Four Years Old in an Urban Community

John Newson, Elizabeth Newson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351519274
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Although psychologists by training, John and Elizabeth Newson have more aptly been described as pioneers in social ecology; they work from the conviction that the causes and the consequences of child-rearing attitudes can fruitfully be investigated only in the framework of the total social environment in which they occur. This book continues their analysis of child rearing in an English urban setting.

CHAPTER 1
Background and Introduction

This book is about a group of seven hundred children as they reach their fourth birthdays in the English Midland city of Nottingham. It is about the social and material context of their lives: the streets and street-friendships, backyards and neighbours, homes and families, which make up the kaleidoscope of their everyday environment. It is about the emotional tie which forms the core of each child’s experience-his relationship with his parents; and in particular, since he is only four years old, it is about the behaviours and emotions which are generated between the child and that person with whom he spends the greater part of his waking life-his mother.

Our study of four-year-old children is the second phase in a long-term project designed to investigate parent/child relationships in developmental sequence. Our aims are threefold. Firstly, we hope to achieve a very detailed picture of the child himself at successive stages of his development from babyhood to late adolescence, a picture built up from his behaviour not in a clinic or nursery school setting, but in his more natural habitat, the home and its immediate surroundings. Secondly, we want an equally clear picture of the mother’s behaviour in relation to her child, and to see how this alters and develops, both in accordance with the child’s objective age, and in response to his idiosyncratic needs and demands; and we are interested not only in her actual observable behaviour, but in her own attitudes, emotional and intellectual, towards her behaviour. Thirdly, we look for the emergence of patterns in the data which we collect, and these may be of two kinds: they may be cross-sectional patterns, leading us to draw conclusions which have validity within a particular age-phase; or they may be longitudinal patterns, much slower to emerge, from which eventually we may learn something about cause and sequence in child-rearing and personality growth.

The first stage in this research project was described in our study of mothers and their year-old babies.¹ Integral in itself, we nevertheless planned, with more hope than confidence, that this should be dovetailed into a much more ambitious investigation which should follow children through their childhood and adolescence, and indeed into early adulthood, if this proved practicable.² We have been fortunate enough to obtain the financial support necessary for the continuance of this work, and we are committed, gladly, to its completion. The chief value of a follow-up study of this sort is, of course, the long perspective which we shall finally achieve of the upbringing of any individual: a perspective in which the details are not the inevitably distorted reconstructions of parents’ memories, but rather a related series of portraits from life, each one true to the child and to the mother at a specific moment of time. It is such an accumulation of contemporary rather than retrospective data which is needed if the more complex questions of socialization are to be answered; and, while at any given age we are interested in all the problems and pleasures characteristic of that phase of development, in the long term it will be the recurrent theme of socialization, sometimes hidden, sometimes very explicit, but always relevant to every situation involving children and parents, which runs like a master thread through any sequential study of child rearing. For this reason, we are continually alert to the moral atmosphere in the home: by which we mean simply the extent to which, and the means by which, behaviours and attitudes are presented to the child in evaluative terms as good or bad, right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable.

Basically, then, we are trying to understand the process of child-rearing as it happens in a fairly typical English urban community. It must be understood that it is not our role to make recommendations: we are not interested in what ought to happen, except in so far as the mother is affected, both in what she does and in her appraisal of what she does, by an awareness of ‘ought’ attitudes existing in her community. We make at the outset certain assumptions, which need to be stated even though we believe them to be generally agreed:

1. The family is the fundamental social group to which humans give allegiance. Cultures vary as to how far they extend family ties and how rigidly such ties operate, but the family remains the basic unit.
2. Throughout the world it is normal for the process of socialization to be initiated by the parents: it is from their behaviour towards him that the child first learns to label his own actions as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The network of social relationships through which the process continues is gradually extended, earlier or later in the child’s life according to the family and community structures of the individual culture; in our own society, the nuclear family excludes outsiders for a relatively long period, so that, for English children, the process of socialization will tend to be mediated through social interaction of a most intense and intimate kind within the family right up to school age.
3. However long the child is restrained from full interaction with people outside his own kin, the family itself is always a part of some wider community with which it is functionally related. This is still true where the family deliberately rejects, or is rejected by, the community, and where the relationship is thus one of withdrawal: the family may choose to spurn the community, but it cannot choose to deny its existence. This like-it-or-not involvement means that child-rearing does not and cannot take place in a social vacuum. Within any society, the range of available occupations, work-roles and work-habits, income and demands upon income, standards of nutrition and housing, educational possibilities, and the geographical environment all interact in more or less subtle ways to evolve the customs and beliefs, attitudes and fashions, which make up what has aptly been called the web of culture; and the individual family’s place in these systems, whether objectively or subjectively assessed, can be ignored neither by the members of that family nor by anyone who tries to understand its internal relationships.

Some notes on method¹

Numerous attempts have been made in the past to show that specific practices in child upbringing are responsible for specific consequences in the adult personality, either individual or collective. Workers in the anthropological and psychoanalytic fields in particular have demonstrated to their own satisfaction the operation of such a process.¹ However, while these studies have often provided us with valuable new insights, more rigorous research has on the whole been disappointing. Nevertheless, no-one seriously doubts that the way in which parents behave towards their children has some effect upon the kind of people those children become; why, then, is it so difficult to pinpoint cause and effect?

The answer is, we suggest, that specific practices in child care—breast- versus bottle-feeding, early versus late toilet training, and so on-are a good deal less important in the long term than the spirit in which they are carried out. Parental attitudes and values-their whole philosophy of child-rearing-must have a pervasive and profound effect upon the developing child: indeed, parents themselves intend this to be so; and if research results fail to demonstrate such an effect, we can only conclude that the research methods were inappropriate. To an extent psychologists must accept the blame for this, in that, by concentrating so emphatically upon specific child-rearing practices and their supposed effects, they have been led to spend overmuch time upon attempts to verify these hypotheses and so have diverted attention from the total climate of the child’s upbringing. Even where a more inclusive approach has been attempted, it has tended to confine itself to personality variables of the parents and to stop short of the community pressures impinging upon the family from outside. While dimensions of personality and attitude such as accepting/rejecting, permissive/restrictive, authoritarian/democratic, etc., are clearly of great significance in a description of parental behaviour, we do not believe that they are in themselves adequate measures of the whole parent/child situation, especially after the first year of life.

Our basic tool of investigation has been and remains the interview: primarily because it seems to give exceptionally good value in terms of detailed data on both behaviour and the attitudes underlying behaviour. In any human activity, the factual event and its associated feeling are of equal importance for our understanding. For instance, it may be a fact that a mother regularly smacks her child in certain situations, and it may also be true that this mother feels guilty whenever she thinks about smacking her child: it is the conjunction of these two things which is important. In the assessment of the socialization process, it may be very misleading to rely on either behaviour or attitude taken in isolation: even a four-year-old child is aware that slaps of the same objective force have totally different meanings according to the feelings and intentions which lie behind them.

It is the normal function of conversation to probe such subtleties if one really wishes to know about the opinions and motives of those with whom one converses. Once talk is flowing freely, in fact, it will be very difficult indeed for the participants to discuss their own behaviour without expressing any attitude towards it: and it is from such expressions of feeling, as much as from a knowledge of events, that the hearer is enabled to predict behaviour in future situations. Thus, if we want to predict how A will behave when next he meets B, the most obvious thing to do is to talk to A about B. From this conversation, provided that we are not personally involved in the A/B relationship, we may expect to gain a very fair idea both of what happened in previous encounters and of how A feels about B. Conversation is by far the most economical means, in terms of time and effort, of arriving at a valid assessment of a situation.

