Keep scolding my child
oNA Travel A few years ago, my family piled up into a quick-filling subway car, and I sat next to my 6-year-old daughter while her 4-year-old sister sat directly across from us. Once, my youngest child pulled her knees to her chest and placed her feet in her seat. Almost immediately, a woman sitting next to her, looking about 70 years old, reached out and gently stroked my daughter's feet, marking her putting it down. My daughter was surprised, maybe a little embarrassed. But she understood and quickly obeyed.
For a second, I wondered if I should feel blamed: maybe that woman is judging that I failed by some basic parental duties. But, about factual matters, it was almost automatic, and the woman intervened me and reassured me that she didn't think much about me. She just experienced an ordinary day of movement on the train, in which reminding the child not to put his feet in his seat is a completely natural gesture.
Finally, I thank the woman for attacking her daughter's feet. But communication also feels foreign. In my experience, from a random adult to a stranger’s child, this kind of guidance is not much in the United States (or, in the UK, where I currently live). Many people don't seem to think that they have the right to mentor not their children, let alone touch. They tend to leave it to parents to manage their children’s behavior, or they may smoke silently when parents don’t step up.
To informally test this hypothesis, I created a brief online survey and ended up interacting with a dozen people from across the United States. Some are parents; some are not. Everyone says that outside of certain situations, they are familiar with their children’s parents, or are questioned about their children’s safety – they will hesitate and then tell others what to do because they are afraid to upset their parents. Tennessee-based technical consultant Marty Sullivan gave a representative answer: “Usually, I would rather avoid taking risks to escalate.”
These reactions put me ashamed of the exchange between my daughter and the woman in Prague seemed to fully reflect some of the benefits. And I know I can’t be alone: historical precedents and cultural norms in other parts of the world reinforce the notion that a stranger can have important advantages in the discipline of children.
tHe is highly individualistic The way to manage children's behavior in public is especially an abnormality in Americans. David Lancy, an anthropologist and professor emeritus at Utah State University, told me that for most human survival, “the whole village is involved in the “the whole village” of children. He told me: “Brothers and sisters, peers, aunts, grandmothers have different roles, including ‘correction’. ”
When I asked Steven Mintz, a family and childhood historian at the University of Texas at Austin, whether in the United States, parenting, especially when it once involved a more collective approach, he seemed almost tickled: “Did it!” he replied. He recalls that during his own childhood, in the 1950s, his parents were “continuously corrected” in posture, hygiene, embellishment and language. He noted that children by the first half of the 20th century were “more public and public efforts”, an approach that required considerable compliance to contemporary standards, which could be considered invasion. “Neighbors, teachers, shop owners and even strangers feel competent on the streets and are often morally obliged to correct children's misconduct, scold their lack of behavior, fight, fight or escort a homeless child,” Mintz wrote.
Today, this “country-style” oversight remains the norm for some pockets in the United States. Michelle Peters, a project manager in El Paso, Texas, whose family originated from Mexico, told me she has seen communities in the United States and Mexico adopt a more collective approach to parenting. “Adults correct their children more generally and more acceptable,” she said. People feel “a greater sense of social intimacy and directness”, which extends to care in public places. However, in most parts of the United States, Mintz told me that collectives have replaced “privatized and protected parenting models.”
Just like in other aspects of parenthood, this closed approach gives parents more control, but also puts them under greater pressure. If you are the sole arbiter of your child’s public behavior, you must always keep a close eye on your child. This sense of responsibility can also cause anxiety: I often find myself guessing and second guessing, not just parenting, whether my children are bothering people or breaking some self-evident rules. (Is my daughter standing too close to that guy? Did that shop owner mind my kids are flipping through their magazines?) Salt Lake City mom Amy Banta told me that this is one of the reasons she really appreciates when others step in to correct the kids. “I can't expect every border your child might cross,” she said. “You have to help me.”
If the goal is to steadily familiarize children with polite social practices, it is not clear that filtering all guidance through parents is the most effective way to do it. On the one hand, the child is very smart. A parent or other caregiver who knows that he is the only child who corrects him may reasonably conclude that he cannot stand up whenever an adult turns. More importantly, I found a gentle intervention from a stranger (as opposed to my na-biting) to be a more effective means of conveying to my children that the people around them are real people, with their needs, their space and comfort should be respected. As Banta says, another adult ridicule can serve as a kind of “social proof”, an enhancement of the lesson parents are trying to teach.
Banta told me that at about one time she brought her then-5-year-old to a community theater show and he tried to sit down and stay still. “I kept telling him that he couldn't swing in the seat because he was shaking the whole row, but he didn't want to hear me because his bounce was fun,” Banta recalled. During the intermission, another woman in a row asked Banta's son to stop shaking the seat so much. Banta told me: “I looked at my son and said, ‘Look? It’s not just me.’ In the second act, he paid more attention to his movements, regularly checking if he bothered the woman, and he gave him a big thumb after the show.
tHis collective method Of course, there may be shortcomings in correcting children's behavior. Many people do have unreasonable expectations of the way their children take action in public. Miranda Rake, a two-year-old author and mother in Oregon, told me she believes that the tolerance of common children is too low in most parts of the United States. Even in Portland, she said, she thought it was laid back, and she “gets stinky eyes” in many places and felt like “on eggshells in many coffee shops and restaurants.” “There are no community cultures around the kids here.” In her opinion, this complicates the issue of whether non-parent interventions will make the environment more or less friendly.
Rake's attention is not completely unfounded. In the United States, collective supervision of children often coincides with “multiple or exclusive community norms,” Mintz tells me, “the authority of adults can sometimes be authoritarian or abusive.” Meanwhile, in many modern societies outside the United States, tolerance for child-like marriage is part of a more public way of raising children. (This is also the norm in most of our evolutionary past, anthropologist Sarah B. Hrdy has extensively studied parenting dynamics in traditional hunter-Canadian society.
Apart from the challenges of balancing tolerance and discipline, both Hrdy and Mintz observed that in many ways, American society simply did not flourish for community oversight. Mintz told me that this culture once existed, and it was supported by various forms of social infrastructure that has been steadily hollowed out over the past few decades. The American community used to weave more closely. Lower mothers are employed outside the home, meaning adults who can focus on each other’s children during the day. Mintz said, “There are few ingrained respect for adult authority that means “few people question the right of neighbors to denounce children’s rude or risky behavior,” Mintz said, and the potential personal risks (legal or otherwise) that children are trained less: Adults can train, correct, and not even fear being reminded, beaten, beating, covered, or covered, or even painted.”
In an era where one knows or interacts with neighbors and a weaker era of social trust, the idea of reviving the norm for collective child raising seems far-fetched. However, the Americans I talk to seem to be largely open to the more direct relationship with other people’s children, if they can only guarantee that such participation is welcome. I will come out and say: Of course I will welcome it.