Three—
Minor Difficulties:
Changing Children in the Late Twentieth Century

Gary Alan Fine and Jay Mechling

Our children, as Peter Berger once put it, serve as "our hostages to history," by which he meant that the human imperative for continuity—the projecting into the future for one's own children, whatever good things one has in one's own life—has an essentially conservative influence on the institutional order. To love one's children is to have "a stake in the continuity of the social order," and to love one's parents is to want to preserve at least something of their world.^[1] Children are not merely reproductions of our individual selves; they bear our communities' values and meanings. They are the guardians of the twenty-first century.

The way that we view the future is linked to our images of our off-spring and to our hopes and fears for them. Likewise, these images influence how our children respond to us, and our response influences their behaviors. If we look at the history of childhood, as described in Philippe Ariès's Centuries of Childhood , we see that images of children have varied considerably over time.^[2] Similarly, children's images of themselves are in dynamic tension because their cultures are based in the adult cultures that surround them and are shaped through material circumstances.

Unlike some apocalyptic writers, we avoid the claim that change in the role of children in the late twentieth century has been particularly radical. The gloomy view seems more moral or ideological than empirical. We may be too close to the changes to assess their dimensions and effects with confidence, or to understand latent effects that are tethered to manifest ones. Still, we do accept that as this century ends, we have witnessed substantial changes in the lives of children. While we have not reached the "end of childhood" in a society that hates children, children's lives and cultures are responsive to shifts in the ways adults lead their lives. Since the lives of adults have changed, the conditions of children have clearly been transformed as well.

Children's dependency poses special problems for adult historians and social scientists wishing to understand childhood.^[3] Identifying changes in the lives of children since World War II entails our sorting out the changing images of the child from the changing practices of child rearing, and this is not an easy distinction. Our goal is to understand the interplay between the environment that children inhabit, the forms of control used by adults, and the responses of children to this environment and control.

First, we explore the effects of the choices and control of adults on children—how the physical and material bases of society channel children's responses and how adult beliefs and actions affect children and adult behaviors toward children. The world as it is given to children is formulated by adults; the social problems that children face are determined by the adult social order. Adults set the material bases of childhood (both the physical and the economic aspects) and they also largely dominate the arrangements of social structure. We explore the way adults channel children into such social institutions as schools, social service agencies, religious establishments, and, of course, the family. The world children inhabit depends on how adults understand their children, how adults think they should interact with their children, and how they understand the ways other adults interact with children.

We also explore the ways children manage to sustain their own culture within the hegemonic structure imposed by adults. Adult practices are not so determining that children are not able to create their own meanings. Children find realms in which they can "be themselves" and share a social structure and folk structure. Whether children's cultures are "oppositional cultures" that eventually fall to the socializing power of the adult cultures is a question worth asking.^[4] Our examination of adults' practices, of children's responses, and the complex negotiations between the two groups, moves toward identifying paradoxes in the lives of American children in the last half century. We are not the first to observe the "biformities," "dualisms," or contradictions within patterns of American culture.^[5] We shall leave it to historians and other readers to decide whether the paradoxes in children's lives in late twentieth-century America are simply local versions of enduring dualisms or indicate something new.

The Paradox of Adult Choices

The contemporary realities of American life seem remarkably different from the realities that were current a half century ago. Some of the trappings of today, such as computers and televisions, were barely ideas fifty years ago. Other currently important trends existed prior to World War II, but did not have the impact that they now have, such as divorce,

drug use, the existence of an urban underclass, federal welfare programs, suburbs, automobiles, sexually transmitted diseases, and the rise of consumer culture. Children are born into a world not of their own making. The world they confront is one created and sustained by adults in institutions ranging from families and neighborhoods to schools, youth organizations, churches, and more. This world was created over generations and a physical and social structure was established.

The physical and material reality of American society has been altered in the past forty-five years in both subtle and dramatic ways. The suburbanization of America has been particularly dramatic (from 23 percent of the population in 1950 to 45 percent in 1980).^[6] Less dramatic, but still significant is the decline of the farm population (from 23 percent to 2 percent during the period 1940–87).^[7] On the one hand, fewer children now reside outside of hailing distance of other children. On the other hand, in most areas of our cities, dense street culture has diminished. The faded images of New York City's Lower East Side at the turn of the century—the stoop culture—have largely vanished, except for enclaves in the poorest areas of large, urban, Eastern conglomerations, such as New York or Washington, D.C.^[8] We have witnessed a "suburbanization of the city," not necessarily in terms of housing types, but in the disappearance of formerly "public" activities into protected spheres indoors.

These effects are filled with paradox. We argue that children have been both incorporated into adult society and set apart from it, to be given their own special, marginalized treatment. Children have been treated, sometimes simultaneously, as adults and as nonadults. We find this paradox in both adult attitudes toward children and in adult behavior.

On the "incorporated" side of the paradox are those critics of culture who argue some version of the "disappearance of childhood" thesis, namely, that television and other adult institutions have erased the boundary between childhood and adulthood, exposing children to every ugly secret of adulthood.^[9] They say that childhood is no more, that children have been too integrated into knowledge of the stresses of adult society from which they should be protected for a while longer.

