Sarah-Michelle Thomas
B.A. Anthropology II, Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University
September 15 2018
As a student of anthropology and the mother of a toddler, the question of “what is good childrearing practice?” often crosses my mind, and I continuously feel caught between the expectations of society and my aspirations for my child. This experience is what motivated me to write this probe into the social and sensory regulation of childhood in Western and non-Western societies.
In Feral children: settler colonialism, progress, and the figure of the child Toby Rollo offers an analysis of the “systemic dualism” of the relationship between child and adult:
The differences between young and older (like the differences between black and white, male and female) are socially (re)constructed to form a binary opposition between ‘child’ and ‘adult’. Specifically, the child is characterized by the absence of distinctly human agency, a ‘childhood animality’ standing in contradistinction to the (ideally) autonomous rationally motivated action of the fully human adult. Children are not simply human beings with different ways of interacting with the world and others, they are a lesser, deficient, or otherwise incomplete form of human being.
Rollo shows how the dualism of child and adult is linked to other dualisms: animal in contrast to human, body in contrast to mind, and primitive in contrast to civilized, with the result that the acquired rationality of the adult is seen as a prerequisite for full humanity and this presumed superiority “not only justifies the use of coercion and violence but frames it as an obligatory means of inducing maturity” in those deemed less than fully human (p. 61).
Rollo and other researchers, such as Pete S. Cook, suggest that the theological doctrine of Original Sin played a significant role in this construction of childhood. The belief that infants are born sinful encouraged parents to discipline their children to become “good citizens” and view any departure from the norm as degenerative or evil, primitive, bestial, inhuman. Cook quotes from a sermon by John Wesley, the Christian theologian and founder of Methodism, entitled On Obedience to Parents (1784)
As self-will is the root of all sin and misery, so whatever cherishes this in children, ensures their after-wretchedness and irreligion; and whatever checks and mortifies it, promotes their future happiness and piety. Heaven or hell depends on this alone. So that the parent who studies to subdue [self-will] in his children, works together with God in the saving of a soul. The parent who indulges it does the devil’s work, makes religion impracticable, salvation unattainable; and does all that in him lies to damn his child, soul and body, forever!
This, therefore, I cannot but earnestly repeat, — break their wills betimes; begin this great work before they can run alone, before they can speak plain, or perhaps speak at all. Whatever pains it cost, conquer their stubbornness: break the will, if you would not damn the child. … Therefore, (1.) Let a child, from a year old, be taught to fear the rod and to cry softly. In order to this, (2.) Let him have nothing he cries for; absolutely nothing, great or small; else you undo your own work. (3.) At all events, from that age, make him do as he is bid, if you whip him ten times running to effect it. Let none persuade you it is cruelty to do this; it is cruelty not to do it. Break his will now, and his soul will live, and he will probably bless you to all eternity.
Directly opposed to Wesley’s sermon would be the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s treatise Emile, or On Education (1762) which started from the premise of innate human goodness instead of sinfulness, and explored ways to curb the corrupting influence of society, rather than the self. The battle between these two viewpoints continues.1 Nevertheless, according to Cook, Wesley’s viewpoint has cast a long shadow, and similar beliefs surrounding the “nature” of children can still be seen to underlie Western childrearing systems. Cook terms this parenting philosophy the “basic distrust orientation”, which he defines as “a system of childrearing tenets which stem from an attitude of distrust towards the human biological “givens”, combined with a belief in directive childrearing techniques”.
