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c 2001) Sociological Forum, Vol. 16, No. 3, September 2001 (°
Two? Two and One-Half? Thirty Months? Chronometrical Childhood in Early Twentieth Century America Ralph LaRossa1,2 and Donald C. Reitzes1
Child-rearing books and manuals from the early twentieth century indicate that pediatricians and developmental psychologists were prone to divide the life course of children into increasingly precise chronometrical “stages,” e.g., focusing on changes from one month to the next rather than one year to another. Little is known, however, of whether parents also chronometricalized their children’s lives. Working with 206 advice-seeking letters written by fathers and mothers in the 1920s and 1930s to nationally known educator and author Angelo Patri (1876–1965), we develop a text-based measure of “chronometrical childhood,” employ it in a multivariate analysis, and find that an urban environment heightened parents’ tendencies toward chronometricity, while the financial strain of the Great Depression did just the opposite. Our results show how age can be viewed as a social construction, subject to the influence of ideology and economics, and that the scheduling of children’s lives can vary in different locales and at different historical moments. KEY WORDS: age; life course; childhood; cognitive sociology; urbanization; Great Depression.
INTRODUCTION Childhood is a world of fine gradations. Not only are “two-year-olds” perceived to be different from “six-year-olds,” but they also may be seen as different from “not quite two year olds,” “just-past-two-year olds,” “twoand-a-half-year olds,” and others who are “two years and nine months.” 1 Department 2 To
of Sociology, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia 30303. whom correspondence should be addressed; e-mail:
[email protected]. 385 C 2001 Plenum Publishing Corporation 0884-8971/01/0900-0385$19.50/0 °
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It was not always this way. While there is evidence to indicate that people in ancient times divided childhood into broad stages, e.g., birth to 3 years versus 4–7 years, and that children were viewed as developing organisms at least as far back as the sixteenth century (French, 1995; Pollock, 1983), the notion that the life course of youngsters could be divided on a year-by-year basis—or for some, on a month-by-month basis—did not take shape, at least in the United States, until the early twentieth century (Cravens, 1985). It was only then that chronometrical childhood, i.e., the minute dissection of a child’s biography, was institutionalized. The historical forces that led to a more chronometrical childhood (for really we are talking about a difference in degree not kind) were (1) the establishment of the ideology of “modern” childhood that separated children from adults and placed them in their own special category with agerelated rights and responsibilities; (2) the growth of the child science industry, particularly pediatric medicine and developmental psychology; and (3) the legalization of compulsory schooling and an attendant emphasis on IQ and achievement tests (Boli-Bennett and Meyer, 1978; Chudacoff, 1989; Hawes, 1997; Zelizer, 1985). Take, for instance, the work of Arnold Gesell and Nancy Bayley, who in the 1930s were two of the country’s leading developmentalists (Rosenbluth, 1994; Thelen and Adolph, 1994). In “Part One” of Biographies of Child Development, Gesell (1939) charted “the mental growth careers of infants and children” in terms of months as well as years. Youngsters’ time lines, besides being categorized as “two years” or “four years” (from birth), were framed as “twenty-nine months” or “forty-two months” or “nine years and three months,” while their educational levels were transposed into fractions; e.g., one child was given written and spelling assessments of “Grade 4.2” and “Grade 3.8,” respectively. Along the same lines, Bayley (1935) designed a test to calculate motoric “age placement” to tenths of a month; e.g., an infant capable of turning side to side would be scored at 3.4 months, whereas a child capable of jumping a distance of 60–85 cm would be scored at 48.4 months. Gesell’s and Bayley’s measures quickly became the accepted standards in the field and, in revised form, continue to be used today. Government regulations, child-rearing books, psychological test manuals, and other published texts may provide a sense of how legal authorities and scientific experts in the early twentieth century reconceptualized the life course of preschool and school-age children, but examining them and them alone leaves unanswered whether parents during this era did the same. Did mothers and fathers, like Bayley and Gesell, minutely dissect their children’s biographies? Were some parents more inclined toward chronometricity than others? What about longitudinal shifts? The objective of this paper is basically to address these questions. Content analyzing a unique set of letters written by fathers and mothers living
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in the United States between World Wars I and II, we weigh the impact of a variety of factors on parents’ tendencies to speak of their children in chronometrical terms, and find that urbanicity and the Great Depression significantly influenced, though in contrasting ways, mothers’ and fathers’ perceptions of childhood in the early twentieth century. The results from our research provide another example of how “an understanding of age can clarify and specify time-honored sociological propositions” (Riley, 1987:1; see Laz, 1998). The results also underscore the importance of considering both locale and history in the sociological study of childhood, while complementing the view that cohort and period effects influence attitudes and behaviors throughout the life course (Corsaro, 1997; Elder, 1974; Elder et al., 1993; Modell, 1989). Last but not least, our research lends valuable empirical support to a sociology of cognition, as we are able to reveal not only the everyday application of age-oriented mental frames but also the conditions under which these frames may appear or be submerged (see Goffman, 1974; Zerubavel, 1991, 1997). AGE AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION People commonly assume that chronometrical childhood is an ontological reality, existing “out there,” but only recently discovered. Thus, for many, the attention devoted to plotting small developmental differences in infancy is but one sign of “how far” the science of childhood has come. “We know a lot more about kids than we did before,” some would interject. “Our concepts and measures are more precise.” There is something to be said for recognizing that the majority of infants