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"Illick's Illusion"
DeMause' replies to Illick's Comment

  by: Lloyd deMause
from e-mail with permission of author July 1999

Special Issue "On Writing Childhood History"

Let us suppose we frame Illick's Illusion as follows: "Of course childhood gets better with time; the world gets richer, so we can devote more time to our children." It is a subthesis to the (wholly tautological) modernization model that informs all historians' writings: "Civilization proceeds (don't know why); so civilization proceeds." The reason why none of these historians actually research childrearing is that the modernization model is quite easy to disprove.

The wealthy parts of all early modern societies, the aristocracy, were the WORST in modernizing childrearing, simply because they had enough money to send their infants to wetnurses for several years so they wouldn't have to have them around, and then to hire nannies and servants to take care of the older children or send them off to boarding schools at 4 or 5. Rich people's children simply were rarely seen by their parents, and spent few years under their parents' roofs as children. It was the "middle classes" who worked the hardest and had the least time that found ways to spend more time with (and therefore confront emotionally and therefore change their own traumatic and neglectful childhoods) their children.

I recall wondering about working class children (who after all formed the socialist parties that were the democratic hope of the 19th and 20th century in many countries) who slept with their children because they had such tiny rooms and only one big bed. I was surprised to find that while the rich often slept with their kids and used them sexually the poor would either put a blanket up between the adults and children or at least would make the children sleep with their feet on the adults' head side of the bed, reversed, so they'd be less part of sex.

I also am astonished to find things like the fact that the first General of the Army who actually told his President he was not going to sacrifice his boys (Gen. Powell) was black, from Harlem, with a really great mother, quite poor. What kind of childrearing must he have had to say sacrifice wasn't the main purpose of his job?

Anyway, richer don't make nicer to children, and poorer people sure do advance the world!

Lloyd

Special Issue "On Writing Childhood History"

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