ogc163
Superstar
At the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, kids clamber over one another in an enormous anthill maze. Carpeted, encaged in wire mesh, consisting of layers of looping and overlapping low tunnels, the Limb Bender, as it is called, spans a storey and a half, and usually contains anywhere from two to four wailing toddlers stuck in its dead centre. Eventually, while a crowd of parents politely holds back snickers, the mom or dad of one of the stuck babes valiantly begins belly-crawling his or her way upward, hissing with as much mustered sweetness as possible: ‘Come down, Callie.’
In his book The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings (2008), the anthropologist David Lancy introduced the idea of the neontocracy: a type of society, unique to WEIRD countries (Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic), in which children are the most valued members. In a neontocracy, the bathtub fills up with toy ducks, the living room is slowly smothered in gadgets, and there is no upper limit on the amount of time and energy adults must pour into the project of childhood.
Further inside the Children’s Museum, kids climb into huge, clear-plastic wind tunnels, shrieking as their hair stands on end. They scramble up rope nets; roll magnets along magnetised slopes; spin a deep-backed wheel filled with copper sand; creep into a completely black room roiled by simulated thunder, chucking handfuls of glass beads onto tables to evoke the sound of rain. If they get bored with that, upstairs there’s a jacuzzi-sized tub of blue pebbles to scoop into windmills and, on the third floor, a waterplay area where they can float boats down channels or carve ice with blunt plastic knives.
When my husband Jorge and I first moved to Pittsburgh, I loved the Children’s Museum. There was nothing like it in Oaxaca, the city in southwestern Mexico where we lived when our daughter, Elena, was between the ages of one and two. I was amazed that I could take Elena there for a whole afternoon and relax as she fiddled with light sticks or sorted rocks into holes. It was like taking my hands off the steering wheel, being able to sit back and zone out as she explored, with the added bonus that all the sensory play and stimulation and exposure to other kids had to be good for her development, right? It felt like a healthy granola bar, sweet and indulgent and still promising flaxseed and fibre.
Shortly after our move back to the United States, I spent a lot of time in such places, designed specifically for children. I took Elena to the art cart at a nearby playground, where she could wander between dozens of stalls, putting together a wooden sailboat or making a Play-Doh mask or stringing beads on to a pipe cleaner. We went to the fall festivals and Halloween spectaculars, getting temporary tattoos, gorging on seasonally themed bags of mini pretzels, lugging around conglomerations of paper plates and popsicle sticks.
I was grateful for these opportunities since I was still her primary caregiver; we had a nanny for four hours a day, and Jorge occasionally took Elena for mornings or afternoons, but I was the one doing most of the childcare. In Mexico, the days had sometimes felt gruelling. Long walks up and down the pedestrian street. Afternoons at the coffee shop, reading books while I sucked down cappuccino after cappuccino and she nursed a limonada. Endless ‘draw-in’ and ‘paint-in’, as she put it then. Sometimes, we’d hike up to the Biblioteca Infantil to send leaves down a pretty little ditch beneath pochote trees and play with a measly selection of grimy plastic toys. But, beyond that, Mexico did not have a kid culture: no institutions, places and events solely for the stimulation and entertainment of children.
I was enamoured with this culture when we first got back to Pittsburgh. It felt like way less work. It was a relief, not only in terms of the demands of childcare, but also because I had wholly and unthinkingly absorbed the contemporary intensive-parenting assumption that my daughter needed something special, something extra, mandated in grave tones by child-development experts. I worried that simply sitting around draw-in and paint-in wasn’t going to cut it, because she had a rigorous series of social, emotional, cognitive, and gross- and fine-motor milestones to meet, and she required endless and attentive tending to do so. The playground, with its spinny wheels full of shiny bobbles and its slides and climbing contraptions, promised this, as did the museum and the outdoor kids’ centre at the local conservatory and the art cart and story time. It was like Parenting 2.0, Parenting Extra, making sure that she not only got sensory stimulation, but also a giant tub of shiny beads.