At the same time, children are increasingly isolated from contact with adults and adult worlds. Outside of formal, adult-sanctioned institutions, such as school or organized play, children are often left alone by adults. Brian Sutton-Smith, for example, demonstrates how toys contribute to what he sees as a main function of modern child rearing—"to turn the child into a person capable of functioning in isolation by itself."^[10] The modern middle-class parent first buys the child a toy as a symbol of affection and bonding, then sends the child off to his or her own room to play alone with it. Careful analysis of toys and the ways in which children

play with them confirms for Sutton-Smith that toys tend to decrease the sociability of play, modeling for children "the solitariness on which modern civilization relies."^[11] Adult use of the television as a babysitter further models solitary activity, and the home video game means that the child no longer needs to go to a video game arcade (the 1970s equivalent of the pool hall) to bring at least some sociability into video play.

This is not to say that children only play alone. Children do play in peer groups, but the circumstances of group play have changed considerably. The children's peer groups of an earlier time were more public , operating in public spaces they shared with adults who had the right and moral authority to intervene in the activities of children.^[12] The neighborhood was an extended family and, on some level, all adults had the right to intervene in the activities of all children. In a perverse way the drug dealer who hires children to hawk his wares and to warn him of trouble is harkening back to our "romantic" notions of the relationships between adults and children, in which the children were truly a part of the community. The relationship between the child and the adult criminal gang is by no means a "new" problem, even though these connections speak more to economic transactions than to moral education.^[13]

Although children are being exposed to the themes of adult life, through television and through contact with adult deviance, they are receiving little guidance as to how they should respond. This leads to the greater sophistication of children—a sophistication that can both be a positive and a negative consequence of their access to adult information and their independence. The rise of computer literacy among some groups of children and their skills in the arts and sciences is deeply satisfying to their adult mentors. However, while there are these successes, there are children who are driven to obtain material objects at any cost, who become bored and alienated, and who make choices that adult society deems improper (pregnancy, alcohol, drug use, or gang activity). In the connection between informational access and lack of supervision the suburb and the inner city have more in common with each other than either has with our images of the small town.

Physical and Material Considerations

As we indicated earlier, adult practices have tended to separate the public spaces of children from those of adults, pushing the children to the margins. Urban folklore portrays an adult world filled with danger for children and teaches the lesson that children must behave in that sphere with adult-defined decorum. The children's public spaces (parks, corners, and some businesses) are continually subject to appropriation by adults.

The single area that is "supposed" to be a child's domain is the school,

but adults are rarely content to let children be children within school boundaries. For instance, well-meaning supervisors rigidly prevent children from participating in school-yard fights.^[14] What had once been a central feature of childhood jurisprudence, important for maintaining the status system of childhood, has been marginalized and transformed into deviance.^[15] Recess has been eliminated in many school districts because educators could not easily define its benefits, and injuries were seen as outweighing the pleasure given to children. Case law holding cities and schools liable for injury, coupled with increasing insurance costs, have led to the closing of school yards and playgrounds outside of school hours, when they cannot be supervised.^[16] So those elements that gave children control of their social world have been limited or eliminated entirely. Our concern for the welfare of our children has resulted in denying them responsibility for making mistakes, and for learning from those mistakes.

Another locale in which children (especially adolescents) bump into adults—often quite literally—is the shopping mall. Mall managers recognize that junior-high- and high-school-aged kids like to "hang out" at the mall, sometimes creating a "nuisance." Case law pertaining to malls tends to define malls as public spaces, so it is not easy to evict teenagers. Besides, teens do bring money to the malls and are tomorrow's affluent shoppers. Children have the privilege of consumption within the limits of their budgets, and consequently share these adult spaces so long as they behave according to the rules established by adults, rules often enforced differentially upon adults and minors. (Adolescents are often sanctioned for actions that are tolerated when performed by adults.)^[17] For adolescents the mall is a place to "hang out," an expressive locale that is supposed to be devoted to adult, instrumental activities (though adult shopping can be just as expressive as the adolescent behavior). Some mall managers have decided on the solution of creating special places in the malls, such as video game arcades, and put those places down the "side streets" of the mall, away from the main thoroughfares. Thus, even "malling" by America's kids is structured to preserve both the social control that adults have over children and to minimize informal social contacts between the groups.

On the other hand, the suburbanization of American neighborhoods, the continuing geographical mobility of nuclear families, and the pervasive view of the private home as a "haven" from the public world combine to give children more control over their unsupervised free play. Parks with their large, unpatrolled expanses, backyards, homes lacking adult presence, and, especially, bedrooms provide arenas for relatively autonomous action. Children often acquire creative control over their

own rooms. It is not uncommon for adults to have to ask permission to enter these spaces; the child's room serves as a haven from the family.

