Children at Play

An American History

Howard P. Chudacoff

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780814717301
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia social

Hear the author interview on NPR's Morning Edition

If you believe the experts, “child’s play”; is serious business. From sociologists to psychologists and from anthropologists to social critics, writers have produced mountains of books about the meaning and importance of play. But what do we know about how children actually play, especially American children of the last two centuries? In this fascinating and enlightening book, Howard Chudacoff presents a history of children’s play in the United States and ponders what it tells us about ourselves.

Through expert investigation in primary sources-including dozens of children's diaries, hundreds of autobiographical recollections of adults, and a wealth of child—rearing manuals—along with wide—ranging reading of the work of educators, journalists, market researchers, and scholars-Chudacoff digs into the “underground” of play. He contrasts the activities that genuinely occupied children's time with what adults thought children should be doing.

Filled with intriguing stories and revelatory insights, Children at Play provides a chronological history of play in the U.S. from the point of view of children themselves. Focusing on youngsters between the ages of about six and twelve, this is history “from the bottom up.” It highlights the transformations of play that have occurred over the last 200 years, paying attention not only to the activities of the cultural elite but to those of working-class men and women, to slaves, and to Native Americans. In addition, the author considers the findings, observations, and theories of numerous social scientists along with those of fellow historians.

Chudacoff concludes that children's ability to play independently has attenuated over time and that in our modern era this diminution has frequently had unfortunate consequences. By examining the activities of young people whom marketers today call “tweens,” he provides fresh historical depth to current discussions about topics like childhood obesity, delinquency, learning disability, and the many ways that children spend their time when adults aren’t looking.

1
Childhood and Play in Early America, 1600–1800

LOOKING BACK ON his own childhood in the late eighteenth century, Silas Felton harbored regrets that he wished to convey to parents of his generation. The son of a Marlborough, Massachusetts, farmer and later a common (public) school teacher, Felton spent most of his youth under the strict auspices of his father and his schoolmaster. Though he occasionally enjoyed some free time, he so chafed under the restrictions placed on him that once he became an adult he wanted his contemporaries to appreciate a child’s need for autonomous activity. “People do not pay attention enough to the Inclinations of their children,” he complained in his autobiography, “but commonly put them to the same kind of business, which they themselves follow, and when they find them [children] not attentive to those particular occupations accuse them of being idle.” Such chastisement, Felton continued, “often damps [children’s] spirits, which . . . sometimes leads to looseness of manners, whereas if the leading inclinations of the children were sought after, and when found, permitted to follow them, [such inclinations] might prove highly advantageous to themselves, their parents and society.”¹ Felton’s advice for his fellow adults, voiced at a time when general attitudes about childhood were beginning to shift, reflected a rarely recognized appreciation for the natural play instincts—“inclinations”—of early American children.

The view of children varied across regions of the American colonies. The belief of New England Puritans—that children were born evil, the products of Adam’s sin—has tinged common assumptions about the childhood of European colonists with hues of austerity and piety. According to this exaggerated perspective, any kind of frivolity, play or otherwise, took place in the devil’s workshop. An American child’s life certainly brimmed with such qualities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But, in fact, different groups of early Americans—the Quakers of the mid-Atlantic states, for example—tolerated youthful indulgences, and virtually all groups, including the Puritans, lavished affection on their children, disciplined them gently, and rationally tried to shield them from the adult world’s corruptions. When it came to playful pursuits, many groups openly accepted at least a limited measure of childhood precocity while also expecting youngsters to control their passions.

For most colonists regardless of region, play was to have a purpose, whether it served God, the community, or the family; otherwise, it was considered to be “idleness.” To children, however, what their elders considered idleness meant amusement and recreation—in a word, their own brand of play. Limited in the time that they could devote exclusively to diversions and short on formal objects to play with, colonial youngsters nevertheless contested with adults over what was “idleness” and what was not. And in defining their play, they created spaces and activities in which to amuse themselves independent of the domestic and social worlds created by parents and other adults.

The Colonial Context of Childhood

American society in the colonial era was triracial—consisting of white, African, and Indian peoples—and in each racial society, children were numerous and valued. White children were especially abundant. Indeed, at no time in American history were there more white children, relative to the number of white adults, than in the colonial era. But also, at no time in American history were white children more seriously involved in adult society than in that same period.

Variations existed across regions and classes, but high birthrates, the result of young marriage age² and generally healthier environmental conditions than in Europe, meant that in spite of widespread and frequent infant mortality, most free families had numerous offspring. Families of white indentured servants, residing mainly in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, tended to be smaller than free families because indentured parents were less healthy and more transient than free parents. But, generally, white women’s fertility in the colonies was greater than it was in those areas of the colonists’ origins in England and the European continent. In New England, for example, women typically gave birth to seven to nine children; further south, by the eighteenth century women were having five or more children. Often, only about two-thirds or fewer survived to age twenty-one, compared with 99 percent reaching that age today. Most revealing, though regional differences were significant, the median age of the white American population in 1700 was under sixteen years, meaning that over half of the colonists were what today would be considered children. In the child-centered American society of the early twenty-first century, the median age is over thirty-five, which is more than twice the colonial figure, and only around one-eighth of the population is under age sixteen.

