Ready or Not: Why Treating Children as Small Adults Endangers Th
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Last annotated on November 21, 2016
Introduction Empty NestsRead more at location 77
Note: bambini/adulti: crimini sesso prostituzione bullismo Anticultural ideas: i bambini vanno bene così come sono.. la teoria va bene all economia(vendere ai bimbi é più facile) alla politica (mito dell autonomia) ai genitori (che non hanno tempo x l educazione) i bambini si presentano come dei piccoli adulti quando invece ancora non lo sono, cio' comporta pericoli. Chi sono i colpevoli? i colpevoli comunemente additati: genitori stressati, mancanza di segreti (televisione...) Il colpevole del libro: le teorie esplicite (pedagoghi, media, avvocati, marketing...) che postulano sempre più l' autonomia del bambino pinocchio: un bambino chd sbaglia (e che quindi ha bisogno)... oggi è inconcepibile il mito dell indipendenza ha reso i bimbi sempre più soli Edit
They rid the nation of child labor and ensured educational opportunitiesRead more at location 80
profound transformation over the last thirty years in the way children look and act.Read more at location 84
dramatic increases in the rates of out-of-wedlock childbirth, welfare dependency, fatherlessness, and abortion. Even though the percentage of teens having sex has decreased somewhat in recent years, sexual activity has trickled down to ever-younger ages.Read more at location 92
In 1993 the schools in New Haven, Connecticut, began distributing condoms to fifth graders.Read more at location 94
according to the New York Times health columnist Jane Brody, experts believe parents should begin teaching girls “how and why to say ‘no’ and what to do should they say ‘yes’” at nine years old, an age that would shock almost any culture.Read more at location 95
kindergartners might be studying the Holocaust or AIDS in school.Read more at location 105
kids between ten and twelve have started to act and dress more like yesterdays’s twelve-to-fourteen-year-olds.Read more at location 110
children describe themselves as “flirtatious, sexy, trendy, cool.”Read more at location 112
lip gloss, “hair mascara,” body paint, and scented body oilsRead more at location 113
today that market has diminished to those between birth and ten.Read more at location 116
The psychologist David Elkind believes “the hurried child” is the offspring of stressed-out, overambitious parentsRead more at location 118
When literacy was a prerequisite for knowledge, children could be kept in the dark.Read more at location 123
The disappearance of childhood is, to a far greater extent than previously understood, a result of conscious human design.Read more at location 128
psychiatrists, educators, child advocates, lawmakers, advertisers, marketers, and storytellers both in print and on the screen.Read more at location 129
They have helped to advance the idea of children as capable, rational, and autonomous,Read more at location 131
childhood has lost its traditional purpose as the time set aside for shaping raw human material into a culturally competent adult.Read more at location 133
the idea that children must be inducted by their elders into a preexisting society,Read more at location 138
they have no role in either socializing them or investing the information with meaning and value.Read more at location 144
The belief that the child should develop independently of the prevailing culture and even in opposition to it is what I call anticulturalism,Read more at location 146
In most cultures, it is axiomatic that adults civilize children by teaching them the rules of moralityRead more at location 151
preadolescent girls are more moral than either their older counterparts or their elders.Read more at location 154
problem for children occurs when adults interfere with these abundant natural gifts.Read more at location 158
Gilligan is convinced that her subjects have undergone not too little of the civilizing process but too much.Read more at location 159
moral self of these girls is drowned out by the “foreign voice-overs of adults,”Read more at location 160
Here is the anticultural myth resplendent: children are naturally moral creatures who are ruined by the adults who attempt to civilize them.Read more at location 163
the wisdom of his nine-year-old son, who tells him to slow down because he might cause an accidentRead more at location 170
we could not have developed a civilization without some natural orientationRead more at location 174
it was considered an obvious fact that children are prone to cruelty, aggression, and boundless egotismRead more at location 176
Freud went so far as to add sexual perversion and patricidal wishes to the gallery of childhood evils.Read more at location 178
James Q. Wilson expressed surprise that he could not find one reference to self-restraint.Read more at location 180
instinct, which once evoked our animalistic legacy, has been sanitizedRead more at location 183
Nineteenth-century books contain child characters who frequently misbehave or demonstrate cruelty,Read more at location 188
But by the mid—twentieth century, child heroes seem to have no personal lessons to learnRead more at location 190
egotistic children “without comment and certainly without criticism.”Read more at location 191
American mothers tend to see their children’s positive characteristicsRead more at location 193
David Elkind lectured across the country about the myth of what he called the “SuperkidRead more at location 200
This sturdy optimism about children’s natures should not be confused with romantic and Victorian pieties about childhood innocence.Read more at location 202
The child of the computer age is efficient and orderly rather than pure and innocent.Read more at location 210
“Babies are learning machines,” Newsweek announced in 1997.28 Ceaselessly, automatically learning, children are unperturbed by emotions and irrational needs.Read more at location 213
Sophisticated kids with a knowing smirk on their face are a common motif on the screen and in glossy magazines. These kids are frequently accompanied by clueless adults, most of them men.Read more at location 217
as women have moved into the workforce in large numbers, the divorce rate has soared, and “home alone” children have come to make more and more decisionsRead more at location 223
Individual autonomy, the right to live life as we want, to think and judge for ourselves, to make our own decisions, has always been a central dogma in the nation’s civic religion.Read more at location 229
Even in the most primitive societies, people have believed that the transformation of children into socialized individuals who understand the requirements of their culture is an intensive process lasting years and requiring the active and sustained intervention of mother, father, grandparents, older siblings, and other relatives.Read more at location 247
increasing the number of years children were kept out of the workforce,Read more at location 250
prepare the young for freedom. In order to shape “self-governing”Read more at location 253
