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Ready Or Not: What Happens When We Treat Children As Small Adults
“Children grow up too fast today!” This complaint, often tinged with a sense of bewilderment and helplessness, is heard with increasing frequency among parents today. Indeed, even the preteen “tweens” are sophisticated beyond their years, experiencing, sexual and emotional aspects of life heretofore considered “adult” and facing emotional and material overload that in the relatively recent past would have daunted people twice their age. In Ready or Not, Kay Hymowitz offers a startling look at the forces in the popular culture that bombard our children today. In particular she shows how “experts” urging us to treat children as “small adults” have affected our ideas about childhood. The most pernicious effect of this new development, she believes, is that the independence and other trappings of maturity that children are given (rather than earning) at an early age makes them paradoxically less able to negotiate the passage to adulthood than their predecessors in an earlier, more protective time.
296 pages, Paperback
First published October 4, 1999
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December 25, 2020
Childhood has changed. The ‘experts’ including our educators, psychologists, lawyers and media executives have encouraged us to view children as mini adults – autonomous individuals who have little need for adult instruction or supervision. Childhood has lost its traditional purpose as “the time set aside for shaping raw human material into a culturally competent adult.” Kay Hymowitz warns that this change has ironically led to fewer children becoming successful mature adults. We need to return to a society where children are inducted by their elders into society – into their culture.
According to Hymowitz, social critics of the 60’s and 70’s introduced an anticultural view of the child. Children, according to this view, already own the materials out of which to build their individuality and autonomy, and adults must beware of disturbing them. These critics could not buy the traditional paradox that a child’s lack of freedom provided preparation for the freedom he would exercise as an adult.
This anticultural view is now seen widely through society. Firstly we see it in the new portrait of baby. Our infants are seen as ‘little scientists with computerized brains’. Child experts like Spock encourage parents to ‘follow baby’s lead’ regarding weaning, and trust him regarding diet, and let the toddler become toilet trained of their own free will. Tantrums are fine, as they reflect a child’s natural assertion of the right to independence. Manners apparently will come naturally. This view of the infant who doesn’t need rearing was a came at a convenient time as women were moving into the workforce. Earlier models like attachment parenting considered mum essential to the infant’s wellbeing, but with this new information processor baby view, Mum was not so necessary.
As a teacher, I was interested to read Hymowitz’s take on education. It was spot on. The new anticultural view of the child has also changed our education system. Most educators today begin by assuming children are rational organised, desirous to learn and work hard, and self-directed. This misunderstanding of the anthropology of the child plays out in pedagogy. This is why school promote ‘discovery learning’, ‘child-centred curriculum’, inquiry learning, and try to promote children’s autonomy in deciding what learning goals to have and how to accomplish them. Key areas where this view of the child has played out is in the whole language approach to reading and ‘learner centred math’, both of which eschew the teaching of rules, but focus on thinking strategies and assume a child’s ‘innate drive to learn’ is so powerful that rules do not need to be taught.
Our change in the way we view children has led to a change in our view of teachers. Traditionally, it was thought that the role of school and teachers was to introduce children to the knowledge that their culture values and that they need to know as future citizens. Now, most teachers, brainwashed by out teacher training systems, believe that teachers main function is to enable students to learn on their own, while only a very small minority consider themselves as conveyors of knowledge. Small wonder there is such a high attrition rate of teachers in the first few years of teaching. Why would you become a teacher if you believe you ultimately have nothing to offer students. No wonder teaching is no longer an honoured profession.
Hymowitz also notes that the globalised information age has led to an undermining of the notion of education as a passing down of knowledge. The concept of an educated person today is someone who is a creative problem solver, an internet explorer. To the anticultural educationalists, traditional knowledge based education kills creativity. Children are apparently naturally creativity, but rewards, competition, teacher surveillance and evaluation kill their creativity. What this view misunderstands is that true creativity cannot occur without an architecture provided by cultural forms. When children are not grounded in the basics, they are stunted in their creativity. In fact, leaving children alone will not ensure creativity, they will turn to what they know – the media they see, the music they listen to. Education should be about taking them outside their world and introducing them to what they might not ever encounter on their own. Anticultural educators leave a child’s brain as they found it – “not creative, but chaotic and empty, not enriched but provincial and narrow.” We have cultural riches worth sharing. There is a body of knowledge that is significant, and should be passed on. Civil society depends on this shared past.
