8% 0% 0% 0% 17% 0%
Non-Student (12) (1)
Student 10.5% 0% 17% 0% 20% 33% 0% 0%
(2) (2) (l) (1)
Part-Time Job 16% 0% 25% 0% 20% 0% 33% 0%
(3) (3) (l) (2)
Full-Time Job 10.5% 100% 50% 100% 60% 66% 50% 100%
(2) (5) (12) (8) (3) (2) (3) (l)

 

 

 

 

 

*Note small overall number

Table 5.

45

Employment Patterns for Families by Group

 

Nursery
Group

Day Care
#1

Day Care
#2

High School
Group

 

Both full-time

Husband full-time and
wife part-time

wife at home
wife in school

wife part-time and
in school

Wife full-time
husband part-time

husband at home
husband in school

husband part—time
and in school

Single mother
full-time

part-time
in school
at home

part-time and in
school *

Single father
full-time

Husband student
wife at home

 

l

10

4

 

 

l

 

l

 

46

 

 

 

Table 6. Sex of Those Interviewed
Day Care
Nursery High School Totals
#1 #2
Women 79% 60% 62% 86% 71%
(19) (12) (5) (6) (42)
Men 21% 40% 38% 14% 29%
(5) (8) (3) (1) (l7)

 

 

 

 

 

 

47

were accustomed to requests for the involvement of both parents. On
another level, the difficulty may have been related to what I sensed as
a reluctance of the nursery mothers to ask their "busy“ husbands to

10 The fact that so many of the women in this group (as

participate.
opposed to the day care groups) were at home all day may have sharpened
the distinction in their minds about the relative worth of their time
compared to that of their husbands. Attempts to generalize from this
study should take the sex imbalance into account.

I was able to obtain a range of parental ages--from late twenties
to early forties in the preschool groups; and from late thirties to
early fifties in the teenage group. Few of the parents, however, were
very young. The majority (60 percent) of the parents in the preschool
group were between 31 and 35, although the second day care group was
somewhat younger than the other two groups. The data indicate that
none of the parents had children before they were twenty and several
had their first child when they were in their thirties (see Table 7).
This may be a crucial variable which should be considered in planning
future studies and in making generalizations from my data.

In terms of marital status, 85 percent of the parents interviewed
were currently married. The nursery group included no divorced or
separated parents, while in the day care groups 25 percent of the

parents were currently divorced. Of those currently married, four of

these were second marriages for one or both partners (see Table 8).

 

101 did find some support for this hunch: of the five fathers who
agreed to be interviewed, four had wives working full- or part-time.
Only one of the 12 with wives at home agreed to be interviewed.

48

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table 7. Age of Those Interviewed
Day Care
Nursery High School
#1 #2
21-25 -- -- -- --
26-30 25% 10% 50% --
(6) (2) (4)
31-35 67% 55% 37.5% --
(16) (11) (3)
36-40 8% 10% 12.5% 29%
(2) (2) (l) (2)
41-45 -- 15% -- 43%
(3) (3)
46-50 -- -- -- 14%
(1)
51-55 -- -- -- 14%
(1)
Information 0
Missing " I3? -' '-
Average 32 34 31 43
Table 8. Marital Status of Those Interviewed
Day Care
Nursery High School Totals
#1 #2
Married 100% 75% 75% 72% 85%
(24) (15) (6) (5) (50)
Divorced 0% 25% 25% 28% 15%
(0) (5) (2) (2) (9)

 

 

 

 

 

 

49

The sample also included considerable variation by religion.
Because of the location of the child care facilities in Protestant
churches, I was initially concerned that the sample would miss parents
of other faiths. However, although the largest proportion of inter-

viewees were Protestant (39 percent), a nearly equal sized group ex-

pressed no religious preference (27 percent).

Additionally, both

Catholic (19 percent) and Jewish (10 percent) parents were included.

A smaller number (3) expressed adherence to Eastern-type religious

beliefs (e.g., the Mahariji) (see Table 9).

 

 

 

Table 9. Religion of Those Interviewed

Day Care
Nursery High School Total

#1 #2
Catholic 17% 30% 13% 0% 19%
(4) (6) (1) (ll)
Protestant 42% 25% 13% 100% 39%
(10) (5) (1) (7) (23)
Jewish 4% 15% 25% 0% 10%
(1) (3) (2) (6)
Eastern 0% 0% 38% 0% 5%
(3) (3)
Other 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%
None 38% 30% 13% 0% 27%
(9) (6) (l) (16)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Predictably, there was little variation in the number of children
per family in the preschool groups. Other than one nursery school
family with three children, the others had one or two children. Only
children accounted for 60-88 percent of the families in the day care

groups as compared to only 25 percent of those in the nursery school

50

group. The narrow range in number of children may be explained in
several ways. In the first place, families with more than two children
are becoming increasingly rare in the population at large, especially
for this social class and age range. Additionally, the costs and logis-
tics of using day care centers or nursery schools increase with family
size. Finally, my requirement that the oldest child not yet be in

first grade made it still more unlikely that any family would have two
children now, even if they eventually had more children. Large families
eege represented in the teenage group--two families included four

children, one had six (see Table 10).

Table 10. Number of Children per Family

 

 

 

Day Care _
Nursery High School
#1 #2
One 25% 60% 88.5% --
(6) (12) (7)
Two 71% 40% 12.5% 57%
(2) (8) (1) (4)
Three , 4%
‘ (1)
Four 29%
(2)
Five
Six 14%
(1)
Average #
Family 1.8 1.4 1.1 3.4

 

 

 

 

 

51

The Nature of the Interview

 

With several exceptions, the interviews were done in the parents'
homes. Four preferred to be interviewed at their business offices; one
said the church lounge would offer more privaoythan her home with four
teenagers; and one met me for lunch at a restaurant near his office. I
told parents I wanted to interview people alone, and, except for the
presence of children, this was possible for all but three interviews.
In one case the women's mother came in briefly and then left. In the
second the man's wife was in the next room off and on. A third case
involved the presence of assorted relatives throughout the interview.
In taking notes, I always paid attention to whether or not children
were present during the interview and to their influence on the situ-
ation. Most interviews lasted one hour, although some lasted as little
as one-half hour and others as long as two hours. In none of the cases
was an interview terminated because a parent did not want to continue.
In fact, most parents reported enjoying the experience: some felt it
gave them a chance to step back and evaluate their lives; others appre-
ciated having someone besides a preschooler to talk to. Most were
pleased that social scientists were finally looking at something the
parents had already noticed, glad for once to shift their attention
from how they influenced their children to how they themselves were
influenced. ‘

All interviews were preceded by a short period of conversation
about children, the weather, work, or whatever interested the parent.
Then I made a short statement noting that sociologists generally look
at how parents socialize their children but ignore influence flowing

in the opposite direction. Following this, I asked a general question:

52

“Can you tell me something about how you, as a person, have been
influenced by your children?" Parents' responses to this first question
varied in length from 10 to 60 minutes. I used various probes to en-
courage them to expand on this general question before I introduced the
more specific questions. The more specific questions were aimed at
getting information in certain categories derived from analysis of the
pilot study data. All interviews were tape-recorded with the parents'
permission; only one respondent asked that parts of the interview DEE
be taped. A short personality inventory (The Myers-Briggs Type Indica-
tor) was administered at the conclusion of the interview with the first
24 parents. This is not part of the dissertation, but will be used fbr
another study I am preparing on variations in interview response. (See

appendix for the interview schedule and the Myers-Briggs information.)

The Process of Data Analysis

 

In analyzing the data my goal is to generate grounded theory that
will be a bridge "between the theoretical thinking of sociologists and
the practical thinking of people concerned with the substantive area"
(Glaser and Strauss, 1967: 241). My criteria (following Glaser and
Strauss) were that the resultant theory be analytic and sensitizing;
"abstract enough to designate the properties of concrete entities, not
entities themselves," while at the same time "vividly sensitizing" for
persons in the substantive area (in my case for parents themselves).

I transcribed the first twelve of the taped interviews in their
entirety. From this I was able to determine which parts of an inter-
view were relevant to the research question. Subsequent transcriptions

included only these parts. I omitted side discussions about the

53

weather, holidays, work and school, as well as any repetitive elabora-
tions on a single theme. In each case I made notes to myself (especi-
ally about the latter) for future interpretation of the abbreviated
transcripts. I also kept notes on observations made while I was at
each house and later reflections on the interview.

Initially, I attempted to code the data using my original inter-
view questions (see Appendix A), and a loose scale indicating the degree
to which this person found parenthood an expanding or a diminishing ex-
perience. This proved unmanageable. First, I could not use the scale
for a variety of reasons--mostly because few parents fell into an
either/or situation. Secondly, my questions did not provide a suitable
method for categorizing the responses of the parents. This was not sur-
prising since I had deliberately used open—ended questions designed to
tap themes I could not have known in advance of the research. In anti-
cipation of this, I kept an on-going list of emerging themes throughout
the interview process.

The analytic strategy I used is similar to Glaser and Strauss'
"constant comparative method.“ This method "is not designed (as
methods of quantitative analysis are) to guarantee that two analysts
working independently with the same data will achieve the same results;
it is designed to allow, with discipline, for some of the vagueness and
flexibility that aid the creative generation of theory“ (Glaser and
Strauss, 1967: 103).

I reread the completed transcriptions numerous times to identify
recurring e[_unusual themes. The first step was to look for clusters
of responses most frequently or most emphatically mentioned by parents.

Some of the themes I noticed during the interview process held up here

54

(e.g., parenthood forcing parents to make decisions, to come to terms
with issues), others did not (male/female differences in involvement,
patterned differences between parents who felt expanded vs. diminished
by parenthood). My selection of theme was based on two criteria: (1)
what the parents said most often and/or most vehemently, especially
items which were (2) as much eplige popular and sociological notions of
adult socialization as possible (i.e., this is because I wanted to open
up new areas of inquiry). This process of sifting and weighing re-
sulted in the categories listed in Appendix B.

I then went through all the transcripts and coded everything that
fell into one of those categories and made master files of all the
examples in each category. The process, though a tedious one, ensured
a close correspondence between the emerging theory and the parents'
actual perceptions of the change-producing experiencing experiences of
parenthood. At first I compared each new example to the ones before
it: How were they alike? Different? Did they really represent a
common theme? Gradually, I developed more abstract notions of the pro-
perties of the categories and could measure each new example against
these emerging notions. In the process, some earlier examples were
dropped and others were added as I clarified the content of each cate—
gory (at some points this involved narrowing, at others,especially near
the end, generalizing the content). From this point on I went back and
forth between the master files and more library research in order to
piece together a coherent way of making sense of the parental percep-
tions I had gathered.

In developing the analysis, I kept rearranging the themes in rela-

tion to each other, searching for the best way to express their

55

underlying similarity. Somehwere in the middle of this process, I went
back to the literature to reread what had been written about ways adult
socialization differs from socialization in childhood. I took Brim's
model as representative of such attempts, examining the fit between that
and parental perceptions of change brought about by having children. My
decision to focus on "situations” emerged as I noted that many aspects
of the changes described by parents were at variance with Brim's model.
Brim was, I presumed, describing adult socialization in general (though
he did list several situations in which his model would not hold, e.g.,
mental hospitals or battlefield experiences). That my findings fit his
model so poorly, suggested to me that something out of the ordinary was
going on. Since I had no reason to believe my sample differed from the
adults he had in mind, the difference had to lie in some structural
variable outside the individuals involved. That variable appeared to

be situational. Thus the dominant themes in parents' perceptions of the
changes resulting from parenthood seem best portrayed as a series of
situations to which parents are routinely exposed (even when they prefer

not to be), and which non-parents can easily avoid.12

 

12Becker (1964: 41) also sees situations as the key to understand-
ing change in adult life. "The process of situational adjustment, in
which individuals take on the characteristics required by the situations
they participate in, provides an entering wedge into the problem of
change.“

 

PART II

BEING AROUND CHILDREN

56

CHAPTER FOUR

"THEY WOULD LIKE TO BUT THEY'RE TOO BIG":
ACCESS TO THE WORLD OF CHILDHOOD

We are often reminded in our analytic
work that the child lives on in the man
and woman. Life itself bears witness

to such survival. When my daughter
Miriam was a little girl and we took her
to the dentist for the second time, she
crawled under a desk and no amount of
persuasion could overcome her anxiety.
Her mother appealed to her in vain, "Do
you think that a lady would crawl on all
fours under a desk in a dentist's
office?" My little girl answered, " hey
would like to but they're too big.“
(Reik, 1948: 390)(emphasis mine)

 

Introduction

 

Sherlock Holmes observed that the most ordinary events, not the
most bizarre, are the hardest to explain. This seems true of the some-
how obvious observation that adults often yearn to be unadult. Reik
(1948: 390) suggests that even children know that adults would like to
re-enter the world of childhood with its special joys and protections.
Less often explored are the meepe of attaining such access and the pos-
sible contributions to adult life of having access to the world of
childhood.

This chapter explores how parenthood provides such access by
placing adults in situations that ellee_and fepee them into the world

of childhood. Two aspects of such access seem central to my inquiry.

57

58

First it provides opportunities for adults to revisit earlier stages of
their own development, a chance to work on the earlier issues and to
strengthen the gains made at earlier times. Second, this access may be
an important ingredient in adult creativity by giving parents access to
the trans-schematic perceptions of children. The interview data provide
examples of both processes.

Certainly being with children is not the eply_way for adults to
obtain access to the world of childhood; it is simply the easiest route
and the hardest one to resist. One of the parents I interviewed noted:
"They give it to you ready made.“ Access may also be provided in other
ways. Participation in sports has traditionally been an acceptable
avenue for adult men. In the seventies participation in sports by
adults increased rapidly, ostensibly for health reasons. What is inter-
esting with respect to my topic is that the increase coincided with a
decline in the birth rate. In the sixties and seventies, Esalen type
groups provided adults with opportunities to be "honorary children" for
certain delimited time periods eeg_for a fee. I suspect it is exactly
that opportunity--to obtain access to the world of childhood--that
accounts for much of the success of such groups. Psychoactive drugs
are also a means of temporarily eschewing the responsibilities of adult
life and seeing the world in a new, often child-like, light. Member-
ship in adult fantasy groups (Trekkies, The Society for Creative Ana-
chronism, and the Tolkein Society) may also function primarily to permit
an entree into the forbidden world of childhood.

With the gains of adulthood come losses. These losses vary accord-
ing to one's place in the class structure, one's sex, one's culture and

one's place in history. For many contemporary middle class adults, one

59

aspect of these losses involves having relatively little access to
those parts of the self that are physical, intense, irrational, emotion-
al and spontaneous. Being an adult, at least in this society and at
this time, means and requires being able to be rational, detached and
controlled.1
The loss of consistent access to the world of emotion, intensity,
irrationality, spontaneity, and physicalness engenders ambivalence in
most adults.2 Being older and having a bigger body only partially cover

up the child within. For contemporary middle class Americans, being

around children is one of the easiest routes into the world of

 

1Philip Slater (1970: 24-25) traces out the sources and implications
of such losses. He and others have written about the psychic costs of
the sorts of internalized controls typical of contemporary middle class
Americans. One of these costs is the inability to give oneself over
entirely to an emotion:

The point of this long digression, however, is that internali-
zation is a mixed blessing. It may enable one to get his head
smashed in a good cause, but the capacity to give oneself up
completely to an emotion is almost altogether lost in the pro-
cess. Where internalization is high there is often a feeling
that the controls themselves are out of control--that emotion
can not be expressed when the individual would like to express
it. Life is muted experience filtered, emotion anesthetized,
affective discharge incomplete. Efforts to shake free from

‘ this hypertrophied control system include not only drugs, and
sensation-retrieval techniques . . . but also confused attempts
to reestablish external systems of direction and control--the
vogue currently enjoyed by astrology is an expression of them.
The simplest technique, of course, would be the establishment
of a more authoritarian social structure, which would relieve
the individual of the great burden of examining and moderating
his own responses. He could then become as a child, light-
hearted, spontaneous, and passionate, secure in the knowledge
that others would prevent his impulses from causing harm.

2See also Schachtel's (1959) excellent discussion of ambivalence
regarding memories of the experience of being a child. Ehrmann (1968:
49) in his analysis of play, cites the ambivalence of adult nostalgia
for childhood.

6O

childhood--a world long closed or perhaps never fully experienced in
the first place. A librarian with five children talked about her depar-
ture from and return to that world:

When you first see them examining things, and it's so mag-
nificent . . . when they first look at a flower or a blade
of grass . . . they taste it, smell it . . . and I do things
like that . . . . I remember as a teenager I didn't do any-
thing like that . . . I was too interested in myself . . . .
You're so busy pursuing whatever it is you're pursuing that
you don't look around you, but children still do . . . and
[so as a parent] you have to look.

Unwillinngxiles

 

Above all, children seemed to provide for their parents an entree
in a forbidden world. While we may imagine we outgrow and lose inter-
est in that forbidden world as we mature, considerable evidence exists
to suggest that we are to some extent, simply unwilling exiles. The
pull of that world remains, but we resist being drawn in. The parents
I interviewed talked about three reasons they resisted being drawn into
that world: a feeling that they were "wasting time," a fear of looking
like fools, and the possibility that they might even be arrested. This
latter suggests a new perspective on "status offenders." Just as
engaging in certain activities (drinking, staying out late, running
away from home) and frequenting certain places (pool halls and rail-
road yards) have been considered offenses for children but not for
adults, certain e§he§_activities (swinging and sliding at the park
alone) and locations (parks, zoos and children's matinee movies) are
considered off-limits to adults without children. Police may feel jus-
tified in watching more closely adults frequenting such places or engag-

ing in such activities. Facetious signs at kids' movies and amusement

61

parks ("adults must be accompanied by a kid") or at the Honolulu 200
("Ask about our rent-a-kid program") testify to the strength of these
powerful, though rarely explicit prohibitions.

The interview data betray the deep ambivalence parents felt: the
seductiveness of experiencing the world like a child versus the advan-
tages and obligations of adult forms of experience. In a similar vein,
Schachtel (1959) and Proust (1964) explore the ambivalence we feel
toward deeply remembering our childhoods--the simultaneous attraction
and danger we feel in the face ofthese close-up memories.

Access to the world of childhood may enhance adult growth and ex-
perience in two very different ways. First, access provides a chance
to revisit earlier developmental stages; and second, it may be causally
related to creativity in adult life. Adult access to the world of child-
hood may be important in other ways, for example, simply as a source of
relaxation for adults. The two topics I've chosen to discuss seem,
however, to be the most salient to the parents I interviewed, as well

as linking up with theoretical literature.

Routes of Access

 

The interview data contain many examples of ways parenthood pro-
vides access to the world of childhood. This chapter has thus far

focused on an analysis of the contributions of access (to adult creati-

 

vity and to re-experiencing earlier developmental stages). However,

for an understanding of the routes of this access, we must turn tempo-
rarily from these two concerns and explore the descriptions offered by
parents. They cited three major ways in which access to the world of

childhood comes about.

62

First, being a parent gives one a chance to do things adults
usually don't, and normatively shouldn't, do: like swinging on swings,
watching cartoons, going down a slide, losing one's temper, and experi-
encing feelings adults don't usually experience. Second, being a parent
gives one a chance to experience reality from a child's perspective: a
different time sense, increased intensity. Third, being a parent gives

one a chance to remember one's own childhood.

Access to Things Adults Usually Don't and Normatively Shouldn't Do

 

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, children provide easy access
to a world generally closed to adults. The extent and importance of
this access varied among the parents I interviewed. For example, some
simply mentioned that they did things they would not have otherwise
done. In all cases, though, children provided what a university pro-
fessor, the father of two teenagers described as "an entree into doing
some childish things." For example, some went to places they would not
have gone otherwise--to circuses, zoos, and parks. They played more
and had a chance to act like a child. Others watched movies and TV
shows meant for Children like "Candleshoe" or "Wild Kingdom."

Other parents mentioned not only the mere fact of the access, but
the learning, enjoyment, and even the joy of such access. For some the
learning was of an academic nature. They read encyclopedias and science
books they might otherwise have ignored:

I would never have read National Geographic but by ten-

year-old was really interested in animals so I learned

from it.
--mother of school age children (from the pilot study)

 

For others what they learned was how to have "pure fun.“ Playing with

their children, they learned to play themselves. As the children got

63

older they sometimes taught parents new sports, as this 37-year-old
mother of teenage boys relates:

I'm starting to learn to play at 37 . . . . In positive

ways recently I've become more athletic . . . joined a

women's softball team. [My younger son] is extremely

helpful and supportive, he teaches me how to do it.

Some found enjoyment in playing board games with their children or in
watching the kinds of things only children generally watch. A librarian,
a mother of five, was representative of many others:

I enjoy many of the things they enjoy, some of the television

programs . . . when they were small I enjoyed watching some

of the cartoons they watched because I found them funny.

Another parent noted that adult movies leave you "just a mental and
physical wreck." She welcomed the excuse of her child to go to kids'
movies.

For many others, the access provided by children was more than a
diversion, more than simple enjoyment. It was a source of intense joy
and wonder, as a university professor, a father of two preschoolers,
described:

. . . suddenly cause you have a kid you have a license to

do all these things again. And that's fun, that's really

_ terrific! . . . One of the good things, the greatest joys

of having kids is that you can be a kid again, you're sud-

denly allowed to do things that when you're grown-up you're

no longer supposed to do, you know, just simple things like

swinging, going down a slide . . . . and suddenly Christmas

is Christmas again. You know, you remember Christmas as a

kid was a great joy, and then it got sort of dull, cause the

miracle had gone out of it, yeah, and then suddenly you have

kids yourself, and oh boy, it's just a miracle to them, you

know and then you can enjoy it that way.

This sense of joy and wonder was especially evident in some of the
interviews. The whole demeanor of some parents changed as they recounted
times they had acted like children. A mother of four had been talking

in a barely audible voice for half an hour. Her own background, she

64

said, was emotionally deprived--she felt very repressed and didn't
remember her own childhood as a fun time. But, as she began to talk
about learning to be a child by watching her own children play and by

beginning to play herself, her voice came alive and increaseiin volume:

"You can swing on the swings and go down the slide even!!"3

The recurrent theme throughout was that children provide a "license"
--they let you "be a kid and get away with it."

I think I've maintained an ability to have fun, to see things
from a young person's perspective . . . . When the kids were
into that sort of thing I used to just love to catch polywogs
with them, you know, the kind of stuffeyou need an excuse to
ge_. . . . It's too bad you need a kid to do those kinds of
things, but that's the way it is. (emphasis mine)

--a school counselor, the mother of two teenage children

 

And so, in a way, I like it now, again now that they're big-
ger cause you can be a kid and get away with it . . . just
walking slowly looking at flowers, even things about animals
or birds you know, things that you knew before but you for-
got that you knew. (emphasis mine)

--divorcee, a store clerk with two young children

 

Play is one of the most important ways in which the learning of
primates differs from that of other animals (see Jane Lancaster, 1975).
It provides the basis for the complex sorts of learning necessary for

a creature born with few instincts. To the extent that adults are now

 

3I had expected to find the most mention of the chance to re-
experience childhood among those parents whose own childhoods had been
especially happy. Also I had imagined that it would be women who were
most drawn in by the wonder of re-experiencing the world as a child. In
part, I was wrong on both counts. I assumed that those with unhappy
childhoods would be the most defended against re-experiencing that
world. In fact, almost the opposite was true. Perhaps this is because
for those with happy childhoods the wonder of that world is no sur-
prise; while those whose childhoods were dim and unamazing (or if amaz-
aing so painful as to have been forgotten) are surprised to come upon it
for the first time. In a similar vein, the amazement expressed by
fathers as opposed to mothers may reflect the differential access to
the world of emotions and fantasy afforded men and women. The child's
world is the Opposite of the rational world of male work and provides
an Opportunity to escape male gender role constraints.

