How to Make Childhood Reappear

I noted in my first post on Neil Postman's book The Disappearance of Childhood that one thing I appreciated is his epistemic humility at the book's outset. Too often people reach too far in attempting to provide pat conclusions to complex issues. I appreciated Postman's reticence to do anything in his book beyond diagnosis.

However, upon finishing the book a clear suggestion is implicit: opt out. Postman's argument is that childhood is disappearing in our culture because we have replaced text-based literacy with image-based illiteracy. Whereas mass literacy prompted the development of childhood as an age distinct from adulthood--little kids can't read at advanced levels of cognition and adults can--our culture is removing the distinctions by flattening the differences. You can see these previous posts that spell out how Postman comes to this admittedly controversial thesis. 

But as I finished the book it became evident that a solution exists: resist the flattening caused by television and other mass media. Refuse to let your kids be indoctrinated into the world of the image and adhere to the world of print. In a move that would make the reformers proud, be iconoclasts. Smash the icons and idols of the modern technocracy.

Postman himself gets to this in the concluding chapter. He offers there a set of questions and responses for what to do if you happen to accept his thesis. His final question is "Is the individual powerless to resist what is happening?" The very wording of the question certainly implies that there might be a way forward (or backward, depending on your point of view). I'll quote his answer at some length:

The answer to this, in my opinion, is "No." But, as with all resistance, there is a price to pay. Specifically, resistance entails conceiving of parenting as an act of rebellion against American culture. For example, for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of a throwaway culture in which continuity has little value. It is also at least ninety percent un-American to remain in close proximity to one's extended family so that children can experience, daily, the meaning of kinship and the value of deference and responsibility to elders. Similarly, to insist that one's children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in sexuality, or self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend. Even further, to ensure that one's children work hard at becoming literate is extraordinarily time-consuming and even expensive. But most rebellious of all is the attempt to control the media's access to one's children. There are, in fact, two ways to do this. The first is to limit the amount of exposure children have to media. The second is to monitor carefully what they are exposed to, and to provide them with a continuously running critique of the themes and values of the media's content. Both are very difficult to do and require a level of attention that most parents are not prepared to give to child-rearing.  

Nonetheless, there are parents who are committed to doing all of these things, who are in effect defying the directives of their culture. Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood but are, at the same time, creating a sort of intellectual elite. Certainly in the short run the children who grow up in such homes will, as adults, be much favored by business, the professions, and the media themselves. What can we say of the long run? Only this: Those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will help to keep alive a humane tradition. It is not conceivable that our culture will forget that it needs children. But it is halfway toward forgetting that children need childhood. Those who insist on remembering shall perform a noble service.

There is much to unpack here and by no means do I intend to do justice by all of it. The parts that I have put in bold are indicative of what I am focusing on for now. I have long had the sense that parenting in the way I feel called to do it is both an implicit and explicit rejection of our culture at large and even some of the subcultures I inhabit. The values that my wife and I value are out of step with the pull of American culture. The way we pursue them strikes others as extreme and over-the-top. But you cannot subvert a decadent culture with half-measures. 

Moreover, as Postman affirms in dubbing this the Monastery Effect, the goal of such parenting is firmly rooted in this world. The parents who make the decision to defy the culture are doing so for the good of the culture, ultimately. Christians, and here I break from Postman's own classically liberal concerns, are to live our lives for the life of the world. We reject culture not to reject the people that comprise that culture but in order to better love and serve them. 

This is the solution Postman denied in the introduction he would give. And the solution must begin at the individual level, expand to communities of faith who unite together to maintain and reclaim what is humane in our tradition, and only then can it ever expand to enact mass change. All other paths of resistance are Luddites smashing the machines. That will not work as long as the majority love the machines. We have to restore a vision of the world that makes the machines superfluous. That will be extremely difficult. But if we value not only our children but childhood itself we will put our hand to the plow.

Raising Dragonslayers

In case it's not clear at first glance what is going on in this picture, this was taken during an interrupted dragon battle a month or so ago in my front yard. Dragons have long been the scourge of our neighborhood, hoarding gold, burning crops, eating livestock, etc. Fortunately for the Leawood district of Littleton, these two fierce youths moved into the neighborhood and have been fastidiously hunting down the local dragons, ministering the cold justice of forged steel to their scaly hides. Again, though it seems perfectly clear to any keen observer of dragon warfare, the weapons my children are wielding are as follows:

1) In my son's left hand is a sword for, and I quote, "stabbing into the dragon's flanks."
2) In my son's right hand is a dagger which some fools may dismiss as an inappropriate weapon for combat with a large, fire-breathing beast. Au contraire, the dagger is for stabbing the dragon's eyes. Furthermore, the dagger is a more fitting tool for this task than the sword, because "I can be more precise with a dagger." 
3) The black rope in my daughter's hand is so very clearly a whip that it barely merits mention, except to say that the purpose of the whip is to keep the dragon at bay while my son goes in with the dagger. 
4) The curved piece of wood in my daughter's hand is a bow for engaging the dragon from a distance while my son runs in with the sword for a good flank stab.

