The Disappearance of the Children’s Table
When our son was five months old, we took a month-long trip through Russia and the Baltic countries. We wanted the baby to meet his Latvian family, and we also wanted to take advantage of a generous parental leave program that gave us an unusually long break from the working world. Travel – at least the kind of low-budget, schlep-your-own-bags, one-bare-step-above-youth-hostel travel that I tend to do – is always less glamourous than it sounds. Add seventeen pounds of teething baby and the glamour quotient drops even further. Why bother? Our guide in St. Petersburg, who was amused by the one she called her “smallest tourist,” said she couldn’t imagine her own parents travelling with small children. They would have parked the kids with the grandparents. But today, she said, people prefer to keep their children close. Today’s grandparents might not even be free to take the kids for a week or two – maybe they still work, or have moved to one of those desirable, inaccessible retirement spots. Maybe they just wouldn’t want two weeks of disruption.
What happened to the children’s table? I’m just young enough that there were relatively few of them when I was a child, and my generation of parents has strengthened this trend. The kiddie table is so rare that it’s an aberration. I was surprised recently when I was asked to take a turn at the children’s table at a gathering. It’s not my idea of a good time – I come prepared only to look after my own little savage. But the hosts did not have children of their own, which may have been the reason for the unusual generational separation.
The disappearance of the kiddie table is reflective of the peculiarly intense child-rearing that we’ve been practising for a few decades now. Take the bicycle helmet, which popular sociologists have made a powerful icon for contemporary parental responsibility. When pressed, most of us will agree that the proliferation of safety equipment is a little silly. And having survived a childhood without helmets, we may subscribe to the vulgar darwinian idea that we’re better for having made it to adulthood bareheaded. It’s better for kids to experiment and hurt themselves, isn’t it? Then again, why take the risk when you could avoid it with a $25 helmet? Do you want to sacrifice your kid on the altar of your fearless self-image? Shouldn’t you give your kid the best chance you can? Hey, maybe you should hire a math tutor. Or register for a French class. Maybe the local public school just isn’t the best you can do. Thus, the bicycle helmet has come to stand for everything from the overscheduled, overachieving child, to the stressed-out, careerist university undergraduate. No wonder we are so ambivalent about it.
There’s an interesting dialectic to the ideas of what is acceptable risk and responsibility for a child. Early in the twentieth century, children were free to fall out of trees and walk to school by themselves, but they were also expected to pick up the meat from the butcher. Sending a nine-year-old on a similar errand today is at best eccentric, and at worst, negligent. Traffic is likely heavier, sure, but we also believe that children need constant supervision. And even as we are protecting our children from accident and misfortune, we are sizing them up on the basis of their adult potential, dispassionately assessing their future chances in the job market.
The chatterati are much less ambivalent about another aspect of contemporary childhood: the birthday party. I have never been invited to any of the parties that - if the newspapers and magazines are to be believed - are a social necessity for the K to 6 set, and involve expenditures to rival the worst of 1990s corporate excess. The only children’s birthday parties I’ve been to were modest, in one case with homemade cake (although I suppose that could be considered an example of ostentatious maternal involvement, if you were really spoiling for a fight). However, I have yet to be at a birthday party without parents. Presumably the parents are left off the invitation list eventually, at the sleepover stage, say, if not earlier. But inviting all of the parents of a four- or five-year-old to a birthday party, while prudent, is also very Generation Now.
While everyone was busy tsk-tsking the children’s party, another social form emerged: the adult birthday party, which increasingly apes the rituals of childhood. At one time, adult birthday parties were restricted to celebrating major decades or advanced age. But the annual party has been taken over by the grown-ups. There is something a little unseemly about this. Remember the Thin Man movies? Nora didn’t throw Nick a birthday party (she did throw one for Nicky, Jr., however). She didn’t need to, since the gin was always flowing and someone was playing the piano and you could smoke anywhere you wanted to. But we live in squeaky-clean times. Even if the kids aren’t invited, these parties look more like children’s parties than they used to. Childhood and adulthood have begun to converge.
Historian Philippe de Ariès famously proposed that the idea of childhood was an invention of the early modern era. Scholars have since quarrelled with the details of his thesis. But the idea that the intense bond between parent and child is a bourgeois luxury fits neatly with the very recent history of the family. Ariès linked the rise of this intensity to concern for the child’s health (which might explain the saliency of the bike helmet). The modern family, he wrote, “cuts itself off from the world and opposes to society the isolated groups of parents and children. All the energy of the group is expended on helping the children to rise in the world, individually and without any collective ambition: the children rather than the family.”
The modern family’s aspect is interior rather than exterior. The kiddie table has perhaps always been an anachronism. It had to disappear eventually.
i ponder this phenomenon as well (i don’t wear a bike helmet). another car in that train of thought: all of the “priviledges” of adulthood are being marketed to children - makeup, stylish (and revealing) clothing, heeled shoes sizes zero to four.. and as these little people grow up they will discover the need for skin toners and anti-age cream, weight loss programs, and expensive orthotics.
