Sept. 6: It's a hard time for bringing up the kids

By David Morrill

Seventeen years ago, when my wife and I adopted our first child, our friends rewarded us with a windfall of baby care books. We were not only grateful for our bountiful harvest, but confident in the wisdom we believed it contained. Surely, we reasoned, one of those six or seven volumes would hold the answer to every question and the solution to every crisis.

Soon, however, we faced a dilemma. When confronted with a stubborn rash or a late-night cough, we found ourselves cross-checking our books in search of a consensus diagnosis, only to be overwhelmed with information, much of it conflicting. Equally galling were the authors who pushed moral agendas that had nothing to do with the particulars of bringing up baby. Often, we discovered, a call home to mom was the quickest route to an answer.

It was my mother, in fact, who mailed me a magazine interview with the late baby expert Benjamin Spock that settled the matter. It was better, Dr. Spock said, to choose one baby book, even if it was a bad one, and throw out the rest, than to try to make sense of a library of them. Simplifying things, he said, was better for the parents' sanity, and hence, the baby's well-being.

He offered another suggestion. Be skeptical of the rising tide of information and advice on childrearing being churned out by social scientists. Much of it is simply a rehash of what has been known for generations, he said. Be particularly suspicious of claims for revolutionary new approaches to childrearing and those declaring that standard practices are all wrong. Zealots and puritans are crowding into the field, he warned.

What was a rising tide of childrearing information in the 1980s has turned into a tsunami today, and because so many of us are products of the information age, we find the growing bank of data hard to ignore. We watch transfixed as the latest research findings are paraded through the media klieg lights.

And surely the zealots carry the day. Tune in to the weekly family programs on the local public radio station and listen to the shrill chatter. Check out Internet sites under "parenting" and read the childrearing gospel du jour. The true believers are not content to simply share their views on raising their own kids. They insist on telling the rest of us how to raise ours - what they should be fed, where they should sleep, how their sense of self-importance should be puffed up, how they should be socialized.

Our obsession with raising our children seems peculiar to our time. The handful of studies that examine the historic literature on the subject, from ancient Babylonia and Egypt up through the early 20th century, find amazingly little. In every age there have been short works on childhood behavior, etiquette and health, but never has the subject dominated the cultural consciousness like it does today.So long as cultural norms were not violated, it appeared, how you raised your kids was your own business.

A sad byproduct of our obsession is that it has stripped childhood of much of its joy. Many of today's children are put on schedules fit for CEOs, shuttled them from one sports, arts or music program to the next, programs, of course, that are administered by adults. Downtime is to be avoided at all costs.

Gone, for the most part, are the impromptu sandlot football and softball games among neighborhood kids, paling around and simply goofing off. Gone too are the opportunities for children to interact with peers and to find their own way in the world.

Tonight, when my seventeen-year-old asked for pizza money and the car keys, I was reminded once again of the fact that, against all odds, he has turned out pretty well. Perhaps it has always been the lot of children to grow up in spite of their parents.

David Morrill is a Florida journalist and Northern California native.