Historical Developmental Psychology

Willem Koops, Frank Kessel, Willem Koops, Frank Kessel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429685507
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

This book explores and underlines the thesis that developmental psychology cannot function fruitfully without systematic historical scholarship. Scientific thinking not only depends on empirical-analytical research, but also requires self-reflection and critical thinking about the discipline's foundations and history. The relevance of history was made especially clear in the writings of William Kessen, who analyzed how both children and child development are shaped "by the larger cultural forces of political maneuverings, practical economics, and implicit ideological commitments." As a corollary, he emphasized that the science of developmental psychology itself is culturally and historically shaped in significant ways. Discussing the implications of these insights in the book's introduction, Koops and Kessel stress that we need a Historical Developmental Psychology. In the book's following chapters, historians of childhood – Mintz, Stearns, Lassonde, Sandin, and Vicedo – demonstrate how conceptions of childhood vary across historical time and sociocultural space. These foundational variations are specified by these historians and by developmental psychologists – Harris and Keller – in the research domains of emotions, attachment, and parenting. This collection demonstrates the importance of bridging, both intellectually and institutionally, the gap between the research of historians, and both current and future research of developmental psychologists.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Developmental Psychology.

Why history matters: Placing infant and child development in historical perspective

Steven Mintz

Abstract

How knowledge of the history of childhood problematizes many common assumptions about child development, rebuts myths that distort public understanding, refutes simplistic linear theories of progress and reveals certain long-term trends, developments and processes that are otherwise misunderstood.

Why is knowledge of history valuable to those who study infant and child development? At first glance, history seems irrelevant to the kinds of empirical and applied research questions that contribute to a scientific understanding of infancy and childhood. The topics that preoccupy developmental psychologists – such as infant and child psychology, children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development, developmental disabilities, and emotional and behavioral disorders – seem profoundly ahistorical. The methods deployed by developmentalists – controlled laboratory experiments, psychometric testing, sociometric monitoring, long-term observation, and ethnographic description – differ radically from the kinds of archival research, textual analysis, and exploration of context characteristic of history as a discipline. History’s only value, it would appear, is as a source of engaging anecdotes, a litany of examples of past ignorance, or a laboratory to test contemporary theories. Yet in diverse ways, a knowledge of history is essential to a scientific understanding of human development.

The historical examples I will cite come primarily from the history of the United States. But I will look at the American experience through a wide-angled lens, placing developments in the United States in comparative, cross-cultural perspective.

How, then, might history be of value to developmentalists? First, because history defamiliarizes the present, reminding us that concepts, practices, and assumptions that we take for granted are in fact problematic and time-bound. Take the Freudian notion that early childhood determines a child’s future development, shapes their personality, and leaves a lasting imprint on their future relationships. Few thinkers would have accepted these ideas prior to the twentieth century. Thus in his 1749 novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Henry Fielding dismissed the title character’s childhood in six words: ‘nothing happened worthy of being recorded.’

Or take the assumption that young children are incapable of performing sophisticated chores. In most past societies, children assumed work responsibilities as young as two or three (Lancy, 2011). Abraham Lincoln, for example, assisted his father in clearing fields when the future president was only two years old. Or take the view popularized by attachment theorists that proper child development requires secure attachment to a single mothering figure and a stable household environment. In fact, most children in the past had multiple nurturing figures and shifted frequently among households (Hrdy, 2009). Or, more controversially, consider current medical advice that co-sleeping arrangements, where a mother and her infant share the same bed, put children at risk. In the past, it was highly unusual for mothers and infants to sleep apart, and even in the United States, reliance on cribs for nighttime sleeping dates only to the early twentieth century. Separate sleeping arrangements for infants reflect U.S. society’s increasing emphasis on cultivating individualism from a very early age (Davies, 1995).

Then, too, history rebuts myths that distort public understanding. Take the myth of the carefree childhood. Many cling to a fantasy that childhood in the past was a time of carefree adventure; for most earlier children, however, growing up was anything but easy. Disease, family disruption, and early entry into the world of work were integral parts of childhood well into the early twentieth century irrespective of social class. The notion of a prolonged childhood, devoted to education and free from adult-like responsibilities, is a very recent invention, a product of the past century and a half, and one that only became a reality for a majority of children in the United States and Western Europe after World War II (Mintz, 2004).

Another myth is the home as a bastion of stability in an ever-changing world. Throughout U.S. history, family stability has been the exception, not the norm. At the beginning of the twentieth century, fully a third of all American children spent at least a portion of their childhood in a single-parent home, and as recently as 1940, one child in ten did not live with either parent, compared to one in 25 today (Gordon & McLanahan, 1991).