There has been a fashion in psychology, probably arising out of the discipline’s persistent insecurity feelings about its scientific status, to devise tortuous tests for the investigation of human feelings and attitudes, and, in the pursuit of objectivity for its own sake, to use such roundabout methods even where the most common-sense course of simply discussing his feelings with the individual would be more appropriate. Often the status of the individual as a thinking person, with the possibility both of making his own insights and of voluntarily supplying material which will allow others to make insights, seems to be mislaid on the way. The projective test, for instance, is useful in direct proportion to the subject’s failure to detect its purpose. To a lesser extent this is also true of the attitude test, which has the additional disadvantage that it fails to capitalize on the subject’s ability to examine his own attitudes, and thus both wastes available information and produces frustration by forcing him to prune every answer to fit arbitrary agree/disagree categories. Both of these types of test have a useful role to play in psychological research; but it is our thesis that the use of an ‘objective’ test does not ipso facto produce meaningful data, and that, conversely, the introduction of the explicit social relationship of direct personal conversation can, given adequate safeguards, produce material which is equally reliable, and which illumines with much greater clarity and in far more detail the real-life situations which it is our aim to understand.

If conversation is to be used as a scientific tool, it is of primary importance to ensure that the subject feels free to say anything he or she wishes. In our own research, this is done in two ways.

Firstly, there is no question of the parents’ methods of child-rearing being judged in any way. We have in any case no desire to do this, believing as we do that judgments are often made all too glibly by people who are professionally concerned with parents and children, frequently without either understanding or supporting evidence; if we felt qualified to judge, however, to do so even by implication would at once frustrate our purpose of providing an atmosphere in which it is understood that whatever may be said will be acceptable. To this end, we start by deliberately underplaying any status which we might seem to have as experts; in the letter which arranges our appointment, we write under no psychological or medical label-which, for good or ill, would present us in a certain image-but merely from the Child Development Research Unit at the University, which has no defined image for the majority of the mothers we see. Readers of our earlier study may remember that the greater part of the interviewing was then carried out by health visitors, and that the answers which they received were in some areas significantly distorted in the direction of the views which mothers associated with the health visitor label. We pointed out then that this was no reflection on the skill of the health visitors as interviewers, but the inevitable result of the fact that they were identifiable with a group whose views were known. The major benefit which financial support has brought to this research, however, has been the possibility of training our own interviewers specifically for the work they have to do, and of keeping them under continual supervision by means of the tape recordings which they return. All our interviewers are married women with young children of their own, and the mothers are aware of this. We believe this provision to be important in achieving a satisfactory relationship with the mother, since she knows that the person talking to her has herself faced the practical demands of parenthood: a criticism often made of health visitors (frequently unjustified, but part of the image) is that ‘they tell you what to do, but they don’t really know what it’s like’.

The second way in which freedom of speech is encouraged is by using a deliberately open-ended technique. The core of the interview is a schedule of carefully-phrased questions,¹ and these are to be asked verbatim; but the interviewer is free to ask additional questions if she thinks it useful to do so, either to probe further into a topic which has been introduced by the scheduled questions,² or to explore any other topic which the mother may have touched upon, but which is not covered by the interview because of its specificity to this particular child.³ The conversation is thus allowed to follow its own natural lines of development. While the nature and form of the scheduled questions are very carefully determined, the mother is not forced into a limited set of responses.⁴ She can answer at length; she can state any qualifications and reservations she may wish to make, and indeed she is encouraged by the interviewer to do this. Just as we make no evaluations as to the rights and wrongs of her child-rearing methods, so we do not try to judge the information she offers as trivial or important: if she thinks it important then it is accepted as such. The function of our questions is both to trigger off the mother’s own discussion of the topics in which we are interested and also to allow her to introduce any topic which she may consider of interest. It is only at a later stage, and on the basis of these total answers (which the tape recorder stores for us in full) that we attempt to classify for the purpose of statistical analysis the sorts of things which mothers typically do or say. That they are not during the interview forced into predetermined response categories is, we believe, of some importance, since this is a major irritant of the conventional survey interview, which often leaves respondents with the feeling of having been pigeon-holed and classified within a tight frame of reference that gave no scope for what they really wanted to say. This we do our best to avoid.

The unbreakable rule that interviewers must never give any impression of making value judgments has implications which extend beyond mere interviewing technique. The methods which we use are open-ended, not only in the sense that any kind of answer is acceptable, but also in the sense that we are at this stage more concerned with detailed and precise description than with th...