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.