cannot sit up without assistance at 2 months, and that youngsters may have trouble in school if they are forced to learn ideas that their minds are not yet ready to absorb. There also is no denying that the anatomy and physiology of children’s brains limit what they can and cannot do. (The same constraints apply to adults.) On the other hand, to allege, without reflection, that there is a clear-cut and natural demarcation between 2-month-old children and 3-month-old children, or between 12-year-olds and 13-year-olds (the latter being “adolescents”), would be akin to believing that there is an ontological line separating August and September. What can be lost in the “childhood-stages-are-fixed-and-discoverable” approach is an appreciation for how much the seasons of a person’s life are, to some extent, social constructions (e.g., see Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Gubrium et al., 1994; Laz, 1998; Modell, 1989; Riley, 1987). One way to understand how the milestones of childhood are partly social is to think of the difference between the physical world known as “the northeastern United States” and a map of the region in which artificial
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lines have been drawn separating “New York” from “Connecticut.” Now imagine a similar mechanism operating to slice childhood into temporal “territories.” In the same way that we need a map—a social construction—to know where “New York” ends and “Connecticut” begins, we need a map—a social construction—to mark the boundary between one school grade and the next, or between one developmental stage and another. In both cases, the distinctions imply a sociology of the mind (Zerubavel, 1997). Examined sociologically, both spatial mapping and temporal mapping may be understood as part of humanity’s efforts to give meaning to things. A cognitive geography of sorts lies at the heart (Zerubavel, 1991:21): Creating islands of meaning entails two rather different mental processes—lumping and splitting. On the one hand, it involves grouping “similar” items together in a single mental cluster—sculptors and filmmakers (“artists”), murder and arson (“felonies”), foxes and camels (“animals”). At the same time, it also involves separating in our mind “different” mental clusters from one another—artists from scientists, felonies from misdemeanors, animals from humans. In order to carve out of the flux surrounding us meaningful entities with distinctive identities, we must experience them as separate from one another.
The distinction between children in the “first grade” and children in the “second grade” thus rests not only on measuring biological and psychological differences but also on lumping and splitting processes whereby different children are lumped together (for not all children in the “first grade” are identical) and similar children are split apart (for some children in the “first grade” probably could pass the “second grade”). Most school systems use a child’s birthday to erect a boundary between one set of children and another set, but age-based grading is an artifact of the calendar—itself, a somewhat arbitrary schema. How else can we account for the situation in which two children who are born 1 day apart (October 15th vs. 16th in some school districts), or even 1 second apart (11:59:59 p.m. vs. midnight), are placed in different school years? Integral to the lumping and splitting is the application of “the law of the excluded middle” (Zerubavel, 1991:46), an illustration of which may be found in almost any child-rearing text. For example, the developmental changes that an infant experiences in the first 18 months of life are more continuous than discrete. Hence, the decision to separate what is actually a continuum into discrete chunks (e.g., “first month,” “second month”), and to deem the chunks legitimate, requires adult agency and two mental operations. First, a line is drawn somewhere on the continuum. Then, the children who are on one side of the boundary are moved to the left pole, while the children who happen to be on the other side are moved to the right pole. In the end, no child remains between the poles, minimizing if not eliminating the impression that there was once a continuum.
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All of this is not to imply that developmental differences in children are purely fiction. There are significant biological and psychological transitions in childhood. But how those transitions are measured and where the lines are drawn are social choices. The words that pediatricians, psychologists, and educators use to partition childhood (e.g., “one month old” vs. “3.4 month old” vs. “48.4 month old,” and “first grade” vs. “Grade 3.8” vs. “Grade 4.2”) do not reflect an underlying truth and nothing more; the terminologies and taxonomies, in conjunction with biological and psychological factors, determine what people believe. Through language and other mediums of symbolic interaction a child’s “age” is symbolically fashioned—and ultimately reified (Gubrium et al., 1994; Laz, 1998).
HOW AGE MATTERS In the Spring of 1997, a special edition of Newsweek hit the stands with the cover story, “Your Child: From Birth to Three.” Editor-in-Chief Richard M. Smith enthusiastically wrote in his introduction to the issue: “Is there anything more precious—and more vulnerable—than a newborn? Or more deserving of a family’s love and a society’s care?. . . In the pages that follow, we chart the explosion of scientific information about how infants learn to speak and move, the breakthroughs in brain research, and the new thinking on how parents, grandparents—indeed, all of us—can help our youngest citizens get off to a strong and healthy start” (Smith, 1997:4). Throughout the magazine there were graphs and tables outlining when various childhood stages could and should be “achieved.” For almost all the charts, the unit of analysis was the month. The father or mother who wanted to compare his or her child’s physical or psychological growth against the latest scientific benchmarks—the title did read “Your Child: From Birth to Three”—was given plenty to think about. But suppose a child did not measure up? Suppose a daughter or son was progressing too fast or too slow? Anticipating the anxiety that the special issue could engender, Newsweek was careful to make the following point: “As any parent can attest, children grow at their own pace. Some babies walk at eight months, others start at fifteen months. Some speak at a year, others a few months later. The step-by-step graphics throughout this issue . . . track an average child’s development from zero to three. Please consider them a guide, not a dictum” (Newsweek, 1997:26). Both the elaborate graphics and the simple warning accentuate the fact that age norms influence how people are viewed and how they are treated. The elderly know this; so do most children. They understand, though not all of them can translate the experience into sociological terms, that the