A third myth is that childhood is a status transcending class, ethnicity, and gender. In fact, every aspect of childhood is shaped by class, ethnicity, gender, geography, religion, and historical era. Not simply a biological phenomenon, childhood is better understood as a life stage whose contours are shaped by a particular time, place, and cultural context. Childrearing practices, schooling, and the age at which young people leave home – all are products of particular social and cultural circumstances. Even the age of sexual maturation appears to vary on the basis of context (Schultz, 1995).

A fourth myth is that the United States is a peculiarly child-friendly society. In actuality, Americans are deeply ambivalent about children. Adults envy young people their youth, vitality, and physical attractiveness, but also resent children’s intrusions on their time and frequently fear their passions. Over time, the United States has become an increasingly age segregated society, in which children’s contacts with adults other than parents are confined to specialists: teachers, pediatricians, child psychologists, music or dance instructors, and coaches. Many reforms nominally designed to protect the young were instituted to insulate adults from children and insure smooth operation of the economic order (Chudacoff, 1989).

Lastly a myth, perhaps the most difficult to overcome, is a myth of progress or its inverse, of decline. Often, the history of childhood becomes a story of steps forward over time: of parental engagement replacing emotional distance, leniency supplanting strict punishment, and scientific enlightenment superseding superstition and misguided moralism. This viewpoint is sometimes seen in reverse: that children are losing their innocence and playfulness too quickly, that overzealous parents are undercutting their offsprings’ independence by coddling and indulging their kids. Both the Whiggish myth of progress and the declensionist myth of decline are highly misleading. Historical change invariably involves trade-offs. Children benefited from dramatic declines in rates of infant and child mortality and increased control over childhood diseases. But the young have fewer ways to demonstrate their growing competence and maturity (apart from sports) and more children than ever suffer from disabilities and chronic conditions (Golden, Meckel, Richard, & Prescott, 2004).

History refutes simplistic linear theories of progress and crude assumptions about inevitability. One striking example involves child abuse. Although the physical and sexual abuse of children has declined in recent years, other forms of abuse remain prevalent, as the literary critic Daniel Kline has observed. These include the violence of expectations – the assumption that children are able to achieve certain markers of maturity before previous eras deemed them physiologically or psychologically ready; the violence of labeling – of attaching pathological labels upon normal childish behavior; the violence of representation – the sexual exploitation of images of girls in advertising; and the violence of poverty, which exposes children to extraordinary stresses and limits their future possibilities (Kline, 1998).

In addition, history reveals certain long-term trends, developments, and processes that we are otherwise blind to. Examples include the long-term shift from an environment in which children were supposed to respect and obey their parents to one where parents seek to earn their children’s love; or the triumph of therapeutic discourse, which uses psychological categories to understand children’s behavior. History also offers valuable lessons: That even young children are more capable than contemporary societies assume or that ideas about children’s nature and how best to rear kids have always been contested (Hulbert, 2003).

Equally important, history allows us to view present-day controversies from a novel vantage point and offers dynamic, diachronic, longitudinal perspectives different from those generally advanced by psychology or sociology. By treating concepts and behavior as constructs, history underscores the radical contingency of all social arrangements and modes of thought. In addition to stressing the importance of change over time, history also emphasizes the significance of social and cultural context in shaping the nature and timing of key life course developments, such as leaving the parental home, attending school, or entering the workforce. History reminds us that conceptions of childhood and children’s essential nature, theories of child development, and approaches to childrearing have shifted profoundly over time. With its emphasis on four C’s – change over time, the significance of context, the role of contingency in shaping historical development, and the ever-present reality of conflict and contestation – history greatly enriches and challenges insights gleaned from the other social sciences.

What is childhood?

Nothing better illustrates the value of history than asking: What is childhood? Is childhood an age range, a period of physical and emotional immaturity, a phase of physiological and psychological development, a label, or a socially-constructed category that varies according to class and cultural context? The answer, of course, is all of the above.

Childhood is a stage of life whose boundaries and cultural meaning vary markedly over time. In seventeenth-century Europe, childhood, by recent standards, began late and ended early. It followed infancy, which referred to the phase of life in which a young person was under a mother’s control, and did not end until around the age of five or six. Childhood was succeeded by youth, which began around ten or twelve and extended into the early or even late twenties (Chudacoff, 1989).