65

required to remain flexible and able to learn things throughout life
rather than just in childhood, to that extent children provide valuable

services for adults by enlarging their capacity for play.

A Chance to Experience Reality from a Different Point of View

Parents reported three sorts of perceptual changes resulting from
access to the activities of childhood. They felt younger or felt they
saw the world as young people did; they experienced time and space
differently; they felt a sense of wonder. The examples they gave were
in some cases similar to reports of perceptual changes resulting from
taking drugs.

In general, the respondents spoke of ways that having a child miti-
gated the ossifying tendencies of adulthood and allowed one to feel like
a child:

You start getting older and older and you kind of get your

mind set . . . . [Having a child] kind of helpsyou enjoy life

and, you know, be like a kid.

--mother of a three-year-old boy (from the pilot study)

I found that having [a child] has helped that . . . especially

at [my age] . . . it's put me in touch with very young persons,

and part of that . . . brings out in me my own youth . . . and

_ my own attachments to life and regeneration.

--a university professor, 41 years old, the mother of a

four-year-old girl

More specifically, some parents mentioned experiencing time in a

4

new light, gaining a new perspective on the here and now. A mother of

two young boys told me:

 

4This shift of time perspective that comes with play is described
by Eugen Fink, a German philosopher, in a translation of Oase des Glucks.

 

Gedanken zu einer Ontologie des Spiels in Game, Play and Literature
(Ehrmann, 1968: 21-22):

In the autonomy of play action there appears a possibility of
human timelessness in time. Time is then experienced, not as
a percipitate rush of successive moments, but rather as the

 

 

66

When you have time, when you stop all those adult things and

go through the day like a child, with nothing else to do . . .
you feel a lot more like a child . . . being able to play, go
outside and play basketball with them or go outside and just
say, 'I'm not going to do anything . . . for the next three or
fbur hours.‘ The kinds of things you think of to kill that much
time.

In the process of being with their children, some parents saw and
were able to experience for themselves different styles of encountering
the world. A mother of two preschoolers told me that children "just
take things in without any attached value to them, they just soak them
up." Another mother told me ". . . you can behave more as a child and
you can be more childlike yourself." A divorced woman, the mother of
two young children said:

. . going to feed the ducks . . . where before I wouldn't

have had the patience. You know, I get there and, you know,

I gotta go, you know, I gotta keep on the move . . . now

[with the kids] you can look at the sky and watch the clouds

and pick things out . . . and I guess in a way it lets you

be a little kid even though you're big . . . there's times
when you can be a little kid cause you're a parent.

 

one full moment that is, so to Speak, a glimpse of eternity.
The child still has this experience of time more than other
men, since he engages primarily in play, as Rilke says:

Oh hours of childhood,
when behind the figures was more than merely the past,
and before us not the future.
Of course we were growing, and sometimes we were eager
to grow up soon, half in order to please those
who had nothing else besides being grown-up,
and yet, in going our own way, we were happy
dealing with things that endure, and we stood there
in the region between the world and the play thing,
in a place created in the beginning
for a pure act . . .
(4th Diuno Elegy)

For the adult, however, play is a strange oasis, an enchanted
rest-spot in his agitated journey and never-ending flight.
Play affords a type of temporal present . . . . Play is acti-
vity and creativity--and yet it is close to eternal things.
Play interrupts the continuity and purposive structure of our
lives; it remains at a distance from our usual mode of
existence. (emphasis in text)

67

Finally, for others, being around children provoked in them a
sense of wonder.5 The mother of two preschoolers explained:

I guess sort of seeing things through my children's eyes

. . . the sense of wonder . . . they come on it cold and

they think of the most ingenious things.

This new apprehension of reality, together with the sense of wonder
it engendered, came to several parents in the process of reading to their
children. At first this seemed contradictory to me; reading is such an
adult activity, so rational, so controlled. Yet, for children, being
read to is none of these. Three parents made special note of the sense
in which stories were not just rational adult-world commonalities but
rather magical events with a life of their own. The mother of a three-
year-old boy told me:

I brought [some of my old picture books from mylmther's]

for [him] to read and I can look at those books and I can

see exactly how I saw them . . . a picture book to a kid

it's like movies and it's real, you know, the animals are

creeping around . . . a whole 'nother world. When I started

reading those old books that were mine to him I remember
how I saw them and it was really like it was real.

 

5The comments of several parents betrayed the ambivalence many felt
as they entered the world of childhood through their children. One, the
mother of two preschoolers, made clear by her tone of voice as well as
by her words that such opportunities were pee_the highlight of her day:

I have heard a lot of pe0ple say, 'Oh, to see the world
through a child's eyes,‘ and it is fun, but it is ge£_the
highlight of my day to see [my daughter] ecstatic over a
butterfly.

Another mother (who had quit working to stay home with her two children)
was quick to add that while playing with her children did change her
sense of time (she is the one quoted on the previous page), it was no
way for an adult to go through life. She seemed almost embarassed to
have admitted to floating through a day like that. She, like other
parents, was ambivalent about the extent to which children extended the
boundaries of permissible action.

68

Her own analysis was that it was like tripping on LSD, that it gave her
access to a world she had forgotten, and that that access helped her be
a better story reader to her young son. Suddenly she realized what the
world of story books looks like to a child. Another mother working on
the final stages of her dissertation was similarly influenced:

It's opened my eyes to, or I've relearned or enjoyed fairy

tales . . . enough so that I have ended up buying fairy

tale books for myself.
A professor of religious studies, the father of teenage children, talked
with me about what he had learned from reading stories to his son's ele-
mentary school class:

I learned how to tell stories. I had always been outside.

I learned to move inside the story. I used to 'shred' the

stories [by giving an analysis instead of reading]. now I

know how to trust the story. Adults feel they have to apol-

ogize for 'just' listening to a story.
This man had been "explaining" scripture to adults for years--analyzing,
examining, 'shredding'. Suddenly, by seeing the power of a really good
story for a child, he saw the power of the immediate experience rather
than a detached analysis for adults as well. He saw something about

how a child experienced the reality of stories and was able to incor-

porate that into his work with adults.

Remembering One's Own Childhood

 

Children took parents back to their own childhoods in many ways.
The most external, direct way in which parenthood prompts remembering
is by the opportunities it provides for discussing one's past. Couples
who have or are about to have a child have more occasions to discuss
theh'own childhoods with each other than those who do not. The push

here is both from practical concerns (How was I raised? How were you

69

raised? How were we disciplined and how do we feel about that now?)
and from a simple sharing of experiences.

Children provide an occasion for pulling up things that may have
been forgotten. A university professor with two preschoolers said:

My wife and I talk lots about when we were that age and when

we were little what we did . . . things that you haven't re-

membered and emotions that you had.
Many parents returned to their childhood experiences for use in making
decisions about their own children. A lawyer told me:

My wife and I have discussed in raising our child the way

we were raised . . . [My wife] works . . . neither of our

mothers worked . . . . I had never given any thought to the

relative merits of a working or a non-working mother and I

never would have.

Besides talking to each other and to their own parents about their
memories, parents also talked to their children and grandchildren. A
mother of teenagers said:

Well, sometimes I tell them about what it was like when I
was little, what I did . . . .

My own grandmother called such tales "ancient history"--the little
stories about her girlhood that we loved to hear. The parents I inter-
viewed noted that their children enjoyed this "ancient history":

[I] tell [my daughter] about my past . . . she always finds
it interesting.

In other cases the recounting of the past was less for entertainment and
more designed to teach children lessons. Similar to the fabled "when-
I-was-your-age I walked five miles to school," such stories were designed
to preserve a past and/or teach a lesson. One mother told me:

I tell her more about my background . . . what her heritage

is . . . I'm not a social climber . . . in a way I'm trying
to tell her, '1ook at what we've lost.‘

70

Many of these stories seemed similar to "war" and "operation"
stories. In fact one mother of teenagers said, "Well, sometimes we tell
our old war stories to the kids." As such they probably serve some of
the same functions. They remind the world (here the children) and your-
self of your own worth, bravery, brilliance, tolerance and/or suffering.

Children also provide the occasion for internal dialogues. First,
they involve parents in deliberate efforts at remembering the past as
an aid to present thinking or decision-making about oneself as a parent.
This will be discussed in later chapters. Parents said it made them
think more about their childhoods in order to evaluate the memories
and use them to help them become better parents. Seeing a problem a
child had, made some parents try to remember how they themselves had re-
solved that, uncovering in the process some uncomfortable memories,
while giving one clues to a better understanding of their own present.

A working mother with a four-year—old daughter explained:

Seeing the kinds of issues that [my daughter] deals with now

makes me think that I must have been dealing with issues--

not very consciously--also, way back then and gives me a

sense of how far back stuff I'm working on now goes.

A father made similar observations:

Knowing now what kids go through at ages two, three and four

. . . having watched [my daughter] . . . you begin to wonder

how did I as an individual work through that? Which raises

a lot of interesting questions, ones which would never occur

without [bringing up kids].

The second kind of internal dialogue was the kind that just popped
up in the process of being around children who are like one once was.

Unlike those mentioned earlier these were spontaneous rather than the

result of conscious deliberate effort. These seemed to come about in

71

6

several ways: by seeing oneself in the child or by noticing the child

doing, thinking or feeling something the parent had done, thought or
felt. In both cases the memory usually came as a surprise or a shock--
it was unexpected and often concerned something long-forgotten. Unlike
the more deliberate recall, these memories were more often detailed and
Specific--pointing to some unique experience rather than being "conven-
tionalized" or "cliched" (see Schachtel, 1959, for an elaboration on
this). Thus parents remembered doing particular things that their own
children were doing now:

Remembering how I had my hair long when I was a little girl

and what pony tails were like and the games that I played

and how my mother used to put Queene Anne's lace in food

coloring . . . .

--mother of two preschool girls

She'll come home singing a song and I'll suddenly join in--

it's a song that I haven't sung since I was five years old.

--34-year-old mother of two preschoolers

Most things [my son] does trigger memories for me . . . how

it was to get a dog.

--father of a five-year-old boy
Parents noted that most of these memories were of "fairly small things.“
Here a university professor, the father of two girls, is speaking:

Yeah, all those things bring back vivid memories . . . you

can just remember just little incidents in your life that

really are fairly small things, like when you learned to

tie your shoes . . . events like when you wet your pants

in school . . . naps . . . teachers . . . . You never think

of them until you have children and then the memories come

back.

Such small things carried with them feeling tones that seem not to
be evoked in ordinary adult life:

Oh yes, when she was first starting to walk . . . I had a

lot of really strong feelings about what it was like as a

child to see things.
--mother of a four-year-old girl

 

6See the chapter on "Close Up Mirrors" for an expansion on this.

72

It's kind of a strange feeling to see things happening again

. . . [like] remembering an old movie, and remembering similar
things happening to you . . . [my daughter] got a new bike--
remembering that fear of someone letting go of the back seat
of the bike.

--mother of two preschoolers

 

Things like that may make you remember specific instances
when you and your parents were interacting like when you were
sick like if you had an earache . . . you get those sorts of
flashbacks.

--father of a three-year-old boy

Thus much of the remembering had less to do with actual behavior or
words and more to do with feelings and emotions and with "nagging ques-
tions.“ A mother reported:

It started when I was pregnant with [my daughter] I guess.

I just started thinking back--no, not even thinking back

. . . [but] feeling back, you know, certain ways that I felt
in my own childhood.

The father of a four-year-old girl explained:

Not really memories . . . . [more like] occasional flashes
here or there of 'Hey, I remember that thought' . . . I
don't remember my behavior when I was her age--I remember
questions I had that were nagging me.

Finally, similarities between themselves and their children pro-
vided much of the impetus for remembering one's children. A university
professor, the father of two told me:

The thing that I dislike most about kids is when you see

them doing things that you disliked in yourself when you

were that age . . . . I don't want to fail and [my daughter's]
exactly that way . . . . I find it intensely annoying, be-
cause I know myself how that limited some of my growth.

A mother was taken back to her past by watching her children:

In a sense too when you have children you see yourself . . .

you see them going through the same kinds of things you re-

member going through, the same sorts of anguish and a same

happiness . . . and . . . you feel a sense of reliving your
e . . . .

73

Creativity and Access to the World of Childhood

 

Contact with one's childhood--with the world of children--also
seems to have a bearing on creativity. In an exhaustive study of adult
geniuses, Edith Cobb (1959) discovered a common thread in all their
1ives--a11 had some tie, some bridge to their own childhoods. Her thesis
is that genius in adults involves the ability to return in imagination
to the early parts of one's life. Schachtel (1959) makes similar claims
for the importance of memory. He, like Cobb, identifies creativity in
adults with access to "trans-schematic experience" which is characteris-
tic of childhood. Paul Shepard (1977) expanding on Cobb's work, feels
that it may be the remembrance of the very landscape of childhood that
makes adult development possible. Thus, being around children and con-
sequent return to one's own childhood may not only mend that which was
torn, but may also be the very fabric of adult creativity and integrity.
Shepard cites the "walkabout" of Australian aborigines as a case in
point.7 In my interviews parents spoke of revisiting the landscapes of
their childhood, both in reality and in imagination, once they had
children--children provided the excuse for this visiting of old neigh-
borhoods and telling of old stories. Shepard and Cobb maintain that

creativity in adulthood thrives on, indeed demands, a connection to

 

one's own childhood. Although Shepard, Cobb and Schachtel do not

 

7Shepard (1977: 19) writes: "In going on the pilgrimage called
walkabout the Aborigine travels to a succession of named places, each
familiar from childhood and each the place of some episode in the story
of creation . . . . the landscape is a kind of archive where the indi-
vidual moves simultaneously through his personal and tribal past, re-
newing contact with crucial points, a journey into time and space
refreshing the meaning of his own being."

74

explore the possibility, I would argue that parenthood may help facili-

tate a return to one's childhood and hence have a bearing on creativity.8

An Opportunity to Revisit Earlier Developmental Stages

 

Erik Erikson (1963) has identified eight developmental stages, each
characterized by a specific crisis to be resolved. His epigenetic theory
of development proposes that the resolution of each stage affects the
resolution of all further ones. Erikson further assumes that no one
ever completely resolves any of the crises of development and that a
certain amount of work on each stage both precedes and follows each
critical period. Thus, while the developmental tasks of adulthood are
easier to the extent that the earlier crises have been effectively re-
solved, it is also possible to fill in the cracks in later life. Erik-
son (1963: 250) talks about the role of institutions for stages of
growth and development:

Each successive stage and crisis has a special relation to
one of the basic elements of society, and this for the simple
reason that the human life cycle and man's institutions have
evolved together . . . .

The parental faith which supports the trust emerging in the
newborn, has throughout history sought its institutional safe-

‘ guard (and, on occasion, found its greatest enemy) in organ-
ized religion. Trust born of care is, in fact, the touchstone
of the "actuality" of a given religion. All religions have in
common the periodical childlike surrender to a Provider or pro-
viders who dispense earthly fortune as well as spiritual health;
some demonstration of man's smallness by way of reduced posture
and humble gesture; the admission in prayer and song of mis-
deeds, of misthoughts, and of evil intentions; fervent appeal
for inner unification by divine guidance; and finally, the
insight that individual trust must become a common faith, in-
dividual mistrust a commonly formulated evil, while the:

 

8Yet it is also important to emphasize the ways in which caring for
children mitigates against the possibility of creativity in the care-
taker. In particular, the constant interruption of children makes
focused concentration virtually impossible. ‘

75

individual's restoration must become part Of the ritual prac-

tice of many, and must become a sign Of trustworthiness in

the community.

One Of the major findings Of my research is that the presence of
children provides parents with another opportunity to engage earlier
stages of growth, another set of "moments Of decision between progress
and regression, integration and retardation" (Erikson, 1963: 270-271).
Parenthood as an institution provides an Opportunity for a "reinforce-
ment of infantile gains" (Erikson, 1963: 250). In other words, children
can, by their presence and their behavior, return parents to critical
stages where they may again find themselves at developmental turning
points.

In a sense, what this means is that children can serve as "thera-
pists" for their caretakers. Nowak and Harlow (1975) report that adult
monkeys suffering social damage from previous isolation can attain re-
latively normal behavior patterns if they are placed with infant
"therapists." Somehow the presence of the juvenile monkeys heals the
damaged adults. There is also some evidence that pets may function as
therapists for their owners. Recent evidence from experiments using
pets with disturbed children suggests that some Of these effects have to
do with "taking care" of something or someone--perhaps in a way that
they themselves were not cared for. Neither the pet nor the monkey
studies focused on the possibility that the curative effects result fitml
the provision Of Opportunities revisit unresolved stages Of development.
The possibility exists though that this is one of the mechanisms account-
ing for the success Of such ventures.

Returning to humans, it seems that children have the capacity to

precipitate either a mending, I'filling-in" process in their parents;

76

or a rending, dissolving one. I found examples of both in the inter-
views. Those studies based on actual data fall largely on the rending,
dissolving side. Most point to the role Of children as precipi-

tants of mental illness in parents. (See, for example, Bakan, 1971;
Zilborg, 1931; and Wainwright, 1966.) On the other hand, more abstract,
theoretical formulations (see, for example, Benedek, 1969) fall more on
the mending side. These latter are, however, seldom grounded in empiri-
cal work. Parenthood in these writings is seen as a fulfilling enter-
prise: it enhances adult psychological functioning.

Since there is already a good deal of data on the connection be-
tween mental illness in parents and having children who are at particular
developmental stages, and since I found more evidence of positive rather
than negative effects in this area, I concentrated this chapter on the
mending, filling-in, ego enhancing aSpects of parenthood. My focus is
on how children,in particular, provide opportunities for adults to
re-engage earlier stages Of develOpment.

Even in a relatively small sample such as mine, I found a variety
of references to getting a second chance at growing up. These ranged
from intense, life-altering experiences to simple pleasures. My focus
here is on the ways this access allowed parents to make up for lost
time, fill-in the spaces in poorly resolved developmental stages. While
a few parents did talk indirectly about the trouble they had with their
children during infancy, it seems likely that their difficulties re-
sulted from the particular conditions under which mothers mothered in
the seventies: alone, in isolated households. In any case, on this

topic the parents talked very little about the negative effects and

77

instead spoke of the ways that revisiting the earlier stages helped them
to grow.

Before leaving this issue, however, it is important to underscore
the degree to which this access to childhood, and, in particular, this
chance to revisit earlier developmental stages, is fraught with eeeeg-
tejgty, As such, it is similar to therapy, but unlike therapy, the
degree Of uncertainty over the possible outcomes is far more extreme.
In therapy, one is guided by someone whose own needs are supposed to be
ignored. In families, the children as well as the parents have needs.
Therapy is guided and arranged by someone who knows the territory. Par-
enthood (at least with the first child in middle class America in the
seventies) is a journey into unknown regions where neither the leader
nor the led know what will happen (though the leader may think s/he
knows and others expect s/he will).

The most frequently mentioned result of this chance to revisit
childhood involved a chance to acknowledge parts Of the self that had
been suppressed as a child. Having children and providing for them a
full range of activities, allowed parents, in the process, to expand
their own repertoires and to incorporate parts Of themselves that had
been ignored or that had been unacceptable to their own parents or to
the larger society when they were children. In caring for children,
people who grew up at a time when sex-role prescriptions were more
rigid had the opportunity to expand the boundaries of permissible beha-
vior. The first speaker below is a part-time secretary and the second
is a university professor. Both have preschool children:

I think I differ a lot from my mother. My mother never did

anything with us kids like sports . . . [but] I probably do
as much as [my husband does . . .] . . . [as a young girl]

78

I was really squelched athletically because . . . after you
got out of third or fourth grade there was nothing for a
girl to do athletic-wise.

I've learned how to go to dancing class, she's allowed me

. I was quite happy that I had girls, because I was
always quite concerned that I was never a machismo man. I
always like ballet and I always like music and I like flow-
ers and interior decorating and I like furniture . . . you
worry about yourself, you know, and so you have daughters
and therefore now you can, I can go to dancing class with
them, and watch them and feel quite relaxed about it.

For others, the perceived gains of revisiting the earlier stages
had more to dO with what they saw as very basic deficiencies in their
background. Having children gave them a second chance to experience the
close physical contact that they had not gotten as children themselves.
One mother told me she rocked her children a lot because she remembered
wanting to be rocked herself. A mother of four (from the pilot inter-
views) said she learned a lot about physical affection from holding
babies:

But to have that close contact with a little living thing

. . influenced me a whole lot . . . a real high for me

nursing him, cuddling him.

The most striking example of a person who benefitted from the re-
turn tO earlier stages came from a mother with four closely spaced
children. When they were all preschoolers, she began to realize that
the impoverishment Of her current life went back to the physical and
emotional deprivations of her own early life. She said:

I used to be exceedingly rigid . . . and seeing the kids as

little spontaneous beings, you know, just influenced me a

lot. I can remember being out on the playground ... . and

there was this big sewer pipe and all the kids would get

down and scurry through it and I wanted to do that so badly

. I finally brought myself to do it and felt so high
[Around this same time] I started crawling around on
the floor with the kids in the daytime and just [started]

trying to do things like that that the kids would do . . .
I think [cooying the kids] did a lot.

79

She was doing for herself what therapists do with adults who have had
trouble with earlier stages of development. Delacato (1963), in working
with reading disabled children, proposed that their problems could be
traced to skipping stages of develOpment--in particular he noted that
a high proportion of such children had failed to go through the creep-
ing stage. His therapy involved teaching school age children to creep
and requiring them to go through a certain number of hours of "creeping
practice" each day.

A father typified the feelings of many parents when he said:

I think that for me, [our daughter] growing up with us has
really allowed the child side of me to grow up.

In writing this chapter I was struck by a recurring thought. Oh
the one hand, one really can't have adults going around sliding in the
park all day and believing in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. Yet,
being able to participate in such fantasies does seem to add an import-
ant dimension to adult life. I noticed that I somehow "approved" of
adults participating in myth perpetuation for the benefit of children
and I approved Of people going down the slide with their children. Yet
at the same time, I was aware Of being appalled when adults took certain
of their own myths too seriously (e.g., by playing Dungeons and Dragons
or by joining such groups as The Trekkies, The Society for Creative
Anachronism, or The Tolkein Society).

What children Offer, and, in a way, almost guarantee, is that adults
can participate in some unadult activities, behaviors, and ways Of ex-
periencing the world without being consumed by the experience. Children
provide "a little window in and out." Thus, the entree provided by

children is more bounded than the others and keeps adults' participation

80

within limits. Thus parents, because their children need them to be
parents, cannot become totally absorbed in being childlike--or rather,
they must be childlike gee responsible at the same time. Playing with
children allows a certain measure of abandon, foolishness and heightened

affect without the danger of becoming totally lost in such ways.

CHAPTER FIVE

CLOSE-UP MIRRORS: SEEING ONESELF IN ONE'S CHILD

One way that the child influences you

is you kind Of see a mirror.