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precept “act your age” and its variants (e.g., “too old to drive,” “too young to be in school,” “You’re such a baby!”) not only reflect social conventions but also set in motion social restrictions, which is another way of saying that “images of life,” like images of race or gender or class, are a form of social control (Gubrium et al., 1994:186; see also Laz, 1998). More broadly, it may be argued that chronological age, however it is defined, provides “the most important single cue for a series of transitions that mark the departure from a prior status or relationship to a major social institution and the entry into a subsequent status or relationship” (Modell, 1989:13). In other words, how a society chronologically frames or “cuts up” a person’s biography has profound implications. Thus, it matters that Newsweek, on the recommendation of the professionals it consulted, chose to focus on the first 3 years of life and labeled them “critical” (Smith, 1997:4). This told the parents of children who were older, even by a few months, that an “era” was “behind” them, while it told the parents of children who were in the 3-year window to meticulously scrutinize their kids. And it matters, too, that Newsweek chose to use the month as the unit of measurement. The caveat about children moving at their own pace thus became particularly necessary because, with months rather than years or half-years as dividing lines, there were more opportunities for parents to wonder whether their children were “on schedule.”3 Newsweek may have charted the latest “scientific information” about infants, but it did so within parameters that had been laid out at least 60 years 3 The
fact that Newsweek offered a caveat for parents does not necessarily mean that the editors understood that time and age are social constructions. The cautions reflect more the “scientific” views of the child rearing experts who, despite their strongly held belief in the value of a developmental approach, were “objectively” offering the qualification that the charts reported “average” growth rates. Likewise, in a book titled What to Expect the First Year (Eisenberg et al., 1989), the following qualification was offered for the month-by-month guides: “All parents want to know if their babies are developing well. The problem is that when they compare their babies to the ‘average’ baby of the same age, they find that their own children are usually ahead or behind—few are exactly average. To help you determine whether your baby’s development fits within the wide range of normal rather than just the limited range of ‘average,’ we’ve developed a monthly span of achievements into which virtually all babies fall. . . . Use the What Your Baby May Be Doing sections of the book to check progress monthly, if you like. But don’t use them to make judgments about your baby’s abilities now or in the future. They are not predictive. If checking your baby against such lists becomes anxiety provoking rather than reassuring, by all means ignore them. Your baby will develop just as well if you never look at them—and you may be happier” (p. xxiv). Telling parents at the outset that they can ignore huge sections of the book (about 300 pages are devoted to the month-by-month guides) is contradictory, to say the least. Striking a similar pose, Benjamin Spock began The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946) with the assurance, “You know more than you think you do.” Then (in the 40th anniversary edition) he went on for 700-plus pages, implying to his readers that they may be not so knowledgeable after all.
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before. Presuming the social construction of age categories and their application make a difference in social life, we focus on the period of time when the categories were first devised by developmentalists and subsequently introduced to parents. Our starting point is the belief that chronometrical childhood is most visible, especially in the early years of life, when it is associated with child rearing. Arnold Gesell’s and Nancy Bayley’s perceptions of chronometrical childhood are discernable in their professional writings on how youngsters change. Their charts and tests essentially are messages to colleagues and parents about developmental markers. Would it be possible, we asked ourselves, to examine the discourse of parents, directed toward an expert, to glean parents’ perceptions of the same phenomenon? Would a message from a father or mother to a child rearing authority offer evidence of familial-perceived chronometricity? Fortunately, we were familiar with a large set of advice-seeking letters at the Library of Congress. From the mid-1920s to the end of the 1930s (encompassing the years of the Great Depression), a New York City junior high school principal by the name of Angelo Patri (1876–1965) regularly dispensed child-rearing prescriptions through his own radio show and syndicated newspaper column. In response to his encouragement, thousands of parents from across the country wrote letters to Patri, seeking his help for their children’s “problems” (e.g., difficulties with school and friends, the “traumas” of “growing up,” etc.). About 7,000 of these letters (as well as Patri’s replies) were donated to the Library of Congress upon his death (Papers of Angelo Patri, 1974). Working with the Patri collection, we set out to discover whether the concept of chronometrical childhood had any basis inside the home. Did the minute dissection of a child’s biography seem to matter to the parents who were open to the discourse and influence of at least one early twentieth century expert? (The parents did ask Patri for his opinion.) Could “images of life” be captured in the parents’ queries; and if so, would it be possible to identify the correlates of these images and thus empirically isolate some of the processes involved in the social construction of age distinctions?4 4 As
far as we can tell, no survey of parents’ perceptions of their children’s ages had been conducted in the early twentieth century, thus studying the history of chronometrical childhood from the point of view of yesterday’s parents presented something of a challenge. We had the option of going to diaries and family correspondence but these documents generally exhibit an upper class bias. Also, diaries and family correspondence, because they tend to be few in number, are not amenable to multivariate analysis (e.g., isolating period effects can be difficult).