I would like to further complicate Rollo and Cook’s analysis by highlighting how the dualism between adult and child intersects with the dualism between the “higher” or “intellectual” distance senses of sight and hearing and the “lower” or “affective” proximity senses of smell and taste and touch, as given in the conventional Western hierarchy of the senses.2 What this intersectionality means in practical terms is that, in Western culture, growing up entails growing out of touch. This point is brought home by Barry Hewlett’s cross-cultural survey of childrearing practices in Diverse Contexts of Human Infancy:
Three- to four-month-old Aka infants are held or touched by a caregiver all day (99 percent of daylight hours), while seven- to eight-month-old infants are held and/or touched about 75 percent of the time. Melvin Konner reports that !Kung three- to four-month-olds are touched more than 70 percent of daylight hours, while seven- to eight-month-olds are touched about 50 percent of the time. Gusii infants of East Africa are held 80 percent of the time at three to six months and about 50 percent of the time at nine to twelve months. Chinese, Malay, and Tamil infants of rural Malaysia are in physical contact with someone over 50 percent of daylight waking hours. These patterns are considerably different from what is found in the industrialized countries of the United States, Japan, England,and the Netherlands. Young infants in these industrialized countries are held and/or touched 12 to 20 percent (2 to 3 hours) of waking hours and older infants are held and/or touched less than 10 percent of the time. Instead of holding the infants, parents place their infants in different types of carrying or holding devices, such as highchairs, walkers, rockers, and playpens.…
American customs are somewhat unusual in that infants sleep alone rather than with others. Middle-class white American infants are unique cross-culturally in that they are not even in the same room as caregivers; they sleep in their own room.…
A sign of indulgence noted in many non-Western societies is the relatively quick response to infant crying or fussing. The standard ethnographic sample indicates that caregivers in 78 percent of the world’s cultures generally provide a speedy and nurturant response to a crying infant. … !Kung caregivers respond within 10 seconds more than 90 percent of the time during the first 3 months and over 80 percent of the time at 12 months. In general, the idea of leaving a baby to cry in order not to “spoil” him or her would be perceived as bizarre in most parts of the world. Response to infants’ crying is generally much slower in Western cultures: American and Dutch caregivers, for instance, deliberately do not respond to infant crying 44 to 46 percent of the time during the first three months.
All of these examples relate to touch, or rather the Western cultural tendency to refrain from touching or handling infants. They highlight the distrust towards the infant’s bodily communication and impulses and the reliance on disciplinary practices that involve, for example, leaving an infant to cry or teaching them to sleep alone, in order to secure proper behaviour. Popular parenting guides also include advice on how to train infants to eat, sleep and play on a schedule, rather than following their own whims.
The distrust in bodily impulses and communication that is already present in infancy continues into childhood. Examples include the imposition of structured meal times (supper will be at 6:00), inherent distrust in children’s feeling of hunger (you can’t be hungry again, you just ate!) and personal taste (stop being picky!). Indeed, sensory regulation pervades most aspects of children’s lives. Children are taught from an early age that verbal communication is superior to nonverbal communication, that emotions are best communicated with words, that bodily expressions of happiness (running in excitement) and bodily expressions of anger and sadness (temper tantrums) are “childish” (!) and undesirable.
Formal schooling continues this process of curbing and/or distantiating the proximity senses. This is clear from the way formal schooling centres on visual and auditory learning, while recess, physical education and plastic arts, which involve more tactile engagement, are but a small part of the day.The privileging of the verbal contrasts with the situation in Bali where, as Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson famously showed, “kinaesthetic learning” is the norm and verbal instruction is the exception.
What are the effects of this disciplining of the senses on childhood development? Studies show that children in Western societies have less and less time to engage in unstructured play. Some parents believe that leaving children to their own devices is too risky, while others believe it to be simply a waste of time. Another study found that “five-year-olds are spending more time engaged in teacher-led academic learning activities than play-based learning opportunities that facilitate child-initiated investigations and foster social development among peers.” Thus, children’s imaginative and sensory play is consistently overwritten by formal schooling.
Summing up: the process of becoming an adult requires achieving control, distance and dissociation from bodily needs, impulses, ways of knowing and interacting. The child is forced to grow out of touch with his or her body and submit to the (often disapproving) gaze of the adult.
Despite the presumed superiority of the fully human (read: civilized) western adult, the sensorial and behavioral training that goes into their formation has many negative (and largely unacknowledged) side effects. Some studies suggest that the lack of sensory stimulation can lead to developmental delays in infants, while other studies link the decline of unstructured play to the rise of mental health issues in children. These studies emphasize the importance of play for social, cognitive and emotional development. Furthermore, controlling feeding practices, such as breastfeeding on a schedule, restricting certain foods, or forcing children to finish what’s on their plates (e.g. eat your vegetables or there’ll be no dessert) are “associated with overeating and poorer self-regulation of energy intake” so these disciplinary practices actually have a perverse effect.
But the impact of excess sensory regulation goes beyond childhood. Cross-cultural research suggests that “there is a linear relationship between aggression and frequency of positive touch”. Kory Floyd studied the impact of lack of positive touch in men, discovering that
“people who experience this phenomenon were, among other things, more lonely, depressed, had less social support, experienced more mood and anxiety disorders and [suffered from] an inability to interpret and express emotions. This lack of affection correlated with a ‘fearful avoidant attachment style,’ the same reaction so common in affection-deprived children from orphanages”.
