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Chapter 1
Orientation and Explanation
It is the function of Chapter 1 first to orient the reader to the viewpoint from which this research is undertaken; and secondly to make the ensuing chapters intelligible by explaining how our data has been collected, analysed and presented here.
This book and the volume that follows it1 together represent the third stage of our long-term study of children growing up in a representative English midland city, Nottingham. We had every intention of writing one comparatively short book on the seven-year-old age-stage of development; when it came to it, we soon realised that the two linked worlds of home and school which our children were now inhabiting demanded two linked books. The links will in fact be very apparent: we have not attempted to keep school wholly out of this study, and even less in the second one have we concentrated on school to the exclusion of home, since we are deliberately concerned with the ways in which the childâs formal educational experience is sustained or diminished by his home environment.
ORIENTATION
In this as in earlier studies, we have first of all concentrated upon looking at the process of child rearing through the eyes of ordinary mothers, and only then tried to put their perceptions into a broader social context. One of our primary aims has always been to draw attention to those aspects of child rearing which parents themselves take to be important. This attempt to achieve, at least on one level, a perspective as close as possible to those who are intimately and at first hand involved with bringing up their own children is not just a sociologically fashionable whim (though we are aware of our place in such a fashion); it stems from a theoretical outlook which has existential and phenomenological roots.
Many issues which define characteristic styles of child rearing only assume importance because of the cultural values which parents have learned to attach to them. Should babies be breast- or bottle-fed? Should they be offered food at predetermined times only, or reach for the nipple at their own sweet will? Should a toddler be expected to sleep with his mother, with sibs, with granny or alone? Should a nine-year-old girl be the casual playmate and companion of her brother, or should she be careful never to touch him, talk to him familiarly or sit on the same mat? and should he be encouraged to lend his possessions to his sister, or should he be strictly forbidden to do so?2 Whether such issues are perceived as significant at all is something we need to know about a culture, before we can start to make statements about which way a particular issue is decided and by which subcultural groups. At the individual level, the degree to which parents perceive themselves to be behaving like everyone else, giving their statements an âof courseâ quality, or whether they feel themselves to be out on a limb in relation to other parents, must necessarily colour the whole pattern of their child rearing.
Thus the view of reality to which children are called upon to react is one which is in large measure socially determined. It is delineated in terms of thoughts, feelings, beliefs and values supplied by people who are continuously involved in intimate interpersonal communication. From the beginning, parents offer their newborn child a framework of assumptions derived from social interaction with each other and with an assortment of human influences stretching back into their own babyhood. The sources of parental attitudes are obviously multiple and diverse, including as they do relatives, friends, neighbours, professional advisors, more distant âexpertsâ via the various media, and the observation of other parents like and unlike themselves.
The parental view of reality â the issues to which parents attach significance â must inevitably be partly focussed by their own up-bringing: we can hardly help transmitting to our children the cultural beliefs which we ourselves have absorbed, or perhaps partly created, as a result of our early experiences. But the process of social learning by which young people acquire notions of how they will be expected to behave towards their own children does not cease at the moment when they take on parental responsibilities themselves. On the contrary, it is precisely at this point that additional social pressure, formal and informal, is directed towards young and inexperienced parents; and this pressure is explicitly intended to influence and change their attitudes towards children. Martha Wolfenstein has pointed out that âAmerican parents . . . . . do not expect to bring up their children in the way they were brought up, any more than they would want to . . . . . drive around in the family car of their childhood. They hope to bring up their children better than they were brought up themselves. For guidance in this undertaking they turn to the contemporary expertâ.3 In our own less expert-oriented society, this is still true: with the proviso that in child rearing all members of society regard themselves as experts, and claim the right to comment on the upbringing of the children of neighbours and friends. No parents can totally ignore such pressure: they may deliberately reject it, but its existence is a part of their social world which they cannot deny.
Moreover, children themselves â even in infancy â rapidly become an important element in the social equation. Each individual child has a unique human personality to be reckoned with, and loses no time in expressing wishes, intentions and feelings which parents can hardly ignore, though again they may choose to reject them. As reasoning and language develop, the child becomes a potent source of feedback to his parents on how their child-rearing practices compare with those of other parents: âJaneâs mother lets her stay up to watch Come Dancingâ; âJohnâs mummy smacked him for taking his pants offâ; âMary canât come and play on Sunday because she has to go to Sunday Schoolâ; âPaulâs Dad sent him to bed because he said a rude wordâ; âGeoffrey has to save up his pocket money so as to have some spending money when he goes to the seasideâ; âEveryoneâs allowed to ride a bike on main roads except me!â
Because of the intensity of the social interaction which takes place between young children and those who look after them, parents and children together continually redefine their own version of reality in terms of shared experiences to which by mutual consent they ascribe significance. In other words, it is characteristic of the human personality that it is mutable: that people change as a result of interacting socially one with another. It must be emphasised that this is true of parents as well as children: from the intermeshing of their lives, new or modified attitudes for both evolve. This means that in practice children socialise their parents as well as being socialised by them, in the beginning because their in-built sources of motivation are stronger than parents can foresee, and later because the more âhomegrownâ core of their personality is given breadth and independence by experiences from outside the family. Socialisation must thus be recognised as a reciprocal social process, the outcome of which is that both parties change from what they might otherwise have become in a different social setting or in a different combination of individual temperaments. This is a view which most of us would readily accept as describing the dynamics of a prolonged marriage relationship: when people live together in close interpersonal contact, it is naturally assumed that mutual accommodation and adjustment will shift both personalities in directions which might have been otherwise with other partners. We are simply arguing that similar two-way processes occur between parents and children.