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METHODOLOGY Sample The archival materials used for this study were originally assembled for a historical study of fatherhood (see LaRossa, 1997; LaRossa and Reitzes, 1993, 1995), and the sampling decisions made at the Library of Congress reflect this fact. During a series of visits to Washington, DC, virtually every letter in the Angelo Patri collection written by a father was photocopied (some 500 of the 7,000 letters) and, for comparative purposes, a sample of mothers’ letters (around 400 altogether) was gathered as well. The main criterion for copying a letter from a mother—understandable within the context of a fatherhood study—was whether the letter offered information about the paternal role (e.g., if a mother talked about her husband’s contact with a child). From this pool of letters, 131 fathers’ letters and 125 mothers’ letters, dated between 1925 and 1934, and 1936 and 1939, were randomly selected for quantitative analysis. No letters from 1935 were included because Patri was ill for a good part of the year and the appeals for help that arrived during his recuperation were apparently destroyed. One additional step was necessary for the present study. In order to see whether the characteristics of a child might influence the parents’ chronometrical orientation, the sample was reduced to only those letters that clearly identified a focal child or, if more than one child was mentioned, a primary focal child. (Sometimes parents talked about child rearing without specifying any child as a source of concern.) This final paring made available for analysis 110 fathers’ letters and 96 mothers’ letters. Who were these parents? Letter writers typically did not discuss their income, occupation, or education, thus making it impossible to measure socioeconomic status (SES) with any precision. The content of the letters, quality of stationary, penmanship, spelling, and grammar all suggest, however, that the people who wrote to Patri were mainly middle class. Letter writers also rarely discussed their race or ethnicity. Although one mother in the sample did allude to her race (she said she was “colored”) and several other parents talked about their own or their spouses’ ethnic identity, letter writers seldom mentioned these attributes. Without the necessary information, we cannot directly test whether there was a correlation between SES or race/ethnicity and chronometricity, though we do employ a proxy for SES (described later) to see if there was some socioeconomic diversity among the parents. What in one sense is a sampling liability, however, may also be considered a plus. Historical studies of the interwar years have shown that middle-class parents were more likely
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to read child-rearing books and magazines and belong to child study clubs, and thus more likely to be exposed to the teachings of the experts (Hawes, 1997). If any grouping had both the opportunity and motive to get “caught up” in the chronometrical fervor of the times, it was the middle class.
Dependent Variable Chronometricity Almost all the parents who wrote to Patri would specify their children’s ages—in itself, an indicator of the extent to which age was used as a childrearing marker. How the parents spoke of their children’s ages, however, varied. Some, for example, referred to their children’s ages in whole numbers: I have a small boy five years old, an only child, normally strong and healthy. He has inherited, and gives evidence of, a nervous temperament. This Christmas he asked for and got an Ives electric train and accessories. It seemed to me an inappropriate plaything for a child of five. . . . The [enclosed] photos show the total of the toys owned by the child prior to the electric train, except that one of them shows him holding his new electric locomotive. I would be very glad to have your views as to whether or not this is a salutary medium for the child’s development, all things considered. . . . (P.D. [male], 29 December 1925, Boston, MA, Box 3).5 I wish you to kindly tell me what you think of my little nine year old girl who is quite a problem to me. She is the eighth of nine children, was the baby girl eight years before the little baby brother came. She has for some reason taken an aversion to school, this being her fourth year. She pretends sickness, hides her shoes, does anything to keep from going. . . . When tested at school her IQ was above the others in her class, yet she is not doing as well as others in her class in her studies. . . . (E.Y.S. [female], 1 May 1938, Joseph, MO, Box 34).
Other parents employed fractions: I have read many of your worthwhile articles in the Providence Bulletin, but have never seen an answer to my question, or desire, “How to make my son tough.” . . . I want my little fellow, who is three and a third years old, to stand right up to the other “kids” and be able to “sock ‘em in the nose,” before they do it to him; and to push the other boy in the face and take his toy, before it is done to my boy. I have tried to teach him to double his fists and punch, but he does not seem to get the knack of it (perhaps, because I don’t know much about it myself). . . . Today, it is “every man for himself.” 5 The
notation for referencing each letter includes the initials and gender of the letter writer; the date the letter was written or, in the absence of a specific date, received; the town or city where the letter writer resided; and the number of the box in the Angelo Patri collection at the Library of Congress where the letter may be found. The letters are reproduced verbatim, with spelling and grammatical errors left intact. Periodically, bracketed remarks are inserted, if doing so makes the writer’s message more intelligible. Ellipses are used to show where, in some cases, sections of a letter have been pruned or shortened. Prefatory comments (e.g., “I read your articles in the paper frequently”) have been excised, unless they are central to the query. Initials substitute for names to disguise the letter writers’ identities.
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LaRossa and Reitzes Be polite and self effacing, and you are stepped on; be tough and aggressive, and you receive respect. . . . (A.L.A. [male], 26 November 1929, Providence, RI, Box 12). My daughter is 4 1/2 years old, she is an only child. She and I have always been together except at times when I had to go places where I could not take a child. . . . Now here is the problem. She cries until she is sick if I go to the store and leave her outside, if I even take her in the store and do not hold her hand for every instant—she cries “Mamma I’ve lost you.” . . . Oh yes, when she is with me she keeps kissing me and loving me. Oh I do want her to love me, but I’m almost afraid that her utter devotion is unhealthy. . . . (M.M. [female], 17 July 1936, Chicago, IL, Box 31).
And a few parents made extremely fine age distinctions: I am the father of a thirty month old boy who finished learning his alphabet both capital and small letters one month ago. He also knows his figures from one to nine. I taught him his letters at the rate of three or four a week in the form of a game and it was great fun for him. I am afraid to proceed any further without expert advice. . . . (J.D.O. [male], 12 February 1925, Chicago, IL, Box 2). I am separated from my husband, to be divorced as soon as possible under the law for his desertion. My baby is twenty-eight months old and has not seen her father since she was eight months old, and does not therefore remember him. In a separation agreement I agreed to support her if he would agree not to see her. The agreement is that upon his electing to pay a certain sum (minimum) he may see her once a month, (that was all he asked—once a month to see his daughter). He has not paid anything toward her support and has not seen or inquired for the baby. I feel the baby is better off without him or his support. . . . (M.B. [female], 9 November 1938, Washington, DC, Box 36).
