Why Americans cannot discipline their children
By John Fleming
USA
America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly
from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.
-Georges Clemenceau (ca. 1925)
The ultimate reason that Americans are
unable to discipline their children is that they have no authority over
them. The American state, together with private industry, especially the
"helping professions," have usurped their authority in loco parentis,
thus empowering physicians, psychologists, judges, social workers,
dentists and other health workers by, in effect, reducing people to
parental incompetence. American children run amuck, throw tantrums in
the "terrible twos" and "fearsome fours," and commit indignities against
their parents and maliciously disobey them such as to shock the rest of
the world. A Eda Leshan in 1985 published a book called When Your Child Drives You Crazy.
Children's actual socialization comes from the ever-present baby
sitter, television, and the school, neighborhood pals and their
interaction at play.
American parents are reduced to their
entertainers, meal tickets and gift givers; in the U.S. the
glorification of consumption and the warfare of status materialism see
the parents constantly showering their "kids" with presents, all too
often in place of true love and affection. The mother resorts to
shrewishness and constant nagging to obtain minimal obedience from her
children, while the deadbeat American husband and father has emotionally
abandoned the family and takes little part in family life. A 1971 study
by college psychologists of fathers in the Boston area found that they
spent a grand total of 37 seconds a day on average spending time with
their infants. Parents do not guide, comfort, govern, teach, nurse,
control, restrain or mentor their children, although they are fond of
giving them a good teasing now and then.
Sadly, the author has observed thousands
of times children crying and reaching out in misery and just begging
for comfort and reassurance from their parents, who stand there
helplessly as if paralyzed or moronic as to what to do, or they
insensitively without any insight scold their offspring for being "cry
babies." The bewildered parents simply do not know what to do, and the
surfeit of advice from so-called experts, which has increased
exponentially since 1945, has ameliorated the problem not at all;
mothers who diligently study Chilton-like manuals to learn "maternal
instinct" still are incompetent, and the malaise has only intensified
after that year.
Permissive child rearing, the way
Americans raise their children, may seem to be an issue championed and
criticized by conservatives. James Dobson, a conservative, wrote the
bestseller Dare to Discipline, the chief virtue of which may
lie in the sensible message of its title. The Duke of Windsor (King
Edward Vlll), notably remarked in 1957, "the thing that impresses me
most about America is the way parents obey their children." But actually
criticism of and effective action against permissive child rearing
ought to be a cause of radicalism.
One of the best exposes of the American parental malaise to my knowledge is Christopher Lasch's 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism;
Lasch was a radical. The book is a modern classic and hardly obsolete,
despite having been published that long ago, one indication of which is
that it is still in print. Lasch traced the history of parental
permissiveness in the chapter "The socialization of reproduction and the
collapse of authority." He observed that "the devaluation of parenthood
coincides with a belated movement to return to the family functions it
has surrendered to the apparatus of organized therapy and tuition....
Welfare agencies furnish a poor substitute for the family." Lasch
referred to "the proletarianization of parenthood," the American
mother's "striking lack of affect," and parents who try to "keep up with
the kids" instead of training and disciplining them. "The 'transfer of
functions,' as it is known in the antiseptic jargon of the social
sciences-in reality the deterioration of child care-has been at work for
a long time...."
Permissive child rearing abets the
political status quo by producing people of political reaction who are
insecure, anxious, conformist, competitive and status-conscious; it
hence is an integral part of social control, a fact the right-wing
critique does not realize. The helping professions, which as Lasch noted
did so much, beginning about 1880 and gaining ascendance during the
Progressive Era, to promote parental incompetence, acted under the
hegemony of American ideology, which is that any man can become rich.
The world owes the universal
acknowledgment of the concept of ideology to Marx, who popularized it as
a revolutionary and political philosopher as the rationale and
justification of the class in power and sub rosa of its
culpable wrongs and injustice. Even to people hostile to the rest of
Marxism, ideology is a standard concept. American ideology demands that
people view opportunity as open to everyone, all the people, which in
turn has the elite feigning democratic lack of class privilege, and that
idea has evolved over the centuries to mean that each generation of
Americans should allow their children to learn societal norms, from
society in general and not from their parents.
Mothers and fathers acquired a hands-off or laissez-faire
creed regarding their children, while for its part the ruling elite did
not rub in against the have-nots its wealth and position, assumed an
anti-ideological ideology and even came to raise its own privileged
children in accordance with the pattern of the lower classes. The
American ideology of wealth dates from early American history, roughly
1650, and no one foresaw its secondary effect on the family-not the
ruling class, or the "Founding Fathers," or the intellectuals and
illuminati, or Tocqueville. Permissive child rearing, hardly part of a
conspiracy, came into being willy-nilly, a result of purposeless
historical forces, unplanned, nondivined, unenvisaged and
nonteleological.
Being raised devoid of comforting, love,
discipline, affection and physical caring (such as hugging, caressing,
holding, breast-feeding, kissing, embracing and cuddling, of which
American parents give their children so very little), Americans in their
collective folly are frustrated, anxiety-ridden, insecure, enraged,
angry, unhappy and selfish. The ensuing hostile, violent and rancorous
social scene, besides moral chaos, social disintegration, barratry and
generational conflict, is remarkable for the unprecedented
intensification of social conflict: Marx's class warfare, Hobbes' social
warfare (the bellum omnium contra omnes), and Machiavelli's
political warfare. Can anyone therefore really wonder at Waco, Ruby
Ridge, Oklahoma City, Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, and Newtown?
Absalom, Absalom!
John Fleming
USA
Fleming is the author of the book Word Power, which can be purchased through Amazon.com.
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