Without realising it, I was falling in line with a long American tradition of worried adults fussing over children’s play, trying to get it just right. The first playgrounds in the US emerged less from a sense of playfulness than from progressive reformers’ moral concerns about the proper socialisation of poor immigrant children. As the American historian Dominick Cavallo wrote in his book Muscles and Morals (1981), play is ‘too serious a business to be left to children and parents’.
An immigration boom had led to overflowing slums in US cities, with immigrant children running free in the streets. As the American historian Michael Hines showed in his study of Chicago at the turn of the 19th century:
It was these children – innumerable, highly visible, undirected, at risk (or so reformers maintained) from their impoverished environment and the lack of wholesome or productive activity – that social reformers sought to save with the creation of play sites that would offer both safety and supervision.
The idea was to delineate not only where children could play, but how they should do it in order to best direct their cognitive, social, emotional and moral development. The neontocracy bumped up here against the ‘gerontocracies’ of the older world, in which children were, at best, ‘incompetent adults’, as Lancy described it, to be mostly ignored or commanded to help with the chores. The neontocracy wanted children in their own carefully organised spaces and, ideally, parents or other adults there to make sure that they were using this space as productively as possible. The idea was to create the right kind of American adult: as Hines put it, ‘patriotic, team-oriented, hygienic, physically competitive, morally upright’. Crucially, the playground was fenced off from the street, delineating where children belonged, and where they did not.
I was shocked to discover, when Jorge and I returned to the US, that he loathed kid-only spaces. He couldn’t stand the children in various stages of overload and meltdown, chucking gooey Teddy Grahams crackers from their strollers; the jittery parents shouting ‘Henry, come here right now and cut out these newspapers for your screen printing!’; the plastic and primary colours and noise and frenzy and monotony of it all. He occasionally enjoyed the Children’s Museum or the Carnegie Science Center on a quiet Thursday afternoon, when he and Elena could wander around without pressure, as through the landscape of a bizarre, abandoned ancient society. But, for the most part, he avoided kid culture.
Childless adulthood ropes itself off from family life, letting parents know that adult recreation is not child’s play
In his book The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings (2008), the anthropologist David Lancy introduced the idea of the neontocracy: a type of society, unique to WEIRD countries (Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic), in which children are the most valued members. In a neontocracy, the bathtub fills up with toy ducks, the living room is slowly smothered in gadgets, and there is no upper limit on the amount of time and energy adults must pour into the project of childhood.
Further inside the Children’s Museum, kids climb into huge, clear-plastic wind tunnels, shrieking as their hair stands on end. They scramble up rope nets; roll magnets along magnetised slopes; spin a deep-backed wheel filled with copper sand; creep into a completely black room roiled by simulated thunder, chucking handfuls of glass beads onto tables to evoke the sound of rain. If they get bored with that, upstairs there’s a jacuzzi-sized tub of blue pebbles to scoop into windmills and, on the third floor, a waterplay area where they can float boats down channels or carve ice with blunt plastic knives.
When my husband Jorge and I first moved to Pittsburgh, I loved the Children’s Museum. There was nothing like it in Oaxaca, the city in southwestern Mexico where we lived when our daughter, Elena, was between the ages of one and two. I was amazed that I could take Elena there for a whole afternoon and relax as she fiddled with light sticks or sorted rocks into holes. It was like taking my hands off the steering wheel, being able to sit back and zone out as she explored, with the added bonus that all the sensory play and stimulation and exposure to other kids had to be good for her development, right? It felt like a healthy granola bar, sweet and indulgent and still promising flaxseed and fibre.