What makes the third set of letters more chronometrical than the other two, and the second set more chronometrical than the first, is the higher tendency on the part of the parents to minutely dissect the focal child’s biography. Thus, months are more chronometrical than are half years, and half years are more chronometrical than whole years. Within these broad categories, further distinctions may be made. If, e.g., the first letter writer had said the child was nearly 5 years old or about to turn 5 years old, we would credit the parent with a higher chronometrical orientation because of the qualification given to the whole number designation. We wanted to use a multivariate statistical procedure to quantitatively isolate the factors that influence chronometricity, hence we created an 8-point scale designed to reflect the differences in how parents spoke about their focal child’s age, with higher points on the scale signifying finer temporal distinctions, i.e., greater chronometricity: “My child is . . . two years old” (Score 1); “nearly two years old” (Score 2); “two and half years old” (Score 3); “nearly two and a half years old” (Score 4); “two years and nine months” (Score 5); “nearly two years and nine months” (Score 6); “33 months old” (Score 7); and “nearly 33 months old” (Score 8). To see whether different cutting points would yield different results, we also created a 3-point scale comprising Scores 1 and 2 (alternate scale score = 1); Scores 3 and 4 (alternate scale score = 2); and Scores 5, 6, 7, and 8 (alternate scale
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score = 3). Because of the skewed distribution on this measure, we computed natural log coefficients as well as beta coefficients. (The skewness was toward the lower end: 52.3% of the parents talked about their children’s ages in years alone, e.g., “two years old,” and 79.7% talked only in years or in fractions of years, e.g., “two and a half years old,” hence avoiding any use of the words “month” or “months.”) The natural log analysis supported the utility of both the 8-point and 3-point scale. Independent Variables The independent variables for the project include the focal child’s age in years, the focal child’s gender, the number of children in the letter writer’s family, the letter writer’s parental status (fathers vs. mother), the average number of syllables per word, the population size of the letter writer’s hometown, and the year the letter was written. Focal Child’s Age in Years While it may seem circular to have chronometricity as a dependent variable and the focal child’s age in years as an independent variable, the fact is that a valid statistical analysis required both. We were confident that we would find an inverse relationship between chronometricity and the focal child’s age in years, i.e., the younger the child, the more chronometrical the parent’s orientation (“two years and three months” would be more common than “eight years and three months”). What we could not predict was whether the correlation would be so strong as to wipe out all other possible relationships. Among the 206 letters in the analysis, the focal child’s age ranged from 1 month to 19 years. The mean age was just above 7. Focal Child’s Gender Approximately 72% of the mothers’ and fathers’ letters centered on boys, which could reflect more value being placed on sons or the perception that boys are more troublesome. Given the level of patriarchy in the 1920s and 1930s, which encouraged closer scrutiny of male children’s “progress,” we hypothesized that chronometrical labels would be more readily applied to sons than to daughters. Number of Children in Family We also thought that family size might be a factor. It seemed to us that, all other things being equal, the more children there were in the home, the
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greater likelihood that chronometricity would be used, because “fine timing” is a cognitive device that could be used to keep multiple children further separated in parents’ minds. We figured, too, that this would be especially true in families with siblings who were close in age, though we did not have enough information about every child in every family to test the proximityin-age proposition. Fathers Versus Mothers Having letters from both fathers and mothers gave us the opportunity to see whether the more ardent consumers of child science lore, i.e., mothers, would be the more active child chronometricians. With letters from men and women, we could also check for interaction effects between parent’s gender and child’s age or gender. Syllables Per Word Our reason for calculating the average number of syllables per word (easily accomplished with a grammar check software program, since all the letters had been typed onto disk to facilitate storage and coding) was to try to measure subtle SES variations within the sample. We had a hunch that higher SES parents would use more multisyllabic words, and then tested that hunch with nine letters in which occupational information had been provided. The ranking of the letters by syllable average was the same as the ranking of the letters by occupational status, so we went ahead and used syllables per world as a proxy for SES. Population Size During the course of the twentieth century, the United States had become an integrated urban nation. However, in the interwar years, there were still large differences by locale in the impact of urban social and economic institutions (Karp et al., 1991). Indeed, it was not until 1920 that the United States reached the point where more than half of the population lived in urban areas. During the 1920s and 1930s, city dwellers were more likely to be inundated with the latest theories in developmental psychology and more likely to be in school districts where grade placement would be a salient issue, and IQ and achievement tests would be employed. The make-thestreets-safe-for-children campaigns and playground movements of the early twentieth century, both of which had the effect of accentuating differences among children and between adults and children, also took hold in the more
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metropolitan areas (Hawes, 1997). These characteristics of urban life led us to hypothesize that chronometrical childhood would be more common among the Patri parents who lived in large cities. Considering the years studied, surrounding population size is a good indicator of the varied character of the urban experience and of the exposure to living in a large, dense, and heterogeneous settlement (Fischer, 1976). Using the 1930 U.S. census to find the population of the locality mentioned in the letters written between 1925 and 1934, and the 1940 U.S. census for letters written between 1936 and 1939, we linked the letter writer’s address with the appropriate census figures. The population variable ranged from 1,000 (e.g., Darien, New York) to over 3 million (e.g., Chicago). Historical Period Finally, to test for period effects, we divided the letters into three groupings: 1925–29, 1930–34, and 1936–39. Coefficients for the last two periods (the early and late Depression years) were based on comparisons with the first period. Between 1920 and 1933, the year that the Society for Research in Child Development was founded, the number of conferences and research projects devoted to child development increased significantly (“Child Development,” 1936). Between 1920 and 1940, the percentage of youth, 14–17 years, enrolled in high school (Grades 9–12) rose from about 30 to about 70% (Elder, 1980). These changes in the public sphere led us to suspect that chronometrical childhood would become progressively salient in parents’ minds during the 1930s. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION Table I reports the coefficients between chronometricity and our independent variables. As expected, the focal child’s age is inversely related to chronometricity. Also, as expected, the relationship is fairly strong. For the mothers and fathers who wrote to Patri, chronometrical talk was more common when the child observed was young. (Bear in mind that the mean age of the children was just above 7. Given the correlation between the child’s age in years and chronometricity, if the mean age were lower, the distribution on our measure of chronometricity would have been less skewed.) The explanation that Gesell and Bayley and most other child science experts would give for this correlation is that younger children change more (i.e., newborns and 1-year-olds are farther apart, developmentally, than are 9-year-olds compared to 10-year-olds) and hence the “distance” from one age marker to the next is shorter during the earlier “stages” of the life cycle.
