Children today have fewer chores around the house and greater autonomy than previous generations, but they’re kept on a shorter leash outside the home. That’s the takeaway from a novel study that analyzed 300 advice columns and editorials from randomly chosen issues of Parents magazine from 1929 to 2006. Dr. Markella Rutherford of Wellesley College was studying changes in the portrayals of parental authority and children’s autonomy over time, Science Daily reports:
The articles in Parents showed that children were increasingly autonomous when it came to their self-expression, particularly in relation to daily activity chores, personal appearance and defiance of parents. In contrast to this increased autonomy that child-centered parenting has given children, the 20th century has seen, in other ways, children’s autonomy curtailed, through increasingly restricted freedom of movement and substantially delayed acceptance of responsibilities. Children now have fewer opportunities to conduct themselves in public spaces free from adult supervision than they did in the early and mid-twentieth century.
“Today’s parents face demands that require near-constant surveillance of their children,” says Rutherford. “Allowing children more autonomy to express themselves and their disagreements at home may well be a response to the loss of more substantial forms of children’s autonomy to move through and participate in their communities on their own.”
Meanwhile an Ohio State study tracked parenting patterns over two generations and found ”great increases” in the amount of reading and affection shown to children today–and reductions in the amount of spanking.
In general, the amount of affection parents show their children increased significantly over the generations. Sixty percent of fathers and 73 percent of mothers in the second generation reported showing their children physical affection and praising them within the last week. But only about 40 percent of their parents showed open affection on a weekly basis. Reading to children also showed a generational shift. Nearly three times more mothers in the second generation reported reading to their children daily compared to their own parents.
Did this study depend on self-reporting by the parents? Today’s parents may over-report reading to their kids. Yesterday’s parents may have under-reported the affection they expressed believing that they needed to be stern authority figures. I’m skeptical.
I believe that Arlington County, VA (DC suburbs) has a law that children 8 and under are not allowed to play in a fenced yard without supervision. Ridiculous.
Michael Chabon wrote an interesting piece in the New York Review of Books lamenting the loss of children’s autonomy. Chabon writes, “The Wilderness of Childhood is gone; the days of adventure are past. The land ruled by children, to which a kid might exile himself for at least some portion of every day from the neighboring kingdom of adulthood, has in large part been taken over, co-opted, colonized, and finally absorbed by the neighbors.”
When I was in 2nd grade, I used to walk 8 blocks to school–alone. So did all the other second-graders. A friend from Arlington, VA–which is quite similar to the area where I grew up–informed me that a mother who allowed her fifth-grader to walk four blocks to school faced heavy criticism from other parents. This, despite the fact that child abduction rates have not risen in the past thirty years.
I’m not sure what I’ll do with my own daughter, but I’ll probably be overprotective if current trends persist.