rejected what until that time was an almost universal acceptance of corporal punishmentRead more at location 254
They encouraged them to awaken their children’s minds and stir their interests by giving them time to play freely and by supplying the now recognizably middle-class home with toys and books.Read more at location 255
No one believed that the transmission of these complex and highly contradictory cultural values would come naturally.Read more at location 258
children do not naturally know how to shape their lives according to their own vision,Read more at location 266
Doubtless this is partly a practical matter. Many Americans simply feel they don’t have the time to satisfy the demands of traditional parenting.Read more at location 268
home life has become what the psychologist Kenneth Gergen has called “less a nesting place than a pit stop.”Read more at location 273
Between 1970 and 1990, white children lost an average of ten hours a week of parental timeRead more at location 279
Economic and work pressures may make some of this parenting drain unavoidable, but a good deal of it is related to the anticultural ideasRead more at location 282
In her 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs evokes the casually assumed role of adultsRead more at location 285
“When Mr. Lacey, the locksmith, bawls out one of my sons for running into the street, and then later reports the transgression to my husband as he passes the locksmith shop, my son gets more than an overt lesson in safety and obedience. He also gets, indirectly, the lesson that Mr. Lacey, with whom we have no ties other than street propinquity, feels responsible for him to a degree.”Read more at location 286
only 39 percent of adults would be comfortable reprimanding kids who are misbehaving in a public area,Read more at location 289
Evelyn Bassoff, a Colorado therapist, reports that when she asks the women in her mothers’ groups what happens when they discipline their daughters, they give answers such as “I feel mean,” “I feel guilty,” “I feel like an old fuddy-duddy,” and “I quake all over; it’s almost like having dry heaves inside.Read more at location 293
youthful incivility points to the disturbingly ironic consequences of anticulturalism.Read more at location 302
prisoners of their own untamed impulsesRead more at location 309
children are in jail in record numbers for having committed crimes much more seriousRead more at location 310
Defense lawyers wonder at the change in their clients. “The kids I represented ten, fifteen years ago were so different,” says a California attorney interviewed by Edward Humes in No Matter How Loud I Shout. “They were still kids. They knew right from wrong more or less … Now … they seem like they are brain-dead. You can’t reach them.”Read more at location 311
crime has increased in amount and severity: “Harassment becomes assault,”Read more at location 315
a radical “downsizing” of their emotional lives.Read more at location 319
Where once Americans were forced to repress their emotions, they now have permission to expressRead more at location 321
This version of history ignores how much value we now place on rationalityRead more at location 322
consider the change in the quality of the American child’s home life.Read more at location 323
our own kids live a remarkably isolated and fragmented existenceRead more at location 324
A study by the National Institute of Child Health and Development found that babies cared for by people other than their parents will typically see those caretakers change twice in their first year of life; one-third of these infants will watch three or more nurturers come and go.49 In The Time Bind, a study of how employees at a Fortune 500 company balance work and family, Arlie Hochschild writes that “real people—neighbors, relatives, friends, baby sitters, teachers in after-school programs, and parents with flexible work schedules—have disappeared, while MTV, the ‘new neighbor’ for the latchkey child, remains only a press of a button away.”Read more at location 326
turning them into rootless migrants without a sense of place or coherent relationships.Read more at location 334
The relationship between adults and children has been infected by the legalistic ethos that so dominates our society.Read more at location 341
recommends a pseudolegal agreement between parents and their “self-care” childrenRead more at location 342
“If you hug a child, even a child who is hurt or crying, I will break your arms and legs … If kids need help in the bathroom, take an aide with you, or let them go on the floor.”Read more at location 345
What do Americans want for their children? In every study, one stark answer predominates: independence.57Read more at location 354
children adopt a knowing posture that adults frequently mistake for true sophistication.Read more at location 364
children naturally turn elsewhere for spiritual and psychic sustenance.Read more at location 372
Typically, American parents, unlike those from more traditional societies, have shied away from using siblings and peers to socializeRead more at location 373
The shrinking of inner life is reinforced by the influence of science on childhood.Read more at location 377
Science has drawn a picture of a child as an efficient learning machine that needs information and input rather than meaning and values. Play, for instance, was once thought of as a means of exercising and freeing the imagination but is now increasingly described as a way to facilitate achievement.Read more at location 378
Young children are supposed to listen to classical music, we are now informed, not because it enriches the spirit by connecting us to a meaningful tradition or by expanding a shared vocabulary of human feeling, but because it advances spatial and temporal reasoning.Read more at location 381
Families should eat together not because mealtime allows them to partake in the timeless rituals of civilized manners and communal sharing, but because children who listen to mealtime conversation do better on vocabulary and reading tests.Read more at location 382
Treating children as autonomous, self-sufficient loners inevitably corrodes their capacity for both strong, trusting connectionsRead more at location 389
Freedom is meaningful only when individuals possess the ability to direct their livesRead more at location 394
individuals must be self-aware, self-controlled, forward-looking, and deliberative,Read more at location 395
critics like Lasch and Robert Putnam have alerted us to a breakdown in civil society.Read more at location 398
less interest in joining organizations, ranging from bowling leagues to parent—teacher associations.Read more at location 399
“Every year over the last decade or two,” he wrote in his essay “Bowling Alone,” “millions have withdrawn from the affairs of their communities.”66 In One Nation After All Alan Wolfe describes a similar retreat: “American suburban communities do seem to be chilly places. Devoid of people during the day, they are filled with people sitting behind television or computer screens in the evenings, too self-preoccupied to live a Tocquevillian life of civic engagement.”Read more at location 400
