Preview of Henry Jenkins' New Book – Where the Wild Things Were: Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Post-War America (Part One)

The following is excerpted from Henry Jenkins’ new book, Where the Wild Things Were: Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Post-War America (New York: New York University Press).

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Extract – Where the Wild Things Were: Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Post-War America

“No parent wakes up in the morning planning to make his child’s life miserable.” Thus begins Haim G. Ginott’s 1965 guide Between Parent and Child. Born in Tel Aviv in 1927, Ginott’s varied career included elementary school teacher, resident psychologist for NBC’s Today Show, and professor of child psychology at New York University. His book spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list, reflecting an expanding market for advice literature addressing parents, given the success of Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care (first published in 1946 and growing in popularity across the 1950s and early 1960s). Ginott’s book adopts an explicitly “permissive” approach, understanding what an earlier generation might have seen as misbehavior as reflecting a failure to communicate: “No one deliberately tries to make his child fearful, shy, inconsiderate, or obnoxious. . . . We want children to be polite and they are rude; we want them to be neat and they are messy; we want them to be confident and they are insecure; we want them to be happy and they are not.”

To overcome these challenges, parents should express their expectations and address children’s needs: “He wants us to understand him. He wants us to understand what’s going on inside himself at that particular moment. Furthermore, he wants to be understood without having to disclose fully what he is experiencing. It is a game in which he reveals only a little of what he feels, needing to have us guess the rest.” Ginott instructs parents how to play this guessing game, moving between broad principles and practical applications. “How do we know what he feels? We look at him and listen to him, and we also draw on our emotional experience.” Let’s label these practices as empathetic introspection. Such understanding must shape parents’ everyday approach: “Our inner motto is: let me understand. Let me show that I understand. Let me show in words that do not automatically criticize or condemn.”

The Fabulous Fifties, a 1960 CBS television special, featured shifts in child-rearing practices among the trends that defined the previous decade. A comedy segment parodied the efforts of the modern parent—in this case, the father—to apply permissive practices in disciplining a boy who has separately asked both parents for money to purchase the same school supplies. The father (Shelley Berman) is thrown off guard by the unpredictable and sometimes irrational choices his son (“Flip” Mark) is making: the boy uses his father’s democratic impulses—such as telling the boy to sit where he wants—to defer the disciplining— as he shifts from chair to chair throughout the conversation. The boy’s dialogue includes non sequiturs the father does not know how to interpret, and the boy does not know how to explain. And the boy rationalizes his choices by deploying familiar permissive concepts, such as talking about the expressive potential of the modeling clay he purchased with the excess money. In the end, the father seeks to punish him by demanding that he stay in his room but is defeated even here, storming off after the boy negotiates exceptions to this rule. Here, the comedy stems from the widely recognized gap between permissive ideals and their application.

Broad ideas about child psychology, empathy, and democracy are essential to permissiveness: a discursive formation, a cluster of interlocking ideas and practices, a structure of feeling that took shape across the twentieth century and reached its greatest influence in the 1950s and 1960s. Here is how Ginott describes his approach: “Permissiveness is an attitude of accepting the childishness of children. It means accepting that ‘boys will be boys,’ that a clean shirt on a normal child will not stay clean for long, that running rather than walking is the child’s normal means of locomotion, that a tree is for climbing and a mirror is for making faces.” Reading this passage, one might be tempted to say that permissiveness is a theory of childhood that explains children’s emotional and social development, seeing certain “wild and untamed” attributes as part of children’s nature. For Ginott, “childishness” would have referred to acting like a child, which for writers of this period would have included images of rambunctiousness and messiness but also curiosity, fairness, and imagination.

The “new” permissive approach was signaled in the first few decades of the twentieth century by the shift from feeding on schedule (a practice disciplining the child’s body, reining in their emotions, and restraining their actions within an adult-centered world) toward feeding on demand (where the parents were expected to interpret the child’s various cries, feeding them when hungry, comforting them when hurt, and providing them company when lonely). From there, parents turned toward child psychology, investigating youngsters’ emotional and fantasy lives. Permissiveness is defined in terms of what it permits. Ginott explains, “Strong feelings do not vanish by being banished; they do diminish in intensity and lose their sharp edges when the listener accepts them with sympathy and understanding.”