Fair point, although I would probably call those “attributes” rather than privaledges, per se. Kids want them because they (naively?) assume that possessing the trappings of being an adult will make them one, and confer the real privaledges of adulthood, which are personal autonomy, the power to change your environment to some degree, and - from a child’s perspective anyway - the love and respect of other adults (This might actually not be so naive an assumption when you think about it).
Then there are articles like this one in Psychology today which speaks directly to the Bike helmet for kiddies.
I have to apologise: I seem to be taking the role of Devil’s advocate when I come here, and it’s only my second contribution. I am a fairly strong supporter of “…vulgar social Darwinism”. As it says in the Psych today article I quoted above, it’s part of normal psychological development for children to feel bad sometimes, even to be at risk and be injured.
For me, the essence of the birthday party is gift-giving. No invitee would show up at a birthday party for a 7 year old without a gift. But adult parties are much more just. . .excuses to get together. People are busy, and a lot of socializing seems to crystalize when there is some moral imperative to make an appearance (or the event is some recognizable social event, like New Years Eve, that you would have to be a social cripple to want to read a book during rather than drink your face off).
At this point I’m likely revealing more about myself than society at large, but it’s not like anyone else is doing the studies and statistics on this one either, so here goes.
Party types:
oops. accidental posting. Continuing here.
So there’s little dinners, where there are 3-5 people invited. You can’t just not show up because you’re tired, since your absence would be detrimental to the dinner party (imagine hosting a dinner party, and having 1 person of 3 invited show up). So these occur fairly frequently.
Large event parties. New Year’s Eve, Solstice, whatever. These are parties where there’s such a recognized event taking place that you’d have to be a little strange to not show up at some party or other.
Birthday parties are a kind of moral imperative party. You have to show up because there is some milestone being passed. Failing to show up would be rude. But would you bring a real gift to a friends birthday party? or would it just be a card, or a gag gift. It just seems that adult parties are totally different from child parties, and to suggest some kind of convergence overlooks that they fill totally different roles. Certainly my friends (and at least some of yours too K!) don’t seem to really care about the birthday (modulo milestones, like decades), except that it makes a convenient excuse to stop doing laundry, finishing your taxes, preparing lunches, and actual get out to see your friends at a (reasonably) large event.
Ok, because of the accidental mispost this isn’t as organized or as thought out as it should be, but here’s the sum-up:
Adult birthday parties are about generating social pressure to socialize. Child parties are about gift giving to children (stop me before I spin off on a tangent about how (probably not very) true that last statement actually is).
Then I reread the article and extracted this snippet:
Which I think suggests something like agreement with what I’ve said above (*more or less*). <shrug> Oh well. I gotta start writing these in a text-editor first.
Well, thanks very much for dropping by, everyone.
q-VAR, the revealing clothing marketed to very young girls is a strange thing, and I don’t know that I have much insightful to say about it, other than to remark on its weirdness. It seemed to start in the edgier chain stores, but I saw mesh thongs in the young girls’ section of Zellers several years ago. I don’t know if it gets more mainstream than Zellers. (This was in the under 6 section.)
embryonic, I’m happy to have a devil’s advocate. Carry on.
Thanks for the helmet article - I’ll add it to my collection. I’ll reply to your thoughts on lofts shortly (likely you’ll end up reading that before this.)
Afton, I suppose you’re right about the moral imperative. It’s just that “moral imperative” and “party” are not concepts that I care to have linked. Adult birthday parties are also usually held in restaurants, chosen by the celebrant, and everyone splits the bill. This counts as a celebration, but it is a different creature from the hosted party.
Anyway, now no one’s going to invite me to their birthday parties… Such was not my intention. (For the record, I have hosted a party in a restaurant, and I do think that this form of entertainment fills a niche. And although I don’t care to celebrate my own birthday publicly, I cheerfully attend others’ parties.)
we should compare collections one day. I have a lot of these things.
The kiddie table is still very much in use in these parts.In fact, when adults with children congregate it is assumed that the older among them will roughly make sure that the younger ones don’t set fire to too many things, or drown before they even get to the kiddie table.
That being said, when people visit I’ve often noticed their reactions, which range from exasperation to horror on the part of many (mostly mothers)spiced with an occasional expression of envy (mostly on the part of fathers), at the apparently cavalier child-rearing practices here.
And the birthday parties seem to fit both bills discussed above. They’re thrown for the children, parents attend, but they are really two parties carrying on simultaneously with a modicum of interpenetration around the teenagers (should they be brow beaten into attending).
sounds like fun.
A confession: here I’ve written all about the disappearance of the kiddie table, and I’m now living in a community where everyone keeps an eye on everyone else’s kids. Which in practice is often two simultaneous parties, much as you describe.
The ideas I’ve expressed in the piece above don’t quite fit with the place I currently live. I wrote this a few months before I moved here.
Maybe I just move in the wrong circles and live in the wrong parts of town in order to experience any of the things I read about on urbanbaby.com.
However, I stand by my conclusions about our ambivalence about the bike helmet.
And I still have a weak allegiance to the overall idea that adult culture is increasingly aping certain rituals and practices of childhood. Why would any grown person want pyjamas with Mickey Mouse on them?