Abstract
The End of Children? assembles the work of fourteen scholars, primarily sociologists, with a social worker, two anthropologists, and a historian folded into what is described as a multidisciplinary collaboration. More than most multiauthor collections devoted to a theme the effort succeeds, not as a multidisciplinary project—it is multiperspectival at best—but because it is so often thought provoking. Each author examines some changing trend in the generation and upbringing of children, so it is necessarily historical and will be of interest to historians of family life and childhood precisely because the issues raised are orthogonal to the questions historians usually pose. Many multiauthor volumes falter because their participants talk past, rather than to, one another. Each of the contributors to The End of Children? ponders the meaning of the question asked in the volume’s title and so is able to stretch his or her part of the canvas to the edge of the frame by variously interpreting the term, “end.”
Ever since the publication of Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood (1982), historians concerned with the “end” of children and childhood have focused on the incursion of experiences intended for adults into childhood’s protective sphere. The result, they contend, has been the degradation of children’s developmental social space. For historians, “end” has meant almost singularly, “disappearance,” “demise,” or “decline.” This book, however, interprets “end” in manifold ways: literally, as in the cessation of reproduction; and conceptually as the point at which childhood stops and adulthood begins; as the economic raison d’être for child welfare professionals whose livelihoods depend on the pathologization of specific populations of children; as the deprivation of “normal” childhood for disabled people; as the product of parental absenteeism, which robs children of the childhood they might have had; and finally, end as “purpose.” That is, reproduction as an assertion of one’s claim on adult status, or more existentially, the desire to leave behind someone who will remember us after we perish—to create a legacy. Indeed, there are almost as many interpretations of “end” in this volume as there are contributors.
The editors lay down a theme in their introduction intended to create a meeting place for all of these essays. For this they borrow from historian John Gillis, who wrote several years ago in A World of Their Own Making (1997) about the difference between the “mythical families” we create and the “real families” we inhabit and experience. They apply this idea to the child—the one that parents project when they contemplate starting a family and the children they actually produce, nurture, and shepherd into adulthood. The reality, they say, often alters parents’ ideas about what they seek in, and for, their children. Although resonant, this theme isn’t taken up in earnest by every essay, yet it appears often enough to evoke another similar theme familiar to most historians of childhood, that is, the distinction between childhood, the idea, and the actual experiences of children in the past.
Which interpretation of “end” the historian reader will find most useful depends on his or her own brand of family or childhood history. Historians interested in the effect of changing demography on family dynamics, gender roles, human capital, work, socioeconomic status, and household composition, for instance, will appreciate the book’s first section on recent fertility trends in Europe and North America. What do parents imagine having a child will be like and how does this inform identity, or the timing of marriage and family formation? Anthropologist Rebecca Upton and sociologist Nathanael Lauster each ask variations of this anticipatory question in their essays. Their willingness to fathom the meaning of procreation distinguishes the approach of these scholars from most family historians, who assume, rather than explicate this important aspect of reproduction and family life.
And in the first half of the book, the authors also examine more familiar issues such as how long-term declines in the birth rate affect immigration and labor and what impact this has on family roles, economy, age structure, and social welfare. Shading into the realm of cultural history, they ask, for example, how “social scripts” for family formation influence concepts of self when young women and men delay their arrival at the threshold of parenthood, or if they wait too long and experience infertility? Do fertility behaviors “trickle down” as middle- and lower-income groups appear to emulate the affluent? How are transitions to adulthood influenced by parents’ divorce?
Even historians who study parent–child relations or the changing value of children rarely stop to consider why children matter to potential parents in some kind of eternal sense. This elision foregrounds, for me, the book’s middle chapter by Nicholas W. Townsend, an anthropologist who considers the role of parenting as an expression of the individual’s desire for immortality. While readers may balk at Townsend’s flat assertions that “childhood and parenthood are not about particular ages or stages of life but, instead, about the attribution of people to social positions” or that the motive for producing and caring for children is to “achieve ancestorhood,” it is clarifying to restate assumptions in this way (p. 102). Over the last few decades, historians have produced a number of thoughtful studies interpreting changes in the life course, the significance of age, and how changes in child rearing reflect attitudes about the meaning of children and the role of mothers and fathers as caretakers. But rarely do we examine whether the desire for immortality provides the impetus for family formation and child nurture. Townsend offers an ethnographic case study of a woman in South Africa to extrapolate a general principle about people’s motives for having children. Certainly, one could cite many other such instances cross-culturally and historically. Many of the world’s religions are organized around ancestor worship, but is Townsend’s claim the cultural equivalent of the belief that every instance of human behavior expresses an unconscious evolutionary drive to reproduce oneself or the species? Still the question, “is family formation fundamentally about immortality?” importantly makes us pause and reexamine the premises of our work.
Historians will wonder at the paucity of historical work cited in this volume. Apart from Gillis, whose work provides the capstone of its edifice, only a handful of historians are referenced in the text or notes. This would seem to indict our efforts as irrelevant to the work of other social scientists. Historians, in my experience, consistently forage in affined fields for questions, methods, and frameworks to approach their subjects. But if the apparent lack of awareness by these social scientists of historical work in their own fields of inquiry is at all representative, it seems either sociologists and anthropologists are more narrowly occupied with the discourse of their own disciplines than we tend to be, or we should be doing a better job broadcasting our findings and engaging other scholars in the questions we ask.