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.Authorities reported a continuedimpulse among fathers to urge sons to face up to their fears, to  be aman, in contrast to the more protective attitudes of mothers.Protestantfundamentalists still punished children on the assumption of originalsin; the frailty rhetoric largely passed them by.Even mainstream approaches could waver.We will see that Amer-ican parents, otherwise open to vulnerability concerns, accepted sev-eral disciplinary settings where assumptions of sturdiness still pre-vailed; the fulminations of sports coaches were the most obvious casein point.Parents did not act on their beliefs in children s frailty as decisivelyas might be expected in two key areas.Americans were slow to pick upthe concern about overeating.In part, this resulted from an older imageof childhood frailty: the underfed, skinny child, which continued todominate concerns into the 1940s, exacerbated by the imagery of theDepression.Even later, hesitancies continued because of the potency ofTHE VULNERABLE CHILD 53the anorexia fear, even though, statistically, the problems posed byanorexia were minor compared those posed by child obesity.It re-mained hard, in sum, for parents to act on an understanding that chil-dren did not spontaneously eat well, that in modern conditions at leastthey were prone to overindulgence.There was also some interesting hesitancy over teenage drivers, de-spite the pervasive and understandable concern about accidents.Theissue of teenage driving was defined by the 1930s, with abundant com-mentary on the need for traffic rules, license tests, and school training.These approaches were quite consistent with the realization that youngdrivers were extremely vulnerable.And Americans readily acceptedregulations over other, related signs of weakness: for example, a briefexperiment with treating eighteen-year-olds like adults by allowingthem to purchase alcohol was ended quickly, and the United Statesended the 20th century as one of very few societies around the worldtrying to defend a drinking age of twenty-one.But, despite the larger imagery of vulnerability, despite the abun-dant evidence that teenage drivers were often the cause and the victimsof accidents, direct regulation of teen drivers remained fairly lax.It wasfar easier to obtain a driver s license in the United States, at a youngerage, than in other industrial societies.The assumption that adolescentsshould drive overwhelmed the reality of vulnerability.Here, even morethan with overeating (where the issue revolved in part around whatkind of frailty should be emphasized), we need to explain the excep-tions to the rule a promise for later chapters.Overall, however, the image of the vulnerable child did win wideacceptance.It helped redefine parental and adult approaches in a vari-ety of areas.It reshaped discipline, in warning against undue harsh-ness.It dramatically colored attitudes toward school, which now couldeasily be seen as too taxing.It affected attitudes toward children s workand even toward the application of consumerism to childhood.The fol-lowing chapters take up these effects, building on the theme of the vul-nerable child but also further illustrating its power and sweep.New beliefs in children s vulnerability also entered into discussionsof adoption procedures, contributing greatly to the increasingly strictprofessional standards developed for adoption from the 1920s on.Frag-ile children needed careful protection so that suitable parents could beidentified.The only problem was that knowledge of adoption of re-jection by one s birth parents might in itself cause  serious narcissistic54 ANXIOUS PARENTSinjury even in the best of cases, making the task of navigating child-hood successfully all the harder.There were larger orientations, as well.The assumption of the vul-nerable child interacted extensively with the increasing and unusualopenness of American society to psychological explanations and reme-dies.If childhood was simultaneously flawed and causal, parents borea huge responsibility for outcomes.Americans were distinctive, bymid-century, in their willingness to attribute personal problems toparental mishandling.Am I too fat? My parents must have dropped theball somewhere, not only in failing to guide my eating but in generat-ing other insecurities that I eat to compensate for.As the Ladies HomeJournal put it, in 1951,  the obese woman s very dimensions reflect herneed for strength and massiveness in order to deny an image of self thatshe brings from childhood, an image felt to be basically weak, inade-quate and helpless. Do you have problems with anger at work? Some-how, your parents did not help you learn to identify and control a dan-gerous emotion.The American temptation to blame parents for providing inade-quate help in growing up safe and sound obviously affected parentingitself.If I as an adult understand some of the damage my parents did tome, how can I do things differently for my own fragile brood? How canI avoid having my children think of me as I think of my own parents? Itwas not an easy task.Not surprisingly, the charm of being childlike, an image oftenevoked in the 19th century, particularly for women, now faded, yield-ing to the more unfortunate consequences of being childish.Adulthoodwarred with immaturity: adult success meant that the debilitating fea-tures of childhood were overcome; yet these same weaknesses made theprocess arduous.The implications of the image of vulnerable childhood for theprospect of parenting were complex and intimidating.Several reactionscould coexist [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]