If permissiveness freed children from constraints, it imposed new expectations on parents regarding how they should behave in response to children’s outbursts. Advocates of more permissive approaches offered parents insights on how they should interpret and enable children’s emotional expression, even as they prepared their children for a world that was unlikely to tolerate behaviors it saw as brattish: “A parent who listens with attentiveness conveys to the child that his ideas are valued and that he is respected. Such respect gives the child a sense of self-worth. The feeling of personal worth enables the child to deal more effectively with the world.” Ginott justifies this approach as a recognition of children’s rights: “The essence of permissiveness is the acceptance of children as persons who have a constitutional right to have all kinds of feelings and wishes. The freedom to wish is absolute and unrestricted; all feelings and fantasies, all thoughts and wishes, all dreams and desires, regardless of content, are accepted, respected, and permitted expression through appropriate symbolic means.” Ginott’s phrase “the freedom to wish” captures the ways children were connected to a larger vision of a more democratic culture.

For critics, the term “permissiveness” conjured images of a world without limits, a world where parents are at the mercy of tyrannical tykes. But Ginott and the other childcare experts saw setting “limits” without intensifying conflicts as essential: “Destructive behavior is not permitted; when it occurs, the parents must intervene and redirect it into verbal outlets and other symbolic channels. . . . In short, permissiveness is the acceptance of imaginary and symbolic behavior. Over-permissiveness is the allowing of undesirable acts. Permissiveness brings confidence and an increasing capacity to express feelings and thoughts. Over-permissiveness brings anxiety and increasing demands for privileges that cannot be granted.”

Having abandoned the more discipline-centered approaches of their own upbringing, parents struggled with doubts about how far they should let their children go:

Civilization has cast parents in the role of “killjoys” who must say no to many of the small children’s greatest pleasures, no sucking of the thumb, no touching of the penis, no picking of the nose, no playing with feces and no making of noise. . . . Some restrictions are inevitable if the child is to become a social being. However, parents should not overplay their role of policemen for civilization, lest they invite avoidance, resentment, and hostility.

Here, adult impulses—such as a repulsion at certain bodily functions— need to be suppressed for children to grow without inhibition, repression, or trauma. Permissiveness situates children’s natural response to the world within a nexus of adult power, where what one adult might tolerate another seeks to shut down. And ironically, no matter how it might seek to dislodge parental authority over children’s bodies, the concept assumes that adults are the ones who might grant permission.

Becoming Permissive

Where the Wild Things Were focuses on the discursive effort required to adjust to this new model of parent–child relations. Such efforts were conducted through advice literature for parents and through children’s fictions, stories across all media that represented and were addressed to the world of the American child.

We—the postwar generation—were the “wild things” in the permissive imagination; our subjective experiences of the world were the focus of adult speculation. Critics accused us of acting like “wild animals” because no effort had been made to “tame” our impulses, while advocates spoke of our “unbridled” energy. By the late 1960s, when many of the initial baby-boom children were college-age, they were said to be “wild in the streets.” In Wild Things, Jack Halberstam writes about Max, the protagonist of Maurice Sendak’s children’s book Where the Wild Things Are, as embodying “the wild not simply as a space beyond the home but also as a challenge to an assumed order of things.” I want to second Halberstam’s conception of wildness as “a chaotic force of nature, the outside of categorization, unrestrained forms of embodiment, the refusal to submit to social regulation, loss of control, the unpredictable,” for the child in the permissive imagination is all these things. The child embodied a natural freedom (in the Rousseauian sense) to operate on the outer limits of the civilized order, a potential to escape adult limitations, and a new world order that the writers who used such metaphors wanted to achieve. In both advice literature and children’s fictions, the child is often depicted as a “wild animal” or a “wild Indian,” suggesting a space outside the civilized domain. As Robin Bernstein argues, the presumption of childhood innocence that justified such wildness in white children was rarely if ever accorded Black children or for that matter, Native children, making permissiveness a form of white privilege.

Keep in mind that adults were willing accomplices to our wildness, making efforts to accommodate our messes and noise. Consider, for example, a 1964 commercial announcing the launch of Transogram’s Trik- Trak, a racing-car toy that allowed children to set up the track as the battery-powered car was in motion. As the announcer explains, the toy allows your car to “go anywhere, room to room, all over the house.” And if the point was not clear enough, there is a diagram showing the car traveling across all the rooms including the parents’ den and bedroom. A boy shouts “Trik-Trak,” and his father puts aside his paper and lifts his legs so the car can run under his feet, smiling and saying “Terrific.” It’s hard to imagine any working father being so cheerful about the car disrupting his evening paper in this way, but the fantasy was potent, not just for the child but also for the adult.

Figure I.1: Henry’s suburban boyhood was informed by an infrastructure of permissive ideas, embodied by the Parents magazine on the coffee table.