Do you even need to ask if they killed the dragon? With such tools at their disposal and a strategy worthy of Sun Tzu combined with the iron will evinced by their determined looks, how could they possibly have lost?

I came home to this scene after a day of work, a day spent thinking about how to educate the students put under my charge. As most of you know, we homeschool our kids. They spend their days at home with the exception of Thursday when they go to a homeschool group for science projects, music lessons, and group play with other kids. They know Latin declensions, can recite a 14 minute long timeline of world history, can skip-count up through the 15s, possess an encyclopedic knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology (we're about to start in on the Norse and Celtic myths), use metaphors in everyday speech, and regularly throw out such words as "cumulonimbus," "precise," "antagonize," and "articulate." 

And this knowledge accumulation is important to me. I trust that down the road it will help them to be wise. I wish more of the students that I teach had received this type of training in their youth.

But that's not precisely why we homeschool. 

People obviously have all of these preconceptions about what homeschooling is (usually how bad it is for the kids) and assume that the reason we are doing it is to shelter our children from the world. And to be quite honest, that is part of the reason. This world sucks. I am not scared of it, but I am cautious of the dangers it has for my children. I don't want to expose them to its worst features because some people think it's wrong to "shelter" your kids. Those people are free to do what they want with their own children, and I frankly don't give a tinker's damn what they want me to do with my little charges.

As to the concern of whether or not kids will socialize, I can't help but ask: "Why in the flip would I want them to socialize to their peer groups?" Just to use a small sample size, my son is playing soccer this fall with a cohort of five year olds from our wealthy suburb. Of his five teammates, I have heard three of them swearing, calling other kids mean names, and shoving people to the ground for no apparent reason. Again, they're five. And any notion that we can dismiss this because "boys will be boys" or "they're just kids" is an attitude that enables the sort of culture that creates five year olds like that (and also, incidentally, allows people like Donald Trump to exist). I don't want my son and daughter (and son on the way) to be "just kids." I do not understand why I would have to accept that.

The more positive reason that we homeschool is because I want my kids to be wild. I want them to slay dragons in my yard so that they can grow up and slay dragons in this world. Metaphorically, of course. Everyone knows the great knights already rid the world of real dragons. I want Owen to pull the (real) sword I bought for him in Kenya out of its sheath and freak out his grandma; I want him to polish it in the morning because Arthur polished Excalibur. I want him to be courageous and full of virtue. Say what you will for our contemporary system of education, but those two qualities are decidedly not the goal.

I am not interested in merely training the minds of my kids at home. I am interested in training their affections. I want them to not only know the Good but love it. We homeschool because I am convinced this process can take place best within the home.

We live in a culture bereft of wildness. And I want my kids to be wild. I don't want their noses buried in iPads even if they are playing "educational" games. I want their noses buried in books, bringing to life the stories they read through their imagination and not through passive sensory receptors. I don't want their minds shaped by movies and television shows, again even the ones that claim to be educational, and oh dear God especially not Veggie Tales. I want their minds shaped by the written word and by conversation with people smarter than them. I want them to build things and use their hands and pursue their passions.

I want to come home and find, as I did today, that my son has made himself a pair of missile shooters for each arm (toilet paper roll and construction paper for the strap, obvs) and that he colored a picture for his best friend using every different marker color and that he read the story of Beowulf and that he makes jokes out of mispronouncing names of Greek deities (he does it in all reverence, Hephaestus) and that my daughter has her history timeline memorized up through St. Augustine and can sing along with her terrible enunciation to dozens of hymns. 

I want other adults speaking into their lives and taking on key roles, but I want the number one influence to be my wife and me for as long as possible. Because no one will love our kids like we do. Ever. It is a sacred duty and an ineffable privilege. It is a limited period in which I can exert this influence. I will not squander it. To make a reference to Hamilton and a line that Elle runs around the house exclaiming, "I am not throwing away my shot." 

This gift is precious. And needed. This world is full of dragons. But it is perilously short on dragonslayers. 