«mother of a three-year-old boy

Being around a child who is both like one once was and becoming

like one is now leads to certain kinds Of changes in parents. One's
children provide close-up mirrors of the self,' of the adult self now
and Of the child one once was. Caught unawares, we are struck by seeing
ourselves in a new light; by the shock that comes with removing (if only
for a moment) taken for granted frames of meaning and leaving us exposed
without the usual peripheral cues. The shock is similar to the feeling
one gets looking at a home movie, hearing for the first time one's own
voice on a tape recorder, or catching a reflected glimpse Of oneself
hurrying by a stOre window.2 These sudden glimpses present pictures of
ourselves and our circumstances that are quite different from what we

see when we deliberately look in the mirror or think about ourselves in

 

'In a similar manner, being a parent makes it more likely that we
will see ourselves in our own parents. Many Of those interviewed men-
tioned this.

2These new glimpses may be more or less "true" than our original
notions--the truth or falsity of the image is not what matters here.
Rather it is the surprise that comes with seeing what we didn't expect
to find that is significant for this research.

81

82

our heads.3, At those deliberate inspection times where there is time
to pose and arrange the view to be presented, we are more likely to see
what we expect to see.4’5 However, the close-up reflections provided
by children generally have much more in common with the sudden glimpse,
the overheard recording and the photograph taken when one is unaware.
They do more than simply show us how others see us; for what others say
they see can be screened out in many ways. It is easy to dismiss, if
not ignore, how others see us. The Old childhood taunt, "It takes one
to know one,“ represents one of our early attempts to screen out those
observations Of others which we find discomforting. Later, we more
sophisticatedly say,-"0h, you're just projecting." Adults also have the
Option Of covering up their shortcomings by denial, turning them into
valued qualities, or by simply ceasing to notice them. Their sudden

appearance in one's children removes that protective screen. The mir-

rors provided by children lack this mediating quality.

 

3A feminist singer introduced one Of her songs by saying that she
came to be a feminist not because of the injustices she had seen hap-
pening to her in her life, but when she saw it happening to her daugh-
ter. Thus her own circumstances (which over the years had taken on a
taken-for-granted quality) were transformed when she saw her daughter
subject to them.

4See Goffman (1959) for an elaboration on adult strategies for
maintaining a particular image.

5At age 11, in the sixth grade, I was horrified to see myself in
a home movie. Tall for my age, I was walking up a hill very hunched
over, trying, I guess, to appear shorter, I resolved immediately to
stand up straight, something no amount of previous nagging had been
able to effect. Before seeing the movie, I had insisted that I was DEE
walking hunched over. Children have this same capacity: when we see
ourselves in them we see things we would never "see” if others told
us.

83

In a related, yet different, way, we see ourselves in our children
because they allow us to regress. Psychoanalytic theorists have dis-
cussed maternal regression, explaining “how some adults--that is
mothers--come to re-experience these originally infantile states“
(Chodorow, 1978: 87). Chodorow (1978: 86) quotes Olden, who writes
that the mother "gives herself up and becomes one with [her new infant]."
It appears from my interviews that (momentarily at least) parents of
older children as well see their children as themselves and vice versa.

A large number Of parents (71 percent) reported seeing reflections
of themselves in their children. These responses were entirely spon-
taneous--there were no questions about seeing oneself in a child on the
interview schedule. This suggests that the issue is an important one
for parents. Indeed, for some parents this reflection was seen as Ehe
one best or worst thing about being a parent. Parental response to
this reflection varied across parents and across situations. The re-
flections were sometimes welcome, sometimes not; sometimes conscious,
sometimes not; and resulted in both joy and pain.

In some cases, parents reported merely a simple Observation: they
looked at the child and saw themselves. For some the conscious experi-
ence ended there. It made them neither angry nor pleased; it led them
to no new insights. It may be that the reflected view of themselves
did have repercussions, but they did not tell me about it. The remarks
of this mother of three are illustrative:

Well, he's very stubborn and he wants just what he wants when

he wants it, and he's a second child and I was a second child

and I can remember that same kind Of frustration. People

would make what I considered impossible demands on me and then

I would just think of ways to outwit them and I can just see
him doing it . . .

84

One mother Of a four-year-Old boy explicitly denied that the reflections
had any effect on her:

You see your own mannerisms and attitudes reflected back at

you, you hear your own words repeated back at you, you hear

how you sound . . . . You see yourself relfected . . . he's

fairly bossy and Officious with other children . . . which

is partlyjust being four years old and partly me . . . . I

see [the reflection] but I'm not sure it changes my behavior,

I'm not really that introspective a person and since I think

I'm reasonably happy with myself I don't have any great moti-

vation to make conscious efforts to change myself.
Most parents seemed to come upon these reflections unexpectedly, one
reported trying to see the similarities:

I was the second of three and I Often look at [him] and look

for myself in him cause he's the second.

--father Of two preschoolers

Many Of the instances Of seeing the self in the child had tO do
with seeing the self one had been during one's own childhood. Some
parents reported that this seemed to make them better parents. One
mother felt she was more understanding Of her daughter's negative, con-
trary impulses because she had been like that when she was a child.
She remembered having the same feelings but not being allowed to ex-
press them. Because of this she was able to allow her daughter to
express them more directly. Others, like the following mother Of pre-
school girls, provided certain activities for their children because
that was what they remembered liking:

I remember doing the same thing for my mother [bringing in

flowers]--she always liked them and put them on the table

. . . . I think maybe as a parent I tend to foster things

that I liked.
A father who did student teaching in an elementary school felt that
being able to remember his own childhood made him a better teacher.

Certainly the psychoanalytic literature suggests that it is pre-

vcisely this capacity for regression, this ability to remember having

85

been a cared for child, that allows parents to parent. Nancy Chodorow
(1978: 87) writes about this:

Analysts explain how some adults--that is mothers--come to
reexperience these originally infantile states. They imply
that empathy, or experiencing the child as continuous with
the self may grow partially out of the experience Of preg-
nancy and nursing (though non-biological mothers make fine
parents). However, their major argument is that (with or
without pregnancy) the ability topparent an infant derives
from having experienced this kind Of relationship oneself as
a child and being able to regress--while remaining adult--
to the psychological state of that experience. (emphasis
mine

The parents I interviewed, although talking about far more conscious
processes than those referred to by Chodorow, echoed this same theme.
The children themselves, by drawing their parents back to childhood,
made them into better parents.

Besides contributing to better parenting skills, the experience Of
seeing in one's child the child one had once been was reported as lead-
ing to new insights about oneself. Some felt reassured--the doubts
they had had about themselves while growing up were dispelled when
they saw their own child doing the same things. This father of a four-
year-Old explains a typical reaction:

Watching someone develop from absolutely nothing, and all of

a sudden become interested in things that I remember myself

being interested in at that age, is a great reassurance.

It's so nice knowing that all Of a sudden I wasn't crazy

when I was young--there really ere important things in piles

of seeds you bring home . . . .

Others, as I described in the previous chapter, realized more the ex-
tent Of their own early problems as they confronted the same ones in
their own children. The father of a four-year-old girld told me:

I've wondered what I did with my anger for years and years

and wondered at what point did I stop being angry? What did

my mother do with my responses? . . . it's a real question
for [my daughter]--she has a great deal Of difficulty

86

expressing anger toward adults . . . and so that led me tO

wonder what did my mother do [that led me to stop realizing

that I was angry].

On the other hand, for some parents these new insights into them-
selves came more from the present, from seeing their own behaviors and
personality traits reflected in their children. A lawyer with a five-
year-Old daughter gained insight into himself from watching and listen-
ing to her. A mother,finishing up a Ph.D. program, told me about the

effects Of her preschooler on her:

Because they c0py you so much I think they make you more
aware of your own idiosyncracies .

Some came to see things about their own behavior that they had not
realized before. For some this came in the form of projection; they
thought about what their child might become and realized they were ex-
pressing fears about themselves:

I want her to be a well-rounded human being without being

too male or too female . . . every now and then I'll think:

'gosh, I hope she's not a dyke,’ . . . you know, stupid

things . . . I have those tendencies myself . . . [she's]

just a mirror.
Or, seeing unacceptable behaviors in their children they realized that
probably the children learned those at home:

Maybe she's reflecting some subtle things on our part that

we aren't even particularly aware of and that's disturbing

. . the point is she Observes what we do and the fact is

we don't associate with blacks [even though we do not con-

sider ourselves to be prejudiced].

Mostly, parents reported seeing their own present and past defects
in their children. One father, who had raised his teenage son alone,
knew already what his own shortcomings were. Seeing them being incor-

porated into his son, however, was the spur to reevaluation and change.6

 

6The effects on parents of trying to set a good example is the

topic Of a later chapter.

87

He told me:

Probably the main thing is because I'm so sensitive to what
goes on externally to me is that I've always picked up very
quickly how [my son] was acting and being and I'd see those
parts within me and that probably did more than anything else
to make me really force myself to change . . . . there were
never any that I didn't know existed before . . . but I would
now be so threatened that I couldn't any longer say 'this
isn't important and I don't need to work on this.‘ . . . Now
I had to say, 'I've got to do something right away.’ Smoking
is a very good example . . . . One of the things that I used
[in order] to stop smoking was [my son] . . . If he smoked

I would see myself in him. I would see a habit there that I
would be able toyget by with as long as I didn't see it in
another person who was . . . copying_me. (emphasis mine)

 

Seeing one's defects (or those of a spouse) in a child sometimes
led to new understandings. A working mother with a master's degree ex-
plained how she became more understanding both Of her husband's
idiosyncracies and of the difficulties her own shortcomings presented
to other people:

One way that the child influences you is you kind of see a
mirror . . . I can see myself in certain things. He wakes
up in the morning like an absolute bear and it's half an
hour before he can be talked to . . . and that's the way I
am and it has helped me to understand how hard it is for
other people to deal with me cause I have to deal with him
at a time when I feel the same way . . . . And I also see
things my husband does reflected in him. They both tend to
be extremely gregarious, always want other people around

. and that's something that has kind of annoyed me in
my husband . . . and seeing it in [my son] has sort of made
it seem more like a natural thing to do . . . and so I find
I can accept it better in both of them . . . .

In Slaughter Of the Innocents (1971), David Bakan suggests that
a major contributing factor in child abuse is seeing in the child those
very traits one hates in oneself. This is precisely the theme Of
La Reine Morte by Montherlant (1967), a play in which a father kills
off all the members of his family (not only his children) in an effort

to exorcise his own flaws which he sees in them. The parents I

88

interviewed were quite explicitly aware of this. A mother with a four-
year-Old girl and a two-year-Old boy explained:

Probably the things we don't like [in ourselves] are prob-
ably most notable [in kids' imitations]. You see your own
defects more . . . probably take it as criticism and maybe
notice it more.

A university professor, for the most part ecstatic about having children,
pointed to children's capacity to reveal one's own flaws as the worst
thing about having children. He said:

The thing that I dislike most about kids is when you see
them doing things that you disliked in yourself.

Finally, a father in the pilot study explicitly summed up what many
parents knew:

That's the heart of child abuse--seeing negative things
about themselves in their children.

In addition to the anger, parents also noted the pejp they felt at
having to "live through it two times." The father Of two preschool
girls talked about his Oldest child's similarities to him and about the
difficulty of seeing the same mistakes being made a second time.

I was one Of those people, even now, who will not try some-
thing unless I can be good at it . . . I don't want to fail
and [she's] exactly that way: things she can do, she'll
just dive in and do them. But other things she just doesn't
want anything to do with then.won't even try. I find it
intensely annoying because I know myself how that limited _
some Of my growth, like in athletic things, cause I wouldn't
even try them and now just to gO play volleyball or some-
thing is a real effort for me; and my parents used to say,
'Oh, you'll regret it' .

A woman with a five-year-Old girl and a toddler had a similar reaction:

Because my older girl unfortunately happensto be very much
like what I was like as a young gir1--I was very shy and
very withdrawn and very slow to enter into things . . . I
just want to say '. . . just go do it and you'll have such
a gOOd time'. . . I think it's hard because I can associ-
ate so much with her when I see her behavior and I know
what she should dO and I know what she shouldn't do and I

89

also know that there's no way I can tell her that. She has

to learn it on her own and that¥j_st kills me,_it really does--
to think that I have to live through it two times' Once was
enough' Oh, that's awful'

Seeing their own shortcomings in their children made some people
less patient parents. One father, a unversity administrator, told me
about the source of his differential response to his two children:

I have been much stricter with [Bill] than with [Andy] and I
tend to pick on him more than I do on [Andy], parth/because
he's older and partly because he's like me . . . cause I can
pick out things in me that I don't like and when I see him
acting that way I want him to change that behavior.

His wife, a full-time homemaker, had the same reaction to the opposite
child. She explained:

[Andy] is just like me . . . only more so and he and I just
go head on you know . . . . When we have a problem . . . I
really get annoyed, angry . . . . I don't know if it's . . .
just that I see him doing things that I try to work on in
myself . . . . [My husband] has just the opposite reaction.
He gets very annoyed with [Bill's] shortcomings which are the
same as his own. [He] is perfectly delighted with [Andy] and
doesn't have any trouble adapting to and putting up with him

. [Bill] is very often a tearful child and that doesn't
bother me, you know, I don't care. But [for my husband] it
goes right to the quick: 'Stop crying!‘ he will say.

They had more patience with a child's problems which differed from their
own, as the same mother quoted above told me: ’
The areas where [Bill] is competent are the areas where I
am not, you know, [so] I feel comfortable just letting him
go . . . and where he does need help I feel very comfortable
filling in some help or encouragement or whatever.
At the same time, parents sometimes liked best the children most like
them despite the conflicts:

We clash a lot more. Except that the fun times are greater--
[Andy] and I are hot and cold, you know.

In addition, they felt they could empathize more with the one like

90

themselves.7

We're so [similar], we think even alike, you know, which is
kind of sad. I can see her . . . when she is acting up
and I can see myself and the attitudes that she has I can
feel them and I can understand how she feels real well.
--mother of two preschoolers

The parents did not always see this increased empathy as a good
thing however, especially when the similarity was between a mother and
a daughter. This mother's concern was shared by others:

[My son's] an altogether different person [than I am], while
[my daughter]--I really know what she's thinking before she
can even really [say it], which is sad for her.

Mothers, like this woman with two daughters, were glad when their
daughters were different than themselves:

So she looks absolutely wrong . . . . She has a round face,
blue eyes, blond, curly hair--she's beautiful. But she
doesn't look like me or [my husband]. [That] makes identi-
fication . . . with her difficult to me, because she's just
this really totally foreign person. Um, her personality is
very different from mine. She's a different child than I
was . . . which isggood for her, it really keeps me from
really living my life in her . . . I think if she looked or
acted more like me it would be bad for her ultimately. This
is good that she's making the break now. (emphasis mine)

Chodorow8 (and other psychoanalytic writers) theorize that it is daugh-
ters rather than sons that mothers have trouble seeing as separate from

themselves. My interview data provide support for this in that no

 

7Research using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (based on the
theories of Carl Jung) suggests that people choose friends whose "types"
are similar to their own-~people with whom they can empathize. One's
children, obviously, cannot be chosen by "type".

8Chodorow (l978) reviews the psychoanalytic evidence for unique
problems of separation and individuation between mothers and daughters.
Her own analysis is that it is early childhood experience that accounts
for the fact that women want to mother.

91

mothers9 reported worrying when they and their sons were similar--even
though they often reported similarities.

Finally, these shocks of recognition gave some parents a sense of
generational continuity. A mother of two preschool girls told me:

My mother was the same age when she had me and there's the

same difference in age between me and my sister as between

[my two children] . . . I think about it a lot.

The mother of a five-year-old boy explained:

In a sense too when you have children you see yourself . . .

seeing yourself all over again . . . you see them going

through the same kinds of things you remember going through,

the same sorts of anguish and the same happiness . . . and

. . . you feel a sense of reliving your life through your

kids.

Children provide close-up mirrors for their parents, reflecting
back what the parents are now and reminding them of what they once were.
This process results in images unlike those we generally have of our-
selves--the images children provide are candid, surprising and, often,
disturbing. Nor can these (often unfavorable) images be dismissed in
the way others can. The parents in my sample gave extensive support to
this. Their children, by acting as mirrors, reflected back to them
parts of themselves they didn't know existed. Likewise, they cast new
light on aspects of which parents were already aware. As a result,
parents felt they were able to take better care of their children
because of the empathy they experienced. In addition they gained new
insight into themselves, were spurred to change some undesirable as-

pects of themselves, were made acutely uncomfortable, were given a new

awareness of the.continuity of generations, and were able to see their

 

9Nor did any fathers mention problems with a lack of separation
and individuation with their sons, or daughters.

92

own lives as a continuous process. This process of seeing oneself in
one's children has much in common with therapy--but its outcome is more
problematical, less sure of a successful resolution. This same theme--
the problematic nature of the outcomes of issues in parenthood as com-

pared to therapy--emerges in the chapters on emotions and on access to

the world of childhood.

PART III

I

BEING RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CARE AND PROTECTION OF CHILDREN

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of human parent-child rela-
tions is the length of time that children are dependent on adults.
Unlike most creatures, human infants could not survive without an ex-
tended period during which adults cared for them. But more transpires
than simple gains to the infant. This process of caretaking, the con-
tinuing day-to-day experience of preserving the life of a child, has
certain consequences for the caretakers as well. Ruddick (l980: 5-7)
sees this process as leading to certain types of thought:

[A]ll thought arises in practices governed by interests

. . Maternal practices are governed by interests in pre-
servation, growth and acceptability . . . . Preservation is

the most invariant and primary of the three . . . . Even

when she lives with the father of her child or other women

adults, even when she has money to purchase or finds avail-

able supportive health and welfare services, a mother typi-

cally takes herself and is taken by others to be responsible

' for the maintenance of the life of her child.
The three chapters in Part III address parental concern with the

preservation of the child.1 The impetus to make forced choices and

 

1Certainly all caretaking is not identical. To the degree that
the practice of caretaking differs, the consequences will differ too.
For example, teachers and nursery attendants are influenced by caring
for children but in ways that are both different and less intense than
those experienced by full-time parents. Even among mothers, there are
certain variations, as Ruddick (l980: 8) notes:

These three interests in the preservation, growth, and
acceptability of the child are, so far as I can tell, species-
wide interests shaping maternal practices . . . . [But] some
mothers are incapable of interested participation in the

93

94

decisions, the factors that lead to new and heightened emotional experi-
ences, the resultant feelings about one's own adequacy as a parent--

all grow out of this concern.

 

practice of mothering because of emotional, intellectual,
physical or economic disability. (In our society the very
poor are often largely prevented from partaking in maternal
practices while the very rich are excused from them.) Actual
mothers have the same sort of relation to maternal practice
as actual scientists have to scientific practice. As mothers
or as scientists they are governed by the interests of their
respective practices. But the style, skill, commitment, in-
tegrity, with which they engage in these practices differ
widely from individual to individual.

CHAPTER SIX

CHILDREN AS PRECIPITATORS 0F EMOTIONAL RESPONSE

When you don't have children . . . you
have no idea of the emotions they bring
to you, things you never realized ex-
isted in you.

--father of two preschool girls

[Having a child brought] a lot more
attention to my own emotions, cause
having a child around heightened
it--heightened it for me: love, fear,
anger . . . the basics.
--father of a preschool boy
Although none of the questions on the interview schedule asked
parents to talk about the emotions2 involved in having children, 78 per-
cent of them spontaneously mentioned that the process of being a parent
elicited emotions of a different kind and degree than they had ever
experienced before. As in the previously discussed matter of decision
making, it appears that highly charged emotional situations are rela-

tively uncommon for non-institutionalized adults in contemporary society}3

 

21 am using emotion in Hochschild' 5 sense of "a bodily deepening
of an idea or an image" (l975: 25).

3Exceptions include religious experiences and conversions, drug
and war experiences and romantic love. Adults in mental hospitals may
have experience with highly charged emotional situations. Group
therapy may require the acknowledgement of strong emotions and the
willingness to take a stand on issues. The latter is sometimes a con-
dition of release-~a sign of "health" and of the patient' 5 ability to
come to grips with "reality".

95

96

The amount and the quality of the love the parents I interviewed felt
fOr their children surprised them. Many noted that it could not be com-
pared to the love they felt for a spouse, for other relatives, or for
children they had taught in day care centers or schools. At the other
extreme, the anger and rage provoked by children astounded and frightened
parents. They talked about this rage with respect and awe, and often
with increased compassion for those parents who actually do harm to
their own children. For many, the realization that they were indeed
capable of a rage they had never imagined led to an increased sense of
humility. Additionally, the love they felt for their children exposed
them to new fears and feelings of vulnerability. Before looking at
what one father called "the basics" (love, anger and fear) in detail, I
want to explore what all three had in common.

The process of caring for a dependent child exposed parents to
emotions that they didn't know existed. For some these may have been
long forgotten emotions. A mother with two preschool girls talked
about the new rage she felt. Her brother-in-law had told her it was
not new, just forgotten:

[He] said that he was sure I had felt that [rage] before,

probably toward my own mother when I was [my daughter's]

age but I don't remember it.

Others, like this mother of a S-l/Z year-old girl, felt that children
provided a release fOr potentials previously unrealized:

The biggest change for me was the realization that you

‘ . can have so much caring and love for another person

. . . [it] made me, not a better person, but a different

person. Maybe a little bit more warm and caring . . .

It's like you've had the potential but you've never had
any release for it before. (emphasis mine)

 

 

97

Both the intensity and the kinds of emotions brought to the surface by
children came as a surprise to most parents. They prefaced their re-
marks with: "I never expected!“, "Who would ever have imagined?",
"I've been surprised!“ Most, like the mothers in the examples above
and the father quoted at the beginning of this chapter, said these feel-
ings were entirely new to them. At first, I suspected that those par-'
ents who mentioned these extremes of emotions were perhaps pe0ple whose
whole emotional life was experienced (or at least described) intensely.
As I talked with more parents, however, I realized that this emotional
intensity, far from being attributable to certain personality styles,
was in fact specific to something in the situation of being a parent.
The emotional intensity that comes with children often took parents by
surprise: the parents I spoke with saw these intense emotions as some-
thing previously unimaginable and presently unexplainable (as having
almost the quality of a drug-induced state).4 A father with two pro-
fessional degrees spoke of his inability even to identify these new
emotions:

The thing. that happens when you grow up is you learn to

identify specific emotions, and what they do to you, and

you learn to verbalize your emotions and isolate different

sorts of feelings and realize that a certain response to

a situation is a combination of different sorts of influ-

ences, and, uh, with kids I haven't got really to that

point yet . . . where I can specifically identify my
emotions--at present it's just a mess of emotions.

 

4The psychoanalytic literature would say that this is because
parenthood activates emotions long-buried--emotions experienced in
infancy before one had the names to associate with them. Schachtel's
chapter "0n Memory and Childhood Amnesia" (l959) theorizes about some
of the reasons for this forgetting.

98

In a way, parents were returned to experiencing emotions "like a child,"
not just because seeing the child brought them back to their own child-
hood, but because children evoke emotions that can't be defined, under-
stood and managed in the way adults can generally do with their
emotions.5 A mother likened the experience to visiting a psychiatrist
or to taking drugs, neither of which she had done:

It's almost as if you've experienced the highest of highs
and the lowest of lows without any use of anything foreign
or artificial-~but you've actually experienced some strange
emotions that I know for a fact I probably would never have
experienced . . . those extremes of personality that you
don't even know exist within you without going to a psychi-
atrist.

