In my last post, I argued that pre-adolescent children need
stories that speak directly to their distinctive emotional needs and crises,
and not just to those of teenagers and adults.
This should be a relatively obvious point, yet it is often overlooked by media companies beholden to the marketing ploy of
“family entertainment” (where the visuals are all for the young children, and
the story, characters, dialogue, and humor are all for the benefit of adults
and older siblings). In doing so, these
companies are engaging in a behavior that Bettelheim thinks will mar any good
kids story, and which children themselves recognize immediately as duplicitous: that of
“winking at the adults over the heads of the children.” (p. 168).
In emphasizing the distinctiveness of the psychology of
young children and the stories that are appropriate for them, however, I want
to make clear what I am not saying. The difference between children and adolescents is not that the former live some idyllic
mental life, or that they are free of deep inner conflict and turmoil. They are certainly not. The difference is that children necessarily process their inner conflicts in
distinctive ways, and age-appropriate stories are needed to help them do so. This is the lesson I take from Bruno
Bettelheim’s work.
Bettelheim’s discussion of the content of children’s inner
conflicts may have us raising skeptical eyebrows, laced with Freudianisms as it
is. When he gets started on “oedipal
conflict” and “the oral stage” we roll our eyes-- we groan every time there’s a
“key” or a “lock” mentioned in a fairy tale because we know what’s coming
next. Such passages leave the same impression
of cliché and second-hand thinking imparted by all private jargons and
ideological lingoes.
If we read somewhat more empathetically, however, we can see
that Bettelheim is making points with this terminology that should be
uncontroversial. Mostly these points amount to the single observation that children are full of intense and deeply ambivalent feelings about their
parents, their other family members, and the world. They tend to move jarringly between emotional
extremes, with very little time for transition—a product of what George Eliot called the child's “strangely perspectiveless conception of life.” They may love their parents and siblings and
yet feel fierce hatred and jealousy toward them in at a moment's notice. It is not only the strength of these feelings and their mercurial character that makes the child's psychology distinctive-- it is also the fact that children tend to experience their emotions as something that happens to them, as if from outside, rather than as something they do. This can render these emotions quite terrifying. The task of
age-appropriate stories is, first of all, to validate these feelings—to provide
reassurance that they are normal and human and unavoidable-- and thereby reduce the fear associated with them.
This, thankfully, has become conventional wisdom among a
certain type of parent or educator, but it would not have been for most of
human history. Societies and moral
teachers in the past tended to assume that children ought first to learn to restrain themselves when confronted with
destructive impulses. The task of
validating these impulses, if it came at all, would come only after the more basic
task of mastering them had been completed. This is indeed a more intuitive way of approaching the problem, and no doubt a more effective one among adults capable of self-mastery. For this reason, most religious moral instruction throughout history has focused almost exclusively on commanding self-restraint, and very little on providing reassurance about human imperfections.
Such religious injunctions about self-restraint are important when they concern negative actions, but taken as they often are in the absence
of any validation of negative emotions,
they can be profoundly damaging, especially to children. If one is only ever exposed to “thou shalt
nots,” especially when one is young, then thou shalt have a very impoverished moral life.
An exclusive emphasis on self-restraint
overlooks two absolutely critical distinctions which all people must learn to
make, however subconsciously, if they are to develop into healthy individuals
capable of forming loving relationships.
The first distinction is that between what we feel and what we do with our feelings. The second
concerns the difference between two forms of self-assertion: one in which we
assert our individualities and distinctive personalities in ways that make for mutually satisfying relationships with other
people; and a second, in which we assert ourselves in destructive and hurtful
ways, in quest of our exclusive gratification.
The neglect of these distinctions in religious teachings
often conveys to people who hear them (especially children) the idea that one’s
feelings are wrong or unnatural, and that self-assertion is inherently wicked, regardless of
the form it takes. They will inhabit the world William Blake depicts in “The Garden
of Love”: “And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door; […] / And Priests in black
gowns were walking their rounds, / And binding with briars my joys &
desires.”
Obviously, a religious ethic of self-restraint is not
incompatible with a recognition of the two crucial distinctions I listed above. But neither does it lend them any heed,
internally, so it must call in other cultural resources to do the work of reassurance. This probably accounts for
why a folk culture has always sprung up in Christian societies. Folk traditions often counteract in many respects the lopsided moral emphases of official church doctrine-- most often by means of folk tales, which validate the negative and destructive emotions we all have, even as they help us to eventually bring them under control by doing so. Throughout most of European history, one
might argue, the church and this folk culture tacitly accepted one another--
maybe even approved, on some level, the distinctive role each played in providing
for a full moral education.