As I enter my sixties, I reflect on this period with nostalgia: the works discussed here shaped the kind of man I would become. In some cases, I returned to the same copies, kept in storage all these years. Some passages of this book are explicitly autobiographical, most are implicitly so. But this book is more than a trip down memory lane. By reengaging with my parents’ generation, I have discovered things I had missed about these texts before. Consider this image (figure I.1) taken from one of my parents’ slides: I always focused on myself, sitting across the room, wearing a striped shirt. I was surprised, then, to notice the pile of Parents magazines on the coffee table in the foreground. The choices my parents made were guided by the best practices in child development and in the service of a larger civic responsibility. Though invisible to the children whose lives it helped to shape, this advice literature was omnipresent.

Many advice-book writers saw themselves as promoting a more scientifically grounded approach to parenting. Some of what they saw as science has been thoroughly debunked—for example, the theory that the child recapitulates the history of the “human race’” or their involvement in eugenics. Other aspects—such as Freudian psychology or Mead’s early fieldwork—have been disputed by more recent accounts. But the importance of these writers’ moral philosophy concerning the relations between children and adults does not rest on claims of scientific validity alone, and these debates do not undercut permissiveness’s historical importance in shaping the American family (and through it, the American society) during a period running roughly from 1946 (the publication of Spock’s book) to 1968 (the beginnings of a strong conservative backlash).

When advice-literature writers referred to the American child as “he,” they were adopting normative practice of the period: “he” stands in for both masculine and feminine cases. Benjamin Spock was early to note the gendered politics around pronouns, writing in his 1957 edition: “I want to apologize to the mothers and fathers who have a girl and who are frustrated by having the child called ‘him’ all through this book. It’s clumsy to say him or her every time, and I need her to refer to the mother.” In the Victorian era, the ideal child was often a girl; Alice, Dorothy, Wendy, Anne of Green Gables, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms, and many more come to mind, who frequently broke free from constraining norms, spoke their mind, ventured beyond the domestic sphere, and engaged in “unladylike” behavior. Another wave of stories in the 1930s and 1940s, but increasingly fringe by the 1950s, depicted young girls—whether outspoken orphans (such as Annie or the characters played by Shirley Temple) or spunky pranksters (such as Little Lulu, Little Audrey, or the Harvey girls).

The ideal child of the permissive era was a boy—almost always white, suburban, straight, middle-class, Christian (mostly Protestant), and above all, American. These were all-American boys, often depicted in red-and-white-striped shirts, blue jeans, and Keds, with disheveled hair, smudged cheeks, and dreamy eyes. Even Charlie Brown had a stripe on his shirt, albeit a jagged, anxious one. These boys turned their parents’ bedrooms upside down or talked back to kings in the pages of Dr. Seuss’s best-selling books. They were rescued by Lassie or led astray by Flipper. These boys are curious, adventuresome, messy, noisy, rough- and-tumble, muddy even. They explore the world, questioning everyone and everything. They sometimes disobeyed and often escaped adult supervision; they were natural leaders and embraced a democratic style of living. This focus on boys assumed that while girls would and often did read books about boys, boys tended to actively avoid books about girls, and it was boys, the perception went, who most needed help in learning to read.

Beyond that, the traits associated with boyhood aligned with the ways America viewed itself as a nation coming out of the Second World War—bold, fearless, outgoing, wild, open for action, eager to explore the world, and curious about the future. Yet, they were also the traits that led the country into colonialist and military excursions; the “Boys will be boys” ethos has been used ever since to justify the worst excesses of toxic patriarchy.

There are certainly adventurous girls in the children’s literature of the period—from Harriet the Spy to Pippi Longstocking or even Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird—but they were far fewer, less central to the conversation, and in the case of Pippi, foreign in origin. For this reason, among others, my book focuses on boy-centered narratives and thus reads the advice literature for what it tells us about masculinity. These are also the children’s fictions most important for me as a boy raised by gender- normative parents. Throughout, I will be asking what it means that the child in the permissive imagination is so often male just as I ask why it matters that these boys are overwhelmingly white. Throughout, I use “child” when referring to the advice literature’s constructions and “boy” when referring to children’s fictions, but do not forget that much of what is written about “the child” assumes that the child is male.

This is necessarily a partial account of the permissive imagination— far from exhaustive even regarding the subject matter it does consider. Many, perhaps most, readers of a certain age will find one or another favorite missing. More than once, I have been asked about the relative absence of Leave It to Beaver. I can offer several possible explanations for why I lean toward Dennis Mitchell and away from Beaver Cleaver, who follows many of the same genre formulas. Part of what interests me about Dennis is that he appears across media—comic strips, comic books, and television—while Beaver appears almost exclusively on television (and a short-lived comic book). Hank Ketcham has a definite authorial voice and strong views, especially about gender and race, which allow us to examine a more conservative yet still permissive stance. Jay North as an actor also appears in Maya, which I also wanted to discuss. But ultimately, it is a matter of personal preference. Dennis lives in my personal mythology. I watched Beaver—everyone my age did—but never fully embraced him.