Changes in public technology affect the relationships between adults and children. The availability of transportation, coupled with American affluence since World War II, has increased children's mobility, thereby widening the geography of their experiences. It sometimes has been said that the geographical range of a preadolescent's bicycle represents the limits of his or her community.^[18] Bicycles are, of course, a primitive technology, primarily suitable for younger children. Adolescents adore automobiles. The last few decades have witnessed unprecedented numbers of adolescents who can drive and who have access to automobiles. The proportion of fifteen- to nineteen-year-old licensed drivers increased from 46.9 percent in 1963 to 54.4 percent in 1987.^[19] With the growth and sophistication of the used car market in the decades since World War II, it has become easier for adolescents to acquire moderately priced automobiles, affordable by adolescents or their parents. The automobile combines the opportunity for an expansion of mobility with a private domain, much like the adolescent's bedroom. The reality that the same sort of activities occur in both spaces (drinking, smoking, joking, and sexual expression) indicates how connected the two locations are. Further, adolescents' automobiles can invade and interfere with adults' spaces and, as a consequence, need to be controlled. Adults have attempted—with mixed success—to prevent cruising, partly by establishing curfews that eliminate late-night driving and by bearing down on adolescent drinking and driving. All of these actions, while grounded in a concern for the adolescent, are equally based in the belief that driving is a privilege that can be suspended at the whim of adult society.

Social Environment

During the past several decades American social relations have changed enormously with significant effects on children. It was only in 1954 that the Supreme Court determined that it was unconstitutional for black and white children to attend segregated schools, and it took several decades for this ruling to be implemented even partially. Along with desegregation, the United States significantly liberalized its immigration policy in 1965 with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Today the immigrants from Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, Mexico, Africa, and Latin America bring to school classrooms and to neighborhoods a new multicultural texture. Add to this the mainstreaming of mentally and physically handicapped (differently abled) children, and one finds the range of peers for children in the 1990s dramatically wider than for children in the 1950s. These changing social conditions will di-

versify children's cultures, since those cultures depend on a transformation of known cultural elements.^[20] To the extent that the store of known information increases, the diversity of children's culture will increase, although this depends on the assumption that children from diverse backgrounds will mix informally, as well as in adult-controlled settings.

Consequently one must be careful not to expect a grand melding of the cultures of childhood. To date it has been easier for Asian-American children to be integrated into the culture of "majority" children than for blacks or Hispanics to be so integrated. We see plenty of evidence of the influence of the forms of African-American expressive cultures upon the cultures of white Americans, but white children can appropriate these cultural elements (slang, dress, music, dance, gesture, and so on) without accepting black children as equals and without acknowledging the worth of the values that led to the creation of these expressive elements.

The revolution in gender roles during the past quarter century, although slow, has had some impact on children's cultures. The women's movement and related demographic changes affect the circumstances of children. Girls are no longer fitted with occupational and avocational "girdles," at least in the overt fashion that was so evident a few years ago. Women's employment outside the home has altered children's lives. With many women working at full-time jobs, children are either placed in after-school cultures that permit them to interact with peers, often with only occasional oversight by adults, or, if they are older, they are permitted to live their lives separate from the oversight of their adult supervisors. Latchkey children are not a new phenomenon, but they have a special importance in today's communities, in which few neighbors, if any, will serve as surrogate parents or feel responsibility for doing so.

The increased number of women working outside the home also affect younger children. Perhaps the most significant change in child rearing has been the dramatic growth in the number of full-time day care providers. Day care providers include corporate entities ("McKids," as they are sometimes called) as well as individuals who care for children in private homes. Much debate has ensued over whether day care has deleterious effects on the health of children who are put into it and whether these children are more aggressive.^[21] Whatever the case, these venues permit children to form their own group cultures at an earlier age than had been customary before collective child-rearing systems became common. American child-rearing practices can be conceptualized as a blend of the nuclear family structure (on evenings and weekends) and a kibbutz nursery (during weekdays). The long-term effects of this type of system are uncertain, and, because of the many cross-cutting factors that prevent causal certainty, may never be known definitively. Atti-

tudes toward these changes depend to a great degree on our ideological beliefs about these changes in family life.

Family structure also influences the culture of childhood. As the two previous chapters have documented, the number of family forms in the United States has multiplied, perhaps exponentially. In many schools, fewer than half the members of a high school class live with both biological parents. Many children pass through several family transformations during their maturation. While neither single parents, step-parents, nor blended families constitutes "the norm," all are normal. Contacts among children from a variety of family types and life experiences increase the range of family group cultures that children can draw upon in creating their own group cultures. Some family types may broaden the networking of children, particularly when the mother and father reside apart; a modern child may belong to two radically different social networks. This mobility also increases the knitting together of the youth subculture, tightening the network of small groups.^[22]

The Professionalization of Parenting

An important feature of American culture in the years since World War II has been the greater willingness of citizens to rely on experts to tell them how to think, feel, and act.^[23] Child rearing is an activity adults feel increasingly unprepared for and anxious about performing, so it is little wonder that expert advice so quickly came to dominate this aspect of life. Dr. Benjamin Spock's The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care , first published in 1945, is only the most famous of a stream of postwar volumes providing advice to parents—and not merely the nuts and bolts of physical child care but also guidance in forming the emotional life of the child.

As Stearns and Stearns demonstrate, expert advice to parents, to married couples, to school teachers, and to office managers has increasingly stressed the domestication of anger and of other unpleasant emotions.^[24] Parents have attempted to control their physical aggression and anger toward their children, and children are expected to do likewise. Temper tantrums are seen as social problems that must be dealt with by emphasizing rational discussion and the value of controlling one's emotions. Experts stress the importance of emotional stability and tranquility for healthy family life. This has a dual effect. Anger has been given a "magical" power, power that separates it from the mundane realm of everyday life. Now, a patina of guilt overlays the expression of anger, previously considered a natural emotion.