Though most of the first colonists in the New World claimed European origins, by the eighteenth century, Africans were the most numerous migrant group, involuntary though their immigration had been. Enslaved women married, formally or informally, at even younger ages than white women—often in their teens—and therefore bore more children than white women did. Slaveowners of Chesapeake Bay-area plantations discovered a profitable resource in female slaves, whose offspring could increase the labor force at relatively little cost or could be sold as a commodity. Consequently, in spite of a high ratio of slave males to slave females and the vulnerability of black children to infectious diseases, white masters encouraged slave births so that the number of African American children per adult female was quite high. As well, by the late 1700s, West African slave traders, who previously had captured mainly young adults, were kidnapping children and selling them to western planters, further increasing the number of black colonial children.³

Little is known about exact birthrates and age structures among North American Indians, the original inhabitants when Europeans and Africans arrived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Before their populations were decimated by imported diseases and killing by whites, an estimated half million Woodland natives lived in groups and villages in eastern North America in the era immediately preceding contact with European colonists. Unlike white children, who tended to live in two-generation families, Indian children, such as among the Iroquois, which was the largest native nation, often lived with a grandmother as well as with parents present in the household. Because Woodland Indian women nursed their children longer than white women did—sometimes up to four years—they had fewer births, usually three or four per mother. Once contact with European invaders ensued, pathogens from smallpox, chicken pox, measles, syphilis, and other infectious diseases carried by the colonists ravaged Indian peoples at staggering rates, killing up to 90 percent of native children and nearly as many adults. Thus, Indian families suffered child illnesses, deaths, orphanage, and overall loss at significantly higher rates than did white and African families.⁴

The demography, economies, and social structures of colonial America (excluding Indians) affected childhood and, relatedly, children’s play in several important ways. First, mortality framed black and white children’s lives more starkly than would be the case in future times. With 10 percent or more infants dying before they reached age one, and many more failing to live beyond their teen years, surviving kids experienced the death of siblings as a fact of life. Clergy such as Cotton Mather frequently warned children that they could be called before God at any time, but youngsters did not have to be reminded; parents had no qualms about exposing them to corpses and dying relatives, young and old. Moreover, with life expectancies in the forties, many children had to cope with the loss of one or both of their parents. Consequently, there were many orphans who were raised by an older sibling or by grandparents, aunts and uncles, or other kin. If no relative was present or capable, an orphaned child could be assigned or apprenticed to someone in the community. A widowed parent often remarried, meaning there was a good chance that a child would share a household with stepsisters and stepbrothers. As well, a large proportion of colonial children, even with two surviving natural parents, were indentured or in permanent bondage and therefore in the custody of masters and mistresses.⁵

As a result of these factors, distinctions between economic roles, communal experiences, and social spaces of older and younger generations in colonial communities were blurred. In a society that fused private life with public supervision, and where both domestic architecture and family responsibilities seldom allowed personal privacy, children mingled with adults and assumed important duties early in life. Until recently, historians commonly concluded from these patterns and from artistic representations of the period that colonists, especially in New England, considered and treated children as “miniature adults.” But such a characterization misrepresents kids’ status. Even though children everywhere mingled with the older generation in the fields, in the household, in the shop, and in the community, Puritans in the North, Quakers and Catholics in the Middle Colonies, and Anglican planter families in the South all recognized that children differed from adults, not just physically but also morally, emotionally, and legally. The most varied patterns occurred in how families and communities handled youthful natures. In the Chesapeake Bay and Virginia area, parents took a relaxed stance toward discipline, while in the Puritan Northeast, a constant preoccupation with making offspring aware and fearful of sin dominated child raising.⁶

Within white families and their communities, the years before 1770 marked a time when children operated under strict pressures to be obedient to parents and to God. Clerical warnings against disobedience and willfulness have long been used to illustrate the severity of adult-child relationships during this period. For example, Pilgrim pastor John Robinson sermonized, “And surely, there is in all children . . . a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their education being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon.”⁷ But methods of child-rearing and attitudes toward children were more diverse and compassionate than historians previously have believed.⁸ The style in Puritan New England was not uniformly “stern,” nor was parenting in the middle colonies and the South commonly “lenient.” Sources suggest that in all regions children were genuinely loved and even pampered by their parents. Nevertheless, the historical record also makes it clear that during childhood, a young white person learned how to “earn” adulthood in ways that were delimited by family, church, and community.⁹ Thus children’s culture and adult culture intertwined, extending from daytime labor into nighttime and Sunday leisure-time pastimes when parents and children jointly engaged in community activities outside the home. At home, they partook of Bible reading and games, such as puzzles and cards, that were intended to teach moral lessons.