How did this cluster of ideas and practices I am labeling the “permissive imagination” take shape? Rather than a rigid periodization, I am drawing on a more dynamic model of cultural change developed by Raymond Williams. Williams stresses “the dynamic interrelations, at every point in the process of historically varied and variable elements.” New ideas do not erase old ones but build upon them. Aspects of cultural traditions are always being pushed aside to make room for the new or carried forward to temper its impact. Williams proposed that dominant (the most widely adopted meanings and practices), emergent (“new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships”), residual (“formed in the past but . . . still active in the cultural process”), and even archaic (“wholly recognized as an element of the past”) may coexist, mutually informing the “structure of feeling” common to a particular period. Thinking of permissiveness as a structure of feeling suggests its aesthetic, social, and emotional dimensions as it is embodied in everyday practices (such as the way adults might kneel on the floor to speak eye-to-eye to children), elements of style (Fred Rogers’s direct address and slow pace, the whimsy of Dr. Seuss or Maurice Sendak, the ways photographers such as Ruth Orkin and Helen Leavitt center children’s expressive practices), and so much more.

“Permissiveness,” always a relative term, was often defined against John Watson the behaviorist, a dominant voice of the prewar period. But the behaviorist model did not go unchallenged in its own time. The roots of permissiveness as an emergent perspective go back to the Progressive Era (1890–1920), when Dorothy Canfield Fisher helped to popularize a version of the Montessori method through her fiction (The Home-Maker) and her advice writing. Fisher was well ahead of her time, but she was not alone. Fisher collaborated with Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg in rallying a group of complementary thinkers who articulated a method of Child Study and translated these insights into advice for parents. Josette Frank and Anna W. M. Wolf are representatives of the expansion of the Child Study discourse in the 1930s and 1940s.

Dorothy Baruch, an educator and child advocate, was the primary voice for a more democratic approach to family life. Baruch, like Fisher, presented her insights in child-rearing guides but also helped to shape fictional representations—in her case, the Sally, Dick, and Jane books that introduced my generation to reading. Having embraced feeding on demand, writers extended this approach to factor in children’s other bodily—even erotic—desires as things that needed to be accepted and accommodated. With this came a larger reassessment of “discipline,” seeking to understand and address the root causes of children’s behavior. Under this paradigm, children had core rights that needed to be respected. The hope was that the next generation would be more comfortable with their bodies and their identities, more democratic in their impulses, more exploratory in their learning, and more connected with the world around them than the previous generation saw itself to be. Dorothy Baruch describes the ideal outcome:

We hope they will become adults who are able to get along without fights and wars, who will want to settle disputes by more civilized means, but who will stand up for themselves and for what they believe to be right. . . . The ideal is the personality which will maintain itself against opposition as it feels the necessity and which will not perpetually be yielding, giving in submissively to any and every influence that comes near.

With the publication of Spock’s Baby and Child Care, permissiveness became the dominant paradigm for parenting and remained so until the late 1960s, when it faced increased challenge from feminists because of its normalization of gender roles and from conservative critics because of the suspicion that tolerance of disruptive behaviors had paved the way for the counterculture. This approach was also informed by a multitude of women—themselves mothers, often women’s rights advocates—whose contributions have been largely neglected. Ginott’s Between Parent and Child concludes with a short list of “books you may find enjoyable and useful,” which includes works by Baruch, Wolf, and Selma Fraiberg.

In The Permissive Society, Alan Petigny argues that America during the Truman and Eisenhower years was less conservative, complacent, and contained than popular memory might suggest: “During the latter half of the 1940s, and continuing throughout the 1950s, the popular ingestion of modern psychology, coupled with changes in child-rearing and religious practices, constituted an unprecedented challenge to traditional moral constraints.” Many of the experts and creatives discussed here held progressive (and sometimes radical) beliefs and saw themselves as helping to reshape American society for a postwar era by reimagining the American family (which they saw as more fluid and more open to experimentation) and reshaping the American child (whom they saw as coming into the world free of the fears and prejudices that had led to the failure of their own generation to overcome racism or embrace global citizenship).

By the late 1960s, conservative backlash toward Spock and his contemporaries would lead to the formation of a “Dare to discipline” approach that saw itself as putting adults back in control over children’s lives. This model remains a potent reactionary force today, while permissiveness has retained a residual status.

Biography

Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era.  He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.