With the coming of the late medieval Inquisition, however, and then with the more extreme sects of the Reformation, this delicate balance was upset, and the tacit peace between
religion and folk culture was violated.
It was in Puritan New England, especially, that the destructive power of
the clergy’s one-sided self-restraint ethic was – ironically – most unleashed. It was here that religious teachers went
furthest in their quest to stamp out the validating power of folk tales -- with
psychologically devastating consequences.
For unrelated research for a course, I have recently been dipping into Philip
Greven’s Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment. The author quotes
from various Puritan Divines on the subject of child-rearing in the 17th
century and its not a pretty picture.
Everywhere in their writings we encounter the idea that the chief task of the parent is to
“break the will” of the child—especially her or his “self-will” and “natural
pride.”
One might think this point about Purtian Divinies is of
limited interest and relevance here, given that the 17th century was a long
time ago, but Greven goes on to quote various 20th century
fundamentalist and evangelical writers on the subject of raising children who
say essentially the exact same things
as the Puritan writers, controlling only for spelling and shifts in
vocabulary. Greven suggests that the
ghosts of Puritanism are still very much with us. There is an important lesson in this not to
confuse what we and our immediate acquaintances tend to think with what
“everyone now knows.” Greven’s book, I am
sure, sold far fewer copies than the evangelical parenting manuals he quotes.
Telling the child that her “self-will” is evil is a toxic
message. For one thing, the emphasis on
“will” elides from the outset any distinction we might make between feeling a desire
to do something and the act itself. The
message to children is that feeling temporary hatred or anger toward their
parents is more or less the same thing as acting out violent acts against them. Children are already secretly prone to think this is
the case—the very last thing they need is to have this terrible suspicion
confirmed. Bettelheim makes clear that
young kids for the most part understand emotion solely through action. As he points out in his discussion of Cinderella, the Brothers Grimm never
tell us that “Aschenputtel” (as she is called in their version) feels sad or
mourns or is dejected—they simply write that she “sat down and cried.” The child intuitively regards crying and
sadness as equivalent—the feeling is the action. So too, as Bettelheim points out, the child
feels unreasoning guilt about the violent and angry feelings she may harbor
toward parents and siblings and friends, because she doesn’t yet understand the
full distinction between feeling a certain way and deciding what to do with those
feelings. Being taught that to have the
mere will to sin is the real evil,
and not the actual commission or attempted commission, is bound to reinforce the child’s deadly moral
confusion on this point.
What the child desperately
needs to hear, by contrast, is that negative emotions are human and
unavoidable—and that the parent fully condones the presence of those
emotions. This is something that the
tales produced by folk culture helped children to hear for centuries, before
small-minded Puritans tried to chase them out of the temple.
*****
So far, what I am saying and what I am drawing from
Bettelheim no doubt conforms to what most liberal parents and educators already
think. Yawn. However, Bettelheim draws a second crucial
lesson from fairy tales that is more upsetting to liberal parenting assumptions,
and I will explore that lesson in the latter half of this post.
I said above that children need reassurance that their inner
conflicts are normal and that their parents approve of them having negative
emotions. Many liberal parents probably take
from this the moral that they ought to have more “frank discussions” with their children
about their feelings, in which they explain to them directly some of the key distinctions listed above.
But Bettelheim thinks this is entirely the wrong approach-- and as much as he finds in the
course of his book that he must defend folk tales from the moralistic critics
of yesteryear and the lopsided ethic of “restraint,” he finds even more, it
would seem, that he has to defend them against liberal
parents who worry that they misrepresent “real life” and interfere with the "frankness" and direct explanations that children really need.
What such parents
often find misleading and wanting in "frankness" about fairy tales are their simplistic representations of
good and evil, on the one hand, and their indirect and symbolic way of dealing with sex on the other. If kids need to understand that their
feelings are normal and legitimate, these parents reason, better to sit them
down and tell them so flat out than to confuse them with stories that only
suggest such knowledge circumspectly.
The trouble with this, says Bettelheim, is that children
can’t simply be made to understand through rational “explanation” that their
feelings and their actions are not the same thing. Kids will continue to perceive them as one
and the same internally, and one cannot rush
the process whereby their minds will eventually escape this reduction. Since they are developmentally unprepared to
make a distinction between feeling and action, then telling them in any direct
form at all that they have angry or aggressive feelings – even if this is
followed up immediately by the words “And that’s normal”—will still feed their
sense of overpowering guilt.
