A couple months ago I finished reading a really interesting book called Huck’s Raft by Steven Mintz. I meant to post something about it earlier, but I never got around to it… and then I was shuffling around some books this afternoon and I noticed the book with a big post-it on the front so I thought I would blog on it and then finally return the poor thing to the bookshelf.
There’s a wealth of information in this book about what childhood was like for children of various social classes from the Puritan times to the current day. The author also describes society’s dominant concerns about children and their upbringing and what children’s relations were like with their family and the greater community. The book was well written and quite readable, and I found it to be a reasonably quick read, even with the amount of information the author presented. I particularly enjoyed the perspective offered by the historical scope of the book. I thought it really highlighted the truth in the old saying that “the more things change, the more they stay the same”.
For example, here’s a quote from 1911:
“The younger generation, she [Cornelia A.P. Comer, writing in a letter to the Atlantic Monthly] grumbled, couldn’t spell, and its English was “slipshod.” Today’s youth were selfish, discourteous, lazy and self-indulgent. Lacking respect for their elders or for common decency, the young were hedonistic, “shallow, amusement-seeking creatures,” whose tastes had been “formed by the colored supplements of the Sunday paper” and “the moving-picture shows.” The boys were feeble, flippant, and “soft” intellectually, spiritually, and physically. Even worse were the girls, who were brash, loud and promiscuous with young men.” (p. 231)
If I had made note of the page numbers, I could have pulled out examples like this for just about every generation of children discussed in the book, going back to the children of the original Puritans. I’m not sure if this shows that there are always curmudgeons and pessimists among us or if it is indicative of general trends in public perception towards the younger generation. My guess is that it is a little of both. What I do find distressing though is how each generation’s definition of what constitutes ill-breeding and poor behavior in the younger set seems to slip farther and farther into the realm of truly awful behavior. One generation’s unescorted buggy rides becomes the next’s attending a movie becomes necking during said movie becomes heavy petting at unsupervised parties becomes hooking up becomes… well, I just don’t really want to think about it! And this particular progression has happened in only about a hundred years, especially if you are looking outside of the big cities. But still, such things are blown out of proportion, and just because it is public perception doesn’t mean that it is by any means true (not that it is automatically false though either…) Later in the book the author cites a study in the 1990’s where adults were asked to guess what proportion of all violent crimes were committed by youth. The respondents believed that the answer was 40%, more than three times the actual rate! So clearly, public perception can be quite pessimistic… but still, I think it would be enormously difficult to make the case that everything is fine, and that the only problems with youth lie in our perceptions.
With all this in mind, I am looking forward to reading the next book on my TBR pile - Hold On to Your Kids : Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers by Gordon Neufeld. A mom from my homeschooling group highly recommended it, and I just picked it up from the library today. I’ll try not to start until after I’m done with The Greatest Generation, but no promises. 
