Better Whipped Than Damned, and So On
the rise and fall and rise and fall of childhood
Childhood is mercury.
Puritans thought that children were born in a state of profound corruption, marked by Original Sin.1 Infants cry and toddlers mope and disobey because they’re fallen, and haven’t had the time and the training to grow into any higher character. The devil is in them, literally. And so the first task of the Puritan parent was “will-breaking,” the act of crushing the natural depravity of the selfish and amoral infant. A child was “better whipped than damned,” in need of the firm and steady repression of his natural depravity. Proper parenting was cold and distant; parents were to instruct.
By the back half of the 19th century, children were sweet creatures, born in a state of natural innocence, until the depravity of society destroyed their gentle character. (“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”) Meanwhile, the decline of family-centered industry changed the household. The historical father, present all day on the family farm and guiding his children with patriarchal modeling and moral instruction, left for work at the factory or the office, and mom occupied “the women’s sphere,” the nurturing home.
Depraved infants, stern and firm parents; innocent children, nurturing mothers. Those two conceptions of childhood and the family can be found less than a hundred years apart at their edges. There are some other pieces to layer into that story, and see also the last thing I wrote here about the history of childhood. But the briefest version of an explanation is that the changing idea of what it meant to be a child was a reflection of growing affluence and security: Calvinist religious dissenters living hard and unstable lives viewed childhood darkly, while the apotheosis of Romantic childhood appeared in the homes of the emerging Victorian management class.
So childhood is mercury: It moves and morphs with societal changes, becoming a different thing in different cultures and economies. It tells you what the temperature is.
In the febrile cultural implosion of 2022, childhood is sexy, and legislators work hard to make sure 12 year-olds can manage their STDs without the interference of their stupid clingy parents.
Or click on this link to see a fun story about a teacher in Alabama who has a sideline as a drag queen, reading a story to young children about a dog who digs up a bone and then cleverly telling the children, “Everybody loves a big bone.” Wink wink! I mean, really, what could be sexier or more fun than talking to very young children about thick adult erections, amirite?
The degradation of childhood is the second act, a lagging indicator. When you see people who don’t know how to treat children and childhood, you see people who don’t know how be adults and manage adulthood, insert own John Fetterman joke here. The assault on children, driven by an inability to see children as children, is the product of a widely disordered culture and the inability to see adults as adults. Blurred cultural lines blur other cultural lines, in a downward spiral. Valuelessness spreads.
We’re doing this to children because of what we’ve done to ourselves, through inherited affluence, unearned comfort, and the emergence of therapeutic culture and the endless validation of unmanaged appetites. But not everyone is lost:
Weak, indulgent, appetite-focused, values-indifferent adults are destroying childhood, and some of them haven’t even been elected to the California legislature. Adrift, we send our ruin downward through the generations.
There are clear alternatives, and we can insist on them.
I’ve just started reading Stephen O’Connor’s Orphan Trains, a history of Charles Loring Brace and the “placing out” movement that (from the 1850s to the 1920s) settled something like 200,000 children from eastern cities in new homes, often with farm families. More about that later, but the start of the book is a concise trip through the history of childhood, and it started me down this road.
If I could start this over, I'd add some discussion about forcing young children to get mRNA injections on the supposed premise that their risk was about protecting adults.
This is one of your best that I’ve read since joining the site. The infantilization of Western adult societies is congruous with the decline of the nuclear family, and the ascendancy of “lifestyle” and material comfort as the greatest goals for our people in our hyper-materialistic culture. Human children, as opposed to say your labradoodle, who is the surrogate child for those who don’t want to commit all the way to a bipedal organism that talks back, require decades of nurturing and development to reach a fully formed state. BTW Have you noticed there are now more per commercials than child product commercials? We are totally helpless when born and stay that way longer than any other critter. Our psychological development is a highly intricate, multidimensional lengthy process that can be disrupted at critical junctures by any number of factors, leading to problems of all sorts. Much of it depends upon a stable family unit with a man daddy and a woman mommy. Radical, no? But validated repeatedly in the scientific literature and empiric observation. The targeted, intentional, cynically depraved dismantling of family roles, parental authority, and social norms by people who frankly know better has caused much of the mess we find ourselves in today. Drag queen story hour for 5 year olds? What is that really about? It’s not about kids missing out on tranny culture, because after all is that something that most of us require in order to thrive? No, it’s not.It’s about confusing and erasing identity at impressionable ages. It’s about taking advantage of cortical malleability in the child brain. The development of therapeutic culture and the widespread dispensation of antidepressants isn’t just because we are more sophisticated in our understanding of psychology. It’s also about inducing dependency and doubt, and casting blame. Toxic masculinity? Systemic racism? Other imaginary shit all from the same psychoanalytic- political wellspring. The good news is that people( kids too) are resilient, much more than we realize. And they can overcome obstacles if they can see the path beyond. And parents are waking up and fighting back. That lady from Encinitas rocks. I’m especially glad to see her because I love that little town and the current municipal wokester administration is a frigging train wreck. The Left is made up of childish weirdos, who luxuriate in their misery, who are envidious and utopian and attract same. This explains their totalitarian tendencies. Emotionally arrested, like a four year old, they seek world domination. The solution is the same as with a four year old. We should have said no to the Leftist temper tantrum a long time ago, before Junior trashed the place.