Parents and other adults are inevitably powerful influencers of children's lives. Adults read children stories, sing them songs, give them

books to read, tell them proverbs, teach them games, buy them toys, take them to movies, and control the televised narratives, including commercials, that consume so much time. (The average American preschool child watches twenty-five hours of television every week.) It seems obvious that as parents face new social realities, so will their children. What we have witnessed in the past half century, sped up, no doubt, in the past twenty-five years, is a change in the relationship between American parents and their children so that children are both more and less autonomous, more and less dependent, than ever before.

The Expansion of Children's Rights

To take one important example of the changing relationship between parents and children, consider the issue of "children's rights" as a variant of the incorporation/separation paradox.^[25] The notion of "rights" emerged relatively recently in Western history, and debates over competing rights occur in specific times and places in response to social strains.^[26] Children's rights movements in America go back at least to nineteenth-century worries about child labor, but the establishment of the modern welfare state in this century has led to children's rights battles, revealing the paradoxical status of minors.^[27] During the past few decades adults have both given additional rights to children and taken significant privileges from them. The individual child is given increased rights of access to institutions and state-guaranteed protection from harm, while, simultaneously, the behaviors that children and adolescents are permitted to enact have been limited.

The proper role of children in our society, particularly in relationship to adult society, is a matter of vehement debate. Some advocates for children claim that we are a society that does not much care for our children.^[28] Others claim that we need to give children additional freedoms, while still others say that we should restrict those freedoms. Some call for additional protections, and others say that these protections have costs. When we speak of the expansion of children's rights, we tend to speak about "rights" that are institutionally protected. Each child is guaranteed the right to be protected and to have equal access to resources. These guarantees typically come from the state in one of its various manifestations—schools, courts, social welfare agencies, and the like: these are sponsored rights. Children are less likely than they once were to be harmed or discriminated against because of their special conditions or their helplessness vis-à-vis adults. The expansion of children's rights, therefore, comes by virtue of defining them as relatively powerless. Consider two examples.

Most school districts prevent teachers from physically disciplining or

restraining children except under unusual circumstances. This policy, while protecting the child from abuse and pain, reduces the social power of teachers, and consequently reduces the range of informal options that teachers have to deal with unruly children. Through current arrangements, discipline in the classroom is only possible if the children accept it. Disruptive children and their parents are not always willing to be party to the discipline. As a consequence, other, more formal and bureaucratic systems of disciplining children need to be established, and these have the effect of turning the school into a kind of court.^[29] The child who resists informal understandings may become enmeshed with psychologists, counselors, and psychiatrists, ostensibly to protect the rights of the child, but equally to protect the system from claims that those rights have been violated.

A second contest between the rights of individual children and the rights of the collectivity or institution arises in the issue of "mainstreaming" difficult children in the schools. For example, in the small, rural community of Cannon Falls, Minnesota, a dispute has erupted over the right of a first-grade girl to attend a regular classroom.^[30] The girl had a behavior disorder involving a lack of impulse control and low social intuition. She regularly assaulted the other children in her classroom, kicking, punching, and biting them, dozens of times each week. What is to be done for this girl and her classmates? The school district, lacking a special education class, determined that she had a right to remain in the class and that she would benefit from being mainstreamed, despite advice of doctors that she be institutionalized. The school considered the child handicapped and, consequently, entitled to education in a regular classroom under the Education of All Handicapped Children Act of 1975. The child and her parents wanted her to remain in the regular classroom.

Yet, what about the other children? Our education system once routinely segregated handicapped, difficult, and disruptive children, and poor students were given little incentive to continue schooling. Today a "normal" education is seen as a right, but this right is not without social costs. The children in this girl's class, one is led to believe, cannot fully devote themselves to learning because of her actions. Many are frightened, and perhaps some will even suffer psychological trauma as a consequence of her behavior. They feel that they are being sacrificed on the altar of mainstreaming, a choice adults make that affects the children. As this case demonstrates, the balancing point between the individual rights of the child and the collective good have shifted over the past two decades to provide more access for the individual child at the expense of other children. A similar issue concerns the rights of children with AIDS to attend public schools. While AIDS is not per se a children's issue, the

presence of infected children in school raises the question of whether the individual child has rights that transcend the desires of other classmates and their parents? Even if some children are made anxious and parents band together to object, the consensus now seems to be that a child with AIDS should be treated similarly to children who are not infected.

Restriction of Privileges

As suggested above, the expansion of rights in some areas has been met by a restriction of privileges in others. Children's rights to equal access to institutions and protection have been expanded at the same time that their behavioral freedoms have been curtailed. Adolescents seem the most notable targets of efforts to curtail freedoms. During the late 1960s and early 1970s a greater variety of behavioral options were available for teens, options not always legally permitted, but winked at by adults. During the past decade the government has felt increasingly secure in limiting choices for minors. This is evident in adults' attempts to control adolescents' sexual behavior and access to alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs. Consider changes in the drinking laws. Whereas between 1970 and 1975 twenty-nine states lowered the age at which young people could legally purchase alcoholic beverages, between 1975 and 1984 twenty-seven states raised their drinking ages. By 1986 the federal government demanded that the minimum legal drinking age be raised to twenty-one, and threatened states that did not comply with the loss of federal highway funds.^[31] High schools were eliminating smoking rooms and declaring their campuses "smoke-free zones." Simultaneously, a drug panic gripped the nation, particularly with regard to teenage usage. With the increase of teenage pregnancy (or "promiscuity") and sexually transmitted diseases, baby-boomer adults demanded that adolescents refrain from behaviors that they had enjoyed as teens.