There are many other issues of interest covered in the book. She covers the teening of childhood and shows the anticultural view of independent children free from adult influence is ironically played up and used by the media in advertising. In another chapter she looks sex and teenagers, and talks about how the anticultural view of teens has led to a decision-making model of sex, assuming that children magically already have the values beliefs and self-awareness for such decisions. But teens do not possess the judgment, self-control, foresight, and self-awareness needed to be fully independent beings. Another chapter of interest is on postadolescence. Shows showing childish 20 somethings are now a common genre. People are not moving into marriage and children and are remaining self-absorbed and aimless for longer. This change is a concern for long term success of society, but perhaps an inevitable result of anticultural approaches to child raising.
According to Hymowitz, social critics of the 60’s and 70’s introduced an anticultural view of the child. Children, according to this view, already own the materials out of which to build their individuality and autonomy, and adults must beware of disturbing them. These critics could not buy the traditional paradox that a child’s lack of freedom provided preparation for the freedom he would exercise as an adult.
This anticultural view is now seen widely through society. Firstly we see it in the new portrait of baby. Our infants are seen as ‘little scientists with computerized brains’. Child experts like Spock encourage parents to ‘follow baby’s lead’ regarding weaning, and trust him regarding diet, and let the toddler become toilet trained of their own free will. Tantrums are fine, as they reflect a child’s natural assertion of the right to independence. Manners apparently will come naturally. This view of the infant who doesn’t need rearing was a came at a convenient time as women were moving into the workforce. Earlier models like attachment parenting considered mum essential to the infant’s wellbeing, but with this new information processor baby view, Mum was not so necessary.
As a teacher, I was interested to read Hymowitz’s take on education. It was spot on. The new anticultural view of the child has also changed our education system. Most educators today begin by assuming children are rational organised, desirous to learn and work hard, and self-directed. This misunderstanding of the anthropology of the child plays out in pedagogy. This is why school promote ‘discovery learning’, ‘child-centred curriculum’, inquiry learning, and try to promote children’s autonomy in deciding what learning goals to have and how to accomplish them. Key areas where this view of the child has played out is in the whole language approach to reading and ‘learner centred math’, both of which eschew the teaching of rules, but focus on thinking strategies and assume a child’s ‘innate drive to learn’ is so powerful that rules do not need to be taught.
Our change in the way we view children has led to a change in our view of teachers. Traditionally, it was thought that the role of school and teachers was to introduce children to the knowledge that their culture values and that they need to know as future citizens. Now, most teachers, brainwashed by out teacher training systems, believe that teachers main function is to enable students to learn on their own, while only a very small minority consider themselves as conveyors of knowledge. Small wonder there is such a high attrition rate of teachers in the first few years of teaching. Why would you become a teacher if you believe you ultimately have nothing to offer students. No wonder teaching is no longer an honoured profession.
Hymowitz also notes that the globalised information age has led to an undermining of the notion of education as a passing down of knowledge. The concept of an educated person today is someone who is a creative problem solver, an internet explorer. To the anticultural educationalists, traditional knowledge based education kills creativity. Children are apparently naturally creativity, but rewards, competition, teacher surveillance and evaluation kill their creativity. What this view misunderstands is that true creativity cannot occur without an architecture provided by cultural forms. When children are not grounded in the basics, they are stunted in their creativity. In fact, leaving children alone will not ensure creativity, they will turn to what they know – the media they see, the music they listen to. Education should be about taking them outside their world and introducing them to what they might not ever encounter on their own. Anticultural educators leave a child’s brain as they found it – “not creative, but chaotic and empty, not enriched but provincial and narrow.” We have cultural riches worth sharing. There is a body of knowledge that is significant, and should be passed on. Civil society depends on this shared past.
There are many other issues of interest covered in the book. She covers the teening of childhood and shows the anticultural view of independent children free from adult influence is ironically played up and used by the media in advertising. In another chapter she looks sex and teenagers, and talks about how the anticultural view of teens has led to a decision-making model of sex, assuming that children magically already have the values beliefs and self-awareness for such decisions. But teens do not possess the judgment, self-control, foresight, and self-awareness needed to be fully independent beings. Another chapter of interest is on postadolescence. Shows showing childish 20 somethings are now a common genre. People are not moving into marriage and children and are remaining self-absorbed and aimless for longer. This change is a concern for long term success of society, but perhaps an inevitable result of anticultural approaches to child raising.
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