What interested parents the most was the intensity, the extremesof emo-
tion which they now experienced:

I feel a kind of anger toward my [three-year-old daughter]
that I don't recall really feeling toward anybody ever. '
--a mother who used to teach nursery school

There's nothing middle of the road--everything's extremely

negative or extremely positive.

--a mother at home full-time with a preschool boy and an
infant girl

 

5Hochschild(l975: 6) speaks to this issue: "Many compositions
together make up our inner mapping of the affective possibilities. It
is a map of expectations, based on how we have arranged and categorized
cues into discrete compositions. We then cast this map over the stream
of raw feeling-experience. The map of compositions creates feelings
from inchoate feeling . . . . By virtue of this map we make up distinc-
tions between 'non-affective and affective' experiences defined as 'pure'
tiredness, 'pure' sexuality, etc. We make up distinctions, too, between
'naturally available' emotions (feelings which are in the nature of
human experience) and feelings which are not. For example, in some
cultures homosexual attraction is thought to be unnatural or unavail-
able to most human beings. It is thus an experience not codified into
a recognizable composition, even prior to the act of management of the
imposition of external sanction. Our experience may or may not fit the
map we cast over it. When experience fails to fit the pre-established
categories, the individual may experience surprise or puzzlement . . .
In my study some respondents described a search, not so much to detect,
as to define already detected elements of experience--i.e., to define
their feelings relative to a pre-existing understanding of available
feelings and emotions." (emphasis in original)

 

 

99

I have been to the extremes and back.
--mother of two

One mother distinguished between the amount of impact on her behavior
that came from various sources and the impact on the intensity of her
feelings. Many things influenced her behavior but only her child al-
tered her emotions so drastically:

Maybe all those things [my work, my husband, my own past, my

friends] have an equal impact on my behavior, [but] [my son]

has more impact on the intensity of the feelings.

As I mentioned earlier, some parents equated these extremes of emo-
tion directly with altered state of consciousness. Certain aspects of
parenthood were described as peak experiences. Such aspects, mentioned
by both men and women, were most frequently linked with the birth or
nursing experience:

The feeling of being pregnant, just creating something . . .

Really it was a feeling of creation, wholeness, just some-

thing different than you ever, ever do . . . . [I] couldn't

imagine another time in my life where I'm going to have that

kind of peak experience.

--mother of two preschool girls

If anybody were to say to me what has been the most excit-

ing experience of your life . . . I would have to say giv-

ing birth . . . . If you've even been somewhat awake during

.it all it has to be a rather mind-blowing experience to go

through all that. To me that was just the heighth (sic) of

everything . . . to see a life come out of your body.
The childbirth literature uses this peak language. It makes parents,
especially mothers, expect to have such feelings and even to work for
them. And it makes women worry or feel guilty if they do not have such
experiences. This process is the same one described by Hochschild
(l975).

Some of the mothers reported that this psychological high experi-
enced during the birth altered them in various ways. Primarily it pro-

duced an awe for life as this high school teacher describes:

100

I think having him and actually giving birth and all gives
you more of a feeling for life that you really didn't think
about before and it really, you're there watching the whole
thing happen. It really strikes you then and kind of gives
you an awe for life that you've never had before.

--mother of a five-year-old boy

A woman with a 2-l/2 year-old girl said the experience changed her feel-
ings about her mother.

My relationship with my mother has changed considerably.
It all happened the day after I had her, it was the actual
birth experience . . . . I was just flying for two days

. . . I just felt this incredible current of energy going
through my system and I knew that was what it was all about,
I mean that' s as close to life as you can get. . . .After
that I just had this really strong feeling towards my
mother.

Another mother, a university professor, noted that her scholarly pro-
ductivity increased due to this psychological high:

The feelings of elation I had as a woman having given birth
. . the feeling of elation that I had in nurturing

another human being. . . . was still strong enough that

it gave me energy to produce intellectual work. I wrote

about four articles in [my daughter's] first two years

. . . and they were published--I haven't been able to re-

produce that kind of productivity since.

--4l-year-old mother

Mothers were not the only ones who felt elated during the delivery
or right after the birth. Greenberg (l974) writes about the enlarging
effects of infants on fathers. The fathers I interviewed provided sup—
port for Greenberg's notions and for those of Klaus and Kennell (l976)
on the importance of contact during the first few hours after birth for
the quality of parent-child bonding. A father of two who is a univer-
sity professor summed this up:

I was there in the delivery room right there when they were

both born and that is just the most fantastic emotion you

have ever experienced . . . . It's just such an amazing

feeling of relief and joy and happiness--it's like nothing

else you've ever experienced and . . . it's just a beautiful
experience, you just both start crying and it's difficult to

IOl

say why you cry when the baby is born . . . it's [an] amazing

sort of an emotion . . . . And then you hold the baby and it's

just amazing . . . . I can remember them both [his children]

wide-eyed looking at you [right after birth] . . . [I] always
thought they were these little blah things until we had our

own.

Speaking in a very different tone, but still awed at the impact, a
second father (a businessman with two small children) describes what
happened to him:

I went through some tremendous emotional changes that happened

so fast I could actually stand outside my own body and watch

them happen . . . [this happened] in a period of 45 minutes

to an hour and a half [after she was born].

This feeling of never-before-experienced ecstasy was not confined
to the birth experience. Both mothers and fathers spoke of it repeated-
ly. These feelings, like those previously mentioned in this chapter,
were difficult to describe. One parent told me "there's also a joy
that goes along with having children that you can't explain to anyone
that doesn't have children." Their efforts seemed similar to attempts
to describe drug experiences to non-users--not even the words exist.
Part of the difficulty is that the feelings experienced have not been
codified (Hochschild, l975). (The pregnancy literature is an exception
to this.) Schachtel (l959) writes that we forget early childhood ex-
periences because they have not been codified into the categories to
which we have access as adults. The feelings described by parents
could likewise not be translated into categories that adults without
children could understand. A father of two, with joy clearly in his
eyes told me: "[having kids is] a feeling of pure joy that I just can't

describe in any other way." This feeling of joy will be discussed in

more depth in the next section on "love".

102

Over and over, as the parents spoke, I felt they were describing
storms in the supposedly calm sea of rational adult life--storms that
upset their understanding of self and life, and of their feelings of
control won (just recently in many cases) during adolescence. For some,
this churned up seas in which they felt they might drown. For others
it led to new levels of reorganization and understanding--of life, of
themselves, of others. These drownings and re-orderings are best under-
stood in the context of the particular emotions involved. As the father
quoted at the beginning of the chapter said, having children brings up
three emotions: "love, fear, anger . . . the basics." Despite their
differences, all three have one thing in common: the kind and inten-
sity of the emotional response surprises and/or shocks the parent and

emerges as something previously unknown or even unimaginable.

Love

Parents were surprised by the kinds and intensity of love they felt
for their children. Over one-third of the nursery school parents men-
tioned this spontaneously despite the fact that the interview schedule
contained no questions about love. First they noted the surprise:

I love them much more than I ever expected to, in a way

that I never thought I would until I had them . . . . How

could you love someone that much?

—-mother of two girls
Many tried to explain the difference in loving a child and other kinds
of love one might experience. It was not the same as the love they had
felt when teaching:

You know, I always liked kids, I have always been a nursery

school teacher, um, so I expected to love my children. But

the feeling of protectiveness and just this sort of all-

encompassing sort of feeling--it's much stronger and differ-
ent than I expected . . . . I didn't expect it to be that

103

different [than liking the nursery school kids]. I expected
it to be similar but maybe stronger. But it isn't even
similar, it's entirely different.

--mother with two preschool girls

 

Nor was it the same as the love for a spouse as this 3l-year-old mother
with a son and a daughter explained:

There's something about when she wakes up from a nap sometimes

and she just looks out the window and the sun's kind of coming

in on her face, I just, I just feel like this is what the

great artists were trying to capture . . . . I don't get that

way about my husband when I see him waking up from a nap--not

at all!
Her sentiments were reflected by another mother, a graduate student with
a part-time job:

The biggest change for me was the realization that you can,

that you can have so much caring and love for another person--

which is different from [for] your husband.

Fathers, too, had these feelings. A university professor with two
children said:

For the first year I really couldn't wait to get up in the

morning to see her . . . just really an excitment about get-

ting out of bed that I hadn't felt in a long time, maybe

since I was a kid myself . . . . I feel very lucky these

days and it's because of the kids . . . . I don't think I've

had that feeling of luckiness before in quite that way.
One of those most touched by the experience was a man who had cared for
a relative's infant for several months alone. He now had a 2-1/2
year-old boy of his own, but the earlier full-time fathering experi-
ence had made a deep impression on him:

I have .really fOnd memories of it, it was a really beauti-

ful experience, really kind of a touching experience . . . .

It was mostly just him and I alone . . . I got pretty

attached to him.

For those with more than one child there was an amazement that it
was possible to love the second one as much as the firSt. A university

professor father spoke about this:

l04

[You wonder] could you love the second one as much as you

could love the first one? . . . [my wife] was very worried
about this . . . [but] there's just no doubt--it was just

almost automatic.

A mother with a 3-l/2 year-old girl and a baby boy had the same feel-
ing:

I'm overwhelmed with the amount of love that I can have . . .
to me it's amazing that when you get that second one that
there's extra there . . . . I think that's a beautiful part
to know that there's always more love in yourself.

Sometimes, however, parents ggnlt love both children equally yet feel
they should. A mother confided that "It's a little uncomfortable to
know that I don't have the same intensity of feelings for both of them."
Some of the difficulty of being a parent lies in this effort to match
"actual" feelings with the ones demanded by the situation. Hochschild
(l975: 9—ll) writes about this problem in a general way:

The third social act performed upon feelings is the manage-
ment of them--the shaping, modulating, inducing, and reduc-
ing of them through feeling-work. Feeling-work is the deli-
berate act of trying to feel what we think we should feel in
a given situation. It is the social act of trying to move
experience to coincide with feeling rules. It has two
sides. On one hand, we sometimes try not to feel an emotion
or feeling we think we ought not to feel (e.g., supression).
On the other hand, we sometimes try to feel an emotion or
feeling we think we ought to: i.e., try to fall in love.

Feeling work is not simply the governance of expression, but
of feeling itself. Situations often place strains on people
which are experienced as demands for emotional display of
feelings we may not immediately experience. We can momen-
tarily hold up a facade to the world and display the appro-
priate emotion. But the strain of upholding one expression
with quite another underlying feeling is too much for con-
tinual daily wear. Thus, there is often a deeper effort at
moving feeling itself to fit the expression thought to be
appropriate to the role and occasion.

Since families are a place of constant contact, the strain of upholding
facades of appr0priate emotions is difficult, and results in a large
amount of "feeling-work" there. This is another reason why parenthood

tends to evoke such powerful emotions.

lOS

The realization of the intense love they felt for their children
led many parents to a new appreciation of their own parents. One mother
felt that without children, a person could never really understand the
love their own parents had had for them:

Almost instantaneously after I had mine, I felt real bad,
because I realized how much love there is of a parent for

a child . . . . I think when you realize how much you love
your child, that's probably how much your parents loved you
and you just didn't realize it. [People who don't have
children] love their parents but yet they . . . don't realize
how much love their parents really had for them.

A working mother with a 2-l/2 year-old girl summed up many themes--the
difference in loving a child versus a spouse, the new appreciation of
parents, and the way the love carries over to other children (which is
discussed in the section on “Fears and Vulnerabilities"):

If I don't see [my daughter] for a while, my heart starts

aching . . . I would give my husband up in a minute . . .

compared to her . . . . This type of love, of yearning

that you have has really shed a lot of light on how my parents

must have felt protecting me . . . . Of course that type

of feeling . . . now has also carried over . . . [to] when

I see someone else's child [and I never had that feeling

before].

Most of the literature on the parent-child relationship points to

the importance for the child of feeling loved and wanted early in life.

 

The positive functions of loving for the adult tend to be ignored.

 

Several functions may be posited. First, the parents I interviewed
reported that children bring out the capacity for love in adults more
effectively than do other people or other situations. The mother
quoted near the beginning of this chapter said, "It's like you've had
the potential but you've never had any release for it before." Another
mother, who felt she and her husband had serious problems, felt that the
child's need for love and security had forced them to get their own

emotional lives in order. In particular, she was amazed that the

106

child allowed them to love at times when they both felt incapable of
it:

We've given her the warmth sometimes when we were feeling
horrible about each other and didn't know where [that warmth]
was coming from--it was almost like opening up_a vein.
(emphasis mine)

Another mother explained that loving a husband was not enough--she

needed to give more love:6
I found that when there was just my husband and I, I needed
a lot more love--both I needed to give more and I needed to
receive more than he was capable of giving. And with the
children I don't have that problem any more now. Because
they demand a lot and they give a lot so they answered a per-
sonal need for me. '

Some saw this happen to their own parents. A woman here is talking

about her own father:

In a lot of ways I think I made my father more caring and
more demonstrative.

One mother felt that what children do is to "provide opportunities to
care about other people intensely."
The second aspect of what loving does for adults concerns self-
esteem. Since the capacity for love is a valued trait in our culture,
7

having a chance to love may make a person feel more whorthwhile. . In

this sense, being loving is seen as a symptom of mental health.

 

6Nancy Chodorow, in "Oedipal Asymmetries and Heterosexual Knots"
(l976), traces out some reasons for this. Because of the structure of
families, (everywhere women are the motherS) boys and girls grow up in
different psychic environments. This results in adults who have dif-
ferent personalities and different capacities for love.

7As I will discuss in the next section, children also bring out

the capacity for rage and anger, thus leading to feelings of decreased
self-esteem. .

107

Parents talked about feeling that since having children they had become
better people in certain ways. ‘A father told me:

Along with the patience, I think emotionally it's [having a
child] probably affected me. Maybe I have a little more
tender outlook . . . . I don't know . . . exactly how to
say this [maybe I have a] softer, tender kind of feeling
toward things in general.

A mother of four high school children who felt she had never been a very
social person said:

I think you must be a warmer person too because you have
had a lot of giving of your love to someone else. I'm still
pretty inhibited with other people . . . but more comfort-
able than I would have been without children.

Another mother echoed those feelings:

I guess with my younger child I see a positive influence
[on me] . . . . There's a real warmth there that I never
felt with any other person . . . but I guess that's been
a positive influence in learning how to love someone.

The sense of being a more worthwhile person was common in the interviews.
Two examples, the first from a working mother with two children and the
second from a father interviewed during the pilot study, show this
feeling:

The feeling.of, um . . . after you've been sitting in the
rocking chair and holding a child who's had an earache and
you rock them and they finally fall asleep in your arms--
that kind of love and compassion and that kind of feeling
that you've made a difference . . . in another person's
life and you so rarely experience that with people outside
your intimate family group and you really don't experience
that maybe once or twice in a lifetime with your husband
or . . . other person where you go through some type of
tragedy together. But the severity of illness and your
‘child's experiencing pain give you that, that intimacy and
the joy that you can't really experience many other ways.

Well, I think that positively there's probably a very

basic way in which I felt some . . . more sense of meaning
in my life. For example . . . one night when [my daughter]
had some kind of congestion and couldn't sleep and just to
hold her so that she could sleep for several hours was to
feel you were doing a good thing; that somehow the cosmos

108

neededtre so to speak; that there was something in the world

where I could be useful. . . children can give you a sense

of being useful.

On a third level, one might argue that the fact of loving a child
in and of itself gau§§§_good mental health. What many parents said in
the interviews is that children make it possible to love with abandon
in a way that seldom if ever happens with other adults. In the same
way that Marx would say that we create our own humanity by doing non-
alienated work, it may be that we create a part Of our humanity by
actualizing our capacity for love. Children, to the extent that they
are releasors of that capacity for love, make us more fully human. This
is not to say that children are the only way to express love--they

simply “give it to you ready made."8

Anger, Rage, and Resentment

 

In contrast to sentimentalized notions of the family as a place of
happiness and love, the actual lived-in experience is characterized by
other emotions as well. Despite the fact that no questions on the
interview schedule pertained to anger, rage, or resentment (nor even to
emotions in general), 32 percent (l9/S9) of all the parents interviewed
spontaneously described ways that their own experience and understanding
of these particular emotions had been changed by having children. In
particular, children sometimes activated an intense rage that few par-

ents had thought themselves capable of. In the words of the father

 

8Nuns, for example, do not have children, but are supposed to feel
compassion and love for everyone. Thus, their situation would have much
in common with the situation of parents. They, like parents, would be
required to do a lot of feeling-work (Hochschild, l975) since there are
strong clear feeling rules for nuns which are often at odds with what
ordinary people "really" feel.

109

quoted at the beginning of this chapter, having children brings up

I emotions, and "then they're up and I have to look at them." This "look-
ing at them" meant many things for parents. For some it was a chance

to explore the sources of their rage. For others it was a chance to
understand themselves and their parents better. For many, seeing in
themselves the potential for child abuse gave them a certain sense of
humility coupled with an understansing of abusive parents that they
could not have imagined before. Other parents, while not feeling rage
at their children, learned about their own anger by seeing rage in their
children. Still others became angry fpp_their children rather than at
them, things they were willing to endure for themselves, they could

not bear to think of happening to their children. Finally a few par-
ents spoke not of rage, but of a smoldering resentment toward their

children that develOped as the years of parenthood went by.

The Surprise and the Intensity

 

The intensity of the rage parents felt toward their children was
reported over and over again. Sometimes the same parent would describe
these feelings repeatedly, incredulous that s/he has actually experi-
enced such rage. Feelings of love within the family are recognized as
legitimate; feelings of anger (especially when these are towards child-
ren) are not. Arlie Hochschild (1975) describes the "feeling rules" we
use in “attending to, codifying and managing feelings." These processes
were evident in the parent interviews. Parents spoke of not expecting
to have certain feelings, of not wanting to have those feelings, and of
trying to change them. Anger (especially when it approached rage and

especially when it was directed at very young children) was the most

110

commonly "managed" feeling reported by parents. Their emphasis in
talking with me (as it was in reporting feelings of love), was on the
intensity of their anger and on the surprise they felt at discovering
that in themselves. A child counselor, the mother of one four-year-old
boy, conveys this sense of surprise:

I have been surprised, um, at the intensity of the feeling

of being a parent . . . surprised . . . that I have gotten

as angry asyl have: that being a parent could involve so

much anger . . . . I didn't expect that, to feel that [anger]

in myself.
Her husband had expressed similar feelings when I interviewed him the
previous evening:

. when he was a baby, I really surprised myself, um,

I've never, you know, I've never really hurt him, but I

could understand why somebody could get to that point very

easily.
A former nursery school teacher with a 3-1/2 year-old and a baby spoke
about being upset by seeing that rage in herself:

So I find a kind of anger that I haven't notice in myself

before . . . [and it] upsets me a lot. I don't like this

kind of rage that I see in myself . . . . I could wring
her little neck sometimes, you know, and I don't like that.

, Resentments

 

Other parents spoke not about anger but about resentments. Since
mothers bear most of the burden of childcare (even in this relatively
egalitarian-oriented sample), it is not surprising that the bulk of the
resentments came from them. The anger described earlier was immediate,
tied to specific situations. The resentment was a response to the con-
tinuous day-to-day responsibility of caring for children. The mother
of two teenage boys (the first speaker below) and another mother with

much younger children offer typical examples of this feeling:

111

. . . as a result then of what I've had to deal with, just
to be really honest with you, [there] has been a resentment
of them having gotten in the way of this kind of growth and
development.

I feel like I've got little strings hanging off me that are

sort of pulling on me and . . . at times I really resent it

and I look at people who are childless and think, 'Boy! That

really looks good!’
One exception to this was a father, the husband of the woman in the
previous example. He felt that he had become a "better" person emotion-
ally through being a parent but that the experience was for the most
part (especially in terms of his intellectural life) a bad one:

I feel very strongly that children have stunted my growth

. . I'm terribly frustrated because our choice has been
to raise kids.

Sources of the Anger

 

Parents attempted to locate the sources of the anger, rage and
resentment and found them in belief systems that were out of line with
reality, in personality similarities, and in displaced anger. In
searching for the sources, they learned about themselves and about
children.

For some, the source of the rage was identified as a discrepancy
between their belief system (their sense of what children shppld be
like) and the reality of children. The same child counselor cited
earlier in this chapter, described what she thought was happening when
she got really angry with her preschool son:

I'm acting like I think it's really possible for a child to

be perfect all the time and that's not possible so I have to

change my beliefs so I can change the feelings that I get

when he misbehaves--so I can look at it like: 'Oh yeah,

here's [my son] misbehaving as is normal for a four-year-
old. ' Then I don't feel the enormous anger.

112

Her process--changing her feelings by changing what she thought--is
what Hochschild (l975: 9) refers to as "feeling-work":

The third social act performed upon feelings is the manage-

ment of them--the shaping, modulating, inducing, and reduc-

ing of them through feeling work. Feeling-work is the deli-
berate act of trying to feel what we think we should feel

in a given situation. It is the social act of trying to

move experience to coincide with feeling rules. It has two

sides. On one hand, we sometimes try ppt_to feel an emotion

or feeling we think we ought not to feel (e.g., supression).

On the other hand we sometimes try tp feel an emotion or

feeling we think we ought to: i.e., try to fall in love.

For many parents, the source of the anger seemed lodged in mis-
conceptions of what could be expected of children at certain ages.
Some, like the mother speaking here, didn't know what to expect of
babies:

I wasn't patient . . . and I expected things from a baby
that [were unrealistic] . . . he was just an infant.

Others were patient (and even indulgent) with infants but expected that
older children should "shape up". The mother of a four-year-old boy
felt angry and cheated:

I think I had the belief that once he was three he was sort

of a grownup or something; that all my patience should bear

fruit: . ... it didn't and I felt cheated.
In a very similar vein the father of two children reported:

There's an age where both [of the children] capture my

heart and they can do no wrong at that period and it's

someplace around two or three and I have all the patience

in the world with them at that time . . . after that I

feel that they ought to begin shaping up.

At other times the anger came not so much from unrealistic expec-
tations for children at a particular age but from perfectionist hopes
for the children. Here another father with two children talks about

one source of his anger:

113

I think we want the children to reach their highest poten-

tial whatever that may be and when we know they can do better

we sometimes get angry.

Children provide safer, more available targets for anger than do
spouses, bosses, and friends. The parents I interviewed spoke of dis-
placing their anger in this way. Sometimes it was anger from long ago
"meant" for one's own parents as shown in this example from a mother of
two:

[my brother-in-law] said that he was sure I had felt that

rage before, probably toward my own mother when I was [the

age my daughter is now].

More often it was anger at a spouse. All of these were from women.
The first is from the mother of a four-year-old, the second from a
woman with four children, ages 8-16:

I also identified that a lot of times when I was acting

angry toward [my son], I was really angry toward my husband

and . . . it was easier to be angry with my kid, cause he

couldn't hurt me back.

I get much more angry with [my daughter] and her bad faults

that are my husband's same bad faults because I feel sub-

consciously it's legitimate to get angry with her and not

with him . . . .

