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Out of the Minds of Babes
| Article
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19813 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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5 / 1991 |
2,505 Words |
| Author
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Gregory Wolfe
Gregory Wolfe is the founder and coeditor of Image: A Journal
of the Arts and Religion, and a frequent contributor to The
World & I. |
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF CHILDREN
Robert Coles
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990
358 pp., $22.95
How do adults perceive children? How do we grownups, separated by the gulf of years and experiences, imagine the interior life of the child? These questions are not mere exercises in nostalgia or sentimentality. The way a culture looks upon its children tells us much about its character, the things it values, and the future it is shaping.
We have all seen those beautiful medieval paintings in which children look like doll-sized adults. There is something endearing about these representations, but they show little awareness that childhood has its own characteristics and development. In contrast to the otherworldly vision of the Middle Ages was the humanism of the Renaissance, whose paintings and sculptures provide us with plump, fleshly children playing with their mothers' hands, breasts, and faces in ways that are immediately familiar to any parent of any time.
Attitudes toward children seem to move in cycles throughout history. The romantic poets celebrated the child as a symbol of innocence and deep intuitive wisdom. Wordsworth, in his "Immortality Ode," sees children as "trailing clouds of glory" as they arrive in this world, fresh from heaven itself. Wordsworth and his fellow Romantics were also interested in the formative experiences of childhood, especially their lasting psychic impact. "The child," wrote Wordsworth, "is father to the man."
Modern psychology, ushered in by Sigmund Freud, adopted the Romantic interest in childhood experiences but increasingly tended to treat these early years as dominated by various pathologies such as penis envy and the well-known Oedipus complex. Less attention was paid to the child's imagination and individuality, and more to his social adjustment and skill development.
The impact of modern psychology is such that we seem to have come full circle, treating children as little adults. We are all too familiar with media reports about Yuppie parents trying to force their children into the educational fast track from nursery school onward. But there are other, more insidious modes in which children are psychologized. In children's books, for example, there is a whole new trend in "therapeutic" stories. When a child's pet dies, say, he or she is not encouraged to
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