By contrast, positive touch has been shown to “lower blood pressure, heart rate, and cortisol levels, stimulate the hippocampus (an area of the brain that is central to memory), and drive the release of a host of hormones and neuropeptides that have been linked to positive and uplifting emotions. The physical effects of [positive] touch are far-reaching.”
Despite the overwhelming evidence against excess sensory regulation, the rational civilized western adult, who epitomizes such regulation, remains at the top of the power structure and serves as the standard for full humanity in contrast with not only the child, but the animal, the so-called primitive, the differently abled and the neurodivergent. The systemic dualism of child and adult can be seen to structure these other dualisms, such as that between civilized and primitive (or settler and indigenous, to put this dichotomy in less pejorative terms) as Toby Rollo highlights in the following passage:
modern settler colonialism persists in part by ensnaring Indigenous peoples in a self-defeating performance of adulthood. Native peoples are compelled to demonstrate intellectual maturity and sophistication in order to establish the possibility and therefore the necessity of their explicit consent (rather than simply implied consent) to the plans of dominant state and market actors. This posture replicates the Enlightenment notion of a scale of civilizational progress upon which the maturity of Indigenous communities is indexed to the cultivation of literacy and marketable skills. As Fanon reminds us, there are hazards in appealing to the intellect as the defining feature of humanity: ‘if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men’.”
The implication of this concatenation of dualisms is that indigenous people are children and that only western civilization has progressed/matured out of childhood and into adulthood. This establishes the hegemony of the civilized and rational western adult over all others.
The process of sensory regulation and training in childhood teaches children not only to distrust their own bodily impulses, needs and ways of communicating but likewise to distrust those who do not conform to the socially approved standard. In other words, when children are taught to use their words to express themselves instead of their bodies (and not together with their bodies); to learn through books and screens instead of exploring the world by touching, smelling, and mouthing; to sleep and to eat on a parent’s schedule instead of sleeping when tired and eating when hungry, they internalize the distrust of bodies, and by proxy of their proximate senses, in imitation of their superiors. Social values and sensory values intertwine so that children also learn to see as inferior (and primitive) those who rely more on their “inferior” senses. They learn that the acquired control of their bodies is the requirement for full humanity in Western society; by proxy, they learn to deny that same humanity to those who don’t fulfil that requirement, therefore, dismissing animals as lacking rationality, women as too emotional, and other cultures as uncivilized and promiscuously sensual.
A word of caution: we must not assume that the non-western attitudes toward childrearing discussed earlier are somehow more “natural” than Western ones, for that would be to subscribe to the dualism of culture versus nature, which is no less a social construct than any of the other dualisms we have been examining. There is no default attitude, no natural baseline when it comes to childrearing. The key is rather to recognize the cultural contingency of all such constructions and to proceed reflexively, rather than ideologically, when exploring the alternatives.
What if “development” were figured as a process of growing in touch, instead of out of it? What if “development” involved the cultivation of kinaesthetic or haptic “literacy”, instead of only visual literacy? We can learn something about this alternative pedagogical trajectory from Kathryn Geurts’ account of “bodily ways of knowing” among the Anlo-Ewe of Ghana in Culture and the Senses. The sense of balance is the cardinal sense of the Anlo-Ewe sensory order, according to Geurts, and the cultivation of corporeal intelligence begins in the womb. The Anlo-Ewe imagine the foetus as seated on a “stool” (i.e. the placenta) in the womb, already practising the art of balance. Upon birth and continuing throughout childhood, the child’s limbs are massaged so that they will be able to walk and move in culturally approved ways (with grace and poise). This is a matter of first importance, for the Anlo-Ewe have a vocabulary of 50+ terms for different ways of walking, and inferences about the moral character of a person are drawn from observing how they move. For example, lugulugu refers to a meandering walk and directionless person while kadzakadza is to move or walk like a lion, decidedly and with purpose. Geurts records how she often heard mothers calling out to their children to correct their comportment.
Anlo woman selling peeled oranges at the Anloga lorry station. Photo courtesy of James E. O’Neal.