In other cases, the anger was not displaced onto the child from another
person, but rather took the form of anger at what the child could do
that one had been denied as a child:

I might even be angry at [my son] because maybe he's
getting to do things I didn't get to do.

That most of the analyses in this category were from women may reflect
the extent to which middle-class American women's expression of anger
has been constrained and edited. (Confounding this is the fact that

there were more women than men in the sample.) At the same time, how-

ever, men too mentioned feeling more angry at children than at other

114

people. Implicit in their responses was the suggestion that somehow

in other relationships they were able to control their rage much more
easily--that there was something about the parent/child relationship
that cut loose those controls. One father made the distinctions expli-
cit:

E canJget angry with him much faster than with anybody
else .

For others it seemed that the anger emerged from trying to deal
with a child whose personality was like their own. Two mothers-~the
first with two young boys and the second a high school counselor with
two teenagers--spoke about this problem:

[My son] is just like me only more so and [he] and I go

head on you know . . . . When we have a problem . . . I

really get annoyed and angry, and I don't know if it's if

I just see him doing the kinds of things that I try to

work on myself . . . .

When [my daughter] and I get into confrontations, they're
real douzies!

This over-identification with a child and the confusion of anger at the
self with anger at the child (as shown in the first example above) has
been cited as one source of child abuse (Bakan, 1971). This was men-

tioned earlier in more detail in the Chapter on Children as Mirrors.

Increased Understanding

Some of those interviewed reported that they now understood their
own parents' anger in new ways. Many mentioned this, but a young
mother provided the most graphic report of her new understandings. As
she spoke I could "see" hgp_mother emptying the drawers, and feel the
twin emotions of wonder and understanding that the daughter described:

My mother . . . used to really lose it. [I used to think],

'Wow, look at Mom, she is crazy! . . . she's really gone
bezerk this time.’ . . . I've seen more of that in myself

115

now . . . . There was the time that my mother came storm-

ing in and said, 'You want a messy room? Well, I'll give you

a messy room!I [She] took all my drawers out and dumped them

on the floor. That incident has left me in wonder for low

these many years--until now. Now I can understand it: 1331

someone could be driven to that behavior.

Understanding "how someone could be driven to that behavior" also
led to a new understanding not only of their own parents but of child
abusers. Seeing in themselves the capacity for violence against their
own children, many felt compassion or at least understanding for those
parents who do abuse their children. The parents I interviewed, many
of them human service workers themselves, were humbled to find this
capacity within themselves. A father who was a social worker noted:

When he was a baby, I really surprised myself . . . . I've

never really hurt him, but I could understand why somebody

could get to that point very easily.

Another father, this one with two professional degrees, spent a lot of
time with his two young daughters. He said:

You can realize . . . how children get battered. [Even when

you are financially secure and all] there are still times

when kids can drive you nuts.

Mothers too spoke of realizing they were capable of hurting their
children: I

I don't like to think of myself as a person capable of smash-

ing a three-year—old, and though I've never done it I know

that I could do it. I could wring her little neck sometimes.

I can now say with some semblance of mind that I realize why

some children are abused . . . . Not that I have ever abused

but I can see where you could get to the point where you

could take that kid and smack him and throw him against the

wall.

Bakan (l97l: 90) sees the helplessness of the child as eliciting abuse
from "parents who are themselves overwhelmed by feelings of helpless-

ness." Since we are seldom forced to confront helplessness in our

116

relationships with other adults, these deeply buried feelings of rage
have few occasions to escape. We can generally demand that other adults
take care of themselves, or, at the very least, that they not expect us
to do so. In the final analysis we can usually leave another adult
whose behavior is too helpless for our liking. The seriously ill (men-
tally or physically) are exceptions. Even then we generally have the
option of having them cared for in an institution. Barrie Thorne (per-
sonal communication) suggests that the abuse of the old (both at home
and in institutions) may spring from similar structural causes as that
of infants. 1

In addition to an increased understanding of anger in others (in
child abusers and in one's own parents), those interviewed felt they
came to understand themselves better through confronting child preci-
pitated anger. Both men and women learned from this experience, though
sometimes in different ways. As suggested earlier, the experience some-
times helped women learn to accept and express anger. One mother was
especially frank about this:

I've learned a lot about my own emotions through him and

there's a part of me that doesn't like to admit that be-

cause I think that's not fair to him . . . it's like I can

practice on him, I can express anger far more directly,

far more openly, um, and then it passes . . . that really

transfers into my dealing with other adults.
Men, on the other hand, have traditionally been free to express anger
directly. Through children, though, they became more critical of their
responses--they began to do some of the "feeling work" traditionally
done by women. The father quoted at the beginning of the chapter con-
cerning "all the basic emotions", noted:

I like to [keep] everything under control, you know, so

it's [the strong emotions unleashed by his child] been a
good learning experience.

117

Another father began to examine his own feelings a bit more:

She'll say 'Well, why are you mad at me?‘ . . . then you

step back and say 'Gees, well why am_I mad? What's the prob-
lem here?‘ . . . it makes you come in contact and think about
what you're doing more; think about your own feelings a lit-
tle bit more.

Finally, parents also spoke of ways that dealing with the anger
their children felt helped them understand themselves better. Here a
father who is a university professor is talking about what he learned:

I've wondered what I did with my anger for years and years

. . . because it's a real question for [my daughter]--she has

a great deal of difficulty expressing anger toward adults

. and so that led me to wonder what did my mother do
. so it leads to a personal exploration.

Fears and Vulnerabilities

 

I think they make you vulnerable to

feelings that you wouldn't have to feel

obviously if you didn't have an associ-

ation with children.

—-mother of two preschool girls

The project of caring for a child, of holding oneself and being

held by others as responsible for the protection or preservation of a
child, exposes parents to a wide range of vulnerabilities and fears.
The parents I interviewed emphasized their pervasive awareness of how
much might go wrong in this project. A father (overheard at a dinner
party) summarized this sense of vulnerability in the face of one's
children: "My children can hurt me more than anyone else." The ways
in which children could "hurt" parents were varied, but most seemed re-
lated to the way that having children changed one's relationship to
danger in the world. Both fathers and mothers said they were more
aware of danger, more aware of "how fragile the whole thing is." At

the same time, they were also aware of their own powerlessness in the

face of these dangers.

118

This kind of vulnerability--where one is assumed to have complete
power and yet is at the same time powerless to prevent things from going
wrong--is similar to what Sarah Ruddick (1980) describes as resulting
in "humility". In discussing the antecedents of maternal thinking, she
suggests that "humility is a metaphysical attidude one takes toward a
world beyond one's control." Mothers, she writes, using Adrienne Rich's
(l977) words, engage in “world-protection, world-preservation, and
world-repair." But they must do that protection, preservation and re-
pair under circumstances beyond their control: children are born with
birth defects, are subject to unpredictable influences after they are
born, and, as one father said, "do get sick and die." Marx ir1 a
more general way makes this same observation about all people:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as

they please: they do not make it under circumstances chosen

by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered,

given and transmitted from the past.

Nowhere is this more true than with the experience of parents, especi-
ally mothers. This unpredictability and chance, in a project so close
to one's self, produces a sense of humility whose roots Ruddick (l980:
l9) summarizes:

As the philosopher Iris Murdoch puts it: 'every natural

thing, including one' s own mind, is subject to chance . . . .

One might say that chance is a subdivision of death.

We cannot dominate the world. ' Humility which emerges from

maternal practices accepts not only the facts of damage and

death, but also the facts of independent and uncontrollable,

developing and increasingly separate existences of the lives

it seeks to preserve. 'Humility is not a peculiar habit of

self-effacement, rather like having an inaudible voice, it

is a selfless respect for reality and one of the most diffi-
cult and central of virtues.‘

In my own research I found precisely these same factors, even

though I was not aware of Ruddick's work until nearing the end of my

119

project. The parents I interviewed described their new awareness of
dangers and their feelings of helplessness in the face of these. While
the possibility of a child's death was the most devastating fear, other
fears existed as well. Some parents spoke of fearing that a child might
"turn out badly" and thus reflect badly on them; others talked about
children being sick or injured; still others about the fear that their
children might stop loving them. Such vulnerabilities, it seems, occur
very infrequently outside of parenthood. Certainly, it is possible
that people may be deeply hurt by what happens to their proteges or to
other products of their life's work. Yet such possibilities are unlike-
ly for most people, if only because few people have the opportunity to
be so invested in their work. Children alone retain the potential to
make their parents vulnerable in such all-pervasive, global ways.

The themes of vulnerability and fear as they emerged in the inter-
views fell into three categories. First, parents felt they gained a
new awareness of danger in the world. They felt vulnerable and even
fearful in the face of these dangers and realized that their own ability
to protect and preserve the child had finite limits. Second, they
realized their own vulnerability should these protecting, preserving
efforts fail. The possibility of the death of their child was, for
most parents, the worst thing they could imagine. Finally, this feel-
ing of vulnerability and fear with regard to what might befall one's
pwp children seemed to result in a changed sensitivity to preserving

and protecting all children--even those remote in time and place.

Realization of New Dangers and of the Child's Need for Protection

Psychoanalytic literature is replete with references to the need

of the new mother for protection and tends to talk about this at times

120

in terms of irrational fears (see for example, Winnicott, 1958). Such
accounts imply that these fears are the result of female hormones or of
specifically female psychic processes. My research suggests that it is
rather the practice of mothering that evokes such fears. Since both
fathers and mothers mention this and since it appears to have such a
clear ground in real dangers, the search for an explanation in hormones
or in the early childhood experiences of women seems superfluous. Thus,
in my interviews both mothers and fathers spoke of ways that having acflfild
increased their awareness of the fragility of life and of the dangers
that exist in the world. A mother of two preschoolers typified this:

When [my daughter] was born I was immediately into a long

period where I was very much aware of the world and the state

that it was in and that really upset me . . . . I immediately

fell in love with her and I didn't want her growing up in a

world full of hate and war and killing. All of a sudden I

realized how vulnerable she was . . . I had nightmares for a

long time.
The father of two high school boys, his step-sons, echoes this senti-
ment:

I have more of a feeling of how fragile the whole thing is.
Dangers that had always been present took on a new significance, "they

approach much nearer, as this mother of two preschoolers explained:

I've become so much more aware of evil influences in the

world--bad people--they were always terrifying . . . but

they approach much nearer with children to protect . . . .

I've become so much more paranoid about protecting myself

and my loved ones.
For some parents this new awareness took on an intensity that frightened
them and even made them question their own sanity. A mother with two
preschool girls described this:

Another kind of disturbing thing that's happened since I've
had children . . . and that's become almost a neurotic

121

. fear of any situation where I wouldn't be in control.
For instance: holocaust kinds of fantasies. You know,
being Jewish, and having grown up just knowing about con-
centration camps and things like that and hearing all the
stories and having relatives and everything that went through
it, never affected me until I was pregnant with [my first
daughter] and suddenly the thought of being in a place where
people, evil people were doing things to me and my children
makes me crazy . . . . So, when I was pregnant for the first
time, I had horrible nightmares about people ripping my un-
born children out from my womb and everything. I've heard
that they really did [things like that]: strapping my legs
together when I went into labor, just these horrible things
that . . . I thought it was horrible before, but [then] it
was just this horrible gorey storey. But suddenly being
pregnant, they all came back--stories that, that, I hadn't
heard in years just started creeping back into my conscious-
ness from somewhere--it was really scary . . . . I guess
being pregnant and having a child just makes you so much
more dependent on your surroundings. (emphasis mine)

 

Protecting children is not easy. The world j§_a dangerous place
and children, just by their normal activity, subvert parents' efforts
at protection and preservation. Ruddick (l980: l7) discusses these dif-
ficulties:

A mother, acting in the interest of preserving and maintain-
ing life, is in a peculiar relation to 'nature.‘ As a child-
bearer, in the service of the Species, she often takes herself
and is taken by others to be an especially 'natural' member
of her culture. As a child-tender she must respect nature's
limits and court its favor with foresightful actions ranging
from immunizations, to caps on household poisons, to magical
imprecations, warnings and prayers. 'Nature' with its unpre-
dictable varieties of dirt and disease, is her enemy as much
as her ally. Her children themselves are natural creatures,
often unable to understand or abet her efforts to protect
them. Since they frequently find her necessary direction
constraining, a mother can experience her children's own
liveliness as another enemy of the life she is preserving.

The parents I Spoke with mentioned a wide range of concrete worries and
fears that came from trying to protect active, lively children. The
mother of a three-year-old told me she was "concerned about her safety
as a girl already.“ Some of these new worries felt by the parents came

about as anger:

122

If [my daughter] does something like . . . run out in the

street I am terrified that she is going to get hit by a car

and yet I'm screaming and yelling at her and angry . . .

and I know that's the same kind of reaction my parents had

Parents were afraid of things for their children which they didn't
worry about for themselves. A mother talked about being angry at the
P38 cover-up pp; because she might be contaminated, but because she
realized she could contaminate her son through breastfeeding.

Repeatedly, the parents talked about themselves as protectors--
about the worrying they did and about the steps they took to prevent
harm from reaching their chilren. Children were always in the back of
their minds. The father of a five-year-old girl, whose wife was away
for the year on an internship, told me that now while he was teaching
he was always wondering how his daughter was--"before I was a free bird?
A mother with a two-year-old girl expressed this same feeling: "I'm
going through more anxiety about working full-time since I have her."
Parents with older children worried too:

The older one is finally driving so that means a lot of
scary feelings.

Parents became more cautious. They planned ways to escape fire, and
they wore seatbelts. A woman with two children talked of seeing an
accident in front of her house:
The woman and child both fell out of the car and were killed
instantly. You know, here it was, right in front of our
house, and, uh, we started buckling the kids and buckling
ourselves and we never said anything even.
Some of the concerns were more existential. One father wanted to

protect his daughter not just from dying, but from having to confront

her own death:

123

I find myself also wanting to protect [her] . . . why bring

into the world someone who is going to have to confront their

own death?

Both fathers and mothers expressed surprise at the lengths to which
they would go to protect their children. One woman came to understand
her own parents' love for her when she realized she would save her own
children before she would save herself. Another woman, the mother of
two girls aged five and two, was describing the extremes of emotion that
come with being a parent. She said she now knew that she could steal
if her family were starving and that she could kill to save her child.

. . when I think of my vulnerable child being forceably

taken from me by someone, I really think I could fight until

death for my child, which I never would have experienced that

type of feeling before . . . if someone were to start drag-

ging my husband off [well] he's an adult, he can take care of

himself.

A father with a girl four and a boy two, talked about the protectiveness
he felt when his daughter was born:

Before I saw [her] there was nobody in the world that I would
die for . . . that changed just like that.

Yet, through all of this, the parents expressed a sense of their
ultimate helplessness in this task of preservation. The mother of a
five-year-old girl said:

[I've realized] how painful it can be to be a parent, I

don't think I realized that before . . . . Knowing that you

don't know what lies in the future for them and that you

don't want them to get hurt and yet chances are that some-

where along the line something . . . is going to hurt them

quite deeply.

A mother with two children mused that her concerns were not so much
different concerns since she had children, but rather concerns of a dif—
ferent degree:

My concern fOr the environment . . . ecology . . . nuclear
. . were always things that in high school and college I

124

was very concerned about but now that I have kids it terri-
fies me . . . some of the things that are happening . . .
what kind of life will my kids have? Are they going to have
a life at all? I get scared, I get angry at things like the
P38 scandal . . . it would have concerned me before . . .

[I] was breastfeeding my son . . . . My anger at [the cover-
up] . . . . It's not so much I'm worried about any kind of
contamination I might have . . . but I feel so helpless . . .
[about] my son . . . so again the degree is different.
(emphasis mine)

This helplessness is precisely what Ruddick cites as resulting in
the virtue of humility. Parents, too, were aware of the effects on -
themselves of engaging in the tasks of preserving and protecting in such
an uncertain project. One parent said it was not that children were the
.ppLy source of this opportunity, but rather that they give it to you

"ready made":

They provide opportunities to care about other people intens-
ly. . . I'm not sure that having children is a really essen-
tial part of being an adult. . . I'm sure that it's possible
to become an adult without having children. I'm sure that
those situations can be provided in other ways. Surely I

know plenty of people who don't have children who are . . .
real responsible valuable adults--my aunts [for example] . . .
they have cared for other people. It's not the child, it's
the caring and the taking on of responsibility and I suppose
having a child sort of gives that to you ready made. (emphasis
mine

 

Others, like one father of a three-year-old boy, disagreed and felt that
this kind of protection and care was not really appropriately directed

towards adults:

It's . . . fun to just have the ability to be a protecting
force in somebody's environment--it gives you a sense of ac-
complishment and importance . . . it's easy to get [that]
with a kid. It's much easier to get [that] with a kid than
an adult. . . . I'm not sure that I'd want to have a spouse
that wanted to be protected all the time.

One facet of the job of protecting the child was staying alive
long enough to finish the task. A mother told me:

125

You're more conscious somehow of your own mortality and you
make conscious efforts . . [to] avoid situations . .
We're non-smokers . . . thoughtful [about the food] we eat

. and I really don't like to go with my husband in an
airplane . . . if anything happened to us, what would happen
to them?

Parents reported being more afraid of their own death now that they had
children to take care of. They drove more slowly or even not at all
sometimes (one mother told me "New Year's Eve we don't go out of the
subdivision") and worried about airplanes. One four-year-old told me
his parents were "going on separately planes"--a fact his mother veri-
fied a few minutes later. A father talked about how much more cautious
he had become since his children were born:
. made me much more cautious about lots of things . . .

I get nervous on airplanes for example, particularly if [the

children] are not there . . . I never used to be afraid to

fly and now I find myself nervous about flying . . . maybe

it's just that I'm older . . . but I relate it to having

kids.
A mother with two preschool boys shared with me her worries:

. . about airplanes, I used to love to . . . fly. .

I still like to but it's changed because I don't like it so

much cause I' m afraid of crashing. . . What if the plane

does crash? What about the kids? We had to think who would

they go to and who could do a fairly decent job of raising

them?
Mostly they worried--apg made sure they didn't die. A father who had
given up scuba diving, told me he now felt "more responsible to stay
around." A mother said:

It becomes more important not to die. I mean I've got this

job and nobody can do it. I mean I just decided I can't

die. Nobody can take care of my kids in the way I want

them to, um, so the thought of dying is just too awful now.
Even parents of teenagers wanted to stick around until the job was

"finished":

126

Recently [I] confronted the very real possibility of having
a very serious disease myself and that really scared me in

terms of my kids. I . . . want to live long enough to see

them grow up and I just felt like I wasn't finished . . . I
wanted all of a sudden to just clarify their values and get
everything all tidied up.

Realization of Own Vulnerability Should a Child Die

 

Many parents spoke of the new vulnerability felt in the face of
imagining that one of their children might die. The death of a child
is harder to accept than the death of adults (for an analysis of this
see Schoenenberg, Carr and Peretz, 1970; Byulay, l978; and Burton, 1974).
Beyond their worries about being there to protect their children most
parents said they themselves were really not afraid of their own death.
They were terrified of the death of their children. The possibility of
death became more immediate when one was a parent:

I wasn't [concerned] about death in college . . - now I

think [about] death, [and] accidents . . . all are very pos-

sible and I worry more about something happening to her than

to me . . . . Before you just went on your way . . . death

was more in the distance, but now it's part of everything.

(emphasis mine)
--mother of one

 

The step-father of two teenage boys talked about his fears:
It makes me a little bit more nervous . . . in that they
have so much potential and I'd hate to see it cut short
. . . . I have more of a feeling about how fragile the whole
thing is.
Some of the parents talked about "rehearsing" ways to deal with the
death of a child. A father, whose children were both healthy, spoke of
thinking about what he would do if he found out his child was going to
die:
I'd try to be rational and say 'If I'd never seen you,

never had you, I'd have never known the emotions that I've
had up to now . . . .'

127

Others talked about more religious or mystical ways of explaining a
child's death to themselves. Virtually every parent who mentioned the
possibility of the death of a child, saw it was the worst thing that
could happen in their life time. One mother of two preschoolers who
had previously lost infant twins knew the enormity of the loss:

It may sound terrible, but I wanna die before they do. I

buried two sons and I don't wanna go through that again, you

know. You can handle it once in your life . . . it was hard

enough going through it with the twins.

These fears for the safety of the child and one's consequent ten-
dency toward overprotectiveness and caution grow, not out of flaws in
the psychic structure of the caretaker, but rather have their roots in
the practice of caretaking. Ruddick (1980: l7) notes correctly that
such rigid or excessive control is an "occupational hazard" of motherhg--
it is "the likely defect of the very virtues [mothers] are required to
practice":

It is no wonder then that as she engages in preservation a

mother is always liable to the temptations of fearfulness

and excessive control . . . . If mothers are more frequently

wary than non-mothers, if we are tempted by fearfulness to

simple supernatural comforts or authoritarian states or

familes, this is a hazard of our work situation. (emphasis
mine

 

New Sensitivity to Other Children Being Hurt

 

Finally, ten out of the 59 parents interviewed reported that having
a child somehow altered their reactions to the plight of children in
general. Some examples of this have already been cited on the pre-
ceding pages. On a very basic level, being a parent made some people
realize that children are human, as this 28-year-old mother of one

preschool boy explained:

128

[Before you have one of your own] you don't realize that

they're people just like you or I . . . . I have a lot more

respect for children now.
Furthermore, it increased their empathy for other children and for other
children's parents. The speaker below is a school teacher with two
teenage children:

You get a different perspective: they're somebody's child--
you can empathize with certain things.

Having children made remote dangers more immediate:

I'm more aware of the things that are going on in the world

now in relationship to my kids, . . . thing, um . . . the

whole idea of having children or at least a son who might

someday have to fight a war . . . I mean I care about the

war in Vietnam, 1 was opposed butnw'reasons for being op-

posed were . . . not that personal, it was sort of broad-based

thing that war is wrong.
A two-way process seemed to occur: remote dangers took on more personal
meaning, and parents' personal feelings about their own children ex-
panded to encompass a larger, more remote world. Parents reported
being unable to read about child abuse with the same detachment possi-
ble before they had children:

Before . . . I'd read an article about child beating in the

paper and I'd think, 'Oh, that's too bad.‘ Now it makes me

sick.

--mother of two preschoolers
Nor could they watch television or film violence that involved children.
A father with two preschoolers who described himself as a blunt,
blustery risk—taker, talked about this:

I used to be able to watch war movies . . . as an intellec-

tual observer . . . it never affected me emotionally at all

. . . Very many times [now] I cannot watch that stuff any-

more [if children are involved].

His wife (who had been interviewed separately a few minutes before,

giving them no chance to compare notes) had a similar observation:

129

[You] probably have a greater value for children having
children of your own. There was a movie on TV one time
called 'Cubie 7' . . . films of the Nazi's attrocities

. . . . One of the experiments was letting a newborn starve
to death . . . . I don't think it would have affected me

as much if I hadn't had my own children.

Another mother could no longer watch horror movies:
My husband and I have always been horror movie freaks . . .
but [now] we cannot go to . . . anything [that shows things]
happening to children. ‘
Even parents who had always opposed war on intellectual or moral grounds
found they experienced a new revulsion to it once they had children of
their own. A politically active mother of a preschool girl said:
[What struck me was] the different impact that footage from
Indochina about children had on me after she was born as
[compared to] before she was born . . . . Just knowing in a
much more gut level way the humanity of children . . . .
anyone who does that to a child has got to be stopped . . .
I guess it's knowing . . . the humanity of children plus a
gut level sense of their dependence on adults that it's far

worse to do wartime situation things to children than it is
to adults.