Childhood is also a developmental phase, but one whose attributes have been defined in very different ways. At various times, children have been regarded as animal-like, innately sinful, pure and innocent, cute and playful, and, recently, incipient scientists. In addition, childhood needs to be understood in terms of institutional arrangements and social roles that have varied widely. In the twentieth century, childhood became synonymous with school attendance. In the past, in contrast, many children spent substantial amounts of time as servants or wards in other families’ residences.

Childhood is anything but a marginal subject. The history of childhood is bound up with key cultural, economic, historical, psychological, and sociological themes. These range from the structural – such as the growth of the state’s police and administrative powers, the rise of modern bureaucratic institutions, the development of the welfare state, and the emergence of modern criminal jurisprudence – to the developmental, including shifting patterns of socialization, enculturation, and maturation, the cultural, such as the triumph of the therapeutic, and the economic, like the growth of a consumer economy. It is through childhood that we can see how ethnic, gender, racial, and religious identities are transmitted, and how social class makes itself felt in private life. The history of childhood also encourages us to rethink what we mean by agency, identity formation, generational consciousness, and subcultures and their relationship with mainstream culture. Childhood is the missing link between the psychological and social, the domestic and the public, the past and the future.

The history of childhood is commonly viewed from perspectives with deep historical roots. There is the Rousseauian view of child development as the story of the loss of organic wholeness, innocence, and a sense of wonder, a view that contrasts radically with that associated with the classic bildungsroman or coming of age story, of maturation as a form of liberation from paternal authority, familial hierarchy, and naïveté. Then there is the declensionist view of children growing ever more insolent, impolite, and ill-mannered, which stands at odds with a Whiggish view that emphasizes progress, defined in terms of improvements in children’s health, the decline of child labor, the gradual breakdown of rigid gender roles, and increasing access to school.

Since the 1970s, as birthrates fell, increasing proportions of adults declined to bear children, and growing numbers of seniors began to live in adult-only communities, the United States became a more adult-centric society. One consequence was a hardening of attitudes toward children apparent in mass culture. Landmark depictions of children in Hollywood films – such as Carrie, Taxi Driver, or Thirteen – portrayed children possessed by evil spirits or employed as prostitutes or engaged in casual sex and drug use. Negative views of children could also be found in popular discourse in the United States, in the oft-repeated claim that contemporary children are coddled rather than challenged, indulged rather than pushed toward achievement. Yet at the same time, child protection represents the ultimate trump card in political and judicial discourse. Children’s health care, child pornography, undocumented children, and the juvenile death penalty and life imprisonment are treated very differently than similar matters involving adults. A fundamental tension prevails, between an earlier ideal of a protected child, sheltered from the stresses and harsh realities of adult life, and the prepared child, exposed from an early age to knowledge about the adult world, the better to be able to cope with the complexities and disruptions that characterize contemporary society. Parents, as well as U.S. society as a whole, vacillate between the contradictory ideals of sheltering and shielding children from premature exposure to adult realities and preparing them to compete in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and competitive environment (Calvert, 1992).

Childrearing

The United States is unique in its preoccupation with the proper way to raise children. Americans write and read more childrearing books than those in other nations and worry more incessantly about children’s well-being. As a result, it is impossible for American parents to rear children intuitively or un-self-consciously. Parents face a barrage of contradictory advice: to bottle-feed or breast feed, to co-sleep or use a crib, to use a stroller or a sling. Disagreements among childrearing experts are nothing new. Every era has been buffeted with clashing counsel, pitting those who emphasize parental authority and discipline against those who advocate affection and bonding. Since the late nineteenth century, every generation has had experts advocating a parenting style they claim is buttressed by science, only to be challenged by other authorities claiming scientific validation for their approach (Hulbert, 2003; LeVine & LeVine, 2016).

The 1920s illustrates conflicts among childrearing experts particularly vividly. Behaviorists, like the psychologist John B. Watson, advised mothers to avoid hugging, kissing, or playing with their infants and to rigidly schedule feeding and sleeping, lest their children fail to develop a capacity for self-control. Child development specialists, led by Arnold Gesell, tied certain traits to children’s age and stage of development. At the same time, early Freudians anticipated Dr. Benjamin Spock by calling for a more loving relationship between mother and infants, but also worried intensely about the dangers of maternal over-involvement. What linked these contrasting viewpoints was a fear that any dysfunction in mother–child relationships would lead to lifelong psychological maladjustments.

The late nineteenth century marked the birth of a scientific approach to childrearing advice. Supplanting earlier childrearing tracts, written by ministers and moralists, were works by physicians and psychologists. Deeply concerned...