The way to have children’s negative emotions properly
validated, says Bettelheim, is to have these emotions “externalized” onto one-dimensional
villains. The reason why “Cinderella,”
say, helps children to process their real-world feelings of sibling rivalry, is
that it does not in fact mirror reality: it says to the child in effect: I
don’t actually have violent or negative desires—I simply feel the way I do because of
the evil stepmother and the evil stepsisters and all they put me through. And furthermore, because it is “just a
story,” the child projects her anger onto the villains, without this creating guilt
that she might be betraying her real-life parents or siblings by doing so.
Most adults recognize that in real-life, the villains are
not so clearly drawn. We are often the
source of our own problems, to some extent, and good and evil coexist uneasily
in our own behavior and intentions.
Liberal parents are no doubt uncomfortable, therefore, with seeming to hide their knowledge about the complexities of good and evil from their children. They probably are most uncomfortable of all, for this reason, with the way in which fairy tale villains are violently punished at the end of
most stories (the witch in “Snow White,” for instance, is made to wear red hot
shoes and dance until she drops dead-- a detail left out of most modern retellings). I
tend to share the discomfort of such parents, especially as someone who is deeply opposed to "retribution" as a model of justice.
Bettelheim does not dismiss such concerns, but he argues
that for children to eventually reach a mature moral attitude which transcends
revenge and makes room for forgiveness and reconciliation, they must first pass through a developmental stage in which evil is
given a very concrete form-- and is eliminated fully in the course of the story, as
symbolized by the death of the villain.
Children don’t think of the witch’s demise as the death of a full
person, says Bettelheim, but as the mastery of whatever
aggression and destructive impulse at first set the plot in motion.
I tend, with some continued hesitation, to agree with him. One could ask, for instance, what would
happen in the Lion King, say, if Scar
did not die at the end of the story through the consequences of his own evil
deeds? One of the few alternatives would
be to have him relegated to some inferior position, forced to cringe and toady his way through life as punishment for his actions. To adults, this seems a less “cruel”
resolution to the story, and in real life no doubt it would be. But to the child for whom the death of a
villain is simply its elimination, continued existence on such terms would be a
much worse fate for Scar—and would probably make him seem to them more like a real, and
quite pitiable, person, rather than a manifestation of evil.
Bettelheim makes another point that is bound to unsettle
some liberal parents: it has to do with the way kids learn about sex. This is often where liberal “frankness” is
seen as most essential, by many contemporary parents, because in the absence of real
information, it is thought, children are likely to come up with strange and frightening
delusions about sex that do them a great deal of harm.
Bettelheim would not fully discount the wisdom of this, but
he insists that the important message to be learned from sex education (that
sexuality and the feelings it arouses are normal and potentially positive
features of life, if acted on in healthy ways), is better conveyed to children symbolically and indirectly
rather than didactically, at least before the child reaches
puberty. This is so because the
child has deeply ambivalent feelings about sexuality, as she does about most
things in life, and needs to have the negative
aspects of these feelings given some symbolic validation if she is ever going
to recognize the potential for positive
aspects as well.
The well-intentioned liberal educator who explains
rationally that sex is “natural” risks alienating the child, who in fact views
sex as grotesque and senseless. Says
Bettelheim: “Modern sex education tries to teach that sex is normal […] But
since it does not start from an understanding that the child may find sex
disgusting, and that this viewpoint has an important protective function for
the child, [it] fails to carry conviction for him.” (291). Fairy tales such as the “Frog Prince,” by
contrast, do a better job, says Bettelheim, of symbolically lending credence to
children’s ambivalent feelings. They
validate the child’s immediate repugnance -- in this case of the frog-- as natural, while also holding out hope to her or him that the feeling of
disgust will, in the process of healthy maturation, eventually be replaced by a
positive valuation of sex with the right person.
I’m not entirely sure how far I’m willing to follow
Bettelheim in this, or how far he wants to take us. While the point he raises against modern
approaches is a compelling one, it seems equally pernicious to try to
teach sex ed through fairy tales. I’m
sorry, but I just don’t think that the subconscious Priapic imagery of “Jack
and the Bean Stalk” can prepare a boy for his first nocturnal emission, or that
hearing about three drops of blood spilled on a white handkerchief in a fairy
tale will, on its own, make menstrual bleeding seem “natural” to a girl the
first time it happens. Bettelheim
doesn’t quite argue that they will either, but he seems to indicate a
preference for a form of sexual education that never refers explicitly to
sexual acts or to the physiological changes of puberty. One suspects his feelings in this regard grow
out of a psychoanalytic training that attributed much more potency to “symbols” and “dream images” than we now think
they deserve.