In contrast to whites, Indian parents harbored less severe attitudes toward authority and child rearing. As historian Gloria Main and others have discovered, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century observers such as Baptist renegade Roger Williams in New England, Catholic missionary and ethnographer Father Gabriel Sagard, and Jesuit priest Pierre de Charlevoix (the latter two in the Great Lakes region) noted that native peoples gave their children considerable independence as well as affection. David Zeisberger, a Moravian missionary who worked among several eastern Indian communities in the eighteenth century, recorded in his diary how Indian parents seldom disciplined their children, who were allowed to “follow their own inclinations” and “do what they like and no one prevents them.” Native kids, wrote Zeisberger, unlike white youngsters were spared the rod—“reproved by gentle words” rather than suffering physical punishment. Among many native peoples, gender separation usually occurred once the early years had passed. Girls, who at quite young ages joined the company of women in undertaking household tasks, likely experienced more regimented lives than boys, whose outdoor activities, at least until adolescence, generally took place outside of adult male presence.¹⁰

Enslaved African and African American children endured the hardest childhoods. Forced into taxing labor at early ages, they confronted capricious family disruption when one or both of their parents were sold to another owner—assuming, that is, that their parents survived the high slave mortality rates. Still, black children received similar kinds of affection as other youngsters did. Studies of farms and plantations in various colonial southern communities have revealed that around three-quarters of slave children lived in families with at least one parent present and that black children received loving attention from their elders. When parents were absent in the fields, died, or were sold away, other adults in the slave community, often referred to as “aunt” or “uncle” even when unrelated, served as surrogate mothers and fathers. When possible, the older black generation bought, made, and gave gifts to slave children, and the bond between slave children and their parents was so strong that some newspaper ads seeking runaways mentioned children who had fled the plantation in search of a parent who had been sold away.¹¹

Adults thus employed a variety of ways to raise—or in social scientific terms, to socialize—children in American colonial society. Few if any parents, whether Anglo, Euro, Indian, or African, spoiled their children or were permissive in the modern sense of the term, and some historians have long believed that white colonists, especially New England Puritans, disdained children as innately evil beings in need of immediate, strict, and frequent moral tutelage. The oft-quoted Cotton Mather characterized even babies as sinners, asserting that “the Devil has been with them already. . . . They go astray as soon as they are born.” Yet more recently, scholars have uncovered convincing evidence that most parents felt and expressed deep fondness for their young. They grieved openly when an offspring died—as happened frequently—and took tender care to protect the young physically and emotionally. To be sure, not all parents exercised restraint; a study of early British and American diaries by historian Linda Pollock has revealed that cruelty and beatings were regular occurrences in some children’s lives, as they have always been. Nevertheless, references to gentle and forgiving treatment are evident throughout the colonial period. Whatever the method of discipline, adults of all races firmly believed that they could and needed to guide their children’s rehearsal for adulthood in very specific ways, and they worked hard to implant their own and their communities’ norms of behavior in the young.¹²

Children, on their part, shouldered family responsibilities, caring for younger siblings and working in the family economy. Except for the wealthiest white youngsters, these duties characterized the pread-olescent years of all racial groups, though male Indian offspring appear to have had the fewest responsibilities. In all groups, gender divisions arose early in life, as girls stayed close to home to help mothers or otherwise occupy themselves in the home while boys ventured farther away, either to aid fathers in the fields or, in the case of Indians, to learn hunting skills. Mostly, kids adapted to their roles, but even when pressed hard to accommodate adult needs, they did not unconditionally accept a daily routine of relentless labor. Innovative by nature, children developed their own culture, one that sometimes challenged their assigned place in society and diminished parents’ confidence about governing the lives of their offspring. That culture, if not one of play in the modern sense, certainly involved playful behavior.

“Devil’s Workshop” or “Gamesome Humour”?

Devereux Jarratt experienced a childhood that in many ways typified the patterns of the colonial era described above. Born in 1733 to a relatively poor Virginia family, Jarratt lost his mother to disease when he was six, and his father, a carpenter, died less than ten years later. With one parent gone and the other struggling to support the family, young Devereux was left mostly in the care of his oldest brother. Looking back on his youth, Jarratt, who had become a “New Light” Presbyterian minister, recognized some waywardness in his behavior and his brother’s neglect of him, but his reflection contained elements of both confession and pride, when he wrote that his brother permitted him “all the indulgences a depraved nature and an evil heart could desire.” Knowing the shortcoming of a “depraved nature” and his possible congress with the devil, Jarratt nevertheless engaged in a kind of mischievousness that characterized independent childish behavior that today would be considered as independent, unstructured play.¹³

In the minds of the pious, play as a pastime of a colonial white child was considered “the devil’s workshop,” leading to sin and dissipation. New England Puritans seemingly had the strictest attitude toward childish recreation. Seventeenth-century Massachusetts preachers such as Thomas Shepard and John Cotton regularly sermonized...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Childhood and Play in Early America, 1600–1800
• 2 The Attempt to Domesticate Childhood and Play, 1800–1850
• 3 The Stuff of Childhood, 1850–1900
• 4 The Invasion of Children’s Play Culture, 1900–1950
• 5 The Golden Age of Unstructured Play, 1900–1950
• 6 The Commercialization and Co-optation of Children’s Play, 1950 to the Present
• 7 Children’s Play Goes Underground, 1950 to the Present
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author