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LaRossa and Reitzes Table I. Factors That Influence Different Measures of Chronometricity Chronometricity
Child’s age Child’s gender Number of children Father as letter writer Syllables Population 1930–34 1936–39 R2 n
Eight categories
Three categories
Natural log
−0.438∗∗∗a
−0.434∗∗∗
−0.419∗∗∗ −0.056 0.040 0.058 −0.088 −0.051 −0.054 −0.071 0.066 0.001 0.203∗∗∗ 0.001 −0.225∗∗ −0.293 −0.147∗ −0.220 0.32 206
−0.160b 0.068 0.266 −0.067 −0.106 −0.034 −0.122 0.021 0.001 0.203∗∗∗ 0.001 −0.228∗∗∗ −0.806 −0.116 −0.470 0.33 206
a Standardized coefficient. b Unstandardized coefficient. † p ≤ 0.10. ∗ p ≤ 0.05. ∗∗ p ≤ 0.01. ∗∗∗ p
−0.062 0.036 0.055 −0.049 −0.030 −0.023 −0.033 −0.015 −0.001 0.197∗∗∗ 0.001 −0.237∗∗∗ −0.330 −0.127† −0.202 0.32 206
≤ 0.001.
We would concur with this assessment. However, we would assert, too, that the demarcation and measurement of age not only reflects but also constructs developmental boundaries. Thus if a parent believes, as some of the parents in our sample did, that yearly markers are too coarse to use with young children and opts to speak in fractions of years and/or months when talking about preschoolers, then that parent will see biographical realities that less chronometrically oriented parents will not necessarily see. One mother, e.g., began her letter to Patri by specifying her daughter’s chronological location, and in doing so provided a context for a later point she made about how “smart” and “tall” her daughter was “for her age.” My little girl is nineteen months old and will be two years old August 25, 1927. She is quite a nervous child, very peppy, never still more than a minute. . . . She is exceptionally fond of her father, and will go to no one else if he is around. However, when we say to her, as her father drives up, “Run to the window and see Daddy,” she will run to me instead and cling to me as if she was terribly frightened. . . . Everyone speaks about how “smart” she is for her age. I give this so you may judge her better. Physically she is almost perfect. She is tall for her age, but is well-proportioned. . . . (G.E.W. [female], 24 March 1927, Detroit, MI, Box 5).
Note that the qualifier “for her age” was intended for Patri, so that he could “judge” the child “better,” but clearly a judgment already had been made by the mother. What defined the daughter’s actions as a “problem,”
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warranting a request for help, was that the actions were being carried out by someone who, in the mother’s view, was approaching her second birthday. Turning again to Table I, neither the child’s gender nor the letter writer’s gender had an impact on chronometricity. Contrary to what we had hypothesized, boys were no more likely than girls to be spoken of in chronometrical terms, and mothers were no more likely than fathers to be chronometrical in their orientation. The number of children in the family and the average number of syllables per word also had no effect. In short, individual and family characteristics, as measured in this study, exerted no influence on chronometricity in this particular data set. In contrast, the two macrolevel variables—population size and time period—told another story. Both were significantly related to chronometricity. For population size, the relationship was positive: the higher the population in the U.S. census area surrounding the letter writer’s address, the more chronometrical was the letter writer’s orientation. Figure 1 shows that the critical cutting point was at the 1 million or more mark. Living in a large city thus appears to have had a major impact on the chronometricity of childhood. There are two possible reasons behind the heightened chronometricity among the parents in the more populated areas. One is that the social world of the city tends to alter people’s perception of clock and calendar time.
Fig. 1. Chronometrical childhood by population size.
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As Simmel (1950:50) long ago noted “[W]ithout the strictest punctuality in promises and services the whole structure [of a metropolis] would break down into inextricable chaos.” Chronometricity, in other words, is what urbanites “live with” and “live in” every day. For a parent in New York or Chicago, the minute dissection of a child’s biography may have been part of a more general preoccupation with punctuality and being “on time.” The second reason is that city dwellers in the early twentieth century were more likely to be immersed in the culture of child science. IQ tests and achievement tests were commonly used in urban school districts, making the calculation of a child’s age potentially problematic rather than simply arithmetic (years and/or months since birth). A mother on the west coast told Patri that her two sons, one 13 and the other 11, received scores (on an unidentified test) of “7.2,” which for the older child meant he was “three months backward.” (L.F. [female], 28 September 1932, Los Angeles, CA, Box 20). A father on the east coast told a story of child who was repeatedly examined and found to be mentally behind: I have a son who will be 10 next April 8. In the Fall of 1932, on the advice of members of the family that the boy behaved in a queer way, [we] . . . took the boy to the Medical Center. Pictures of the brain showed no abnormality. His IQ was rated at 55. It was the opinion of the doctor that the child be sent away from home. Instead of sending the boy away from home, I sent him to a kindergarten located in the neighborhood I lived. In the summer of 1933 the boy was taken for a physical examination and the physician thought the boy was suffering from pituitary gland disturbances. . . . In February 1934 when the boy was almost 6 he was placed in 1A in P.S. 189 in Brooklyn. In about two months the principal complained that the child does not sit still and disturbs other children. He ceased attending school. The following September I attempted to register the boy, but the principal told me that he will accept the boy only upon the report of the Psycho-Clinic Department of the Board of Education. . . . I took the boy for a test and received an IQ rating of 49. . . . Last September 1937 I took the child to the Psycho-Clinic, and he received a rating of 42. These ratings appear to indicate that the child is not developing mentally at the pace that he is developing physically. . . . How much would you charge to give my boy a psychic test and general evaluation, provided, of course, you generally do this kind of work?. . . . Possibly you could suggest reading literature on the subject of backward children (S.M. [male], 23 March 1938, Bronx, NY, Box 34)
What is interesting about the father’s letter is that it shows how the availability of tests, clinics, and assorted experts could alter a parent’s cultural “tool kit” (Swidler, 1986). Living in a city gave the father greater access to chronometrically oriented people, products, and places, which made it more likely that the father would find the means and the inspiration to chronometrically measure his son over and over again. Period effects were also found. During the 1930s, parents’ chronometrical orientation declined. Figure 2 would appear to show some recovery in the late 1930s, but the difference between 1930–34 and 1936–39 is not statistically significant. The negative impact on chronometricity thus lasted
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Fig. 2. Chronometrical childhood by historical period.