There is a practical aspect to this cultivation of kinaesthetic and vestibular skill. In Anloland, most wares, and not only wares but water have to be transported “by hand,” as we would say. Only, the Anlo-Ewe have perfected a hands-free method for moving wares: headloading (see illustrations). Headloading depends on cultivating a highly refined sense of balance. There is a deeper reason for all the emphasis on balance and the premium attached to bodily agility in Anlo-Ewe culture, though, and that is that training the body to be supple and flexible is supposed to ensure suppleness and flexibility of mind. This is considered a cardinal virtue, the reason being that the Anlo-Ewe are a minority ethnic group in Ghana, with a long history of migration and persecution, yet they hold a disproportionate number of government positions and have also enjoyed considerable entrepreneurial success. The reason for this success is encapsulated in a proverb: “If you visit the village of the toads and find them squatting, you must squat too” (p. 96.) In other words, both the resilience and the success of the Anlo-Ewe people is associated with striving to live a balanced life and being able to assume many different postures, depending on the demands of the situation. Growing up the Anlo-Ewe way involves growing ever more in touch.
Despite a budding parenting subculture, my partner and I have faced an inordinate amount of pressure to rein in our child. Since his birth, we’ve experienced a barrage of stares, glares, worried looks and even rebukes for trusting his abilities and his interests. We did not foresee the sheer amount of unwritten social norms embedded in the childrearing universe. Our toddler likes to explore his world by mouthing everything he finds. (Babies should only put baby toys in their mouths. They shouldn’t go about mouthing the world). Our toddler is independent, energetic and prefers to do things his own way. (There is a right way to play in the jungle gym, and that’s not it!). He spends his days running, climbing, jumping and dancing. These days, he especially loves climbing ladders all the way to the top. (Toddlers should not climb the big kid structures at the playground. They are too tall and too dangerous!.) He prefers to run around barefoot and naked, unencumbered by his bulky cloth diaper. (Children should be clothed in public!) He prefers to squish his food and transfer it from one bowl to the other. (Toddlers shouldn’t play with their food!)Sometimes he eats a lot. Sometimes he eats nothing at all. (Children should finish what’s on their plates!) He has very few words and even less interest in using them. (18-month-olds who don’t have a vocabulary of at least 20 words have a language delay and should attend speech therapy.) He would much rather communicate with his whole body, frequently with hugs, kisses and signs he’s made up himself; other times, by tugging on a hand, by dropping a book to read on someone’s lap, and sometimes by hitting. We explain that he communicates with his body and that we’re working on finding some other way to express his feelings than by hitting – as we pull him away from a rapidly deteriorating situation. (Toddlers that hit are being bad, no matter their intent!) “I’ll train that out of him in no time,” says the daycare provider, as she raises her voice at our child. We don’t return to that daycare. (Toddlers need to go to daycare to learn how to behave and socialize!) More often than not, our child prefers running around during toddler storytime at the library. (Letting your child run around during storytime is disrupting the peace.)Sometimes, we also unconsciously enforce social norms. When he chooses to sit still, at story time, we tell him he is being good, but then have second thoughts, because that is upholding what we know in our hearts to be an arbitrary structure of power and domination. Other times, we call him our wild child, our little tornado. We equate him with the forces of nature.
In conclusion, I hope that this probe highlights the strenuous process imposed on children in order to attain the sensory control necessary for acceptable “civilized and rational”behaviour, as well as its side-effects, and its relationship to western hegemony in all its strains. I believe that in order to topple the hegemony of the West over the rest, of men over women, of humans over animals, and of the neurotypical over the neurodivergent, we must start by seeking to change the way we raise our children.
Notes.
1. In “Handling Children: To Touch or Not to Touch?” Anthony Synnott traces the shift in childrearing philosophy that occurred in the United States in the mid-twentieth century from curbing touch (“Babies under six months should never be played with; and the less of it at any time the better” according to Dr. L.E. Holt) to coddling (“Every baby needs to be smiled at, talked to, played with, fondled – gently and lovingly – just as much as he needs vitamins and calories” according to Dr. Spock) and is now becoming more restricted again. Synnott’s account sensitizes us to how childrearing advice tends to oscillate wildly, and it is hard to strike the right balance.
2. On the hierarchization of the senses in Western history and culture, and how this intersects with hierarchies of gender, class and race see David Howes and Constance Classen, Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society. London: Routledge 2013.
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