What sustains these paradoxes about the rights and privileges accorded to children is late-twentieth-century ideas about the innocent child . Children and even adolescents are increasingly seen as being in need of protection from themselves and from others. If we consider the dramatic social problems of the 1980s, we find that a large number deal with threats to children. Those social problems that do not specifically center on children—such as the homeless, AIDS, and cocaine addiction—are often framed in terms of their effects upon children: homeless families, pediatric AIDS, and cocaine babies. This trend shows no sign of abating; indeed, each morning newspaper brings new examples. As Joel Best notes, the image of the "threatened innocent" became common in the 1980s.^[32]

One can see these ideas played out early in the decade in parents' efforts to transform Halloween from a child's folk festival of liminal disorder and inversion to an orderly, "safe" event, closely supervised by adults. The Tylenol product tampering incident of October 1982 sparked the adult move to protect the innocent child from the ravages of Halloween mass murderers, even though the two events seemed on the surface to have little in common. For decades, American adults and children alike had dealt casually with cautionary legends about razor blades in apples, poisoned candy, and heated pennies. But adults responded to the Tylenol tampering by virtually eliminating Halloween altogether that year. As Best and Horiuchi observe, Halloween crystalizes the fears that parents have for their children.^[33] The world, even the suburban neighborhood, is a dangerous place for children, a place where even most neighbors are more or less strangers. Halloween epitomizes this concern because it is the only night when children seek routine contact with adult strangers to demand "treats." Despite the absence of children being poisoned by strangers on Halloween, fear runs deep. Hospitals now routinely x-ray children's treats, but in the 1980s adults preferred to organize community Halloween parties and tried to eliminate trick-or-treating altogether.^[34] The taming of Halloween that Gregory Stone noted near mid-century has continued, as it has been taken away from the control of children.^[35]

The recent social problem of "missing children" dramatically reflects adult fears for innocent children. The number of children abducted by strangers remains very small, certainly under a hundred each year.^[36] Most children who "vanish" are either runaways or are snatched by non-custodial parents. While these may be important problems, our interest is in the cultural implications of the unrealistic, widespread adult panic over missing children. A child's vanishing galvanizes a neighborhood and community. In Minnesota, the apparent adbuction of an eleven-year-old from rural Stearns county set off numerous community activities—billboards, rewards, rallies, arm-bands, vigils, and the like. The missing boy, Jacob Wetterling, brought Minnesota together as a community of care and fear.

The "epidemic" of physical and sexual abuse of children in the 1980s taps the same adult anxieties as do Halloween and missing children. There can be no doubt that children are abused, physically and sexually; the nature of abuse and the circumstances of the victims make child abuse a difficult phenomenon to study for large cultural trends. Is child abuse increasing, or have the conditions for uncovering abuse changed? Again, the cultural response to abuse is the "text" that concerns us here. Stories about alleged "sex rings," pornographic filming in day care centers, and satanic rituals circulate far out of proportion to the actual instances. The

horror and anger experienced by adult audiences hearing these stories show us the symbolic potency and centrality of our adult view of children as innocent victims.

In 1984, for example, Minnesota was shocked by a county prosecutor's claim of a child sex ring operating in a small exurban community of Minneapolis. The prosecutor accused two dozen adults of sexually abusing twenty children. Eventually she dropped all of the charges (one man pleaded guilty), claiming that further prosecutions might jeopardize a case involving child murder and pornography. State investigators found that the sexual abuse case was mismanaged from the start, and, aside from the single conviction, most of the other people who were charged were almost certainly innocent. The McMartin preschool case, in which the directors of a preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, were tried on fifty-two counts of child molestation, ended in January 1990 with an acquittal. The jury was unable to arrive at a guilty verdict in the longest-running (two and a half years) and most expensive criminal trial in the nation's history. The public was outraged; some callers to a San Francisco Bay Area radio talk show were almost sputtering in their anger. The prosecutors, bowing to public pressure, decided to refile the charges on which the jury could not reach a verdict, but the second jury was also unable to reach agreement and the case was finally dropped.

Parents' concerns that their children could be harmed, or even driven to suicide, by fantasy role-playing games or rock music lyrics are part of this fear of the corruption of innocent children. In many cases, adults envision a vast, hidden conspiracy of satanists who are pied pipers to the young. While not all of those who campaign against fantasy games and rock music share these apocalyptic visions, the concern they do share stems from the image of children being corrupted by evil strangers. Such cultural products can destroy the child's, or even the adolescent's, free will. Several notorious cases, including a case involving Judas Priest, involve the deaths of teenagers who allegedly listened to heavy metal rock songs advocating suicide.^[37] However, these cases have not led to conviction of the musicians. Some adult groups, such as the Parents' Music Resource Center, cofounded by Tipper Gore and other political figures, advocate warning labels on rock music packaging or, in some cases, bans on certain offensive lyrics.