the entire decade—when the United States was in the throes of the Great Depression. Because of the increased cultural emphasis given to developmental psychology in the 1930s, we had expected that chronometrical childhood would become more rather than less salient in parents’ minds during the Depression. It appears, however, that the Depression created a disjunction between the dictums of the developmentalists and the cognitive orientations of the Patri parents. Why? The economic crisis of the 1930s, and the resulting uncertainty it created, hastened children’s “coming of age” and forced them to be more “planful” (vs. playful) with their lives (Elder, 1974; Modell, 1989). This was particularly true for the children who had to leave school and go to work to help support their families, but it was also true, to some extent, for the young women and men whose educations were uninterrupted. Granted lowincome and working-class families were the hardest hit, but many well-todo families were negatively affected as well. Indeed, countless numbers of Americans woke up every morning in fear of losing their jobs, and “deficit living” was very much the norm (Wandersee, 1981). Simply put, while the middle-class parents who wrote to Patri were less likely to suffer the financial deprivation and anomie that befell many other parents, the Depression still could “get them”—to borrow a phrase used in a query from a child (H.S.B. [female], 28 May 1937, Green Bay, WI, Box 33). Thus, one possible reason
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why the letters to Patri evidenced a decline in chronometricity in the 1930s was that the parents of the Depression, besieged by financial strain, were less likely to look at their children as children, whose lives should be measured in months. There is another explanation, not unrelated to the first. Between the 1870s and 1930s, the social value of children changed. Over time, children were increasingly viewed as economically “worthless” but emotionally “priceless” (Zelizer, 1985). This historical shift would suggest an association between the sacralization of childhood, the stratification of childhood, and the chronometricalization of childhood. (That is, the more sacred the child, the more she/he is seen as belonging in a separate class than that of adults, and the more minutely her or his biography is dissected.) In the 1930s, however, while the country was in the midst of the Depression, children’s economic value may have increased, while their emotional value may have declined. This “reversal of fortune” could have reblurred the boundaries between childhood and adulthood, boundaries that chronometricity reflected and created. If the chronometricalization of childhood is associated with the stratification and sacralization of childhood, then our study reinforces the thesis, advanced by others (e.g., Zelizer, 1985:6), that the movement toward stratification and sacralization, which was at full throttle in the 1920s, was halted or curbed, if only temporarily, during the 1930s. CONCLUSION The social construction of discontinuity is mediated through symbols, i.e., shared social meanings. Arnold Gesell’s growth charts, Nancy Bayley’s developmental tests, and the everyday phrases that fathers and mothers use to chronologically locate their children are designed to cut up continuous stretches of “landscape” into distinct “territories.” All are maps framing what is seen and not seen (Goffman, 1974; Zerubavel, 1991, 1997). The maps, however, are not fixed, but can be altered by ideological and economic forces. In the early twentieth century, various authorities and experts were promoting more “scientific” approaches toward childhood, which as the years went by, became increasingly associated with chronometrical views of child development. These views were more likely to be absorbed by parents living in urban areas because of the degree to which temporal precision figured into city life and because of how much urban schools relied on IQ and achievement tests and developmentally oriented grade placement. These views also were more likely to resonate with parents living in urban areas because the economy of the city generated increased concerns about children’s welfare. Juvenile delinquency, to mention just one concern, was perceived as a greater problem in Boston than in Des Moines, and the fathers and mothers who
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lived in the city often were eager to learn about, if not internalize, the latest theory of child development. They then could feel that they were in a better position to steer their kids down the “proper” path (Hawes, 1997). During the 1930s, the authorities and experts further increased their emphasis on chronometrical childhood and, had the Depression not come, there is a good chance that parents likewise would have increased theirs. In many a home, however, the economic crisis reconfigured parent–child relations, which, in turn, altered adults’ perceptions of their daughters and sons. Chronometrical childhood declined, even among the middle class, because, in the grip of the Depression, differences between adults and children became less salient. The fact is that the parents who had to pull their youngsters out of school and put them to work may have had a stake in not viewing their children in chronometrical terms. Erasing the divide between adulthood and childhood could have made their dire circumstances easier to accept. Seeing how urban living and deprivation altered how one group of parents in the 1920s and 1930s viewed their children prompts us to speculate on whether the same correlations would be operative today. First of all, we must recognize that there are significant differences between the early and late twentieth century. Urbanization following World War II changed from the pattern of urban concentration that characterized U.S. cities since the middle of the nineteenth century to one of urban deconcentration and the growth of suburbs. By 1970, more Americans lived in suburbs than in either central cities or nonurban areas (U.S. Bureau of Census, 1997). Further, as a result of the growth of the interstate highway system, increased popularity of television, as well as national integration of manufacturing, distributional, and service institutions, there is less variation in the everyday experiences of people living in different sized locales than in earlier periods of U.S. history (Karp et al., 1991). Considering these late twentieth century demographic shifts, we would expect to find a different set of correlations, were we to carry out a study of chronometricity among today’s parents. Specifically, we would expect that the suburbs’ higher concentrations of middle- and upper-middle-class families, combined with the concentration of families with young children, would increase suburbanites’ reliance on professional standards of assessing child development and childhood chronometricity. We also would expect that suburbanites would be more inclined to perceive their children as belonging to a special “different-from-adult” class, and that they also would be more frustrated over their children being “off schedule” or “out of sync.” What about the impact of economic factors? Looking back to what happened during the Depression, we would hypothesize that economically threatened parents today would be less prone to perceive their children in chronometrical terms and less likely to view them as belonging to a special
