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Comment

By: Peter Petschauer
Special Issue "On Writing Childhood History"
The Journal of Psychohistory 16 (2) Fall 1988

I am grateful that Lloyd deMause described the drawn-out struggle for acceptance of his insights on the history of childhood and recounted some of the callous disregard by humanities and social scientists for theories which contradict their world-view. But I was disappointed that he did not catapult us into the next levels of ''his" history. The elaborations offered by his champions and critics can after all move us onto new awareness. As he knows better than most, that progression is what scientific investigation is all about: discourse evolving into new levels of understanding.

Let me now say clearly, I do accept his basic suppositions, especially the elaborations on the more recent modes of childrearing. Almost every student, for example, who wanders through my classes immediately recognizes the intrusive mode as her/his parental approach; most even understand without hesitation their resistance to moving beyond their elders' stage. On a different level, deMause's insights are confirmed most readily through the educational advice I studied for my The Education of Women in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1988) and recently analyzed for the male perspective in Carl-Heinz Mallet. Untertan Kind. Nachforschunger uber Erziehung (Ismaning bei Mtinchen: Max Hueber, 1987).

At this point I would like to enter into a short discussion with deMause. My concerns concentrate on two areas of his model: one deals with trends and statements that contradict the principal parental expres-sion in some of his childrearing modes and the other pertains to a better articulation of the transition between modes. In regard to the first point, I would like to ask what are we to do, for example, with the findings of Klaus Arnold, Kind und Gesellschafr in Mittelalter rind Renaissance (Paderborn: F. Schoningh, 1980) and Steven Ozment. When Fathers Ruled. Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983)? It is not enough to dismiss Arnold with one sentence or to place Ozment into a footnote. Both question suppositions astutely and contribute significantly to what could be called "our" understanding of irregularities within or between modes.

Although the issue of overlapping came up only in passing in deMause's essay, this phenomenon may provide us with a unique way not only for continuing to refine the content of his modes, but also for explaining the process of change over time. At some point in the history of the debates regarding childhood, we spoke of psychoclasses, but was/is that no more than an admitting that every society brings forth some men and women who recognize the cruelties of the proceeding or the prevalent mode? Two examples may illustrate my hope for a better hold of this generalization. After mass one Sunday, an older Aferer told me passionately as we spoke about children of the village of Afers that he had felt extremely uncomfortable about the ghost stories which were told to children when he grew up. ''Aha. I thought, here is the breakthrough: I will now get at specifics of changing views and ways of childrearing." So I followed up with: ''How did you come to this insight?" "Hm! I don't remember: I just knew that this way of doing things was not correct." Although I felt momentarily thrown back to square one, we began searching for variables in his past and found that he had grown up in a gradually changing environment. He had grown up around a father who was one of the first skiers in his region, i.e., a man who had traveled in the entire area (at the turn of the century), and he had enjoyed the companionship of a live-in who started the village's first band (around 1910), i.e., a well-read man. Maybe most importantly, because of the small size of his farm, the man had to learn a trade and because of it he worked in most of the towns in South Tyrol. But then the question arose: how does a person like this overcome the resistance of others who continue in an old pattern? In this setting, the explanation is relatively easy since an increasing number of women and men had become exposed to outside influences and thus the whole village turned to the next mode within about two generations.

But how is one to obtain similar information for an earlier period in which the available sources provide no more than hints? However uncomfortable it is to us, we must allow as a start that earlier forms of repressive behavior sometimes were first steps toward greater understanding. When we look back and read with disdain, e.g., of a father (like Martin Luther) and of a practicing pedagogue (like August H. Franeke) that children need to be beaten, we cringe. But understood in the contemporary context, such instructions mean that a child was neither murdered,

ignored nor held at an ambivalent distance. While beatings represent parental projections of their evil, parents perceived their approach to serve their children's cleansing benefit. Almost logically the next step in the relationship between parents and children had to be greater insight regarding the concept and expression of the idea of benefit. Did the breakthrough come when a child, having been subjected to regular beatings, recognized that it was not to his benefit to have been tortured in this fashion? And did such a child then consciously avoid interpreting the word benefit in the old fashion? Indeed, during the eighteenth century, this new understanding emerged in several German elite and middle-class families. Yet it was not men but women who recognized the unusualness of the old methods. Was this because they were generally only spectators to their parents' harsh methods? This seems to be one implication of Raffael Scheck's and my research mentioned by deMause and pursued since then.

For me two avenues were important. First, the male middle-class discourse, e.g., on beating and other behaviors, was not alone in determining parental expression. How are we to sort this discourse from the actual behavior within families when memoirists often felt obligated to be in tune with contemporary rearing practices? Second, the data on families in Italy and in Germany show an amazing and inexplicable survivability of some families. Can one attribute some of this success to childrearing methods that preceded those of the society as a whole? Those are quite obviously only my priorities. Others would have to involve a more conscious search for the interrelationship between childrearing and the various cultural, religious, economic, etc. aspects of particular societies. that is, we ought to continue to balance the view forward from childrearing to adulthood with the perceptive backward from adults who stood in a certain society to childhood. In this context, someone needs to clarify better the overlap between educational theory and household and institutional behavior. It also seems that we have not done enough with the difference in the rearing between boys and girls; this well-known issue for feminist thinkers would broaden our investigative theories and thus enhance outcomes.

Peter Petschauer, Ph.D., is I.G. Greer Distinguished Professor of History at Appalachain State College, Boone, NC 28608, and is a contributing editor to this journal.

Special Issue "On Writing Childhood History"
The Journal of Psychohistory 16 (2) Fall 1988

Digital Archive of PSYCHOHISTORY Articles & Texts [Books texts] [Journal Articles] [Charts] [Prenatal] [Trauma Model] [Cultic] [Web links] [Cartoons] [Other]

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