Certainly a few abductions by strangers occur each year; certainly children are abused by parents, relatives, trusted caretakers, and some strangers; and certainly some adolescents commit suicide. But the scale, intensity, and rhetoric of the public reaction to these cases suggest that even a few instances raise powerful alarms. Children remain a screen upon which adults tend, in many cases, to project their own fears about the larger social world.

The Age of the Innocent Child

Why have the 1980s seemed to adults such a dangerous time for children? What is there about our culture and the social location of the people worrying about these matters that these should be seen as serious social problems at the present time?

The most straightforward explanation is that we are more concerned about these issues because dangers to children actually have increased. Unfortunately, this approach does not get us very far. For one thing, we do not have reliable data for drawing comparisons across time. Changes in reporting practices and changing definitions of behaviors such as child abuse erode our confidence in the data.^[38] Even if we could trust the data, figures on injuries, deaths, and kidnappings suggest that the last decade has been no more dangerous for children than past decades; indeed, one could argue that children were much more at risk before World War II than since.

More persuasive, we believe, is an approach stressing the construction of social problems. Those issues that the public turns its attention to are symbolic constructions, and this symbolization mediates reality. We do not claim that parents are misguided or wrong in their choice of social concerns, but rather that circumstances selected and defined as major public concerns are chosen out of social and psychological pressures. As Kessen has argued, the very notion of the child is a social construction.^[39] What becomes a salient issue depends on factors that transcend statistics. Statistics can be massaged in numerous, rhetorically sophisticated ways.

Children are subject to a particular form of symbolic demography . Symbolic demography refers to cultural beliefs that result from the intersection of demographic trends with the ideologies of the populations experiencing the trends. Zelizer, for example, argues that over the past century, American children have increasingly been defined as "priceless."^[40] With the decline in family size, each child is less replaceable; yet, paradoxically, because of restrictions on child labor and increased affluence, the child has no intrinsic economic value. Since World War II, parents have decided to raise small families, to give extensive attention and resources to each child. Children, it is said, should be works of art. The modern child becomes priceless not only because of his or her replacement value but also because of the child's investment value, both in material and emotional terms. Our point is that many demographic trends are currently filtered through popular perception with cultural consequences.

Consider the symbolic demography of the American baby-boom cohort. During the 1970s and 1980s the baby-boom generation became parents, producing the "echo boom." If parents in the 1950s and 1960s

had anxieties peculiar to their social arrangements, so did the baby-boomers when they became parents.^[41] Postwar families established patterns of suburban life relatively isolated from the extended family and the world of work. Children growing up in suburban families in the 1960s experienced a dramatic, gender-based division of labor—the existence of relatively clear, if not always fully functional, roles. Cultural images of the family reflected and reinforced these demographic patterns. The baby-boom generation followed the television lives of the Anderson family ("Father Knows Best"), Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, and "Beaver" Cleaver.

The demographic realities of family life changed in the 1970s and 1980s, though the public images of the family were slow to catch up. Economic trends, divorce rates, the women's movement, and other forces undermined the gender-based organization of the family. Memories and images of growing up in the 1950s could no longer serve as useful guides for behaving in the 1970s and 1980s. Eventually, popular culture images began to catch up with the demographic realities; "The Brady Bunch" depicted a blended family, and several popular television series (for example, "One Day at a Time" and "Kate and Allie") featured single mothers struggling to make a living and to be good parents—and succeeding.

Still, television sit-coms provide little real guidance for a generation of parents experiencing a radical discontinuity between the family lives they knew as children and the family lives they were attempting to create for their own children. These discontinuities help to create the fears and anxieties motivating the adult choices we described earlier. People project personal and social uncertainties onto external dangers.^[42] Uncertainty and stress are transformed into external threats, making them psychologically tolerable. Fears of kidnappers and Halloween sadists reflect fears of being an inadequate parent.

Perhaps a more dramatic fear is the physical abuse of children. All parents get angry with their children and the vast majority use physical force or psychological pressure.^[43] At one time, these behaviors were considered normal for child rearing.^[44] Today this "normal" parenting is fraught with guilt in the face of the ideological domestication of anger. Worse, wrongly or publicly labeled actions can lead to an official investigation and the possibility of having one's own child—that most valuable of possessions—snatched away by agents of the state. Every yell, each slap, has a nascent terror for the parent, as well as for the child. The conflation of missing children with unhappy runaways simply adds to parental fears and mistrust. The public narratives of missing children embroider real events with the power of real anxieties.

Parents of the 1970s and 1980s suffer complex reactions to their own insecurities about raising children. They project their own fears and

concerns about their potential inadequacies. The threats must not come from inside the family, but from outside, because imagining the threats from inside the family are too painful and too psychologically possible. Guilt feelings about latchkey children and about putting children in day care centers—both necessities, given the demographic and economic realities of the 1970s and 1980s—find expression in the outrage over "missing" children. In a sense, it is the parents who are "missing," both in the sense that they are absent from their children's worlds and in the sense that they are "missing" their children's growing up.

Similarly, the meanings of paradoxical messages to 1980s children about drugs, alcohol, and sex may lie as much in the life experience of the baby-boomer parents as in the objective conditions of the lives of children in the 1980s and 1990s. There is strong evidence of alcohol abuse and drug abuse in children, rates of teenage pregnancies and abortions are startling, and sexually transmitted diseases increase the risks of sexual behavior; thus there is a real basis for the fears that parents have about their children. At the same time, however, one cannot deny that parents' experiences also condition their responses to what they perceive as the world in which their children are coming of age.