What to Expect When No One's Expecting

Walter Berglund, the protagonist of Jonathan Franzen's sometimes infuriating, often excellent 2010 novel Freedom is something of a liberal hypocrite. A one time apostle of Paul Ehrlich and population control activists, Berglund settled down in gentrifying St. Paul with his wife Patty and did the unthinkable: reproduced. . . twice! Berglund is burdened by this guilt his entire life, despite his love for his kids, and tries to recompense his misdeeds through a lifetime of service to the planet he sees himself as complicit in destroying. A bumbling sort of hero, Walter gets into some tangles even in that endeavor, but that is not really the point here.

Population control was once en vogue and is still rather blithely accepted by a significant portion of our nation's intellectuals as well as the average person who through trickle-down idiocy has come to accept overpopulation as fact. Pundit blowhard chieftain Thomas Friedman wrote Hot, Flat, and Crowded in 2008, and though he doesn't prescribe one child policies or anything as likely to elicit negative reaction the underlying assumption for the final descriptor is that our planet is perilously crowded with creatures possessing opposable thumbs and we need to ramp down productivity (so to speak) until our planet can heal itself. 

In other words, the danger to humanity rests for most on the side of overpopulation. Rarely do we see the opposite argument made: that the waning birthrate in this country and throughout the industrialized (and mostly entire) world is actually a dangerous, potentially unreversible reality that will have far-reaching consequences for pretty much everyone alive today. Which is why Jonathan Last wrote the cleverly titled What to Expect When No One's Expecting, a small book with big implications.

Last begins by recounting the time early in his marriage when he and his wife lived in a yuppie district of D.C., one of those neighborhoods where the dog boutiques outnumber the baby stores. An overwhelming majority of the inhabitants did not have kids and once you decided to take the plunge, the astronomical pricing of the neighborhood made it unrealistic for most to afford to live there with kids. To the suburbs, breeders! 

This little anecdote underscores that while children are increasingly valued in our culture (the $700 strollers, baby yoga sessions, preschool Mandarin classes, etc.) they are at the same time decreasingly present (shades of supply-side economics at work here). In other words, children are not required for help on the farm and most all of them live to adulthood these days so we don't have nearly as many. Perhaps even more importantly for our culture, the purpose of life is now self-fulfillment and raising kids is generally acknowledged to suck. Times they have a changed, and now children are more  of a personal accessory, something validating adulthood and accomplishment and to boast about at parties, than they are, say, a blessing from the Lord or, to take a different tack, necessary propagations in a Darwinian world. Or, going to neither extreme, something intrinsically worthwhile, even if they make life hard.

There are many factors contributing to the decline in fertility around the globe, and Last aims a sawed-off shotgun at our culture to try and hit them all. Some are admirable: the increasing freedom and equality of women in the past 50 years. Some are pernicious: the hookup culture and abortion. Some are the fruits of unforeseen consequences: Social Security and the welfare state for the elderly. And, as Last readily concedes, it is impossible to pinpoint a single cause or even the biggest cause. What we have in Western culture (though this is far from a Western problem; Japan is the reigning king of the dire consequences of decreased fertility) is a cocktail of elements all contributing to making babies less ubiquitous, desired, and necessary (in the short run, of course). And the long run effects of this trend are not potentially, but inevitably disastrous. 

Consider economics, for a moment. When Social Security was put in place by FDR in the 30s, the average life expectancy was 58.1 for men and 61.6 for women. So the number of people qualifying for Social Security payouts was exceedingly small. Over 40 workers contributed to the system for every beneficiary. Social Security, for those who followed the work of Bernie Madoff, is a Ponzi scheme, and as Madoff's dissatisfied clients found out, Ponzi schemes only work if you keep getting more suckers workers to buy in at the bottom level. When you combine low fertility with increased life expectancy, and refuse to touch the sacred cow of Social Security, you end up in a disturbing place. Where there used to be 40 workers for every beneficiary, today that number is at 2.5. By 2050 it will be under 2.0. Accordingly, Social Security taxes have been on the rise and can only be expected to continue to rise until the system implodes, we are annexed by China, or the Lord returns.  The low birthrate, coupled with an increasing lifespan makes for an unsustainable imbalance between the young and the old. Our population will soon look like an inverted pyramid, with ever increasing numbers at the top and decreasing numbers at the bottom. Which is good for a population. . . never. That is never a good thing and has never proved reversible.

Now consider the sociology of Social Security. Kids used to be a requirement if for no other reason than you needed someone to take care of you when you got older. It may not be the most romantic reason to have kids, but it is practical. Today, in a socialist dream, you have the state to take care of you. And here is the kicker, the state will even help you if you failed to contribute any suckers workers to the bottom of the Ponzi scheme. In other words, there is almost no practical reason in our culture to have children. You can refuse to have kids, put in your Social Security throughout your working life, and then overdraw based on what you put in from the paychecks of your friends' kids. 