In arwflated,yet almost opposite way, having children made parents
take a new attitudetoward danger and hopelessness. For the sake of
their children, they had to try to be hopeful, as this father of a pre-
school girl describes:

One of my doubts about bringing children into this world

. . where the world is going and so why bring children

into that . . . . [but since my daughter was born] I’m a

lot less apocalyptic.

Children, in order to grow, must confront dangers and parents learn
a lot in the process. The mother of five children talked about the
early seventies and about her son, then 15, whose political beliefs and
actions both terrified her and led her into new growth:

I woke up one morning and he was gone [to a political rally

in Florida]. I was absolutely panic-stricken . . . . On the
one hand acting as mother I was wanting to protect him and

130

get him to ease off on things that were foolhardy. On the
other hand when it came down to a matter of basic principle
sometimes I could see that he was really right and that a
person needs to put things on the line and put themselves

in danger in order to make the society notice . . . . I
imagine in some ways the mere fact of what I saw as a very
real danger was enough of a goad to make me do some things

to make me stand up and face [my son] in some ways I wouldn't
have if it hadn't seemed so dangerous to me . . . . [My hus-
band] and I for instance, went out and, uh, listened to some
of the speeches that were being given at the rally . . . which
I probably wouldn't even have done if [my son] had not been
involved and I found that I felt much better after having
done it. I didn't feel as frightened about the whole situ-
ation.

In contrast to claims that the concerns of women (taken usually to
be identical with those of mothers) tend to be particularistic while
those of men tend to be more universalistic, the interviews indicate
that intense parenting (which may be done by men or women) results in
more universalistic rather than particularistic concerns. The internal
dynamics of this more universalistic concern may differ (as indicated by
the parents quoted in the last few pages), but the results are similar.
In the process of parenting a particular child, one comes to feel more
concern about the fate of children in general. I find in the interview
data, support for the possibility that being a parent, with its demands
to focus on one's own children, simultaneously enlarges one's capacity
for caring about other children and about concerns that go far beyond

one's own family.

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHILDREN AS PRECIPITATORS OF DECISION MAKING

I think you have to make all decisions
when you have children.
--mother of two preschoolers

Introduction

 

One of the earliest patterns I saw in the interviews was the way
that children forced parents to make up their minds, take stands, act
on long-held beliefs, or come down on one side of the other of an issue.
The issues involved were both practical and philOSOphical ones-~usually
a combination of both. For example, parents reported feeling a need to
decide about baptism or to decide whether, as pacifists, they should
allow their children to play with guns. The interviews were filled
with "they've forced me . . .'§ "they've required me . . .'L "they've

"1 The forced nature of these decisions was clear. Many

made me . . .
noted that without children they would never have been required to make
a choice or take a stand on many of the issues. In other cases, the

decisions were ones that all adults are generally required to make, but

being a parent gave them a new cast.

 

1Compare this with the words used in the chapter on "Access to the
World of Childhood". In that context parents were more likely to des-
cribe children's influences with words like "allowed", "enabled",
"facilitated".

131

132

In this chapter, I will explore some of these forced choices
described by parents. Sometimes the decision involved simply acting
on a long-held belief. Other times, it meant finally making a decision
on some long-considered topic (e.g. parents said that children made
them finally settle some issues, like religion, which previously they
had left open). In still other cases, parents were forced to make de-
cisions on dilemmas they had never imagined existed before. In this
sense, and others, the way in which children forced their parents to
make<flxfisions or to take stands was similar to the way in which children
increased the degree and type of emotional response to which their par-
ents were exposed.

A brief look at some differences between regular decision making
for adults and that which occurs as a result of being responsible for a
child may be useful in underscoring the special nature of children's
contributions in this realm. In adult life, habit and routinization
(both personal and cultural) remove large parts of life from problem-
atic status. Standardized ways of perceiving the world mitigate against
the introduction of novelty that would require new adaptation and
thinking.

In addition to these routines, adults (when they choose to) have
other means at their disposal to avoid making decisions or even con-
fronting issues. For example, they can often leave the scene of con-
flict, can avoid answering questions that make them uncomfortable, and
can avoid (by careful selection of friends and activities) putting
themselves in situations where "things will come up" that they don't

want to deal with.2

 

2There are, of course, exceptions to this immunity to difficult
decision making that are similar to the experiences of parents. The

133

Kinds of Decisions

 

In virtually all the interviews the sense emerged that children's
mere presence, and one's responsibility for their care, pervaded vir-
tually all decision making. The comment of this father of two pre-
schoolers was typical:

Suddenly all your decisions are modified by the fact that
you have kids.

Yet his response was not typical of fathers. While many of the parents
in this sample professed role sharing and some even came close to
equally dividing the physical work, in most cases the wife assumed much
more of the emotional work of child rearing. The mother in the follow-
ing example explained that although they split things fifty-fifty, she
was still the "psychological parent":

That kid is constantly inside my head so that everything I

do I do partly with an evaluation of the impact of him in

my head and so, you know, sometimes I wish that I could

just wrench it out of my head for a while and be free of

that concern.
Many husbands_did talk about the effects of children on their own deci-

sion making processes but they generally did so in less all-encompassing

ways than did the mothers.

 

loyalty oaths of the sixties forced people to take public stands. Thera-
py (or confinement in a mental hospital) makes heavy demands on adults

to confront new issues, to look at old ones in a new light, and to answer
questions one might prefer to avoid. Religious conversion likewise de-
mands that novices redefine large parts of their old lives and values.
Practicing transcendental meditation or transactional analysis has as-
pects of both therapy and religion for Westerners. Travel to a foreign
country forces new perceptions and tends to make strong demands on an in-
dividual to come to terms with unfamiliar situations. While all of these
have some things in common with parenthood in forcing one to confront new
issues and make decisions, there are important differences. Parenthood
combines duration and intensity in ways the other do not (e.g. A teenage
girl traveling with me and my two children for several weeks, observed
suddenly "Oh, you have them all day, every day, for e-i-g-h-t-e-e-n
yearsi). Travel seldom lasts 18 years, therapy does end eventually, and
religious conversions are, by definition, time bounded.

134

The level of the decisions varied--from decisions about concrete
everyday matters to moral and ethical decisions. On an everyday level,
children required parents to make many decisions in different and more
pressing ways than if they had not had children. The mother of two pre-
schoolers told me:

You make a decision now, you consciously put them into it,

you know, you talk about where we move, our job, .

Those things are practical everyday things but they certainly

would never have entered into our thinking had we not had

children.

Many of the decisions parents felt they had to make now that they
had children were ethical, moral or religious. For some, the coming of
a child drew them back to the church of their childhood. Others saw
churches in a new light--some decided that a particular church, while it
had been fine for them as adults, was not good for children. Others
found that having children left them stranded—-they could not decide
what to do:

I had thought 'Well now, should the children go to church or

shouldn't they' and for me I couldn't do that, because I

would be the first hypocrite, I should think, to send my

children without taking them.

--mother of two

I do more thinking about my childhood . . . I try to make

value judgments on what experiences I had that I want to pro-

vide for my kids . . . [I ask myself, 'what did I get out of

church] that I am denying my kids?‘

In many cases these moral and ethical issues were closely tied to
practical ones. In fact, in many ways, this seems to be the most import-
ant point. Children take abstract beliefs and make them concrete. For
example, breaking up fights among toddlers raised for many parents the

whole issue of pacifism. The same issue came up in deciding whether to

allow the children to play with toy guns. Parents had to find ways to

135

reconcile their own beliefs with what "seemed workable" in the face of
childrens' needs and possibilities. In some cases this process
strengthened, in others it weakened, parents' commitments to their old
values and forced them to take stands even in cases where before they
had not seen any issue. Suddenly for many parents old beliefs popped
up and demanded action. In some cases this had all the mystery of rab-
bits being pulled out of hats. A mother tried to explain the curious
position in which she found herself:

I said to my husband: 'I want to have [our daughter]

baptised.‘ He said, 'Why?‘ And I said, 'I don't know,

I just do.‘
Somehow the situation of being a parent encouraged pulling all kinds of
rabbits out of hats--rabbits that then demanded food and cages. The
rabbits were often long-forgotten or dimly remembered values and beliefs
pulled out of who knows where. To cage and feed those old beliefs,
children were sent to church, baptised, and taught moral codes that had
little to do with the lives their parents led. In many cases this in-
fluence was a conservative one. As such it had an almost magical
quality: some magical rite performed in one's own childhood must be
continued to protect the baby (or child). Like throwing salt over one's
shoulder, it may be something one doesn't even really "believe" anymore,
but the stakes are too high to ignore it.

The outward signs (the baptism, the church attendance) then tie

one even tighter to the myth.3 This applied not only to church

 

3The literature on attitude change as a function of behavioral
change is relevant here. People tend to come to believe in those things
on which they have taken a public stand (see e.g. Festinger and Carlsmith,
1959). Children, by forcing parents to take public stands may pro—
foundly shape their parents' values and beliefs.

136

attendance but to visits to the doctor and to sending children to public
schools.4 This mother's response was typical:
I don't think they've changed (my values and beliefs) that much

but as we raise the kids we're forced to act on them a lot more
and we tend to be a lot more rigid about them.

Convervatism

 

The often cited conservative influence of children may be at least
partially attributable to such mechanisms as those I have just described}5
One mother told me that since she had children, she had become more
rigid, "more protective of some of those values." Another mother said
she was more conservative and religious than she thought she was now
that she had children. Another mother of preschoolers told me

Something I know I was more liberal about (before I had child-

ren) . . . was such things as X-rated movies . . . . I really

feel they should be more restricted, I think since I've become

a parent--I've become more conservative along those lines.

The task of being responsible for the care and protection of children
forced parents to redefine their stand on many issues. One mother's
response was typical:

I'm becoming more conservative, more concerned about things

like crime . . . [before] it wasn't a big concern of mine,

you know. I was worried about the 'war' and things like
that. Now I find myself heading towards my parents more.

 

4A group of highly educated parents met for two years to discuss
alternatives to public school education. They worked out an analysis of
how to improve such education and planned to open a school when their
children reached kindergarten age. At the last minute most of the par-
ents decided against putting their own children in the new school. They
felt they couldn't "take the chance" with their own kids. For reasons
they could not entirely articulate, they found it easier to commend
their children to the experts they "knew" were wrong, than to take a
chance on something new with their own kids.

5See the section on "Setting an Example" in Chapter Eight for
other ways in which children can be a conservative force in parents'
lives.

137

You know, wondering about crime and the effects of it on kids.

Um, worrying about drugs in school--before I could care about

drugs in school . . . now the thought of having my children

smoking dope in the nursery school does not please me.

However, children's influences on parents' decision making was not
always in a conservative direction. Parents of older children (like
one father who began wearing work shirts instead of neckties at his
children's insistence) felt they had changed their views on many speci-
fic issues because of their children (e.g. on dress styles, the war,
sex, drugs, the work ethic).

In addition, parents' concern with and responsibility for the
future was broadened as they became parents. A father, talking about
his own future, said he now saw it in a different light:

My decisions as to the future are very much weighed by

my kids and I think a great deal about the years that are

left and how best to spend them.

Similarly a mother remarked:

Now I think more about the future . . . I'm forced to think
ahead . . . . Now I find myself thinking in years.

Their concerns about the future become more broadly defined:

I worry a lot more about pollution, energy, anything that
smacks of the future--I suddenly have a real stake in the
future . . . it always had bothered me before, but now it's
definitely different now that I have kids because it's per-
sonal.

--mother of preschoolers

More Universal Concerns
Children also seemed to make the concerns of their parents more
universal, as this mother describes:
I think they probably in their greatest influence have taken
me out of a very small, little world and moved me into think-

ing about lots of other things than I probably would have
. . . [they] make my concerns more universal.

PART IV

BEING RESPONSIBLE FOR SHAPING THE GROWTH AND ENSURING
THE ACCEPTABILITY OF CHILDREN

Daily contact with children who are learning, who are new to the
world, who need knowledge to survive, and who have fresh questions means
that all parents must come to see themselves and act as teachers. The
effects on parents of acting as teachers has only recently been explored.
Ruddick (1980) cites the parent's interest in the growth and acceptabil-
ity of the child as one of the forces shaping "maternal thinking." In
particular, she cites two outcomes of encouraging the growth of children
and of trying to ensure their acceptability. The first involves a ten-
dency toward thinking in terms of openness and change in response to
the changeability of the growing child. The second involves a sense of
humility resulting from the necessary conflicts that emerge (e.g. the
conflict between fostering preservation and acceptability).

Over 42 percent of all the parents interviewed spontaneously men-
tioned the effects they experienced from serving as teachers of their
children. That parents see this as a central influence can be gauged
both by the enthusiasm of their response and by the fact that over two-
thirds of those mentioning such effects did so within the first few
minutes of the interview. The secions that follow examine four aspects
of this teaching process: deciding what's worth teaching, providing a

setting and a cast of characters, setting a good example, and answering

138

139

questions. In each case, the parents themselves were changed in the

process of teaching their children.

CHAPTER EIGHT

TEACHING

Decidigg_What's Worth Teaching

 

I think you have to make all those deci-
sions when you have children.
--father of two preschoolers

Almost every parent interviewed said that having a child precipi-
tated a whole series of decisions with regard to what's important to
teach. Involved here are decisions about the content of instruction
(how do we decide what the children should learn?), about the values
that are important and worth passing down, and, as a special case of
the previous one, what religious values and customs should be taught to
children. For many parents this meant decisions about very broad areas
of value and belief. Children were the occasion for digging into areas
that might otherwise remain buried. A father with a five-year—old
daughter described his thinking:

Having [my daughter] in the house has given me a chance to

really think about it and decide, 'Hey, how do I want to

bring this child up? Do I want to do as [my father] did

and pretty much leave everything open, offer no direction

either phi1050phically, morally or anything else, or set

down a pretty definite path that when she gets old enough

she can accept or reject?‘

Many of the examples had to do with making decisions about the
importance of religious training. As in the previous example, such ef-

forts involved reflecting back on one's own moral or religious education.

Many re-evaluated their own upbringing. Some reaffirmed their early

140

141

beliefs, like a 33-year—old mother of preschoolers who said that having
children made her think more about religion, and decide that she liked
the specific one she was raised with and wanted it in her own home.
Others who had stopped going to church began to feel again that it was
important. The response of this working mother of two was typical:

I was always very church oriented anyway . . . but then I

drifted away. But having small children, why I want them

to know God and . . . so it's up to me to make sure that

they do . . . . It's been there but it's coming out in the

open again.

Others, like this father of two, were more ambivalent. A churchgoer as
a child, he did not attend now but wondered sometimes: "What did I get
out of it that I'm denying my kids?" Still others rejected church. A
father of two said the church had been fine for him and his wife until
they had children. With children to think about, they re-evaluated the
messages given by their church and decided to leave. Another father
told me:

I think . . . consciously . . . of whether to us religious

training in children is important and in my case I think

I have rejected it as something that you teach children

. . I think you have to make all those decisions when

you have children.

Making decisions about what's worth teaching had a variety of
effects on parents. As the previous examples illustrate, making such
decisions tended to force parents to look at their own past and at how
their own parents had answered those questions. The result was a criti-
cal appraisal of that past and a hooking of the past to the present and
the future. What transpired was more than idle reflection. One father
told me that deciding what to teach his son drove him "back to my own

childhood . . . trying to figure out what sorts of influences [my

parents] had on me that I might like to pass on." Parents sifted

142

through memories of their own childhoods and selected experiences and

values to pass on. A 31—year-old father of two told me "I try to make
value judgments on what experience I had that I want to provide for my
kids." A mother teaching part-time at a university said:

One of the things about being a parent is you feel maybe you

[have learned] some valuable lessons in life and you hope to

pass those on to make it easier for the next generation, hope-

fully a better place for that.

Choices regarding family tradition included a simultaneous re-
appraisal of the past and orientation toward the future. A mother of
two preschoolers told me "You remember how [Christmas] was celebrated
when you were little, and what you want to incorporate of that into
your own family now." Another mother typified the conscious attempts of
middle class parents to shape the content of their children's memories:

I think you think about things consciously. For instance:

What kind of tradition are we gonna have around Christmas?

What is important for children to have as a memory or as

tradition associated with that sort of thing?

Parents also looked elsewhere for help in deciding what's worth
teaching. Some, like this mother,tmrned to their own mothers:

For some reason, although I feel in a lot of ways she isn't

the type of person I'd want to ask for advice from, because

she's my mother she's the one I call and ask--it's so contra-

dictory.

The increasing role of experts and the decreasing experiential bases for
gaining information about child rearing contribute to the anxiety ex-
perienced by many parents. (For a discussion of these issues see
Ehrenreich and English, 1978.) A single father who had raised his
teenage son alone talked about this in one of the pilot interviews:

knowing how to raise children, he said "was, and still is, a great

mystery to me." Many in this highly educated sample turned to books

143

for advice on what to teach children. Not surprisingly, those parents
who talked the most about turning to books were the least sure about
their own ability to know what to do. The remarks of this 31-year-old
homemaker with two preschoolers were typical:

I read everything I can get my hands on, you know, whenever

I'm coping with something new. I've read Dryker's one hundred

times backwards and forward, but it's still very hard for me

to apply.
While reading such books helped parents feel they were doing the right
thing by consulting an authority, such practices also led to increased
guilt as parents like the preceding one realized the gap between what
they were supposed to do and what they actually did with their children.

Deciding what is important to teach children led parents to question
the importance of values they held. A divorced women, just finishing
her Ph.D. in education, told me that confrontations with her five-year-
old son often resulted in her realizing that what she was going to
such lengths to teach him (e.g. manners and certain sorts of discipline)
was not really so important as she had thought. Another mother who had
taught full-time during most of her five-year-old's life, had a similar

experience:

A lot of these values that I had, that really when you come
right down to it I question their importance.

Fathers, as well, came to question their own values, as in this case
where the work ethic came under fire from a five-year-old:

It's hard to explain to him. 'Well, I don't want to go to

work today particularl but I still have to . . .' and a

whole series of these [questions] has made me think more

about 'Well why g9_1 have to go really?’

Many noted that being a parent had not led them to change their

ideas about what's important to teach, but it did lead them to g9

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something about what they believed. This was reported by both men and
women and by those who stayed home as well as by those who went out to
work. A mother who was going to school part-time talked about the
effects her preschoolers had on her:

I don't think [my values and beliefs have] been changed that

much, but as we raise the kids we're forced to act on them a

lot more and we tend to be a lot more rigid about them.

A university professor, the father of two preschool girls, said virtu-
ally the same thing:

I'm not sure so much that [my values and beliefs] have changed

as that I find myself in the role of teacher more and so I'm

forced to make these attitudes explicit.

A high school teacher with preschoolers told me that having children gave
her an opportunity to teach the things she already knew were important--
things you really couldn't teach in school to other people's children:

These are things that I've always, you know, felt strongly

about anyway [but] I don't really have a whole lot of oppor-

tunity to talk about it . . . it's there but it's inside.

But with children you talk about it more, it comes out in

the open more.

At the opposite extreme was the mother of six children, the youngest
eighteen. Before she had children she didn't even realize she hag_any
particular values. As she got older she realized that she did have
some and that she was communicating them to her children.

In summary then, deciding what is worth teaching to children en-
gages parents in a variety of re-evaluations of their own childhood
experiences and of their current value systems. This process not only
raises new issues and reopens old ones, but also, in many cases, results
in taking action on issues in ways that could be avoided if one did not

have children. Thus children move parents from idle speculation and

reflection to an engagement with concrete issues requiring immediate

145

action. This "decision precipitating" quality of caring for children

was discussed in a more general way in Chapter Seven.

Providing a Setting

 

Virtually all the parents interviewed discussed the effects on them-
selves of working to provide a particular context and cast of characters
within which their childrens' socialization would take place. Whiting
(1978) sees the provision of settings as the major route by which par-
ents influence their children. Reporting on the results of her recent
work on “the effect of culture on mundane social behavior" she writes
(1978: 4)

We do not deny the importance of the mother and father in

molding the child but our analysis of samples of maternal

behavior acorss cultures convinces us that the mother's and

father's greatest effect is in the assignment of the child

to settings that have important socializing influences.

My own research suggests that parents are quite explicitly aware of
this and will go to great lengths to place their children in the set-
tings they feel are appropriate.

First, many parents cited "what's best for the children" as a major
determinant of residential choice. The particular residential settings
chosen by this sample of well-educated parents reflect the values of
that group. They altered their place of residence in order to provide
children with settings that would teach them lessons such as getting
along with other children, tolerance, and racial awareness. The re-
sponse of a 34-year-old mother who loves the country was typical. She
said they moved so the kids would have playmates:

[having children] influenced where we bought a house . . .

We lived in the country before and it was very peaceful but
we didn' t have any neighbors.

146

The mother of a three-year-old chose this particular town because she
wanted her son exposed to different kinds of pe0ple:

That's why I like living in [this town], because I feel

there's such a mixture of people . . . I want them to know

there's all kinds of pe0ple.
Others moved to avoid "bad" influences on their children. The divorced

mother of a preschool girl told me:

I lived in California which is really wild. But I moved from
there cause I don't think it's a good place for kids.

The mother of a three-year-old boy emphasized the value of stability:

I think it made me want to own a home a little more too. And

it's made me want to stay put--I like to travel and [my son

has] proved to be a good traveler . . . . But I have a real

sense of wanting him to grow up in the same house and have

the same friends.

In other cases the place of residence was chosen with educational oppor-
tunities for the children in mind. This father's comment was typical:

Well, education has become an important thing. Moving into

a school system that . . . had available . . . foreign langu-

ages, music . . . we knew we were going to pay through the

nose in property taxes.

The effects of place of residence on growing children seemed clear
to parents. The effects on the parents themselves are also considerable,
though they were less often mentioned by parents. Surrounded by neigh-
bors they might not have chosen for themselves, the parents changed in
a variety of ways. One mother, for example, noted her new appreciation
of a sense of community in a neighborhood:

I would very much like to be more out in the country. [My

husband] would like to be in a very urban kind of lace, but

to be in a neighborhood with kids [is just so nice] . and

the sense of community is something that we weren't that re-

Sponsive to [before we had children].

On a smaller scale, parents reported providing other settings or

situations for their children that necessitated change in their own

147

’Hvesas well. For example, as I described in Chapter Four ("Access to
the World of Childhood"), they went places they would not otherwise have
gone. One parent offered the example of doing things she wouldn't or-
dinarily have done (e.g. "taking swimming classes or a bug class"). A
university professor, the father of two small children, talked about the
demands of the nursery school for parent participation on weekends at
functions like "mud-pudging". He explained:

My automatic reaction to that is 'God damn it, I will ppt!‘

. . . [but when] I do go and 'mudpudge' and I find that

actually when I get there I do enjoy it.
In particular, many, who otherwise wouldn't have done it, reported going
to church for the children, as this mother of two preschoolers noted:

We were not going to any church, but all of a sudden when [our

daughter] got old enough to [ask questions about religion]

. we started looking around for some church.