Baby-boomers grew up in the relatively repressed 1950s and early 1960s. The "cult of domesticity" of the 1950s demanded control of sexuality. Elaborate dating rituals delayed sexuality, marriage, and childbirth. Alcohol continued to be the intoxicant of choice for the middle class, and recreational drugs were out on the dark edges of society, supposedly used by people of color and other marginal folk, such as artists and musicians. In general, public discourse of the 1950s favored the clean, cool, and controlled, over the dirty, hot, and wild. As a result, many baby-boomers coming of age in the 1960s began experimenting with sexuality and drugs, often simultaneously. The availability of the birth control pill changed things in ways historians and social scientists are still sorting out. The women's movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the anti-war movement changed the conditions of childhood and adolescence in many ways. Marginal cultures of the 1950s moved into the center of attention in the 1960s, as African-American, Far Eastern, and other cultures produced the multivocal music, dress, dance, and philosophies of the 1960s. In contrast with the cool, controlled 1950s, the 1960s and early 1970s reveled in ecstasy, abandon, and sometimes reckless experimentation.

We can read the late 1970s and 1980s as a cultural commentary on the 1960s. Baby-boomers who smoked marijuana, ingested drugs, and experimented sexually in their youth now scorn cigaret smokers and white sugar.^[45] Middle age blunts the edges of experimentation. If this interpretation is correct, then parents of the 1980s come to "read" the alcohol

use, drug abuse, and sexual behavior of their children. The child's body again has become a potent symbol, and the treatment of that body—including abduction, physical abuse, sexual abuse, sexual behavior, drug use, alcohol use, suicide, and abortion—has become a powerful cultural text dominating public discourse. The centrality of these images, grounded in the experiences of the baby-boom generation, is a function of that generation's real and symbolic importance in the nation's demographic profile. In a crucial sense, the concerns of the baby-boom generation are the concerns of public discourse.^[46] Because so many in the baby-boom cohort are parents, that group's agenda is the agenda for the nation.

Of course, we must not overextend our argument for the centrality of symbolic demography for understanding the effects of adult decisions on children over the past four decades. Class and race differences in this period are dramatic, and attitudes about female children probably have changed a great deal more than attitudes about male children. In all instances, however, the social scientist must look at how the demographic conditions of a social group interact with the symbolic framing of their lives. Parents attempt to socialize their children according to their own subjective and symbolic understandings of the conditions of their lives.

The Responses of Children

We have thus far painted a one-sided portrait of the lives of American children. As we have aimed to show, adults have been particularly confused and ambivalent in their treatment of children over the past few decades, in part because adults have been facing a bewildering array of social transformations. Amidst certain kinds of neglect of children, and perhaps in response to this neglect, adults have moved to exert increasing control over children, from the domestication of anger to the domestication of play.

Yet, children have their own resources for resisting adult control. Children have always maintained their cultures—both authentic and derivative—separate from the cultures of adults. This chapter will conclude by looking at changes in the ways children create their social worlds.

Developmental and sociohistorical forces collide in the creation of the child's world. Our common sense tells us that biological and psychological development must be significant elements in children's cultures; yet we also know that theories about the biology and psychology of child development in any historical period are not immune from ideological pressures. It is therefore impossible to present a true and complete picture of children's culture. The social psychoanalytic approach of Harry Stack Sullivan, for example, led him to emphasize the separateness of

the preadolescent's chumship, wherein "one finds oneself more and more able to talk about things which one had learned, during the juvenile era, not to talk about."^[47] Others downplay the importance of the chum for social development. These disagreements should not stymie us, but we do need to recognize that our models of the child's development bear social meanings that affect the child we "find" in our inquiries and, further, we need to recognize that there are numerous children's cultures grounded in groupings that may be quite different from each other.

The first thing we can say about children's cultures is that despite differences in content, most research has indicated that children maintain folk traditions that are remarkably resilient. Although children's cultures draw on a wide range of adult cultural materials, they remain indigenous social forms. Folklorists of childhood recognize that many elements in the cultural life of children are nearly unchanging, lasting for centuries, transmitted from older to younger cohorts.^[48] This transmission is remarkable in that it is grounded in oral communication. Unlike adult culture (in many respects a written, material, or electronic culture), children rely on their memories. Children remember and share what is important to them. These materials are malleable and alter according to children's changing interests and needs. Here we find what one of us has called "Newell's Paradox," which means the paradox that children's folk cultures are distinctive in being both conservative and innovative.^[49] On the thematic level, children's cultures are remarkably stable, but on the level of a local group, traditions are continually being developed.

A distinctive feature of children's expressive cultures are their antithetical stances toward official (adult) cultures.^[50] The 1988 presidential election provided an instructive example of the antithetical nature of children's cultures. George Bush had raised as a campaign issue the fact that Michael Dukakis had vetoed, as governor of Massachusetts, a bill requiring teachers to lead students in the Pledge of Allegiance. Bush made it clear that children would pledge allegiance to the flag in the America he meant to lead. The scholar of children's expressive cultures, however, knows the foolishness of this debate. Art Linkletter built a 1950s television career around the fact that when young children learn such things by rote, they garble the text into nonsense words. When children finally are old enough to understand the words, they then invent and pass on parodies of the adults' sacred texts. Thus, the hallowed Pledge of Allegiance becomes, in the mouth of an eleven-year-old, "I pledge allegiance to the flag / Michael Jackson is a fag / Pepsi Cola burned him up / Now he's drinking 7 Up."