The theoretical implications of such a standpoint are, however, rather profound, because they compel us to question any simple model of one-way causal prediction in relation to child-rearing methods: the notion that the personality of a child is essentially determined by the way his parents have opted to treat him. Even when we can provide evidence of statistically significant associations in terms of group trends, the results must remain ambiguous and unamenable to simple cause/effect explanation. Do stubborn and wayward children get that way as a product of repressive discipline, or does stubbornness tend, in our culture, to call out a pattern of parental strictness which would not be evoked if the child were more placid and amenable by nature? Interpretations of correlations, even when statistically valid, may still only reflect our own particular cultural preconceptions: there are, after all, cultures where stubborn waywardness would be considered a special virtue, a trait to be deliberately nurtured in children, and where parents would be disappointed if it did not occur. The explanation of statistical association can only properly take place against a background of the cultural values and beliefs to which parents subscribe, coupled with the styles of life and work with which they may not be in total accord but which do in fact constrain them.
Thus in many ways the reader will find that we are far less interested in the actual snippets of behaviour which people perform, than in the frame of mind which brings them to the performance, how they justify what they do, and how they evaluate their intentions and the results. It is arguable that whether a child is physically or verbally chastised by his mother is of less moment to him than the spirit in which she does the chastising; and certainly we believe that mothers can more meaningfully be categorised by what they say about smacking than by how often they do it. Our most important use of behavioural snippets (and probably the most predictive) is in fact to regard them as straws in the wind which offer clues to how mothers approach the business of child rearing: so that, for instance, a motherâs willingness to pin up or otherwise keep her childâs drawings may have little significance as an incident on its own, but can be used with other behavioural indicators to tell us how far a general attitude of child-centredness informs her whole contribution to the relationship; similarly, the behavioural fact that a mother sometimes threatens her child with a policeman is of less importance than the attitude of mind which classes bamboozling as an appropriate technique for dealings with children.
It follows that it is not within our intentions or desires to provide, at the end of this research, recipes for child rearing. Obviously we hope that we are making some contribution to an understanding of the dynamics of the parentâchild relationship, and that this will be helpful in giving insights to parents themselves; but we do not set out to prescribe behaviour as such. To quote Martha Wolfenstein again, âBehaviour in adult â child relations is deeply rooted in strong and incompletely conscious feelings, not readily controllable by conscious good intentionsâ.4
Still less could we accept what has sometimes been suggested as the object of this kind of research: the devising of a set of optimal child-rearing strategies or controlling techniques designed to impose more effectively the will of one generation upon the members of the next, or to produce some particular kind of personality which somebody has decided is more acceptable than others. Although parents do attempt to control their childrenâs behaviour (and indeed the development of their personalities) within limits, such an emphasis upon technique must ultimately be regarded as pathologically manipulative. Most of the parents in our study are concerned with techniques as such only as short-term expedients when they feel that the longer-term relationship in which ordinary communication takes place has momentarily broken down. In the longer-term perspective, their intentions are to provide a protected and positive social environment in which the childâs autonomous personality development can take place. They respect, at least in theory, their childrenâs right to move towards becoming effective adult members of society. They welcome signs that their children can exert social influence on other people as individuals in their own right. They hope that their children will become creative and independent. They expect to be changed by and to learn from their children. And if something goes wrong, they tend to accept at least some responsibility for falling short on what might well have been a far too complex assignment
EXPLANATION
Basically, then, we have tried to paint a comprehensive and rounded picture of the seven-year-old growing up in this not a-typical English community in the second half of the twentieth century, and to explore the general feel of what it is like to be that childâs mother. Obviously it was necessary for us to have some preconceived ideas of the kinds of questions we needed to ask; but the direction which the discussion took, and the emphasis which mothers placed upon different aspects of particular issues, were matters upon which we deliberately looked to our respondent to guide our thinking. This whole theme of the adoption of a hypothesis-seeking rather than hypothesis-testing approach is one which we have explored else-where;5 rather than be repetitious, we refer the reader to that discussion. Similarly, the interviewing method as we have developed it has been described in general in our study of four-year-olds6 and in detail in the 1976 paper just referred to; we do not propose to re-state here our reasons for choosing the strategies we have.
Briefly to set the study in context, it forms the third of a series in which we are following a sample of Nottingham children through childhood to the second generation. The childrenâs mothers are interviewed at length in their own homes at what we consider to be focal points of development: around their childrenâs first, fourth, seventh, eleventh and sixteenth birthdays. At any one age-stage, we have data on approximately 700 children;7 losses are âtopped upâ so that we can continue to make statistically useful statements on a cross-sectional basis at each stage. Eventually we shall be able to make longitudinal statements about a comparatively small group of children on whom we have data from one to sixteen years, and about much larger groups for whom our records start at four years or later and finish at sixteen or earlier. At sixteen the âchildrenâ are themselves interviewed, separately from their mothers, and we hope to retrieve a proportion of them again at the birth of their first babies.
This longitudinal project was devised and undertaken quite independently of others concurrently in progress, but it is fortuitously very complementary to them: we have elsewhere discussed the longitudinal approach in relation to these various English studies.8 Like them, the existence of a body of children on whom so much data was being collected has given rise to research involving subsamples of âourâ children.9 In the Nottingham study, the class-stratified sample excluded three major groups: immigrants of less than ten yearsâ standing, children with handicaps diagnosed by their first birthday and illegitimate children not legitimised by the first birthday. Comparative studies have now been completed or are in progress on all these groups.10
As before, we have had to cope with the basic technical problem of recon...