I don't want to paint with too broad of a brush here. There are people unable to have kids and people who should not have kids (look at me sounding like a eugenicist), but that is not most people. Most people in our country who don't have kids make this decision as part of the proliferating "lifestyle choices" that must be ever-validated in our culture. (Unless, of course, that lifestyle choice involves having numerous children. Then, sadly, you are a nutjob.) And I don't think it does injustice to the word, or the sentiment behind most people not having kids, to call this selfish. People don't like that word, because it invokes judgment, which is again only proper when directed toward poor white people and the religious in our culture, but no one I ever met who has told me they never want kids has ever given me anything other than a selfish reason (i.e. travel, free time, don't want a real job). But in reality the only thing that allows people to make this "lifestyle choice" is that other people still keep having kids so the non-breeders can live off of the Social Security those kids keep pumping into the system. Again, not feelings, like "I feel bad that you called me selfish," but reality.

I am not here saying that we should only allow procreators to draw Social Security--that would be incredibly creepy legislation--, but that when the entire structure of a culture incentivizes people to refrain from having kids then that is a very dangerous place for a culture to go. As well as irrevocable.  Last runs through a catalogue of the social policies of Western Europe designed to reinvigorate the anemic fertility rates of our cosmopolitan models, and as a group they have failed. No matter how much time you give a mother (or father) off of work, no matter how great the government-sponsored daycare is, no matter what the cash payout tax refund is for bringing baby into the world, the birthrate refuses to budge. Which leads to a conclusion about government intervention in fertility: it is far easier to social engineer decreases in total fertility than it is to reverse engineer the previous efforts and inspire more robust fertility.

Some people will point to immigrant populations as a way to solve the problem. Latin American immigrants have a higher total fertility than a native U.S. of A'er, just as the majority Muslim immigrant population in Western Europe has a higher fertility rate than the native population. But this is an extremely short-term solution. Leaving off issues of immigrant integration, Last shows that within a generation of residency in the United States, Latin American fertility drops to levels just as low as natives. It makes no sense to keep allowing more and more immigration as a way to grab up the one immigrant generation of higher fertility. Talk about creepy policy, as well as a weird case of robbing Peter to pay Paul: this might help arrest the demographic plunge of the United States, but it would almost certainly hurt the country whose people we were pilfering. 

The really only other significant reason to have children, other than the practical reasons that used to exist, is because you believe them to be a blessing, despite the cost. Put another way, no one is going to all of a sudden start having kids because they believe it is their civic duty. We are no longer communally-minded. We are each of us, if not rugged, then pacified and entertained individualists. Freedom, to borrow a turn of phrase from John Milton, exists in license not true liberty in twenty-first century America. Put yet another way, in our current cultural climate you would only expect to find people committed to community and with ambitions beyond self-fulfillment having kids. People most often found in religious communities. Which is, in fact, what we are seeing. 

The total fertility rate for the American woman is at 2.01, or right about replacement rate, and dropping. However, if you break this down for women who attend church regularly, the total fertility rate jumps to 2.54. I know, I know, the stereotypes abound here, but it appears as if committed religious believers are the only people actively staving off massive population decline and the disastrous future that entails. As religion continues to wane in our country, it is difficult to see a secular source of such devoted childbearing arising from the ashes of religion.

Last's book struggles, as all such books struggle, when it comes to making recommendations. Prophets of doom are great at diagnosing and poor at prescribing. He suggests more family friendly tax policy and work situations, but he spent a good chunk of his book talking about how such policies are impotent elsewhere. If you take away both the economic/social incentives for having kids as well as breed an intense narcissism directed toward self-fulfillment and the search for the ever elusive self, it is difficult seeing how another month of maternity leave is going to make it seem worthwhile to invest 18 years plus (30 is the new 18) in raising multiple children.

So I throw my hands up in despair as I close, not knowing what to do. My despair isn't merely about the harsh economic future of a culture that is top heavy with old people, though that is certainly a daunting prospect (Japan recently became the first country wherein adult diapers outsold baby diapers, which I find to be extremely sad). My despair is that we have lost the language to call people to repentance. We have lost any notion that you can rebuke in kindness. More than that, we have lost almost any notion that we exist in community with one another, and are inextricably bound to one another. The most proffered defense for previously illicit activities is "I'm not hurting anyone else, so why do you care?" But we are not islands, and hell is Sartre's existentialism, not other people. Individual choices invariably effect the group, and my generation's great individual reticence to be parents is going to yield unimaginable long-term consequences for our culture.