The antithetical stance of children's cultures sometimes requires secrecy or esoteric encoding in order for the lore to exist alongside adult

cultures. Many antithetical strategies (for example, parody and nonsense) are built into children's lore, but one of the most prominent is "dirty play."^[51] Children may be personally wonderful, kind, and good and still engage in play deemed highly undesirable by adult moral standards. Given the ideological suppression of disagreeable emotions, children may have good reasons to keep traditions that involve aggression, vandalism, obscenity, and racism hidden from sensitive adult guardians. Although children, if asked, would admit to behaving in ways adults find disagreeable because such "misbehaving" is fun, we can see such playful subversion as involving children's needs for control, status, social differentiation, and socialization to perceived adult norms.

Control

Dirty play constitutes a claim-making behavior. It proposes that children have the right to engage in activities and have opinions that contradict adult pressures. Children demand for themselves the right to make judgments about race, sex, and authority—precisely those areas of social structure that adults wish to preserve for themselves. Although the content of this play is troubling to adults, it is equally troubling that children should feel competent to make these judgments. Perhaps we can speak of children's culture that undermines the adult authority structures as "playful terrorism," a kind of mock guerrilla warfare. Such terrorism is politically impotent because of the disorganization of the "terrorist group," their lack of commitment and uniformity of beliefs, the tight control that adults have over them, and the rewards that can be offered to those who conform. Still, there are potential threats in the testing of boundaries and legitimacy, and so such actions, when they become known, may provoke harsh retribution.

Status

Children's cultures shape relationships within the group as well as outside. Behavior that is unacceptable to adults may gain a child status with peers. Children are engaged in a continual and consequential contest for status. Within any particular children's community resources are spread relatively equally, so status becomes crucial for distinguishing individuals. A premium exists for being willing to do things that other boys and girls want to do but are afraid to do. If consensus exists that a prank is desirable, the boy or girl who performs it or leads the group gains status for breaking the barrier of fear. The social rewards of "deviant" play suggest why it is so rare for children to engage in these behaviors while alone. It is not that children have destructive impulses, but rather that they want to show off in the presence of friends.

Social Differentiation

One important task for children is to define themselves in contrast to other groups that share characteristics with them. Whites are not blacks, boys are not girls; race and gender make a difference, and society reinforces these differences. Public norms of tolerance and civility find such judgments heretical and morally repugnant. Yet, from the standpoint of the child, these beliefs, like so much ethnocentrism, seem natural. Casting racial or gender insults on others provides a group with some measure of collective self-worth, admittedly at the expense of another group. While this need to put down another to gain self-esteem is unfortunate, the process is common at all ages. In childhood, when questions of identity-formation are crucial, it has a particular weight.

Socialization to Perceived Adult Norms

Hidden culture is not created de novo; rather, it is a transformation of what children see enacted by older peers and adults and in the various media to which they are exposed. It is transformed to meet their developmental imperatives and their level of understanding. The content of adult discourse and media to which children are exposed has impact, though often it is content that many adults sincerely wish they had not communicated because of its sexual, aggressive, and anti-social themes. To the extent that children are exposed to large segments of adult life, their cultures will represent transformations of these adult themes. Adults cannot shield preadolescents from what they do not wish them to learn. Aggression, sexism, and racism exist in adult activities and discourse, even when the adults are trying to discourage those behaviors. The exasperated parent's warning, "Listen to what I mean, not what I say," acknowledges the adult's impotence in the face of children's interpretation of messages.

Conclusion

Children reside in a world that they do not create. Dealing with this reality is complicated by the fact that it is constantly changing. It is not the world that children—and adults—faced in the past. The world changes, we change the world, and our responses to that new world change. One should be skeptical of the view that society today is especially at risk. Writers earn their keep by convincing gullible parents, educators, and care providers that some new, unique threat to children exists, but the truth is that the state of the world can always be pictured as a crisis by those with a mind and a motivation to do so.

Children and adults reside in a world that is delicately balanced; it al-

ways has been so. Yet, it is a moving equilibrium. The social drama, despite the obvious power difference between adults and children, is not entirely one-sided. As we approach the end of the century and embark on the inevitable self-reflection that such milestones always provoke, it is well to recognize that adults and children do not necessarily have the same cultural or social agendas. Children can, in some measure, resist the control of adults. While we, as adults, have some responsibility to help shape the worlds of children, we should also come to respect their natural response to our aid—a mix of gratitude and an understandable human desire to be left at peace.

If, as Berger suggests, children are hostages to history, socialization inevitably will be proactive. Through our children, we attempt to shape a future vision of society. We plant seeds that we hope others will harvest. Our collective concern about child rearing suggests that we care about more than ourselves: our children do matter, the communities in which they will reside count, and both can be shaped from a distance. How the twenty-first century will unfold is being determined in homes and schools in the twentieth.