Hah!

In the article Charles linked to below (the one about how children won't make you happy), the author suggests that 19th-century children worked - therefore people liked them better. (yeah, like the ones who worked selling kindling on the streets of New York because otherwise their families would starve. Like them?) The next sentence says that today, by contrast, we have children for emotional satisfaction. The implication is that since 19th-century folks didn't much love their kids, and since their kids worked, parental satisfaction was higher.

Later, the author suggests that parents today are more anxious about child-rearing than ever before.

What a load of hoo-hah. On so many levels. (like - funeral rituals centered on children, whose mortality rate was massively higher in the 19th century, suggest a pretty serious emotional investment in children. But whatever. If you write for Newsweek you can just talk out your hiney all you want, apparently.).

So today I'm reading through Harper's Weekly from 1865, and I come on this item:

"Children.

The “headaches” of early childhood are on the increase; medical men are more than ever alive to thefact that children are over-excited in the nursery, and,but too often, too early, and far too hard-worked in the school-room; they are “forced,” as gardeners would say,for too early exhibition in the drawing-room.

They passtoo much of their early life cramped into a sort of orderly,by drill-attained manners, utterly destructive of the sweetest, most healthy characteristics of true children. Forever, from the earliest moment they can be taught anything, they are bidden “not to be rude, but to behave pretty,” as if, in real truth, the prettiest feature of child life was not a sort of rudeness—the exuberance of real child nature.

Martyrs to the vanity of our day, they are limb-hampered by the folly which makes them mere dollsfor the exhibition of their dresses and the ingenuity oftheir nurses in dressing their hair. Taught a deportmentin character with their costume, they become, but too often,vain little puppet imitations of men and women, all the winning artlessness proper to their age being thus forciblytaken from them; they strut about, pretty pictures, whenthey had far better be tumbling about with the abandonnatural to their age, but which would at once destroy the claim to that sort of prettiness their careful “get up”had given them.

This precocious training in the nursery has its fruit in that great amount of butterflyism of whichwe see so much in after-life, in those stately, artificial,variegated specimens of young-lady life of which everywatering-place gives such a cloud. Much real goodness is there in some of them; but there is the same sad sense of “out to be looked at” stamped upon their gait and adorning, only of an older kind, as that with which at from four to seven years of age they entered the drawing-room to visitors or the dining-room to dessert."
Harper's Weekly, January 28, 1865, p. 55.

Oh no! Turns out that Americans obsessed about their children even in the past. What? There was no golden age when things were happy, oh so happy? How disappointing.

I just hope we can avoid "butterflyism" in future.