The community ties provided by churches have a kind of universal appeal
to parents. Even people who would ordinarily be Opposed to organized
religion sometimes joined churches to provide their children with a
stable sense of community. One father, a long time political activist,
recognized that his daughter lacked such a stable community because of
the transience of the university community coupled with the paucity of
like-minded people in the town. He himself was surprised that he was
thinking about joining a church:

50 what I've really been thinking about is going to Church X

. a real change for me. To think that I would even pppy

side; it!

Like the father in the last example, many reported that providing
a setting for children meant making drastic changes in their own plans

(e.g.‘just kind of putting [aside] what you want to do"). The effects

of this, both in terms of the particular situations the parents were

148

now in, and in terms of simply putting aside what they wanted to do, are

considerable and deserve further study.

Providing a Cast of Characters

 

Whiting's (1978: 2) analysis of cross-cultural data examines the
relationship between contextual variables and "mundane social behavior."
Her theory:

. says that patterns of interpersonal behavior are devel-
oped in the settings that one frequents and that the most
important characteristics of a setting are the cast of char-
acters who occupy the set, in particular the age and sex of
these characters.

Many of the parents reported altering their own activities so they would
be around their children more. They changed their employment patterns
and divided up their time differently. Mothers, especially those in

the nursery school group, made more changes than fathers and provided
complex justifications for doing so. A mother of three preschoolers
explained:

I'd rather stay home until they get into school and see that

they have the kinds of things that I want them to have. I

feel like I can do a good job.

With some there was a thinly disguised message that without the mother
at home, things would go wrong. This 29-year-old mother with a B.A.
gave a common response:

But for me, I would not be happy--going out and having a

babywitter all day--because . . . I want to be able to say

at least I was there.

Some justified the ways children had hindered their career growth by
explaining that raising children who would contribute to the world was

important:

Oh, in both cases I think they've been a handicap to my career
because in each case I've chosen to remain home . . . but I

149

really can't see myself devoting my life to improving other kids'

conditions and ignoring my own . . . if I am going to make a con—

tribution to the world . . . I think the biggest contribution

I can make is to produce, raise two healthy, giving, loving

children who are also going to contribute to the world.

Even professional mothers (such as the previous one) took it for
granted that they would stay home at least part-time with their child-
ren. Some didn't even justify their actions but rather seemed to deny
that anything was going on. In several cases I mistakenly assumed that
some mothers were working full-time outside the home because they re-
peatedly said that children had not hurt their careers at all. It was
only later in the interview that I discovered that they were working
part—time or not at all. One mother who was teaching only part-time
told me:

I don't think [having children] altered my long-term plans for

myself much. . . . I' m part-time employed as a professor . . .

and I'm gonna continue to be that way until I feel the children

don't need some influence from me.

Only one father was the primary caretaker, and the couple said
this was going to change when they had a second baby. The father was
home because of a work-related injury.which happened before the first
child was born, and continued to care for the baby while going to col-
lege. His wife worked full-time. Other fathers did alter their work
lives but never to the degree that mothers did. A university professor,
35 years old, explained his recent actions:

I was just offered the chairmanship of department X, and I

turned it down . . . it was going to eat a great deal of

time away from my family.

Another father in a managerial position decided that he "didn't want to

work under a tremendous amount of stress and have a heart attack at 55

and die, and spend [his] evenings away from home." Not only were the

150

fathers less likely to alter their work patterns very drastically for
their families, but the reasons they gave differed--none worried about
something awful happening to their children if they worked full-time.

As part of providing a particular cast of characters, some parents
talked about getting pets because of what that would teach the children.
This mother's explanation was typical:

That's another reason why we bought the dog--because I think
animals are helpful in teaching children about death.

If, as Whiting (1978) suggests, the provision of settings and choice
of a cast to people them are the most important ways that parents shape
their children, we should also be sensitive to the implications of these
choices for the parents themselves. Such choices mean that parents will
be exposed to the same situations--certainly adults who live in suburban
communities are exposed to quite different situations ppg_a very dif-
ferent cast of characters than those who live in a dense city. More
significantly perhaps, by wanting themselves to be the main cast of
characters for their children, parents are selecting children as their

own main cast of characters.

Setting an Example

 

You've got to work toward being the kind
of person you want to be or can be, so
they will have an example.

--father of two preschool boys

As children, most of us were exhorted to "be a good example" for
our little sister or brother, or to "set a good example for the first
graders.“ We were well aware then that the goal of our parents and
teachers was as much to reform our pup behavior as to insure the good

behavior of the "little ones." Ordinary people know a good deal about

151

the significance for the self of being a model. Educational research
(see especially Miller and Morris, 1974; Fouts, 1972, 1974, 1975; Newman
and Dickerson, 1976) has demonstrated significant effects of modeling

on the model. One experimental study (Miller and Morris, 1974: 1103)

of a marble dr0pping task found that children "increased their choice

of the hole imitated and decreased their choice of the others." Another
study (Newman and Dickerson, 1976) showed that serving as a model re-
sults in better performance regardless of whether imitation occurs as
long as the model's status is higher than that of the observer. Simi-
larly, social facilitation studies (see for example Dashiell, 1930;
Pessin, 1933; Zajonc, 1965) have shown that the presence of an audience
alters subject's task performance. A more recent study (Henchy and Glass,
1968) demonstrates that subjects whose task performance is viewed by an
evaluative audience emit more dominance responses. Surprisingly, study
of the effects of serving as a model has not captured the attention of

I That such effects do occur within the

sociologists of the family.
family seems clear. That they have been neglected, only underscores the
degree to which the study of parenthood is locked in sentimentality and
ideology and ignores the day-to-day lived-in experiences of parents and

children.

 

1An exception to this is the work of Haugan and McIntire (1972)
which found that parental imitation was reinforcing to infantile vocal-
ization. Miller and Morris (1974) note, however, that it may be simply
the contingent vocalization, not its imitative component, which is re-
inforcing. O'Toole and Dubin, 1968) have observed that parents imitate
their infant's body movements. Others (see especially Cosaro, n.d.)
have documented adults' imitation of children's speech patterns.
Neither of these latter two studies, however, looked at the effects of
the modeling process on the parents.

152

Although I asked pp questions about "setting an example," (or even
about teaching in general), 42 percent ofthe parents interviewed gave
examples of how their own thinking and behavior had been altered by
their efforts to "set a good example" for the children. The percentage
of parents mentioning this varied: 58 percent at the nursery school,
40 percent at day care #1, 25 percent at day care #2, and only 14 per-
cent in the high school sample. Due to the small number of parents in
the last two groups (only eight and seven respectively) these compari-
sons must be treated cautiously. If they are representative, however,
they suggest that concern with setting a good example is more salient
for parents of younger than for parents of older children, and more
salient for parents who see themselves as the sole caretakers.

For most adults there are few opportunities or requirements to set
an example for anyone. One's personal behavior is rarely scrutinized
in a close way. Teachers do try to set examples for younger ones. In
the case of teachers such modeling is bounded in time and space and con-
fined to setting particular sorts of examples and lacks the total, con-
tinual quality of parents' modeling.2 Older children take (and are
expected to take) this example-setting role less seriously than do
parents. They lack both the commitment to adults goals and the respon-

3

sibility for the younger child's attainment of them. Non-parents do

sometimes establish intense mentoring relationships where their students

 

2Barrie Thorne (personal communication) reminds me that there are
exceptions to this. Teachers' private lives, for example, may be
scrutinized by school boards concerned about the overall example they
are providing.

3See Ruddick (1980) for an elaboration on the parent's responsibil-
ity for the "acceptability" of the child.

153

imitate them. This may be especially true when one passes down a parti-
cular style of painting, dancing, or writing to a protege, at those

times the example one is setting takes on a heightened importance.

Examples from the Interviews

The parents I interviewed spoke of trying to set a good example in
three different areas: daily life details, moral issues and in a more
general, all-pervasive way. Not only did parents mention an awareness
of setting a good example, but they were explicit about the effects of
this modeling on their own behavior and thinking.

For most adults, the details of daily life are hidden from others'
scrutiny. Goffman (l959) distinguishes between front and back regions:

The performance of an individual in a front region may be seen
as an effort to give the appearance that his activity in the
region maintains and embodies certain standards. One grouping
has to do with the way in which the performer treats the audi-
ence while engaged in talk with them or in gestural interchanges
that are a substitute for talk. These standards are sometimes
referred to as matters of politeness. The other group of
standards has to do with the way in which the performer com-
ports himself while in visual or aural range of the audience
but not necessarily engaged in talk with them. I shall use
the term "decorum" to refer to this second group of standards
. . . . [p. 107] (emphasis mine)

It was suggested earlier that when one's activity occurs in
the presence of other persons, some aspects of the activity
are expressively accentuated and other aspects, which might
discredit the fostered impression, are suppressed. It is
clear that accentuated facts make their appearance in what I
have called a front region; it should be just as clear that
there may be another region--a "back region" or ”back stage"
--where the suppressed facts make an appearance. [pp. 111-112]

In Goffman's view, "Since the vital secrets of the show are visible
back stage and since performers behave out of character while there, it
is natural to expect that the passage from the front region to the back
region will be kept closed to members of the audience . . . ." His

subsequent discussion points to the difficulties experienced by workers

154

with inadequate control over the entrance of others into their own back
stage. That he does not mention the lack of "back stage" available to
parents only highlights the degree to which this is taken for granted.
Goffman does talk about bathrooms and bedrooms as back stage, but not
specifically in connection with exclusion of children. As anyone with
small children knows, these areas are hardly back stage for parents
anyway.

For middle class American parents, the back stage area shrinks as
children leave infancy. More details of their everyday life become part
of the front stage area, observed and commented upon by their children.
Not only are children witness to what is immediately visible and audi-
ble (i.e., parents language and behaviors), but they become adept at
recovering traces of behavior that parents have attempted to keep secret
from them. Thus children find candy wrappers in the trash or under the
car seat to use as evidence that parents have sinned on the sly.

Language, specifically the parents' use of profanity, was the most
frequently mentioned daily life behavior that parenthood constrained.

In the first place, having children made parents more aware of their own
use of profanity. A father of two told me:

I never realized how much I used [profanity] until it came

back through the pure mouths of babes. It didn't sound so

good.

Parents reported that this realization was generally followed by attempts
to "clean up their act." A lawyer with a preschool daughter said:

I think I've grown more concerned about some of my language

. . you know, you hear it repeated and you say, 'Well,
wait a minute, maybe I'd better be careful about my own
language.‘

A mother who worked occasionally as a secretary told me:

155

We'll say, 'Shut up,‘ which I don't like saying. It slips

out. Then when he says it we say, 'That's not a nice word and

we don't use that word.‘ . . . so I really stop and think now

before I reprimand him with words I don't want him to use.

That they should "clean up their acts" had a taken-for-granted quality.
Only one parent spoke about yhy kids shouldn't swear:

Clearring up my act . . . I do realize there are a lot of
peo le that [my son] might be talking to [that would judge
him] by the language he uses.

--social scientist, father of a three-year-old boy
The parents, too, would be judged since children serve as extensions of
parents' reputations and "face".

On another level, some parents began to change their speech pat-
terns (using a larger vocabulary and more complex syntax) as an example
for their children to imitate. Change of speech patterns often occurs
among upwardly mobile persons or among those whose schooling or job
requires it. Doing it for the children, however, has a different qual-
ity: it is both less instrumental and more important at the same time.

A father of a 3-1/2 year-old boy told me:

We're more conscious not only about the type of words we
use but about the way we use the English language.

This mother reported she and her husband changed:

. . the way we explain things to him, the vocabulary we
use. I think we're a little bit more careful in how we
say things . . . so they'll understand . . . trying to be
a little bit more descriptive . . . . [My husband] and I
both thought that we needed to improve our vocabulary.

Language and other daily-life-details may be seen as good or bad

"habits"4: habits which, as adults, we generally need not take serioqun

 

4This is not the place to go into a definition of good and bad
habits. However, it is important to recognize that the particular
habits which are considered good and bad vary by social class and across
time. The interview data provide clues that parents find it relatively
easy to set a good example for those habits that they themselves learned
in childhood. Not surprisingly, they have more difficulty modeling those
"good" habits they have merely read about.

156

Those few bad habits that we feel especially guilty about can be kept a
secret and the rest are, after all, our own business. Thus, after child-
hood, most adults are free to watch as much television as they please,
to eat candy before dinner, to procrastinate, to be messy, and to be
unsociable. Parenthood, to a certain degree, removes this freedom,
placing "habits" again in the foreground as parents try to set a good
example for their children. For example, the food habits of parents
changed not only becauSe they wanted to eat healthy food and feel better
physically, but because they wanted to set a good example for the child-
ren. In some cases the focus was on what was good for the children's
health:

I would eat any junk food before--I ate it all. We do not

have anything in the house with preservatives or anything

like that and that's for the kids.

--mother of two preschool girls
In other cases the emphasis was less on simply providing healthy food
for the kids and focused explicitly on setting a good example. Speak-
ing is the mother of a three-year-old boy in a family where both parents
work outside the home:

He has affected our eating style . . . I got concerned about

what he was eating and in order to influence him toward the

way I felt he should, I had to change what I was eating.

Parents also stopped smoking tobacco and using drugs so their
children wouldn't pick up these habits. The mother of two preschoolers
told me:

It made me decide I don't want to take drugs or do any of

that cause I don't want my kids to do it. And they'll think:

'Well, if Mom does it, it's ok,' and I don't want that. It's

like smoking tobacco . . . . I don't want my kids to do it.

Parents watched television less and became more careful about keeping

the house neat--all in an attempt to set a good example for the kids:

157

I find I don't watch even things that I would like to watch
cause I don't want [my son] sitting there watching it too.
--mother of a preschool boy

My husband is constantly throwing his stuff all over the
place . . . however now that the son is imitating his father,
it's a little bit easier to encourage my husband to pick up.
--mother of a boy aged five and an infant girl

If it were just me alone in the house I might let the dishes

90 for ten days . . . with her I try to keep everything

orderly so she can come from some semblance of order.

--working mother with one preschool daughter
A very quiet man, the father of two preschool boys, forced himself to
be more sociable so that his oldest son, who shared his introverted
tendencies, would not grow up ignoring people and relationships:

I'm the kind of person who for the most part could get along

without other people . . . . But I really don't want him to

grow up and be that way . . . . So I probably let my wife

talk me into doing things with other people more than I might

have.

In the chapter on decision making, I discussed the extent to which
children force interaction between spouses and require confrontations
on issues that might otherwise be ignored. This same process occurred
with regard to example setting. A mother of a preschool boy talked
about how disagreements with her husband about food could be ignored
before they had a child:

I'm much more concerned about nutrition than [my husband]

is, . . . before he could have plenty of junk food in the

house . . . and it didn't bother me cause I could ignore

it. Now if he's sitting there eating junk food [our son]

wants it and I don't want him to have it, so we have to

work that out . . . there has to be more interaction. You

either have to work these things out or else it's going to

blow up completely.

Some parents talked about the adult equivalent of sneaking cookies from
the cookie jar. Parents find themselves with new constraints on their

behavior that put them curiously in the same position as children.

158

Thus, even Americans, who like to see their behavior as freely chosen,
are aware of the degree to which they are constrained, first as children
by their parents, then as parents by their children. A father with two
young children told me:

Well the dual standard catches everybody . . . you reprimand

them for something and then you turn around and do it your-

self . . . . You feel guilty sneaking candy. You won't give

any to the kids cause they shouldn't have any before a cer-

tain time, but you're a parent and you can . . . so you feel

kind of guilty.

While many of the things parents said they changed in order to set
a good example for the children were related to eating, recreation, and
other concrete behaviors, some parents did mention changes or more
attention to what might be called moral issues: being fair and honest,
being religious, or, more generally, being a "good person." In a
pilot interview a mother of five children mentioned the honesty issue:

Because we feel we've had to be honest with our children, we

are honest in our relationships with others . . . I think

. that you are somewhat of a role model . . . they've got

to see these values in action.
She felt that by trying to set a good example, she and her husband in-
corporated more honesty into their dealings with the rest of the world.
Another mother picked up this same theme:

It brings out more honesty too, I think, in an adult cause

you're trying to teach your child, you know, to be honest,

and so you as a parent have to make every effort to be

honest . . . .
--high school teacher, mother of two preschoolers

 

Single parents spoke of ways that the presence of children altered
their own sexual behavior. Behaviors they would have found acceptable
had they been childless, were now seen as unacceptable because of the
example they felt they were setting for their own children. A 26-year-

old mother of two preschoolers told me:

159

I guess living with somebody before getting married [would
have seemed ok before] . . . but now I think it would be
screwing up their heads . . . . [I] don't want them to think
it's ok to live with anybody.

A mother with older children, both in high school, felt the same way:
I'm sure they affect my sex life currently . . . . I'm not com-
fortable with having men stay over and wake up in the morning
with my kids here.

Finally, many parents explained the effects on themselves of set-
ting an example in general rather than specific ways. Children seem to

have the capacity in this sense to prod parents to "do better." A

mother with a three-year-old boy said:

He really influences me, and my husband too, I think, to try
to do better.

In addition, children prod parents to think about what's important and
to do something about that. The father of two preschool boys, himself
a professional, told me:

They help refine your own thought processes. You arrive at
these values and those personality traits that you don't want
the children to have [and] you attempt to control yourself
better . . . . It's like screaming at the kid for screaming
in the house.

Another father talked about this introspection:

They force me to look at my behavior, and they force me to
have an idea of what's important, and what it means to be a
grownup in terms of setting an example for them.

This same father, a university administrator, summed up the feelings of
many parents when he observed that:

Without kids, I doubt that one thinks about being an example
for others . . . when you have kids and you have to be an
example, you have to think about what kind of an example you
want to be. You've got to act that out--and in some cases

it is an act--you've got to do that, you've got to work toward
being the kind of person you want to be or can be so they will
have an example.

160

The interviews provide support for the notion that models are
changed as a consequence of being watched and imitated. Children con-
front parents with an incentive to "try to do better,“ to "set a good
example." Part of this results from the relatively small back stage
area parents have vis-a-vis their children. This process involves not
only changes in the overt behavior of the parent but also sets in
motion chains of valuing decisions: What is right? What is good?

What is important? These issues, initially raised for most people in
the abstract during adolescence, now take on concrete meanings and
must be acted upon in the preSent--whether or not one feels that all
the information is in.

What is interesting to me here is the way that behaviors that are
permitted for childless adults become forbidden (or at least subject to
constraints) when one has children. This eliminates some of the need
for formal social control over adults--those who are parents will be
kept in line by their children.5 In this way children are a conseva-
tive force. Adults may really believe that certain habits are relative-
ly harmless but when it comes to their own children, they would rather
not take a chance. In the process their own behaviors are constrained
and narrowed, approaching closer current ideologies about the correct

way to live.

 

5Here I am talking only about the extent to which parents behavior
is constrained in order to set an example. Parents are also kept in
line in other ways by the responses of their children. Thus children
exhort parents to dress more like other children's parents, to buy the
right products, and (especially if the child is in the 6-12 age range)
to be as much like everybody else as possible.

161

Answering Their Questions

 

New to the world, children with their questions about the universe
and life and death cast parents in the rdle of experts. A 31-year-old
mother, with a B.A.,currently at home with two preschool children said:

You know, all of a sudden you're supposed to know where rain-

bows come from and why rain feels the temperature it is . . .

and, you know, who is God? . . . a lot about death. Your

big topics: God, death, sex . . . . You realize that what

you say is really going to make an effect on this little mind

~ . it's awesome.
Parents responded to this challenge by becoming experts. They realized
they could remember things they never even realized they knew. A 26-
year-old mother, a store clerk with a high school education, told me she
had to answer questions about:

. . even things about animals or birds, you know, things

you knew before but you forgot that you knew or didn't

realize that you knew . . . when the kids ask you questions

you think, 'Oh, I didn't know that I knew that.‘

Most of the time they didn't already know, so they had to dig. The
father of a four-year-old girl at the day care center explains how this
works:

And I guess for her it's nice to have somebody who can answer

the questions which keeps me digging . . . which of course

brings up questions for myself which I had asked at her age

and I didn't remember the answers or never got answers for.

This digging involved fast and hard thinking as this mother with some
graduate school offered:

[It] makes you really think hard, cause all of a sudden

you're having to come up with all these answers to questions

--things you never even answered to yourself before.

Some turned to books for the answers:
He has made me think seriously about getting a set of ency-

clopedias which is something I would never do . . . [But now]
I need somewhere to get real fast information.

162

In the process of trying to explain things to their children, par-
ents changed their ideas about themselves as teachers, about children
as learners, and about education in general. A woman working on a
Ph.D. reported that teaching her preschool children gave her confidence
to go on to teach at the college level:

. . just the teaching role itself . . . not only the model-

ing, but the explaining . . . . Teaching my children gave me

some confidence in seeing that I can [do it well] . . . . About

three or four years ago I started teaching at the college level

and I don't think that I would have done that if I hadn't had

some kind of rewards from my daughter that I was getting my

message across.

Many parents noticed that they saw children and teaching in a new light.
Practices they favored before now seemed inappropriate in the light of
their experiences. One mother told me she had previously been quite
taken with Montessori schools. Having a child of her own now, she
realized that Montessori schools might not be good for all children.

She explained, "Now I would not even consider taking him to a Montessori
school." Another mother of preschoolers changed her mind about the
plasticity of children:

[Now] I sometimes feel you don't really have a lot of influ-

ence. You can teach extraneous things . . . but you don't

really have much effect on what kind of person this is . . .

They are already there, they are not blank slates.

A mother finishing up a degree in education said that having a child of
her own made her know things about education in "a different way":

I have learned, I guess, the real meaning of things that I

knew cognitively, like you can't push people to learn. I

can see that in action and I know it in a different way.

A father (also a teacher) told me that raising a child gave him a chance
to confirm his theories of growth and development. Others felt there

was a carryover of what they learned from teaching their own children

163

to their professional lives. A university professor, the father of two
said:

Also it's probably helped me a little bit in my teaching and

relationships with students to realize the role of things like

discipline.

Most importantly to the parents, trying to explain things to a
child exposed them to new worlds, forced them to see things in a new
light, and refined and clarified their own thoughts. A mother summarized
this when she was telling me about her daughter's question about "Why

are butterflies blue?":

That's when the real re-education begins--answering the basic
questions for your child.

Sometimes it was a matter of learning about particular things. For
mothers, a chance to learn some science was one of the benefits of
having children. Science has traditionally been closed to women, yet
being mothers they had a ready-made excuse to dig in and learn some-
thing. This mother's response was typical:

He has opened up other worlds to me that I might not have

been interested in . . . the science stuff [for example]--

although that had been a fantasy way back . . . . When I

knew I was pregnant [I thought] 'Wow, if I have a kid maybe

it will be one that is interested in science and then I can

learn all that stuff that I was curious about but never

learned the first time around.

--divorced woman, son age five

The chance to do things adults of one's sex have been denied seemed
one side benefit of having children. Other examples of this, not con-
fined to a teaching setting, were discussed in the chapter on "Access
to the World of Childhood." The father who talked about taking his
daughter to dance class parallels the experience of the mother just
quoted. Thus, in a certain very delimited way, being aparent provided

opportunities to cross gender-specified boundaries of behavior. More

164

generally, children gave parents a new look at the world. This was
discussed earlier in Chapter Four, but is included here since much of
the access to the world of childhood comes in the process of answering
children's questions. A 34-year-old woman who usually worked but was
home that year with her two children told me:

I think . . . it's given us a different look at life . . .

parents tend to see things again like it's the first time--

like you're really looking at something that we've taken

for granted . . . like a flower and the sun and stars and

the moon. And when you have to start answering these ques-

tions you have to start looking a little bit more closely

yourself . . . you see things with their eyes.