On the other hand, Bettelheim has a point that children need
to have their negative feelings toward sex validated, just as their eventual
progress toward a positive understanding of sex must also be validated . Moreover, he is right that sitting down and
explaining such things to children directly is often bound to fail in precisely the way
that trying to explain the distinction between feeling and action is
ineffective.
It would seem then that the same basic deficiency is shared
by both the liberal and the authoritarian/evangelical parenting styles we’ve been
discussing so far. In short, neither
ideology of parenting is willing to let itself be guided sufficiently by the development of
the child’s own mind, or to provide validation to what the child actually feels, rather than to what the adult thinks he or she should feel. They both, at their
worst, impose didactic instructions (or “explanations”) from above, which –
regardless of the intent behind them – convey to the child the impression that
her feelings must be wrong or perverse, because they are so often at
odds with these instructions.
This prevents her from gradually developing toward the two
basic distinctions we all have to make in life, if we are going to be healthy
and loving individuals: the distinction between feeling and action, and the distinction between
creative and destructive manifestations of self-will. The first I discussed in
detail above. The child begins to make
it fairly early in the development process, and probably even with a one-sided
education about the evilness of “will” she will eventually come to recognize it
in some form.
The same cannot be said, however, of the second distinction.
I would argue that if the child is prevented from ever making this
distinction, by a parenting style that tries to tell her that all forms of “self-will” and
self-assertion are evil, she may never fully develop it, with damaging consequences.
This is because the child who is told that “self-assertion
is evil” comes to recognize two things as she matures. The first is that everything she has reason
to value in her life involves some sort of self-assertion: including her
creative endeavors, her quest for meaning, and the positive relationships she
establishes with other people. She would ordinarily
take legitimate pride in these things, and feel validated and encouraged by
them to engage in life – but these very facts instead result in guilt for her,
because of her warped moral training.
The second thing she recognizes is that her authoritarian
parents, who are attempting to “break her will” in line with evangelical
bromides, are asserting by so doing their own self-wills. She therefore
concludes that her parents are hypocrites—and probably, too, that all morality
is hypocritical. Because self-will
appears inevitable, she concludes, then the question is simply whose will is
going to win out. This leads to the view
that life is purely a theater of conflict in which some must win and some must
lose. There can be no self-assertion
that does not simultaneously do harm to others, and no self-abnegation that
does not simply empower others to do harm to oneself.
This leads to a profoundly despairing attitude to life. It serves as a self-fulfilling prophecy as
well, in that the person whose moral training has led her to think this way
will only ever be capable of interacting with people as potential competitors
and as disembodied wills that clash with her own. She has been taught that there are no ways of
asserting oneself and gaining legitimate pride and respect in life that do not take
away these things from others, which means she has been taught there is no such
thing as a mutually satisfying
relationship between people.
This is probably the most crippling thing any parent could
teach a child, because it prevents her or him from ever learning how to
love. The capacity to love depends on the hope that one can find a relationship with another person that is not
simply a political contest of wills in which one party gains temporary
satisfaction from another. "Will-breaking" parents do not offer this hope—they crush it by their implicit assertion
that their own selfhood can only be realized by the extinction of their
child’s.
If there’s one thing that folk culture and the tales it
tells have always done, by contrast to Puritanism, it is to
offer hope. This is the gift that
stories can still make to children: they can offer hope that love is real and that one’s true
feelings and the assertion of one’s own self are not detrimental to it-- that
they can, in fact, help one to find it.
I have been talking about stories in this post, but of
course, the stories we tell in our society can only do so much. Ideally, these stories only reinforce what
the child already sees modeled for him by his parents or guardians and other
family members.
But we can’t always rely on
this. In deeply unequal and
competitive societies like ours, which give children plenty of reasons to fear
that life is a “zero-sum game,” and in which family bonds are loosening and
snapping for so many people, the need for the message of folk tales is great
indeed. Yet it is precisely in these
sorts of societies that folk culture seems to be on the ropes. Whatever else this tells us, it should certainly make clear that our society's biggest tellers of stories to children-- like Walt Disney Studios-- have no slight or trivial responsibility.
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