Shortly after our move back to the United States, I spent a lot of time in such places, designed specifically for children. I took Elena to the art cart at a nearby playground, where she could wander between dozens of stalls, putting together a wooden sailboat or making a Play-Doh mask or stringing beads on to a pipe cleaner. We went to the fall festivals and Halloween spectaculars, getting temporary tattoos, gorging on seasonally themed bags of mini pretzels, lugging around conglomerations of paper plates and popsicle sticks.
I was grateful for these opportunities since I was still her primary caregiver; we had a nanny for four hours a day, and Jorge occasionally took Elena for mornings or afternoons, but I was the one doing most of the childcare. In Mexico, the days had sometimes felt gruelling. Long walks up and down the pedestrian street. Afternoons at the coffee shop, reading books while I sucked down cappuccino after cappuccino and she nursed a limonada. Endless ‘draw-in’ and ‘paint-in’, as she put it then. Sometimes, we’d hike up to the Biblioteca Infantil to send leaves down a pretty little ditch beneath pochote trees and play with a measly selection of grimy plastic toys. But, beyond that, Mexico did not have a kid culture: no institutions, places and events solely for the stimulation and entertainment of children.
I was enamoured with this culture when we first got back to Pittsburgh. It felt like way less work. It was a relief, not only in terms of the demands of childcare, but also because I had wholly and unthinkingly absorbed the contemporary intensive-parenting assumption that my daughter needed something special, something extra, mandated in grave tones by child-development experts. I worried that simply sitting around draw-in and paint-in wasn’t going to cut it, because she had a rigorous series of social, emotional, cognitive, and gross- and fine-motor milestones to meet, and she required endless and attentive tending to do so. The playground, with its spinny wheels full of shiny bobbles and its slides and climbing contraptions, promised this, as did the museum and the outdoor kids’ centre at the local conservatory and the art cart and story time. It was like Parenting 2.0, Parenting Extra, making sure that she not only got sensory stimulation, but also a giant tub of shiny beads.
Without realising it, I was falling in line with a long American tradition of worried adults fussing over children’s play, trying to get it just right. The first playgrounds in the US emerged less from a sense of playfulness than from progressive reformers’ moral concerns about the proper socialisation of poor immigrant children. As the American historian Dominick Cavallo wrote in his book Muscles and Morals (1981), play is ‘too serious a business to be left to children and parents’.
An immigration boom had led to overflowing slums in US cities, with immigrant children running free in the streets. As the American historian Michael Hines showed in his study of Chicago at the turn of the 19th century:
It was these children – innumerable, highly visible, undirected, at risk (or so reformers maintained) from their impoverished environment and the lack of wholesome or productive activity – that social reformers sought to save with the creation of play sites that would offer both safety and supervision.
The idea was to delineate not only where children could play, but how they should do it in order to best direct their cognitive, social, emotional and moral development. The neontocracy bumped up here against the ‘gerontocracies’ of the older world, in which children were, at best, ‘incompetent adults’, as Lancy described it, to be mostly ignored or commanded to help with the chores. The neontocracy wanted children in their own carefully organised spaces and, ideally, parents or other adults there to make sure that they were using this space as productively as possible. The idea was to create the right kind of American adult: as Hines put it, ‘patriotic, team-oriented, hygienic, physically competitive, morally upright’. Crucially, the playground was fenced off from the street, delineating where children belonged, and where they did not.
I was shocked to discover, when Jorge and I returned to the US, that he loathed kid-only spaces. He couldn’t stand the children in various stages of overload and meltdown, chucking gooey Teddy Grahams crackers from their strollers; the jittery parents shouting ‘Henry, come here right now and cut out these newspapers for your screen printing!’; the plastic and primary colours and noise and frenzy and monotony of it all. He occasionally enjoyed the Children’s Museum or the Carnegie Science Center on a quiet Thursday afternoon, when he and Elena could wander around without pressure, as through the landscape of a bizarre, abandoned ancient society. But, for the most part, he avoided kid culture.
Childless adulthood ropes itself off from family life, letting parents know that adult recreation is not child’s play