In a more disconcerting way, children confronted their parents with
questions that are usually not discussed in everyday life. They asked
about "your big topics: God, death and sex." One mother told me she
has "to answer some of the basic questions of life that I would never
have had to do probably." Most of the questions were ultimately
unanswerable, as a mother of a five-year-old explains:

I've learned a lot about things. The questions he asks that

I don't know the answer to . . . questions for which there

are no answers . . . [like] 'Why do people hurt each other?‘
Children forced their parents to confront their own death, at sometimes
inappropriate times, as a mother of two describes:

It really makes you have to face things that maybe you hadn't

faced before. I remember the time [my son] said to me 'Well--

are ypg_going to die?‘ . . . We were driving the car and I

almost ran into a tree cause I had to say 'yes' and it just

hit me that I had never had to say that to myself . . . that

was really a shocker to me . . . . He just got an answer, it

wasn't that scary to him.

Another mother remembered her own bad timing as a child when she
asked questions about veneral disease on the subway:

I remember that happening too. You're real confused and you

don't know why things are going a certain way what is happen-

ing and when you try to find out you're hitting on very sensi-
tive territories . . . . Of course a kid doesn't have the

165

sense of danger to shut up. I can remember being on the bus
with my mother and . . . they used to put advertisements up
all around the top of the bus and one of them really caught
my eye because I didn't know what it meant and I said to her,
'What is cyfullus?'--it was an advertisement about syphilis
and gonorrhea . . . and she kept saying 'don't ask me'

and I of course just got that much worse, wanting to know.

The biggest challenge for parents, and the aspect of teaching that
changed them the most, was the attempt to explain things in ways a
child could understand. Many parents said that trying to explain death
to a preschooler made them give it much more thought than they might
have otherwise. A lawyer, the father of one preschooler, said children
raise

Questions like 'Why do flowers bloom? . . . What happens when

you die?’ I think it gets you thinking [more] about questions

than you would have otherwise . . . and it's even more chal-

lenging to do [that thinking] with a child . . . . You and I

could talk about what happens when you die . . . but to ut

(emphasis

it in terms that a five year old can understand . . .
mine)

 

One father spoke about the difficulties of explaining parental values
to a child--how, for example, do you explain your objections to "the
plastic economy" to a four year old? Explaining things to a child re-
quired parents to dig beneath rhetoric and fiture out what the real
issues were to them. A mother told me:

The things that keep coming to mind is what has happened to
my consciousness and my attitudes and beliefs in trying to
explain a whole series of things to a child . . . . It's
real different to explain a class analysis of why things are
the way they are in South Africa rather than a race analysis
to a four year old . . . . Trying to find key concepts that
she can understand. . . while trying not to frighten her

. It's forced me to clarify some of my thinking and
not rely on slogans or words that have whole bunches of
connotations . . . . When you start describing things on
that level--like that half your kids die cause you can't
make enough to support them-~it's just so heavy, it has such
an impact on me--it really intensifies how I feel. (empha-
sis mine)

 

 

 

166

The theme of clarification resulting from trying to explain things to
a child was mentioned frequently in the interviews: it seems to be a
central way in which the teaching process changes the teacher.6 The
two fathers (both with professional degrees) quoted below typify the
comments of many parents:

I usually like to . . . . sit down and watch ["Little House
on the Prairie"] with her and talk about it during and after
the show . . . and discuss what do you think about that

. . . The simple morality type thing that you don't even
think about but when you sit down and [try] to verbalize it

. it helps you condense it into somethipg_more tangible

than just a general feeling that you shouldn't do [this or
that]. (emphasis mine)

 

. without children it becomes a value we just more or
less use for our own decision making, but with children
you'd like them to get. . . their priorities straight

. . .And as you attempt to impart it to them, you re-
fine it better in your own mind. (emphasis mine)

 

 

 

6The fruitfulness of this in college teaching has not been suffi-
ciently explored. This year I have experimented with assignments that
require students to write explanations of complicated books as if they
were writing for a child. As a pedagogical tool this has been quite
successful.

PART V

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

167

CHAPTER NINE

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

Introduction

 

What factors distinguish the kinds of influence that children have
on their parents from other kinds of influences adults experience? Any
answer to this question depends partly on pfliph other adult influences
one considers. In Chapter Two I discussed the problems inherent in
using a socialization framework for understanding the effects of child-
ren on their parents. Despite those problems (e.g. the conceptual am-
biguity that pervades the field, its emphasis [especially among socio-
logists] on preparation for role performance, and its tendency to ignore
unwitting influences),the concept is useful here in providing a means
of highlighting the unique features of the process I studied. First,
it allows a comparison of the effects of parents on their children (the
traditional focus of socialization research) with the effects of child-
ren on their parents. Second, an examination of models of adult
socialization can offer a systematic means of identifying the ways that
the influence of children on their parents differs from other sorts of
adult socialization (e.g. learning to drive, or training for a new job).

Some theorists have argued that socialization after childhood is
quite different from socialization during childhood. Yet, as I will
explain in this concluding chapter, in the special case of the sociali-

zation of parents by their children, such differences are at a minimum.

168

169

The non-elective nature of parents' participation in three major change-
producing situations appears to be the key to understanding why the
socialization of parents by their children is so unlike other kinds of

socialization in adulthood.

Differences in Socialization During Childhood and Socialization in
Later Life

 

It has been claimed that there are central differences between the
socialization of children and that of adults. Such differences, however,
are minimal in at least one type of adult socialization--the case of
socialization of parents by their own children.

Orville Brim's (1966) broad conceptualization of such differences
is a useful focus for exploring this claim because of the clarity with
which it illustrates corrmonly held notions about the differences between
socialization in childhood and socialization in later life.] Against
his model, the content and the process of the socialization of parents
by their children stand in sharp contrast.

In his essay, "Socialization Through the Life Cycle," Brim (1966)

presents a conceptual framework for understanding the differences and

 

1Brim himself (1966: 46) mentions that children g9 have effects on
their parents. He writes:

At first one thinks of the adult as being the more autonomous,
mature member of society with clearly greater power to change
the behavior of those with whom he interacts. He may alter his
marital relationship, change his boss's ideas, and influence
the community's political climate. But on reflection it is clear
that the child also may influence the family system in which he
lives. He modifies the expectations of his parents about his
wishes and actions, teaching them the concept of developmental
tasks, forcing them to convert both their proscriptions of what
he should not do and their demands for what he should do to fit
his own maturational sequence.

However, Brim does not integrate his observations about the effects of
children on their parents with his own theoretical model of socializa-
tion in adult life.

170

similarities between socialization during and after childhood. He

looks at both the content of socialization and the relationship of the
learner to the socializing agent. With regard to the content of social-
ization, Brim (1966: 25) identifies six shifts: "[a shift] from a con-
cern with values and motives to a concern with overt behavior . . .

from acquisition of new material to a synthesis of the old; from a con-
cern with idealism to a concern with realism; from teaching expectations
to teaching how to mediate conflict among expectations; from a concern
with general demands of society to a concern with role-specific expec-
tations; and finally, a change from 'I-me' components of the personality
to other components." Further, he selects several aSpects of the indi-
vidual's relationship to the socializing agent which differ over the
course of the life cycle. First, "[s]ocialization at later ages quite
often does not require the individual to take the role of one being
socialized"(Brim, 1966: 34). Second, there are differences with regard
to the degree of power and affectivity present in the situation. Third,
adults, unlike children, are free to leave situations in which they are
being socialized.

Over half of the differences betwen child and adult socialization
cited by Brim do not pertain to the special situation of the socializa-
tion of parents by their children. The results of my study indicate
that, on the contrary, this particular case of adult socialization gpgg
involve (1) values and motivation, (2) a high degree of generality, (3)
core identity issues, (4) a high degree of power differential and
affectivity, and (5) takes place in a setting which one cannot leave.
Each of these five parts of Brim's model is analyzed in more detail

below.

171

The Content of Socialization

 

Brim begin's his model by positing that over the life course a
shift occurs in the content of socialization. Childhood socialization
is concerned with values and motivation--that of adults with behavior
and knowledge. He writes (1966: 25-27):

There are three things a person requires before he is able to
perform satisfactorily in a role. He must know what is ex-
pected of him (both in behavior and values), must be able to
meet the role requirements, and must desire to practice the
behavior and pursue the appropriate ends. It can be said that
the purposes of socialization are to give a person knowledge,
ability and motivation. .

A simple cross-classification of these three concepts with
values and behavior establishes a paradigm which helps to
analyze the changes in content of socialization through the
life cycle. In this paradigm six cells are indicated by
letters for simplicity of reference:

Behavior Values
Knowledge A B
Ability C 0
Motivation E F

Brim (1966: 25) proposes that over the life course, "the emphasis
on socialization moves from motivation to ability and from a concern
with values to a concern with behavior." Adults are presumed to have
the proper values and motivations. He notes that, "In general, then,
socialization after childhood deals primarily with overt behavior in the
role and makes little attempt to influence motivation of a fundamental
kind or to influence basic values. Society is willing to spend much
less time in redirecting the motivations and values of adults."

Contrary to Brim's claim that socialization after childhood has
little effect on values and motivations, socialization of parents by
children is intensely centered on issues of value and motivation. My

data, and the research of others (see especially Klaus and Kennell,

172

1976; and Rheingold, 1969) point to a substantial amount of motivational
socialization of parents by their children. Clinical evidence supports
the view that motivation to gap; to take care of a child often comes
gftgp delivery as well as before (see Fraiberg, 1975). My own data sup-
port this. Belief in an "instinct" for mothering in humans has largely
been abandoned (see, however, Rossi, 1977, for a new look at this
question).

Further, the assumption that motivations for parenthood are learned
during childhood and adulthood also seems like an over-simplification.
Greenberg's (1974) study of fathers present in the delivery room,
Fraiberg's (1975) observations of breakdowns in the attachment process
between parents and their blind infants, and Rheingold's (1969) descrip-
tions of the socializing nature of the human infant--all point to ways
in which infants (by early eye contact and later smiles and vocaliza-
tions) encourage parents to wapt to care for them. Brim (1966: 25)
assumes that childhood is the time when "the individual is motivated to
behave in appropriate ways and to pursue designated values." My inter-
views with parents point to the extent to which adults, too, learn new
motivations as a result of being parents. The motivation for caring
for a child is one example: such motivation is ppt simply learned in
. childhood and then acted upon in adulthood--but rather it is learned to

a substantial degree during experiences with an infant.2

 

 

2Here I am not arguing against formulations, such as that of Nancy
Chodorow (1978), which claim that the early childhood experiences of
women predispose them to want to mother. Rather I am asserting that
experiences with an infant both produce and reinforce motivations to
care for children.

 

173

Likewise, my interview data show that parents experience substantial
shifts in values as a result of influences from their children. Parents
of older children reported becoming less conservative on many issues.3
Values regarding premarital chastity, drug use and the work ethic were
altered. Parents came to question their earlier support of the war in
Vietnam, and their response to conscientious objectors changed. As a
consequence of raising children, parents also changed their religious
beliefs (becoming sometimes more, sometimes less religious). In general,
being responsible for a child led parents to take stands on issues they
would otherwise have left unexamined and not acted upon.

Brim posits an increase in specificity in adult socialization. He
suggests that over the life course there is a change in "whether what
is taught applied to many social situations or to just a few," and notes
that in "most instances the content of later-life socialization tends
to be role—specific, rather than general in nature" (1966: 32). Yet
the parents I interviewed stressed the general nature of the things
they learned from being parents. What they learned from (or about)
their children they applied to a wide variety of social situations, not
simply to themselves in their role as parents. For example, as a result

of having children, parents were able to change their own relationships

 

3The influences of children on their parents are historically con-
ditioned. The degree of isolation of the nuclear family, for example,
significantly alters the kinds of effects parents will experience. In
addition, such things as the social and political climate have an enor-
mous impact on the issues that will be salient for a family at a parti-
cular point in history. Most of the older parents I interviewed had
teenagers during the sixties and seventies--times of turmoil and unrest.
Teenagers may have had very different effects on parents during the
forties and fifties. Research on families has often been blind to such
historical constraints.

174

with other people--they learned to be less defensive. Others took what
they learned from children and applied it to their work--like the mini-
ster father who learned not to "shred“ stories. For many, their response
to other children being harmed was sharply altered by being parents
(e.g. the ones who could not watch horror or war movies if children
were being hurt, or the father who was reluctant to fire a man who was
a parent). What they were taught by their children altered them in
fundamental ways and applied to many social situations rather than to
just a few.

The issue of a shift from "I-me" to "I-them" components of the
personality is more complicated than the previous issues. For Brim,
the "I-me" system corresponds roughly to Mead's "generalized other"--
the child has forgotten the particular others (from the earlier "they-
me" relationships) but internalized their prescriptions. Brim argues
that adults, on the other hand, engage more in "I-them" relations (where
the self is the subject and the other is the object) or in "they-me"
relations (where the other is clearly identifiable). Brim says (1966:
32—33), "At later ages the source of the material which is acquired is
more readily identifiable; the 'they' involved is usually quite clear.
Moreover, with the growth of power in maturity, one increases the degree
to which he is the instigator of the action and consequently is engaged
more frequently in, and thus thinks about himself as, the 'I-them'
relationships."

My data contradict this claim, especially if one takes Brim's (1966:
33) equation of "the 'I-me' component of the personality with the core
personality, with 'identity'." While parents are to an extent able to

identify the particular other (in this case their own child) quite

175

clearly, this model breaks down in several ways. To begin with, one's
children may take on a larger-than-life significance. Their appraisals
(as many of the parents in my study asserted) are taken more seriously
than those of others. Parents are also judged by others on the basis
of the product they have fashioned. Psychoanalytic theory suggests
that being a primary parent evokes deeply felt yearnings and results in
a diminishing of ego boundaries. In such a context there is a less
sharp separation of the two people, making the distinction between "I"
and "them" more difficult than usual. All these factors lead to an
increase in the extent to which being a parent shapes the core identity
issues that most theorists consign to childhood. While Brim notes (1966:
33) that “not uncommonly, dramatic shifts in identity do occur at later
stages of the life cycle, since significant persons may have an unusual
impact upon a person's appraisal of his own basic characteristics," he
does not explicitly include one's children among such "significant
persons." The perceptions of the parents I interviewed are that the
process of caring for a child almost necessarily involves re-appraisal
of one's own core characteristics. At the most basic level, parents
reported the process giving them feelings of increased competence or
incompetence that were quite pervasive--spilling over into other areas
of life. Some said that their parenting skills provided a basis of
self-esteem, or esteem from a spouse, while others felt that they had
failed miserably. Others began to see themselves as a different sort

of person (one capable of anger and rage, of compassion for others and

of being "brave").

176

Relationship to the Socializing Agent

 

Brim also outlines differences between adults and children in their
relationship to the socializing agent. My interview data do not support
two of the three differences he claims.

Brim states:

It is clear that the child is socialized in a context of high

affectivity and high power, and the adult in a sharply contrast-

ing situation of affective neutrality and little power differ-
entiation. Strauss points out in his paper that the "high power,"

“high support“ (or positive affect) relationship leads to the

acquisition by children of deep-seated motives and values.

Other investigators theorizing about the child's acquisition

of basic parental and cultural values also take this view: that

the environment where the socializing agent and the affective

rewards and punishments are great is the one where the funda-
mental components of personality are established. The adult
socialization context does not have these characteristics and

is not conducive to the inculcation of basic values.

Unlike the adult socialization situations Brim had in mind, the social-
ization of parents by their children j§_conducted in a highly affective
relationship. The interview material underscores this point dramati-
cally. It appears that it is precisely this highly charged affective
component that accounts for the striking differences between socializa-
tion of parents by their children and other sorts of adult socialization.
Brim cites exceptions, e.g. prisoners of war, religious conversions,

and brainwashings, but fails to mention parent/child issues.

Research on primate behavior has uncovered an interesting parallel
to this matter of the relationship between learning and affectivity.
Jane Lancaster (1975: 45-46), reporting on the work of Itani (1958),
Kawai (1965) and Kawamura (1963), notes that the spread of innovations
in troupes of Japanese Macaques could be understood by looking at
"attention structures." New habits spread slowly through troupes

"following lines of special relationships, usually ties of affection."

177

Adult males, she reports, "were not resistant to [new ideas] on princi-
ple; they simply did not notice what was going on in a way that would
affect their behavior. On those occasions when adult males did learn
new food habits it was in the context of "very special relationships
which they develop during the birth season," when they sometimes "'adopt'
recently weaned yearlings for a few months." Lancaster underscores the
importance of a strong affective climate for new learning in adults.

In addition to high affectivity, the parent—child relationship also
involves a high power differential, though in this case it is in the
Opposite direction from what Brim describes. My research leads me to
believe this is a crucial ingredient of the situation in which parents
are socialized by their children.

Finally, socialization of parents by their children takes place in
a system they cannot leave. Alice Rossi (1969), in one of the few
theoretical papers on the "transition-to-parenthood," proposed that it
is exactly this inability to leave that makes the transition to parent-

4

hood different from the transition to other adult roles. Fabe and

Wikler (1979), who interviewed women in their late thirties regarding
decisions about child bearing, cite this is one of the major issues con-

fronting parents. Once you've had children, you can't send them back.5

 

4Other seemingly irrevocable role transitions (e.g. being a nun or
a priest) can be reversed. Interestingly, sterilization (which is again
related to parenthood) is about the only other non-reversable process to
which adults are generally exposed.

5Yet it is important to recognize cultural variations in the degree
of irrevocability (see, for example, the child sharing described by
Stack, 1975). To a certain extent my sample may be skewed to conceal
more transitory experiences of parenting.

178

This irrevocability, together with the constant pressure to maintain
the role, has certain consequences that differentiate it from other
sorts of adult socialization.6 One must deal with things whether or
not one is ready (one parent I interviewed said, "We realized we had to
get ourselves together, we didn't have time to stay immature."), and
whether or not one is able. Thus, while adult socialization is usually
confined to learning things one wants to learn (e.g. attending nursing
school), making changes one wants to make (e.g. joining a social move-
ment), and confronting issues one wants to confront (e.g. going into
therapy), parenthood involves little of this freedom. Beyond the
initial "choice" to have a child, what follows is a non-elective trip
through uncharted territory, with no chance to get off and few chances

to take a break.

 

6The irrevocable nature of parenthood may be especially significant
in this particular historical context where so much else (e.g. marriage,
careers) j§_revocable.

APPENDICES

179

APPENDIX A

INTERVIEW SCHEDULE

 

 

 

 

 

PART A

l. Introductions, pleasantries.

2. Begin with a broad question: "Traditionally sociologists have
-focused on parents' influence on theirchildren. I'm interested in
the other side of this. That is, how are parents influenced by
their children? Can you tell me something about how you, as a per-
son, have been influenced by your children? How have your adult
growth and development been influenced by them?"

3. Notice where they take this broad question and how they answer it.
What do . . .

They mention first? last?

Are they general? specific?

Note tone of voice, manner, style, attitude, choice of words.

Note body language, facial expressions.

Are they enthusiastic or not?

Do they offer little or much elaboration?

Do they seem puzzled by the question or do they seem to "Know
what I mean?"

Do they mention a lot of things or just a few but in detail?

How much probing is necessary?

4. Use of probes.

Initially, use the following: Any other ways? Have you noticed
anything else? Is that all? Any other areas?

When they began to slow down and the general probes didn't work
anymore, I went on to Part 8.

PART B

1. Has having children influenced your memory of your own childhood?
How or in what ways?

2. Has having children affected the way you feel about or interact

with your own parents? How or in what ways?

180

3. Has having children influenced your values and beliefs? How or in
what ways?

4. Has having children influenced your sense of the future? How or in
what ways?

5. Has having children had an influence on how you feel about life and
death? How or in what ways?

6. Have you noticed any differences (in influence) according to the age
and sex of the child? What are those differences?

7. For some people, having children seems to expand their world, makes
them think of things they never thought of before. For others, being
a parent seems to be a constricting experience, one that cuts them
off from the world and narrows their experience. Do you know both
sorts of parents? Has it been mostly constricting or enlarging for
you? What do you think makes the difference? (for yourself and for
others)

8. Some theorists feel that being a parent is a necessary part of adult
growth and development. Others feel that children inhibit adult
growth and development. What do you think?

PART C

Analysis (this was not really part of the interview, but rather a way for
me to be thinking about the information as I was gathering it).

Setting the interview up in this manner provided the following categories:

1.

Those things parents mention spontaneously:

a. Before probing

b. After probing

Those things they mentioned when I followed up on earlier comments.

Those things they mentioned only in response to a specific question
from the list in Part 8.

Those things mentioned spontaneously during Part B (e.g., sometimes
parents talked about the importance of changed emotional response
during a question on values and beliefs or memories).

—l
O

OGDNChUT-hwp

181

APPENDIX 8

GENERAL CODING CATEGORIES

Children as precipitants of emotion response.
Children as decision precipitators.

Setting an example, being a model for the child.
Trying to teach children something.

Seeing own childhood behavior and personality in the child now.
Seeing oneself in the child.
Triggering memories.

Making one think about the future.

Providing an entree into the world of childhood.

182

APPENDIX C

PLEASE RETURN TODAY IF POSSIBLE
June 12, 1978

Dear Parents,

I'm doing an interview study of the ways that children influence their
parents. If you'd be willing to talk with me about this, please check
the YES box below and add your phone number so I can call you soon about
arranging an interview. I'm interested in the experiences of both
single and married parents. The interview will take about one hour and
involves only the parent(s), not the children.

 

 

NOTE: Since my focus is on the influence of young children, I will not
be interviewing parents with older children. If you have an
older child (one who was in the first grade or above during
1977-78) please indicate below.

Thanks,
.c:::7 [ZZZ] YES, you may call me.
/7 W "M“
,6? a” PHONE:

Beverly T. Purrington

1651 Seven Trails Court i:::] I do not want to participate.
Okemos, MI
(349-0420) [:1 I am ineligible because I have

a child who was in first grade
or above during 1977-78.

PLEASE LEAVE THIS LETTER IN THE BRIGHT GREEN SHOEBOX IN THE MAIN OFFICE,
AFTER YOU HAVE CHECKED ONE OF THE BOXES ABOVE.

(A letter from my dissertation advisor, explaining the project, was
posted at each of the day care centers and nursery school.)

183

APPENDIX D

MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

 

DEI’AR'I'MI'ZN'I' OF SOCIOIOGY I‘lAS'l' LANSING ‘ MICHIGAN ' 48824

April 26, 1978

To whom it may concern:

Beverly Purrington is conducting an interview study
of the influence of children on their parents. This
study will provide material for Beverly's Ph.D. dissertation
in Sociology at Michigan State University.
Your c00peration would be greatly appreciated.
Should you have any questions, please call:
Beverly Purrington~- 349—0420 or
M.S.U. Sociology Dept.-- 355-6640 or
Barrie Thorne (Beverly's dissertation adviser)-— 332-3866;
355-7545

Sincerely,
Lyn/m}, V V1414“-

Barrie Thorne
Associate Professor

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