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class. All other things being equal, children growing up under financial strain also would be more likely to experience an erosion of childhood—not just because they would be forced to become household providers earlier than their middle-class counterparts, but also because their own age consciousness would be less chronometrical. We insert the qualifier “all other things being equal,” rather than let it be assumed, because there are a variety of other variables, associated with economic growth and decline, that in the late twentieth century could have a countervailing influence on chronometricity and childhood. The case can be made, e.g., that since World War II a healthy postindustrial economy has led to a proliferation of electronic media (television shows, motion pictures, and video games) that have had the effect of making childhood “disappear.” Before the advent of television, youngsters enjoyed the luxury of being sheltered. Now they are bombarded with transmitted images that permit them to “know what adults know,” ultimately robbing them of their ignorance/innocence (Postman, 1982:85; Winn, 1983:5). We would agree that popular culture can have a profound effect on childhood. Indeed, we empirically demonstrate this effect, showing how the culture of child science in an urban environment promoted chronometricity in the interwar years. Nonetheless, we would also maintain that a troubled economy can have an impact on childhood, independent of the media’s influence. Low-income children who are forced to work to support themselves also come to “know what adults know,” regardless of whether they watch television. Our study would indicate, too, that low-income children could be deprived of whatever benefits there may be to having one’s growth and development closely monitored. If the chronometricalization of childhood is associated with the stratification and sacralization of childhood, then low-income children today lose the advantage of being perceived as “special.” The variation in parents’ perceptions of their children’s temporal biographies reminds us that something as central and seemingly universal as time may be experienced differently by people within a society as well as across societies, and that the differences can be sociologically interpreted (Zerubavel, 1997). Concepts of time thus may be linked to different subcultures and to different structures that may come and go (e.g., urbanicity, suburbanicity, and economic crisis). The process is by no means limited to childhood. Proximity to retirement, e.g., encourages workers to change their time orientation from “time in state” to “time-left” (Ekerdt and DeViney, 1993) A shift in the cognitive framing of “time until retirement” from “years” to “months” and “days” may be part of the shift in the consciousness associated with the retirement process. The same can be said for the process of dying. How people measure the end of their waking lives (do they count the
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months, the days, the hours?) can influence how their remaining time seems to pass (Glaser and Strauss, 1968). Finally, the results from our study suggest that chronometrical childhood is a concept that deserves serious scholarly attention. The text-based measure that we employ could be profitably applied to other data sets; not only other fathers’ and mothers’ advice-seeking letters, but also parent-of-new-baby diaries, school teacher/counselor case records, and transcripts of conversations among children. There is certainly no reason why measures of chronometricity could not be incorporated into large-scale surveys. Doing so would make it possible to test more rigorously the effect of SES, race/ethnicity, and gender on chronometrical childhood. Short-term longitudinal studies (e.g., during the transition to parenthood) could help determine the degree to which chronometrical childhood, as an independent variable, exerts an influence. What difference does it make, in both a child’s and a parent’s life, if during early infancy there is a tendency to speak of childhood growth and development in chronometrical terms. Does chronometricity influence how much attention children are given? Does it impact on a child’s self-esteem? In 1932, a mother told Patri that, even though her daughter was “just one month old,” she had “notice[d] already little traces of will and of character [in her child]” which “threaten[ed] to baffle” her husband and her. “We are both young, and tho we consider ourselves very wise in most things, we confess to a woeful ignorance in the matter of child culture. . . . Can you help us?” (L.N.T. [female], 25 June 1932, Alderbrook, NY, Box 19). One is left to wonder what happened to this child who, at such a young age, was being so carefully scrutinized (and who today would be an elderly woman in her 60s). If the social construction of a child’s age does matter, how exactly does it matter—and for how long? Among the questions to be asked, this may be the most important of all.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (SES-8812583) and Georgia State University (RIG-99017). We thank Roni Cantrell Bell, Pamela Priddy Daniels, Betty Anne Gordon, and Ronald Jay Werner-Wilson for their assistance in organizing the historical materials; Fred Bauman and Mary Wolfskill of the Library of Congress for their help in accessing the Angelo Patri collection; and the family of Angelo Patri, especially Frank Merolla, for making the Patri papers available for study. We also appreciate the statistical advice offered by Dawn Baunach and Kirk Elifson, and the substantive feedback received from Sheena Carter, Phillip Davis, Charles Jaret, and Maureen Mulligan LaRossa.
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