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Stumbling Into The History of Childhood

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

Researching the history of childhood has been for me more a series of fumbling questions than an intentional plan. When I was struggling to depart from my own childhood in raising my children, questions began to arise. I had had a "good childhood," I thought, a conventional Protestant upbringing with what seemed like liberal attitudes. But then, why was I so determined to do things differently with my own children? And why was that so difficult? Except for an excellent graduate course in child development, very little in my university training prepared me to deal with these questions. Probing in a variety of directions for answers, I discovered in psychology and in materials on child care and childhood only a minimum of insight, mainly derived from my investigations of Sigmund Freud. I was forced to explore my own experience.

Pondering my childhood, I discovered that it was not so rosy as I had thought. Remembering certain adolescent preoccupations, I wondered as well how it all might be connected to religion. And I recalled things my parents had said about my grandparents.- my mother's father who con-templated his oldest son and decided thoughtfully, ''I'm whipping more devils; in than I'm whipping out - l'll never whip any of my children again"; her mother saying, "Spank them before [hey are old enough to remember so it won't do any harm''; and on my father's side the great-grandfather, orphaned young and, with no family to care for him, 'bound out," who according to family legend had severe problems with his wife and children.

More reading followed, and some years working with a mental health center team that was developing workshops on child/parent relationships - Parent Survival Training, we called the workshops. Utilizing a model I had created earlier to train volunteers for a crisis center phone line, we developed role-playing exercises to help parents explore their feelings and strengthen their capacity for empathy as well as provide them with constructive ways of limit-setting. Though not a little shocked by the feelings about being parents I found in these groups of well-educated and well-off middle class parents, I could see that they seemed to be very receptive to the experiences the team was providing for them.

After the Parent-Survival-Training group work, I continued to read and to explore my own childhood history. The opportunity for a year at the University of California Berkeley looked golden until I discovered that no graduate program seemed to fit my questions. Discarding my first impulse to enroll in the school of social work, I settled on a graduate program with Alan Dundes' "group in folklore" in the anthropology department.

This was fortunate. Alan Dundes had pioneered in applying psychoanalysis to folklore (and had faced extensive adverse criticism and hostility as he did so). I was able to turn almost every research requirement into an exploration of some aspect of attitudes toward childhood or toward women as mothers as these are revealed in folklore, a rich and generally untapped source. To my delight, my proposal to utilize the Sears Roebuck catalogs to relate the history of toys in the twentieth century to parents' attitudes toward children was enthusiastically approved, That thesis topic could not have been formulated in these terms, however, but for a serendipitous discovery.

Perhaps the best part of my stay at Blerkeley was its graduate library. introduced in my course work to La Barre, Roheim, Whiting and Child, etc., I devoured their work and whatever other writers I could identify that might possibly offer answers to my questions. Exploring in the periodical stacks one day, I discovered The History of Childhood Quarterly and sat down and read for hours. The result was the Sears toy study.

That study has consumed ten years, with much fumbling at the beginn-ing to develop a method of cataloging descriptions of thousands of toys so as to yield the information I needed. It has emphasized for me the im-portance of searching for resources of data which can be quantified, since a sizable base is needed if reliable conclusions are to be drawn. Although I am from a liberal arts background, I have become convinced that when we interpret our conclusions for publication, it is extremely important that we indicate clearly the nature and extent of our data-base as well as the frequency of our findings.

The Sears Toy study is now completed, but because toys have been shown to be such fruitful markers of parental attitudes toward children, much comparative work remains to be done: with toy suppliers from other countries; intensive studies of pre- and post-war periods compared with interwar periods; toy catalogs from suppliers catering to different social classes. Logistical-and financial-considerations can be prob-lems. It turned out to be necessary, for example, to go to the Sears Archives in Chicago to acquire some of my data. For the toys of other countries, even more extensive travel would be necessary. In addition to these problems, there is the problem of tedium that is inherent in ac-curately recording the necessary information for comparisons when thousands of objects are involved. A computer and statistical methods are essential. The interview method, however, might be helpful in diluting this tedium, as well as providing valuable insights.

Interviews, a source that has been little utilized in studying childhood history, although not always reliable, might help us grope toward understanding of some of the as yet unexplored questions in family history. Interviews in nursing homes, for example, might provide in-sights about not only the lags in some families, but what goes into the making of soldiers and plumbers and social workers and teachers and ministers and peacemakers-and psychohistorians. What seems to me especially important, however, is that as psychohistorians we record as much as possible from our own childhoods, not only what toys we were provided with but what childhood felt like to us, with the explicit homely information about what happened in our families under significant cir-cumstances, as well as what we know about our parents' families.

If our own resistances makes this task difficult, interviewing others is extremely problematic. My associates, I have found, are sometimes vaguely interested in "the history of childhood" as an abstraction, but when questions probe their own childhood, they generally evade them or change the subject. In my one opportunity to inject childhood history in-to a teaching situation (I included Barbara Finkelstein's essay from Regulated Children Liberated Children and required the children's literature students to write not only on their own experiences in becoming literate but to interview parents and grandparents on this topic as well), I discovered its salience for college students, underscoring Lloyd deMause's comments on the relationship of Thomas Kuhn's clash of paradigms to the difficulties of securing a place for psychohistory. Meanwhile, as Alice Miller has said (personal communication),

You do an important work if you continue to write about your own experience. This way you make people aware of what happens to them. The first who will listen to you will be people with a less cruel childhood. . . because they have less to deny.

Ardyce Masters has just completed a book manuscript, The Games Parents Play: Sears Roebuck Toys and the History of Childhood, of which "The Doll as Delegate and Disguise" The Journal of Psychohistory), 13(3), Winter 1986) is an adapted chapter. She is an independent researcher in psychohistory with a Masters Degree with the Group in Folklore of the Anthropology Department at the University of California Berkeley (pending). She is currently working on a study of the history of Quaker childhood and its bearing on Quaker dedication to social concerns and pacifism.

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

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